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All Music Guide:
American avant-garde violinist, improviser, and composer Malcolm Goldstein has been exploring the sounds possible with the violin since the early '60s, when he, Philip Corner, and James Tenney founded the Tone Roads Ensemble. In addition to receiving commissions for his own work from a number of arts councils and vocalists, other composers (including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Ornette Coleman) have written works specifically for Goldstein. He has performed all over Europe and North America, in groups, solo, and with dance troupes. Recordings of Goldstein's music (including his 1997 solo performance at the Fire in the Valley festival) finally started becoming more readily available during the '90s.
Wikipedia:
Malcolm Goldstein (b. Brooklyn, New York, United States, March 27, 1936) is a composer, violinist and improviser who has been active in the presentation of new music and dance since the early 1960s. He received an M.A. in music composition from Columbia University in 1960, having studied with Otto Luening. In the 1960s in New York City, he was a co-founder with James Tenney and Philip Corner of the Tone Roads Ensemble and was a participant in the Judson Dance Theater, the New York Festival of the Avant-Garde and the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. Since then, he has toured extensively throughout North America and Europe, with solo concerts as well as with new music and dance ensembles.
His "Soundings" improvisations have received international acclaim for having "reinvented violin playing", extending the range of tonal/sound-texture possibilities of the instrument and revealing new dimensions of expressivity.
Since the mid-1960s he has integrated structured improvisation aspects into his compositions, exploring the rich sound textures of new performance techniques within a variety of instrumental and vocal frameworks. Numerous ensembles such as Essential Music, Relâche, Musical Elements, The New Performance Group of Cornish Institute, L'Art pour l'art, Quatuor Bozzini and Klangforum Wien have performed his music, as well as the Ensemble for New Music/Hessischer Rundfunk, Frankfurt, of which he was the director in the 1990s. His music has been performed at several New Music America festivals, Meet the Moderns/Brooklyn Philharmonic, Pro Musica Nova Bremen, Acustica International/WDR Cologne, Invention '89 Berlin, Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik, De Ijsbreker Amsterdam, Maerz Music Berlin, Cologne Triennale, Sound Culture Tokyo, Neue Horizonte and Ton Art Bern, and Musique Action Nancy.
He has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts/Inter-Arts (USA), the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts, and Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, as well as numerous commissions from Studio Akustische Kunst/WDR Cologne. In 1994 he received the Prix International award for his acoustic art/radio work "between (two) spaces".
He has written extensively on improvisation as in his book Sounding the Full Circle. His critical edition of Charles Ives's "Second String Quartet", which was commissioned by the Charles Ives Society, is now being prepared for publication.
He now resides in Sheffield, Vermont, USA and Montréal, Québec, Canada.
