Charlie Morrow

• Name — Charlie Morrow • Birth Name — Charles Morrow • Born — 1942 • Birthplace — Newark, New Jersey, U.S. • Occupation — Sound artist, composer, performer • Website — http: www.charliemorrow.com

Early in his career Morrow organized his own concerts, including “New Music for Trumpet and Ensemble” at Carnegie Hall. But in 1973, after “An Evening with the Two Charlies”, a programme of pieces by Morrow and Charles Ives presented at Lincoln Center, he turned away from the concert hall, preferring to work in public spaces, parks, harbours and city streets. “I became more interested in working with environmental acoustics rather than the blank canvas of the concert hall, where you remove all other sound in order to create your own,” Morrow has explained. Most of his event compositions are immersive and defy capture; Morrow has consequently released few recordings., During the mid-1960s Morrow helped Charlotte Moorman organize her acclaimed annual Avant Garde Festival in New York City. Morrow has subsequently worked with professional musicians, such as singer Joan La Barbara in The New Wilderness Preservation Band and percussionist Glen Velez in the Horizontal-Vertical Band. But involving members of the public and participation by non-specialists has been a consistent goal of Morrow’s work. He conceived the Ocarina Orchestra as an ensemble that could be musically effective without requiring technical expertise. Morrow has played in a variety of musical contexts over the years, including Derek Bailey’s Company at London’s ICA in 1981. He has also provided sympathetic musical accompaniment for numerous poets over the years, including Allen Ginsberg. In April 1980 Morrow and Swedish sound poet Sten Hanson organized the 12th International Sound Poetry Festival, at Washington Square Church in New York City. In 1973, Morrow organized a Summer Solstice celebration, the first in a series staged annually in New York until 1989. Increasingly Morrow has shown an interest into integrating radio and television broadcasts into these celebratory occasions. Amongst his other large scale public events Citywave, realised on the streets of Copenhagen in 1985, involved around 2000 participants, including folk singers, bell ringers, rock groups, marching bands, a helicopter and clowns on bicycles., In 2010 Finnish pianist Ilmo Ranta performed a concert of Morrow’s piano music at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. The programme included his “Requiem for the Victims of Kent State for Solo Piano”, “Soundpiece for Rock Amplified Piano” and more recent “Mozart Reconstructions: Sonatas K331, 332 for piano and midi piano, a 3D spatial work with sound environments. The Little Charlie Festival, a five-day celebration of Morrow’s life and work held in New York City during Fall 2010, gave some indication of the category-defying scope of his creative activity.

It was Art Garfunkel, one of Morrow’s classmates at Columbia College, who introduced him to the commercial music business. Morrow then worked as arranger and line producer for John H. Hammond at Columbia Records, and provided arrangements for hit recordings by Simon & Garfunkel, The Rascals, Vanilla Fudge and The Balloon Farm.

Morrow installations range from sound drawers and cabinets to wind sails to electronic environments. In 1969, painter Carol Brown invited Morrow to create a piece for the Marilyn Monroe Show at New York’s Janis Gallery. He created a soundscape portrait of Monroe using collaged found sound. Venues for Morrow’s later sound installations have included Knoll Furniture Retrospective (Louvre Museum, Paris), General Gas Exhibit (Chicago Museum of Science and Industry), 2nd Acustica International (Whitney Museum, New York), an arctic sound room for the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle, Bonn, the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Planet Earth in New York and the Memorial Railroad Museum in Altoona, PA. In 2000 Morrow created audio work for the National Museum of Natural History exhibition Vikings. He has also created audio tours for Kennedy Space Center, the Great Platte River Road Memorial Archway and the Empire State Building, New York. Morrow experiments with spatialization and capture of multi-dimensional events led to the development of 3D audio effect True3D spatial software and systems. Installations include Foster and Partners Forteleza Hall at S.C. Johnson Company HQ in Racine, WI, The Smithsonian Institution's Arctic Study Center in Anchorage, Alaska, Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and the Football Performance Center at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon.

Morrow co-produced T.C. McLuhan’s audio version of her bestselling documentary portrait of Native American life, Touch the Earth. The interactive CD-ROM, ScruTiny in the Great Round, featuring Morrow’s music and visual art by Tennessee Rice Dixon and Jim Gasperini won the 1996 Grand Prix du Jury Milia d'Or in Cannes, France. Morrow created a microminiature Haydn Clock Symphony program for Nam Jun Paik's Zapping SLZ104PAC Swatch Watch and transformations of Chopin piano works for Paik's video installation at the Palace of Versailles.

Morrow was Visiting Professor of Spatial Sound, VMK Esbjerg, Denmark, 2007-2009. He has lectured on sound art and design at numerous prestigious venues including The Aspen Design Conference, Columbia University, Oberlin College, Helsinki University of Technology, Copenhagen University, Cornell University and St. Martin’s College of Art, London. In 2004 Morrow participated in the Future of Sound event at the British Academy Awards, co-produced the New Sound New York Sound Cube show at The Kitchen, and had a solo sound art show in the MUU Gallery, Helsinki. Morrow currently resides in Helsinki, Finland and Barton, Vermont.