Susan Alcorn
Encyclopedia
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
, improvisor, and pedal steel guitar
Pedal steel guitar
The pedal steel guitar is a type of electric guitar that uses a metal bar to "fret" or shorten the length of the strings, rather than fingers on strings as with a conventional guitar. Unlike other types of steel guitar, it also uses pedals and knee levers to affect the pitch, hence the name "pedal"...
ist active in contemporary music and free improvisation
Free improvisation
Free improvisation or free music is improvised music without any rules beyond the logic or inclination of the musician involved. The term can refer to both a technique and as a recognizable genre in its own right....
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Life
Alcorn started out playing guitar at the age of twelve, quickly immersing herself in folk music, blues, and the pop music of the 1960s. A chance encounter with blues musician Muddy WatersMuddy Waters
McKinley Morganfield , known as Muddy Waters, was an American blues musician, generally considered the "father of modern Chicago blues"...
steered her towards playing slide guitar. By the time she was twenty-one, she had immersed herself in the pedal steel guitar, playing in country and western swing
Western swing
Western swing music is a subgenre of American country music that originated in the late 1920s in the West and South among the region's Western string bands...
bands in Texas.
Soon, she began to combine the techniques of country-western pedal steel with her own extended technique
Extended technique
Extended techniques are performance techniques used in music to describe unconventional, unorthodox, or non-traditional techniques of singing, or of playing musical instruments to obtain unusual sounds or instrumental timbres....
s to form a personal style influenced by free jazz
Free jazz
Free jazz is an approach to jazz music that was first developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Though the music produced by free jazz pioneers varied widely, the common feature was a dissatisfaction with the limitations of bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz, which had developed in the 1940s and 1950s...
, avant-garde classical music, Indian ragas, Indigenous traditions, and various folk musics of the world.
By the early 1990s her music began to show an influence of the holistic and feminist “deep listening” philosophies of Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros is an American accordionist and composer who is a central figure in the development of post-war electronic art music....
.
Though mostly a solo performer, Alcorn has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros is an American accordionist and composer who is a central figure in the development of post-war electronic art music....
, Eugene Chadbourne
Eugene Chadbourne
Eugene Chadbourne is an American improvisor, guitarist and banjoist. Highly eclectic and unconventional, Chadbourne's most formative influence is free jazz. He has also been a reviewer for Allmusic and a contributor to Maximum RocknRoll.Chadbourne started out playing rock and roll guitar, but...
, Peter Kowald
Peter Kowald
Peter Kowald was a German free jazz musician.A member of the Globe Unity Orchestra, and a touring double-bass player, Kowald collaborated with a large number of European free jazz and American free-jazz players during his career, including Peter Brötzmann, Irène Schweizer, Karl Berger, Fred...
, Chris Cutler
Chris Cutler
Chris Cutler is an English percussionist, composer, lyricist and music theorist. Best known for his work with English avant-rock group Henry Cow, Cutler was also a member and drummer of a number of other bands, including Art Bears, News from Babel, Pere Ubu and Gong/Mothergong...
, Joe Giardullo, Caroline Kraabel
Caroline Kraabel
Caroline Kraabel is a London-based American composer, improviser and saxophonist. She is known for her research into the implications of electricity related to recording, synthesis and amplification....
, Le Quan Ninh
Lê Quan Ninh
Lê Quan Ninh is a French percussionist active in contemporary music and free improvisation.He began studying piano at the age of 5, but turned towards percussion as a teenager. When he was 16, he entered the National Conservatory in Versailles. During this time he discovered free jazz...
, Sean Meehan, Joe McPhee
Joe McPhee
Joe McPhee is an American jazz multi-instrumentalist born in Miami, Florida, a player of tenor, alto, and soprano saxophone, the trumpet, flugelhorn and valve trombone...
, LaDonna Smith
LaDonna Smith
LaDonna Smith is an American avant garde musician from Alabama . She is a violinist, violist, and pianist. Since 1974 she has been performing free improvisational music with musicians such as Davey Williams, Gunther Christmann, Anne Lebaron, Derek Bailey, Eugene Chadbourne, Misha Feigin, Michael...
, Mike Cooper
Mike Cooper
Mike Cooper is a former politician in Ontario, Canada. He served as a New Democratic Party member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1990 to 1995.-Background:...
, Walter Daniels
Walter Daniels
Walter Daniels is an American musician and harmonica player noted for introducing the instrument into a number of styles of music not usually associated with the harmonica, including punk rock, and avant-garde free improvisation.-History:...
, Jandek
Jandek
Jandek is the musical project of an anonymous outsider musician who operates out of Houston, Texas. Since 1978, Jandek has self-released over 60 albums of unusual, often emotionally dissolute folk and blues songs without ever granting more than the occasional interview or providing any biographical...
, and Johanna Varner.
She has written on the subject of music for the UK magazine Resonance and CounterPunch
Counterpunch
Counterpunch can refer to:* Counterpunch , a punch in boxing* CounterPunch, a bi-weekly political newsletter* Counterpunch , a type of punch used in traditional typography* Punch-Counterpunch, a Transformers character...
. Her article “The Road the Radio, and the Full Moon” was included in “The Best Music Writing of 2006” published by Da Capo Press.
Recordings include Uma (Loveletter 2000), Curandera (Uma Sounds 2005), Concentration (Recorded 2005), and "And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar" (Olde English Spelling Bee 2007)
She lived in Houston; she lives in Baltimore
Baltimore
Baltimore is the largest independent city in the United States and the largest city and cultural center of the US state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore...
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