Joseph Byrd - Early Musical Career

Early Musical Career

As a teenager, Byrd played in a series of pop and country bands, later vibraphone in jazz ensembles, while a student at the University of Arizona. He won a fellowship to get an M.A. at Stanford, and relocated to New York in 1959, drawn by the avant-garde, becoming a part of the FLUXUS experiments that were emerging at that time. There he continued composing, and earned some international interest for his use of vocal and instrumental sound in early "minimal" compositions. Byrd also studied with legendary avant garde composer John Cage, and was, according to Byrd, his last student. Another former Cage student, Yoko Ono, offered her New York loft to Byrd for the first public performance of his compositions. Byrd's 1962 Carnegie Hall recital was reviewed in prominent publications including The New York Times. He also worked as arranger and record producer, and as an assistant to composer and music critic Virgil Thomson. It was in New York in 1963 that he met Dorothy Moskowitz.

Byrd returned with Moskowitz to the West Coast, accepting a teaching assistant position at UCLA (moving into a beachfront community populated by musicians, artists, and Indian musicians), where he studied music history, acoustics, psychology of music, and Indian music. At UCLA he formed the New Music Workshop with jazz trumpeter Don Ellis and others, where the first West Coast experiments in what would come to be called "performance art" and "concept art" would develop. These interests led to more composition and his leaving the university in the summer of 1966 to create music full-time and produce "happenings." The collaborations also introduced Ellis and Byrd to Tom Oberheim, who built ring modulators and other devices for them.