David Behrman (born August 16, 1937 in Salzburg, AustriaInt) is an American composer and a pioneer of computer music.
In the early 1960s he was the producer of Columbia Records' Music of Our Time series, which included the first recording of Terry Riley's In C.
[1] In 1966 Behrman co-founded Sonic Arts Union with fellow composers Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma.
He wrote the music for Merce Cunningham's dances Walkaround Time (1968), Rebus (1975), Pictures (1984) and Eyespace 40 (2007).
A history of the work of Merce Cunningham.
A Tribute to John Cage is Paik's homage to avant-garde composer John Cage. A major figure in contemporary art and music, Cage was one of the primary influences on Paik's work, as well as his friend and frequent collaborator. In this multifaceted portrait, Paik creates a pastiche of Cage's performances and anecdotes, interviews with friends and colleagues, and examples of Paik's participatory music and television works that parallel Cage's strategies and concerns. The methodology and philosophies that inform Cage's radical musical aesthetic — chance, randomness, the democratization of sounds — are evident as he performs such seminal pieces as 4'33" (of complete silence) in Harvard Square, or throws the I Ching to determine performance sites. Among the collage of elements included in this work are segments from Paik's Zen for TV; Paik and Charlotte Moorman in early performances, including the TV Bra; and anecdotes from composer Alvin Lucier.
With participation of John Cage, Earle Brown, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, David Behrman, Max Neuhaus, Morton Subotnik, Phil Corner, Joe Jones, Alvin Lucier, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Ben Patterson, Wolf Rosenberg In 1971 we produced, in association with West German Television, a documentation on New York’s musical avant-garde. It was broadcast only in Germany at the time. By 2010, after nearly 40 years, it seemed desirable to recycle the performances and interviews with the composers and to create a revealing look back to those years for English-speaking New Music fans. The film offers valuable insights into the nature and issues of advanced composition at the beginning of the 1970s.