Roberts, Megan

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Roberts, Megan

Roberts, Megan , American composer; b. Hemp-stead, N.Y., Oct. 12, 1952. She was taken to Calif, as a babe in arms, and flourished there, taking lessons with Robert Ashley at Mills Coll. in Oakland, and with Emma Lou Diemer at the Univ. of Calif., Santa Barbara. She experimented with unimedia arts of audio, video, dance, and theater; then switched to rock ’n’ roll. Her most mind-boggling contribution to the unichore-ovideoelectrobiosonic School of California Calisthenics is Suite for a Small Chamber (1976), in which the movements of dancers trigger electronic devices and tape-loop playback machines. In her video piece Factory (1976), she utilizes the technique of strobosonic photophonos-copy. On Jan. 14, 1977, she presented in San Francisco a multimedia study in violence free of moral redeeming value. Her major work, I Could Sit Here All Day (1976), is scored for birds, drums, and disembodied human voices, and tends to represent the ante-human and anti-human predecessors of rock ’n’ roll

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire

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