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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.
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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the historical content of the book after discussing its methodology and context.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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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