Although Alvin Curran is almost universally recognized as one of the leading figure of the late 20th Century musical avant-garde, he has never received the recognition he deserves in the form of a proper publication. This is in fact the first book ever to present a complete and coherent picture of this gigantic figure of experimental music. A radical experimentalism and a kind of innate volatility have, in fact, long kept the person and the work of Alvin Curran, one of the historic founders of the group Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), at the margins of contemporary musical historiography. His vast and all-inclusive experience refuses to fit into the common schemas and cubbyholes, excluding him from the conceptual straitjackets of current Western musicology. 

Lavishly produced and conceived, the book is centered around extensive descriptions of the most important works and compositional techniques, providing a historical account of Curran's musical concerns and changing style: in permanent flux between two distinct cultural geographies (Italy and USA), sensitive to an infinity of pressures, encounters, transformations, and provocations, Curran’s artistic voyage is presented here through a comprehensive historical and critical study that avoids buzz-word definitions and gives great respect to his otherness – an otherness clearly and happily a part of the variegated musical universe of our time. 

Gathered for the first time in a single monograph, the contributions of several of the foremost Italian and international scholars – enriched by an astounding “travel log” by Alvin Curran himself and by unpublished images from his private archive – confirm the role of this composer-performer-teacher-writer as a major contributor to the evolution of artistic languages in the late twentieth century and beyond.Gathered for the first time in a single monograph, the contributions of several of the foremost Italian and international scholars – enriched by an astounding “travel log” by Alvin Curran himself and by unpublished images from his private archive – confirm the role of this composer-performer-teacher-writer as a major contributor to the evolution of artistic languages in the late twentieth century and beyond.