Alvin Curran presents GRAM GRA GRAMMAR / GRA GRAMMAR GRAM, a live-electronic performance presented for the first time. Drawing from a vast repertoire of audio files recorded over more than sixty years, Curran generates a spontaneous and ever-new musical performance. “I sit at the keyboard and play the world,” the composer states.

“For over 60 years I have recorded the sounds of our planet: its people, its musics, weather, forests, oceans, insects, birds, animals, machines, events, ambiences.  These are my natural instruments, natural musics… All I do is play them.  Their stories are your stories.”

The event will take place in the first-floor room dedicated to UNAROMA LIVE.
Free admission until capacity is reached.

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Alvin Curran, Endangered Species, 2026  
 
Endangered Species is an ongoing solo project, initiated in 1988 under the title Electric Rags. Over time, it has evolved in relation to the places and contexts of performance, as well as to the possibilities offered by musical technologies. Drawing from a vast archive of approximately 3,000 sound files collected over sixty years and reworked through a MIDI sampler and piano, Curran creates an ever-changing musical experience, in which each performance takes shape as a new sonic narrative. 

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ALVIN CURRAN (Providence, Rhode Island, 1938) has lived and worked in Rome since 1965. He studied with Ron Nelson, Elliott Carter, and Mel Powell. In 1966 with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum he co-founded the collective Musica Elettronica Viva. Curran has taught at Rome’s National Academy of Theater Arts (1975–1980), Mills College (1991–2006), and the Mainz Hochschule für Musik (2011), among others. He has published extensively on music, his own music, and that of other artists; he has staged thousands of live performances, and his discography includes more than thirty solo and sixty collaborative recordings; his sound art works have been exhibited in various international institutions. A book about his work, Alvin Curran: Live in Roma, was edited by Daniela Tortora (Die Schachtel, 2010), and The Alvin Curran Fakebook, an illustrated compendium of notated pieces was published in 2015.