Richard Teitelbaum, a composer and improviser widely admired in both contemporary classical and avant-garde jazz circles for his work with synthesizers and electronics, died on April 9 in Kingston, N.Y. He was 80.His wife, Hiroko Sakurazawa, a classical pianist, said the cause was a stroke.A soft-spoken trailblazer in the field of electronic-music performance, Mr. Teitelbaum viewed making music with machines from a perspective rooted in physicality and intuition — a stance that set him apart from an earlier generation of studio-bound technicians.“My approach to the art of musical improvisation,” he wrote in a 2006 article in the journal Contemporary Music Review, “has been concerned with developing and realizing the musical potential of one’s unconscious mind.”In that article, Mr. Teitelbaum explained that his explorations were prompted by what he described as “a kind of hallucinatory experience I had one night in 1966 in Rome, in which I imagined unusual waves of energy passing between myself and two other people with whom I was seated.” Seeking to translate that experience into music, he engaged the synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog to design an interface that would enable brain waves, pulse, breath and galvanic skin response to trigger sonic responses from a synthesizer.Rome in the 1960s was home to a global confluence of avant-garde art and radical politics. It was there, in 1966, that Mr. Teitelbaum came together with two similarly iconoclastic American composers and improvisers, Alvin Curran and Frederic Rzewski, to form Musica Elettronica Viva, or MEV. Motivated by the nascent electronic music of John Cage and David Tudor, as well as the work of free-jazz innovators like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, MEV would sustain its activities for more than 50 years.“Richard, who seldom took the lead, was the fundamental air around the music, surrounding it with knowledge, humor, occasional politically charged reminders, still never fearing to take over and wipe us all out with the whole history of electronic music,” Mr. Curran said in a statement. “While our aspiring musical philosophical styles in concert were distinct, Richard gave us the reliable mystical thread that bound us all.”Early synthesizers were bulky, complex assemblages of boxes, knobs, plugs and wires. Mr. Teitelbaum — who is believed to have been the first to bring a modular Moog synthesizer to Europe, in 1967 — had to forge ways to work in real time alongside other musicians, whose instruments ranged from cello and saxophone to glass panes and metal objects amplified with contact microphones.Another challenge was more political: how to develop a signature sound in a milieu that de-emphasized individuality. “People weren’t really thinking about the construction of a personal voice in experimental music at that time, and some people were even opposed to the idea,” the trombonist, composer and scholar George Lewis, who collaborated with Mr. Teitelbaum for decades, said in a phone interview. “But Richard had a very iconic sound, and people could draw from that in order to create their own worlds of music.”Mr. Teitelbaum, whose sonic vocabulary emphasized otherworldly sounds and textures over flamboyant shows of manual dexterity, was quick to dismiss any suggestion that he might be a jazz musician. Still, he sustained enduring collaboration with prominent figures from the jazz world, including the saxophonists Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell, the violinist Leroy Jenkins and the percussionist Andrew Cyrille.“What I wanted to do was match sounds that I could get from my instruments with the sounds that Richard got from the synthesizer,” Mr. Cyrille, who worked in a duo with Mr. Teitelbaum in the 1980s and then engaged him for a more conventional quartet in 2016, said in a phone interview. “It was like a dance: We embraced each other, we would go here together, go there together, and sometimes we would even separate a little bit. It had to do with what we heard in our heads, and what we thought we could do with our instruments in the moment.”Richard Lowe Teitelbaum was born in Manhattan on May 19, 1939, to David Teitelbaum, a lawyer, and Sylvia (Lowenthal) Teitelbaum, an actress. He started piano lessons at age 6.He earned a bachelor’s degree in music in 1960 at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. There he met the influential maverick composer Henry Cowell, whose zeal for non-Western musical practices he would embrace. (Mr. Teitelbaum later became an executor of Mr. Cowell’s estate.)At Yale University, where Mr. Curran was his roommate, Mr. Teitelbaum studied composition with Mel Powell and theory with Allen Forte, earning a master’s degree in music in 1964. That year he attended the Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt, Germany, where he worked with the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti and Milton Babbitt.Mr. Teitelbaum then moved to Rome on a Fulbright fellowship to study composition with Goffredo Petrassi. Lingering the next year for private lessons with the composer Luigi Nono, he was reunited with Mr. Curran, who introduced him to Mr. Rzewski, a kindred spirit Mr. Curran had met in Berlin. Together, they began to envision what would become Musica Elettronica Viva.Joined initially by the soprano Carol Plantamura and three more improvising composers — Allan Bryant, Jon Phetteplace, and Ivan Vandor — MEV pursued a mode of improvisation that was structured yet flexible. The group performed widely in Europe, often erasing the boundary between performers and spectators by inviting audience members to perform. A high-profile engagement at the Actuel Music Festival of Jazz, Rock and New Music in Amougies, Belgium, in October 1969 introduced Mr. Teitelbaum to Mr. Braxton, Mr. Mitchell and other members of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.Mr. Teitelbaum also pursued an abiding interest in non-Western musical practices. In 1970, while studying ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University, he formed the World Band, which he envisioned as an MEV-style collaborative of musicians from Indian, Japanese, Korean, Middle Eastern and North American disciplines. Awarded a second Fulbright fellowship in 1976, he spent a year in Tokyo studying shakuhachi (bamboo flute) with the master musician Katsuya Yokoyama, a relationship that culminated in a recorded collaboration, “Blends” (1977). In the multimedia operas “Golem” (1989) and “Z’vi” (2003), Mr. Teitelbaum employed elements of Jewish musical styles to illuminate subjects drawn from mystical traditions.Beyond his work as a composer, performer and facilitator of new technology, Mr. Teitelbaum busied himself as an educator and scholar. He held teaching positions at the California Institute for the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and York University in Toronto. In 1988 he joined the faculty of Bard College in upstate New York, teaching and directing the school’s Electronic/Computer Music Studio for the rest of his career.In addition to Ms. Sakurazawa, Mr. Teitelbaum is survived by his younger brother, Tim Teitelbaum, a noted computer scientist.His pursuit of innovation meant to thwart complacency never abated.“In attempting to define his idea of indeterminacy, John Cage said that he likes to be in a situation in which he literally doesn’t know what he is doing,” Mr. Teitelbaum wrote in 2006. Likewise, he explained of his own work, “by creating an interactive situation in which the performer cannot consciously comprehend or predict the outcome of his actions, his/her mind will bypass more superficial levels of thinking and rational control to reach something deeper.” More
