Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Review of Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits. Dr Edward Crooks Biography: Edward Crooks teaches on occasion at the Music Department of the University of York (UK) and also works as a freelance copyeditor. He completed his PhD thesis John Cage’s Entanglement with the Ideas of Coomaraswamy in 2011. Forthcoming publications include a paper on Cage’s friendship with Joseph Campbell, which will appear in the Journal of Black Mountain College Studies. His research focuses on Cage’s thought and aesthetics, in particular his borrowings from Asian and European religious and philosophical traditions. 1 Benjamin Piekut Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits University of California Press (2011) Reviewed by Edward Crooks What might be learned about musical experimentalism if the object of study is shifted from rhetoric to results? Benjamin Piekut’s Experimentalism Otherwise investigates five significant moments in the history of American experimental music, all of which occurred in 1964, four of them in New York. His key protagonists—John Cage, Henry Flynt, Bill Dixon and the Jazz Composers Guild, Charlotte Moorman, and Iggy Pop—span a range of styles. With the exception of an epilogue that examines later events in Ann Arbor, each of the cases probed reveals a “disastrous” gap between objective and outcome (p. 1). Disasters and conflicts, Piekut argues, reveal more about the construction of experimentalism than the triumphs. I will return to the historical content of the book after discussing its methodology and context. Michael Nyman’s influential categorisation of experimentalism should be challenged, Piekut argues. In Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, first published in 1974, Nyman took the entangled groupings of the avant-garde and out of them constructed a linear history. Eschewing past reifications and grand narratives, Piekut rejects Nyman’s dialectical polarisation of the terms “avant-garde” and “experimental”—the “European avant-gardism” of Stockhausen versus the “American experimentalism” of Cage—and instead uses the terms interchangeably (p. 14). Where Nyman focussed on “purely musical considerations,” Piekut widens his gaze to bring into the equation social, cultural, ideological, and economic considerations, and the influence of discourses of class, race, gender, and sexuality. He argues that earlier histories cannot explain how experimental music became what it did, tell us little about its dissemination, and ignore the varied networks involved in its construction. The local narratives he uncovers point to such gaps and reveal telling examples of what has been missed. 2 Piekut situates his research in relation to that of musicologists Amy C. Beal and George E. Lewis, and cites the methodological and analytical influence of cultural sociologist Georgina Born and philosopher of science Bruno Latour. He relates his methodology to what Born refers to as “post-positivist empiricism”. Outcomes are not postulated in advance. Theoretical approaches inform and are informed by extensive use of original primary research—in particular interviews and oral history—in order to gain perspectives beyond archival resources and, where necessary, extend existing frameworks (p. 175). Combining this with Latour and actor-network theory necessitates Piekut “disregarding any artificial and normative separations among fields and actors and embracing the messy assemblages that result” (p. 9). The glory of his messy assemblages is that they frequently lead to alternative narratives better able to reflect the complexities and entanglements of the New York avant-garde than the narrative offered by Nyman. His results complement Beal’s publications on the development of experimental music, such as New Music, New Allies (2006), and Lewis’s remarkable volume on African American experimental music and American experimental music culture A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (2008). Experimentalism Otherwise is also an important addition to Cage studies. Although Cage is not the sole concern of the book, Piekut’s study focuses on areas of the composer’s life and work not previously adequately studied. As such it fits neatly alongside other recent critical investigations into Cage that have challenged earlier studies through the use of new archival research and by turning to discourse analysis methodologies and critical theory. Piekut’s knowledge of Cage’s music and writings and the voluminous literature on Cage is clearly evident from the text as well as the extensive bibliography; however, I was surprised he did not engage with the arguments of Kahn (1997) or refer to the highly relevant discussion in Wolff and Patterson (1994). I have one concern regarding his characterisation of Cage’s thought, but will return to that later. The book is divided into a contextualising introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue; aside from the introduction, each has a separate focus. Chapter one takes as its subject the disastrous performances of Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–2) given 3 by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in February 1964. An indeterminate composition, Atlas was written using chance operations derived from the star charts referred to in its title. The composer was still fuming about the performance years later, accusing the orchestra of unprofessional and criminal behaviour. Piekut points out that the majority of accounts have relied only on Cage’s recollections, ignoring alternative perspectives. He therefore interviewed musicians and administrators of the orchestra and other witnesses. What he discovered was a second narrative frequently at odds with Cage’s account. Ignoring the composer’s rhetoric, Piekut investigates the political dynamic of the performances based on the “the concrete reality of actually existing experimentalism” (p. 23). The ideological model Piekut discovers in the performance is not anarchism but liberalism. I return to this argument below. Piekut is by no means the first theorist to discern liberalism, capitalism, or other related systems in the ideology of Cage’s work. Nevertheless, due to his relative impartiality and the rigour of his methodology his conclusions carry considerable weight—more, perhaps, than any previous such critique. The second chapter follows developments in the ideological and musical aims of Henry Flynt (b.1940). Part of the circles around La Monte Young and Fluxus artist George Maciunas, Flynt left behind his involvement with European art music in favour of African American musics, particularly the blues, early rock ‘n’ roll and R&B, and the early country style now often termed old-time. From 1962 he began to theorize a radical artistic philosophy removed from the values of European culture. Despite their radical rhetoric, he found that most New York experimentalists, including Cage and his circle, were largely uncomprehending. Consequently, he came to believe that the art music experimentalists were still creating within the artistic, ideological, and institutional frameworks of European music. During the same period he began protesting against the experimentalist elite and the cultural Eurocentrism of the American left. Two of these protests occurred in 1964. Placards were waved bearing slogans such as “Fight Racist Laws of Music!” and “Fight the Rich Man’s Snob Art”. But Flynt’s protests fell on uninterested ears. Presented with a radical assault on European-American cultural imperialism, most of the experimentalists Flynt sought to involve could not or would not engage with the 4 idea that they themselves were implicated artistically, economically and ideologically. Piekut usefully situates Flynt’s protests within prominent currents in leftist politics, the civil rights movement, and global anti-imperialism, and argues that subsequent characterisations of Flynt’s protests reveal the failure of participants and historians to understand the position of the avant-garde in relation to wider discourses. The four night “festival of adventurous music” billed as the October Revolution in Jazz also took place in 1964. The event itself and the collective of musicians that resulted from it—the Jazz Composers Guild—form the subject of Piekut’s third chapter. Trumpeter Bill Dixon (1925–2010) was the guiding light behind the event. Dixon referred to the music he promoted as “New Thing”. New Thing included jazz and non-jazz experimental styles and built on the achievements of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. Although the music created by New Thing artists can be regarded as being as experimental as the styles developed by Cage and his circle, because it was associated with jazz and thus perceived as “black music” it did not have the cachet or garner the institutional patronage that assisted the art music experimentalists. Formed in 1964, the Jazz Composers Guild aimed to ameliorate such difficulties; however, group meetings quickly became chaotic and ideological differences and racial politics became obstacles. Through analysing the combustion of the Jazz Composers Guild, Piekut places the discursive and musicological positions taken by Guild members into the wider arena of the civil rights movement and 1960s American politics, discusses the gender and sexual politics of black nationalism, and the role of masculine and heteronormative identities in jazz and art music experimentalism. Chapter four focuses on controversial cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933– 1991) and her performances of Cage’s 26’1.1499” for a String Player. She first played her full version of the work in 1964 and from that point on incorporated many of her own ideas into her realisation. Cage was unimpressed, feeling that her version went against his artistic and philosophical goals. Questioning again the narrow focus given to Cage’s perspective, Piekut theorises the complexities of Moorman’s agency as a performer. The book ends with a curiously proportioned epilogue. Piekut’s 5 starting point is Robert Ashley’s The Wolfman, one performance of which was attended by a young man named James Osterberg – later better known as Iggy Pop. Charting the early years of Pop’s group the Stooges, whose influences included Cage and Harry Partch, Piekut briefly examines the ignored overlap between avant-garde and popular music. Experimentalism Otherwise is so teeming with characters and arguments that it may appear against the spirit of the work to focus on Cage; however, it is with the model of Cage’s thought that the author constructs that I have a slight reservation. I am not convinced that Piekut’s model captures the flux of Cage’s thought during the early 1960s. Constantly undergoing development, Cage’s thought too was a messy assemblage. Piekut argues that “Cage’s work evidences a peculiar status as both model and mirror—a mock-up of utopian anarchism and register of hegemonic liberalism” (p. 25). While it may have reflected liberalism, the historicity of Atlas as primarily a model of utopian anarchism is less certain. Given that this transitional period in Cage’s thought has received comparatively little attention, I will raise the possibility of a more complicated and less deterministic narrative. I do not suggest this alters the viability of Piekut’s argument: his methodology is too rigorous for that. Cage’s self-definition as an anarchist evolved from a long-standing refusal “to be told what to do”, a dislike of police, dictators, and monarchs, and ideas on sonic and human freedom and enlightenment (Cage and Kostelanetz, 1970: 26; Wolff & Patterson, 1994: 79, 82). It is not clear exactly when Cage began to see his compositions as models of ideological anarchism. Though anti-political and antiinstitutional statements do occur in Cage’s writings of the 1950s (and earlier), when asked about the purpose of his work in 1958 Cage suggested his works were “at the service of metaphysical truth” (Cage & Wallace, 1958: 47). In his second 1958 Darmstadt lecture “Indeterminacy,” Cage criticised and praised a number of compositions—including his own earlier Music of Changes (1951)—based on the degree to which the performers of the scores were able to realise the syncretic psychological and spiritual goals he advocated: “the collective unconscious of Jungian psychoanalysis”; “the ‘deep sleep’ of Indian mental practice—the Ground of 6 Meister Eckhart—identifying there with no matter what eventuality”; “each thing and each being… moving out from its own center”; “a multiplicity of centers in a state of non-obstruction and interpenetration” (Cage, 1958a: 37). Cage’s first indeterminate work for orchestra, the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, was composed in the period just prior to the delivery of this lecture. There is little to suggest that his strategies in that piece were directly inspired by anarchism, though that is not to imply that Cage’s spiritual and metaphysical ideas do not have ideological ramifications. At the time he suggested that the Concert was “concerned with the disparities of nature… like the plants in a forest of completely different structure which grow close together” (Cage and Wallace, 1958: 47; cf. Cage, 1958b: 130). Cage composed Atlas Eclipticalis three years after the Concert. Although the compositional techniques he employed for Atlas do differ from those employed in the orchestral parts of the earlier work, the role of the musicians and conductor and the ideological dynamic of the situation created are not ultimately dissimilar. Cage may also have conceptualised Atlas in natural and metaphysical terms. In the programme note for the New York Philharmonic performances, Cage is quoted explaining that a friend had given him the idea that the three lines of a haiku relate respectively to nirvāṇa, saṃsāra and “specific happening.” “I thought, in writing Atlas Eclipticalis, of the first line and of the stars as nirvana”, Cage wrote (Downes, 1964: 143). In the later 1950s Cage was introduced to anarchism and its history by the individualist anarchist and historian James J. Martin, a neighbour at Stony Point (Kostelanetz, 2003: 278–80). The earliest mention of anarchism attributed to Cage that I have so far located occurs in an unsigned article on Theatre Piece published in Time in 1960 in which the reporter described the work as “Cage’s self-styled ‘anarchistic situation’”. Another early instance occurs in the 1961 lecture “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” which contains the line “But what we are doing is in our ways of art to breathe again in our lives anarchistically” (Cage, 1961b: 253–4). Both reflect Cage’s growing awareness of anarchism. Yet, strangely, the term does not appear again with any consistency in his published writings again 7 until after 1966. Atlas was influenced by such ideas to an unknown degree. Reynolds’s interview with Cage from 1962 primarily demonstrates continuity to his thought of the previous decade. Tomkins’s profile on Cage based on interviews conducted in 1964 suggests his thought was beginning to turn toward sociological matters. Anarchism is not discussed at all in these interviews, even though key developments in Cage’s thought of the early 1960s—affirmative rather than negative action, theatre, science and technology—are all mentioned. An interview Cage gave in 1965 demonstrates that, three years after the completion of Atlas and one year after the New York Philharmonic performance, he was not convinced that anarchism was a practical possibility: “Though I don’t actively engage in politics I do as an artist have some awareness of art’s political content, and it doesn’t include policemen”, Cage informed Kirby and Schechner. “I think we all realize that anarchy is not practical; the lovely movement of philosophical anarchism in the United States that did quite a lot in the 19th century finally busted up because in the large population centers its ideas were not practical” (Cage et al., 1965: 69, emphasis added). Soon afterward, however, his position changed. Anarchism and society became a central focus of his writings and interviews. In mid 1966 he was happy to write “I’m an anarchist” (Cage, 1966: 53), a position he reiterated in an interview with Kostelanetz conducted the same year (Cage and Kostelanetz, 1970: 175). As illustrated by the preface to A Year From Monday, by 1968 the basis for Cage’s theories of anarchism were formed (Cage, 1968: ix–x, 164–67). The difference to his view in 1965 is shown most clearly in the following quotation from around 1978: with the shift from mechanical to electronic technology, there is hope for anarchists. Anarchy is now practical. We have extended the central nervous system (Marshall McLuhan1); the world is an individual mind which does not need to be psychoanalyzed, it just needs to be clearheaded, not divided… into nations, not involved with government or governments, just equipped with utilities. (Cage, [1978] 1993: 106, emphasis added) 1 See McLuhan, [1964] 2001: 3. 8 What changed between 1961 and 1966? Cage’s writings in the period between the composition of Atlas and the New York Philharmonic performance2 show that he had begun to investigate the ideas of Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. Cage got back in touch with Fuller in 1963 after having first met him in 1948; his correspondence with McLuhan started late in 1964, not long after the performances of Atlas (Silverman, 2010: 214). McLuhan’s and Fuller’s related one-worldisms, ideologically ambiguous and difficult to categorise as anarchistic, are discussed by Piekut as “a technocratic variation on classical liberal—or even libertarian—theory” (p. 60). It probably was not until after 1965 that Cage conceptually linked both theorists with anarchism through combining their ideas with his own, and it may have been only after that point that he deliberately attempted to perform ideological anarchism through his work (see Cage and Kostelanetz, 1970: 7; Heimbecker, 2011: 179-86). Piekut mentions Fuller and McLuhan briefly and incisively but treats them as later additions to Cage’s panoply of influences, relevant from HPSCHD (1967–9) on. In order to formulate an accurate model of Cage’s artistic and ideological intentions at the time of the composition of Atlas in 1961 and the performance of the work in 1964 all these developments need to be taken into account. The beginnings of Cage’s frequent advocation of ideological anarchism and of the ideas of Fuller and McLuhan were entangled with each other and with his earlier spiritual and psychological theories. Furthermore, they were entangled with the conflicts of the period Piekut documents. By presenting Cage’s anarchist position as a fait accompli, Piekut’s study largely elides consideration of the impact the period had on Cage’s evolving position. These conflicts might, in fact, have been part of the impetus for Cage’s turn to concentrate on social and ideological questions. Yet Piekut’s findings also highlight the numerous difficulties Cage faced if he was successfully to update his largely apolitical psychological–spiritual model of indeterminacy forged in the 1950s into the ideological model that, by the late 1960s, he felt the need for his music to embody. 2 For example, Cage, 1962–3: 30–34. 9 The boundaries of the grouping of experimentalism were not just drawn by musical considerations. The great value of Piekut’s work—the methodology he demonstrates as well as the findings he presents—is to have widened the epistemological boundaries of his area of study, encouraging and enabling further scholarship on experimental music and its ontology. Richly deserving superlatives, it is a memorable, exciting, rigorous, and beautifully written book of considerable importance. 10