wolfus2009
When my wife Gail and I were living on Middleton Beach Road near Madison, Wisconsin, Dennis Murphy was one of her music major friends. Dennis used to visit us there and I remember he once set up her piano to do a prepared piano piece.
In 1959 I visited Dennis in his apartment on Bassett Street in Madison, which was almost across the street from what later became the Mifflin Street Coop. At that time Dennis was living with roommates who were art majors and Jim Quigley in Art History. As early as 1959 there was a sort of art bohemian group there in a neighborhood which later in the sixties became a hippie area.
Dennis Murphy was the leader of a group of art and music majors who met regularly at our house at 5710 Bittersweet Place in Madison's Crestwood, a few blocks north of Frank Lloyd Wright's prefab house of about 1956. We improvised on oriental, renaissance, medieval and American folk music. Clayton Bailey, a pottery student then, and I were not musicians, but Dennis taught us to play the mouth bow and Jew's harp. The mouth bows we made were constructed from two inch wide hardwood strips of wood, with one or two piano strings at the upper end of the scale secured with tuning pegs.
The regulars of the group were Dennis Murphy, Raleigh Williams, a math teacher, musician, singer and instrument maker, Monona Rossol, who was a pottery student like Clayton Bailey and myself, and she was also a classical singer. My wife Gail, a piano major, and I were also regulars. Thomas J. Banta, then an assistant professor of psychology at Wisconsin, became a regular also though he did not participate in the music making. There were some others such as Gloria Welniak, another potter, and an art major I called Old Dick Gong.
One time in May of 1962 we met at Clayton Bailey's place out in the country south of Madison. We built up a good sized camp fire which can be heard burning on the audio we made that night. Dennis
Murphy was playing on his sitar, Monona Rossol was wailing or
vocalizing, Clayton Bailey was blowing his blatting ceramic horrn he
had made by rolling a slab of clay and firing it, and I was pounding on my Chinese tom-tom. Had
someone nearby heard all that, they would never have known that three
of those performers were to become well known - Dennis Murphy,
Clayton Bailey and Monona Rossol.
Clayton Bailey attained to some image as a sculptor on the West Coast. Bailey has been written up in numerous art
journals and newspaper and magazine articles and is all over the
Internet. He turned seventy this year. Dennis Murphy is now 75.
Monona Rossol is an authority in New York City on the toxic aspects of
art materials and has written several books. She has a presence on
the Internet. Bernard Pyron
In 1959 I visited Dennis in his apartment on Bassett Street in Madison, which was almost across the street from what later became the Mifflin Street Coop. At that time Dennis was living with roommates who were art majors and Jim Quigley in Art History. As early as 1959 there was a sort of art bohemian group there in a neighborhood which later in the sixties became a hippie area.
Dennis Murphy was the leader of a group of art and music majors who met regularly at our house at 5710 Bittersweet Place in Madison's Crestwood, a few blocks north of Frank Lloyd Wright's prefab house of about 1956. We improvised on oriental, renaissance, medieval and American folk music. Clayton Bailey, a pottery student then, and I were not musicians, but Dennis taught us to play the mouth bow and Jew's harp. The mouth bows we made were constructed from two inch wide hardwood strips of wood, with one or two piano strings at the upper end of the scale secured with tuning pegs.
The regulars of the group were Dennis Murphy, Raleigh Williams, a math teacher, musician, singer and instrument maker, Monona Rossol, who was a pottery student like Clayton Bailey and myself, and she was also a classical singer. My wife Gail, a piano major, and I were also regulars. Thomas J. Banta, then an assistant professor of psychology at Wisconsin, became a regular also though he did not participate in the music making. There were some others such as Gloria Welniak, another potter, and an art major I called Old Dick Gong.
One time in May of 1962 we met at Clayton Bailey's place out in the country south of Madison. We built up a good sized camp fire which can be heard burning on the audio we made that night. Dennis
Murphy was playing on his sitar, Monona Rossol was wailing or
vocalizing, Clayton Bailey was blowing his blatting ceramic horrn he
had made by rolling a slab of clay and firing it, and I was pounding on my Chinese tom-tom. Had
someone nearby heard all that, they would never have known that three
of those performers were to become well known - Dennis Murphy,
Clayton Bailey and Monona Rossol.
Clayton Bailey attained to some image as a sculptor on the West Coast. Bailey has been written up in numerous art
journals and newspaper and magazine articles and is all over the
Internet. He turned seventy this year. Dennis Murphy is now 75.
Monona Rossol is an authority in New York City on the toxic aspects of
art materials and has written several books. She has a presence on
the Internet. Bernard Pyron
