A violinist and composer active in new music and dance beginning in the 1960s, Malcolm Goldstein was the founder of the Tone Roads Ensemble and a participant in Judson Dance Theater. Over the span of his career he has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and Prix International. A proponent of incorporating structured improvisations into his work, he published a book on that matter entitled Sounding the Full Circle. In his 1986 performance at the Kitchen he collaborated with Archie Shepp to celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by transforming his words, articulations, phrasing, and overall pitch/tone into instrumental sound-textures.