Beginning in 1964, the Albright-Knox collaborated with the Creative Associates of the University at Buffalo’s Center of the Creative and Performing Arts—founded by Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra Music Director Lukas Foss and UB Music Department Chairman Allen Sapp—to bring experimental music to Buffalo through the Evenings for New Music series.
On November 29, 1964, Foss directed the series' inaugural concert, which featured eight works, including Henry Cowell’s Twenty-six simultaneous mosaics (1963); George Crumb’s Night Music I (1963), featuring soprano Carol Plantamura; and works by Yannis Xenakis, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Wlodzimeirz Kotonski, Donald Johnson Ellis, and Earle Brown.
In her book This Life of Sounds, historian Renée Levine Packer noted, "For most of the Buffalo audience, the music was a revelation. Certainly no one had ever seen a gong immersed in a tub of water to create a glissando before. In George Crumb's Night Music I (1963), they did."
The Creative Associates perform in the Albright-Knox's Auditorium on October 28, 1972. Image courtesy of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Digital Assets Collection and Archives, Buffalo, New York.
The Creative Associates perform in the Albright-Knox's Auditorium on October 28, 1972. Image courtesy of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Digital Assets Collection and Archives, Buffalo, New York.
The concert on October 28, 1972, featured the Buffalo premiere of David del Tredici's Vintage Alice (1972) in the Auditorium, intermission performances of Ralph Blauvelt's Tape Piece No. 2 (1972) and Peter Gena's Egerya (1972) in a corridor in the 1962 Building, and the American premiere of Morton Feldman's Pianos and Voices (1972) in the Sculpture Court.
The series also featured increasingly bold performances by the likes of John Cage, Julius Eastman, Morton Feldman, and Max Neuhaus. By the time the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts closed in 1980, the Creative Associates had performed more than 300 concerts in the Evenings for New Music series.