The band toured the East Coast, playing at several planetariums in Massachusetts, as well as Lincoln Center, the World Trade Center, and at the United Nations Sculpture Garden in New York. ĬMPMC performances had a ritualistic quality that incorporated many non-musicians, such as video artist Bill Etra who added visual elements to their shows. But according to Rutman, his invented instruments ended up serving more as decorations for their performances, as the other members of the group brought in traditional eastern and western instruments, such as drums, electronic organ, flute, koto, saxophone, tamboura, and yang chin, as well as electronic musical novelties, including the Moog synthesizer and theremin. Rutman's original concept for the group was to have it be made up entirely of handmade instruments, and the group featured a configuration of circular sawblades used as percussion. The CMPMC included Rutman and Demby, with locals Hugh Robbins, Richie Slamm, and Sally Hilmer, and hammer dulcimerist Dorothy Carter, plus occasional guests who all played Rutman and Demby's bowed sheet metal creations. In 1970 Rutman founded the Central Maine Power Music Company (CMPMC) as his first ensemble to play these sculptures. He named one of his creations the steel cello, and another the bow chimes, describing both as "American Industrial folk instruments". Rutman made these new instruments from large panels of flexible sheet metal affixed with steel strings or freely swinging rods that he played with a bass or cello bow. Though this gallery sent him into bankruptcy within its four years of operation, it was here that Rutman created the instruments for which he became known. In 1967 Rutman moved to Skowhegan, Maine, where he built a house in the woods and established another multimedia gallery. Rutman later remarked, "We thought it would sound good as a xylophone, but it didn't." Rutman would later make adjustments to the sheet metal-and-rod contraption, converting it into a fully playable and tunable idiophone. In one piece called The Thing, Rutman wore a white cardboard box and banged on Demby's sheet-metal creation with "a rock in a sock." In another piece entitled Space Mass, Rutman projected film upon a piece of curved sheetmetal onto which Demby had welded several steel rods that she played as a percussion instrument. In 1967 Demby and Rutman held several happening-style events that mixed sonic, visual, and performance art centered around big sheets of metal that the artists had found. Rutman's collaborators included the Beat poet Philip Lamantia, who mentions Rutman in his poem, "The night is a space of white marble", and sculptor Constance Demby, with whom he made his first sound sculptures in 1966. In 1962 Rutman returned to New York where he opened a gallery on Charles Street called "A Fly Can't Bird But A Bird Can Fly", which presented poetry, theater, music, and visual art as multimedia events. He married in Mexico, and the couple had a son, Eric. and worked as a traveling salesman in Dallas, Texas, before moving to Mexico City to enroll in art school. After completing his studies, Rutman moved to New York City in 1950, then had to return to West Germany for military service in 1951. By way of Sweden, Rutman arrived in England in 1939 where he attended refugee schools throughout the Second World War. When the Nazis came to power, he and his mother fled Germany, moving to Warsaw in 1938 and then to Finland just before Hitler invaded Poland. Biography Early life and career īorn in Berlin in 1931, Rutman's mother was a Jewish actress and his father a Bulgarian brownshirt who died in 1933. Best known for his work with homemade idiophones in his Steel Cello Ensemble, Rutman is regarded as a pioneer of multimedia performance in his mixing of music, sculpture, film, and visual art. Robert Rutman ( – 1 June 2021) was a German visual artist, musician, composer, and instrument builder. Sound art, contemporary classical music, industrial music, minimalism
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