Lecture for Jo Kondo

Bunita Marcus – an unsung heroine of post minimalist music and close associate of Morton Feldman and John Cage – releases her ‘Lecture For Jo Kondo’ EP, on 99Chants. A promising talent within the 1970s/80s New York avant garde music scene, at the time (and also at intervals since) Marcus made formidable achievements, but her full potential was side-lined in a patriarchal environment, where male musicians were allowed to easily dominate, largely unchecked. Her important part in the cannon of contemporary music has been almost entirely overlooked in music/arts media, and omitted from the dominant narrative on key figures, which is something the 99Chants label hopes start redressing with this release.

Bunita was an integral influence on her peers, most notably Morton Feldman, who was informed and aided by her compositional and theoretical ideas. He composed ‘For Bunita Marcus’, which was a rare but prominent acknowledgement for her. It was Feldman’s only piece dedicated to a woman, which tellingly sits alongside his other musical tributes – including Samuel Beckett, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Willem, De Kooning and Frank O’Hara – some of the biggest figures in 20th-century literature, art and music