ARCHIVE

Laura Kuhn talks with Lawrence Voytek, who, for 25 years, served as studio assistant to the celebrated American artist and one of John Cage’s closest friends, Robert Rauschenberg. Lawrence is not a trained musician, but an inspired one, taking his lead from Cage in his interest in noise and its place in performance. He plays regularly with fellow musicians Kat Epple and Laurence Getford in the band Sonic Combine, AKA “The Robert Rauschenberg Studio House Band,” but tonight we’ll listen to an excerpt from another of his endeavors, “Strategic Structures,” a name given to both a series of musical metal sculptures built by Voytek and spontaneous compositions that arose out of a 1989 jam session utilizing these instruments performed by Epple, Bob Stohl, and Robert Rauschenberg himself. The setting was Rauschenberg’s Beach House on idyllic Captiva Island, and, as Epple recounts, this was “…a magical night, an inspired collaboration, and an exhilarating setting.”