The music for Spark of Being lies in a unique area between music improvised for silent film and movie soundtrack, a new space that makes this collaboration and its results magical.

Erik Lund’s compositions take listeners beyond music, deep into the intersections of art forms and ideas.

Steve Butters’s twenty-three brief movements for solo percussion on a text from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer were composed, staged, performed, videotaped, and edited in his home studio over the course of six months; it has never been performed since and may never be performed again because of its many technical challenges.

Soon after Thomas Wirtel, a.k.a. Thomas Shabda Noor, met Morgan Powell at North Texas State University in 1957, experiments in group improvisation commenced on a weekly basis, experiments profoundly informed by music of the 20th-century avant garde.

By Ann Starr
Composition is a high-risk undertaking with real consequences for the composer’s life and mind; Morgan Powell is drawn to it by the (potentially lethal) need to question; by questions that produce thoughts with unforeseeable outcomes.