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California Studies in 20th-Century Music
Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits
In Experimentalism Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut takes the reader into the heart of what we mean by experimental in avant-garde music. Focusing on one place and time--New York City, 1964--Piekut examines five disparate events: the New York Philharmonic's disastrous performance of John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis; Henry Flynt's demonstrations against the downtown avant-garde; Charlotte Moorman's Avant Garde Festival; the founding of the Jazz Composers Guild; and the emergence of Iggy Pop. Drawing together a colorful array of personalities, Piekut argues that each of these examples points to a failure and marks a limit or boundary of canonical experimentalism. What emerges from these marginal moments is an accurate picture of the avant-garde, not as a style or genre, but as a network defined by disagreements, struggles, and exclusions.
- GenresMusicNonfiction
296 pages, ebook
First published February 19, 2011
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March 12, 2015
Fascinating social and artistic history of New York avant-garde in the early to mid 1960s. The author Benjamin Piekut focuses on four projects or incidents, involving John Cage (who is the star of this book), Leonard Bernstein, Henry Flynt, Carla Bley, Charlotte Moorman, Jazz Composers Guild, and of course, Iggy Pop. The book is not about the limitations of art or artist, but organizations - for instance the Jazz Composers Guild, or Henry Flynt's stance against the avant-garde world of his time - and the best chapter is Cage dealing with the New York Philharmonic - the making of "Atlas Eclipticalis," which was more like a war zone between the classically trained musicians and the composer. Although written for the academic audience, the subject matter is quite large and easy to get into. In a nutshell, brilliant personalities working within (and outside) a system to do their work. Amazing subject matter for a book.
July 6, 2013
The subtitle "The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits" gave me a bit of pause at first. Was this going to be a broadside about how experimental music fans are worshipping a dead god of fake innovation? It's not. "Limits" here is an open-ended term. As Piekut notes in the intro, the limits are not just walls that you crash into, but learning experiences and opportunities to reconsider your options and your limitations. John Cage loves talking about how, upon being told by Schoenberg, "[the concept of] harmony is a wall that you will never be able to break through," replied, "then I shall spend the rest of my life beating my head against that wall," implying that limitations could also be strengths. Piekut examines four moments of seeming disaster in experimentalism (as he calls it) which he attempts to open up with rigorous research, interviews, and what he calls "reshuffling the deck" with regard to which facts and aspects count as the dominant story-tellers in each narrative.
Take the opening piece, about John Cage's disastrous encounter with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Leonard Bernstein. As part of his series on New Music, Bernstein conducted Cage's "Atlas Eclipticalis," along with pieces by Feldman, Brown, and Wolff and others, for the benefit of a member crowd that was none too interested. The dominant narrative is that the Philharmonic players intentionally sabotaged Cage's work (he likened them not to spoilt children, but rather to deliberately malicious mafiosi). In what is easily the most theory-heavy portion of the book (a bit of a slog for me and my little ant-brain), Piekut breaks down several mitigating circumstances that prevent such a clear-cut I'm-the-good-guy-they're-the-bad-guys approach. Looking at interviews and reports of the time, we find that Bernstein was less than enthusiastic about presenting this "New Music," which he didn't like or respect. The performers saw it as a threat to their talent and the work-a-day discipline (the score called for long stretches of non-playing). Cage was seen as effeminate, and not able to interact with the band or play with them. But through all of these mitigating circumstances (which may or may not add up to Piekut's verdict in your mind), the author comes up with a pretty new point, one that had floated in the back of my head for some time. Cage, though brilliant, though amazing, isn't the freedom-loving free spirit he's often portrayed as, but is more of an authoritarian didact in the way he likes his works performed. As such, he "depended upon a performer who had already internalized the expectations of the composer," rather than a young upstart who might want to put his own ideas (inferior ones, it's implied) into the work. It's no wonder that Cage had a stable of stock performers who "got him" and who could reproduce his seemingly anarchic scores with an almost clockwork regularity, whether it's David Tudor or Malcolm Goldstein or others. It sort of explains why Cage's pieces often have a certain inbound rhythm or sound or feel to them, especially the canonical pieces, or at least allows us to think about his processes in a different way. Piekut doesn't excuse the Philharmonic or Bernstein, but does help us to get a different look at why the event might have unfolded the way it did.
The book follows this path, taking an event with an assumed set of reasons, and uncovering mitigating circumstances. Henry Flynt's public boycott of Stockhausen's "Originale" feels to me like the weakest of the four pieces maybe because I, with my in inbound prejudices, find Henry Flynt to be a bit of a twerp. I'm not opposed to anyone protesting an injustice if they see it as truly damaging, and Piekut goes into his involvement with African American musics and his work with the Workers World Party and related political movements to explain why his view of Stockhausen is seen through the crimson lenses of perceived Imperialism and the dominance of Eurocentric thinking in the Avant Garde. I can see his point...the avant garde was assuredly quite lily-white at the time (as the next chapter notes), and Stockhausen was pretty clear about his taste in high art vs. "peasant" musics. Fine, so Stockhausen wasn't someone I'd want to spend a lot of time with. But two things pop up here for me: 1. high art of any kind doesn't change society as much as you'd like to hope, and even less does it reinforce existing standards. If you want to go after Imperialism (a worthy foe), I'd start with more direct causes of the injustice; 2. trying to stop something from happening brings about less positive change of the time you seek than creating something new. A more effective counter-protest might have been some jazz or roots music coming from across the street; 3. the carnival-like nature of the Stockhausen piece insured that most people would think this was part of the show, and 4. this is a bit dickish of me to say, but I'd rather listen to Stockhausen's worst piece than Flynt's finest hour. It's not even a competition. That's, of course, the conundrum of living in the world and trying to be moral. The people on the side of the angels are often insufferable boors, while the worst of them can play a mean ring-modulator.
Part three takes us through the formation and quick flameout of the Jazz Composers Orchestra, led by Bill Dixon, Archie Shepp, Amiri Baraka, and others, and their difficulty in creating a viable avant garde/jazz sponsorship, performance, and distribution network. As mentioned above, the overbearing whiteness/Eurocentrism of the avant garde of the time, not to mention the prevailing idea that even the most "out" free jazz was not avant garde so much as some roots holler for drinkin' and dancin' made for a steep climb for the JCO. Despite an integrated organization (Carla and Paul Bley, Michael Mantler, Roswell Rudd, and others sat in meetings alongside Shepp, Sun Ra, Marion Brown, Baraka, and Dixon), there was confusion over not only what the goals were, but even what obstacles they faced. Piekut nicely dissects the two dominant approaches to understanding race after WWII...the "color-blind" idea favored by white musicians who basically called things the '60s equivalent of "post-racial," and the "race conscious" approach favored by black musicians, who knew the full extent of what was at stake. There's a lot of interesting stuff in this chapter, but I must admit, and maybe it's my own prejudices as well, but this chapter felt like it was imported from another book. A book I'd like to read, to be sure, but it was the only one of the four that approached things from a mostly cultural and monetary standpoint. Tied with Flynt's work with labor groups, the middle two sections form a core of economic and quality-of-life concerns, while being framed by two chapters dealing with Cage, which mostly cover aesthetics.
Chapter four is about Charlotte Moorman and more specifically about her many performances of John Cage's "26' 1.1449" For A String Player," a chance-generated piece that requires unimaginable mental and physical dexterity to play. As noted, Cage often asked his player to play in a manner that goes against classical cello training, in which the pressure and angle of attack of the bow and fingering goes against decades of neural programming that is the results of decades of "classical" cello practice. Moorman approaches the piece with great difficulty, and of her first performance of it, Cage analogized her performance to a "murder" of his composition. If that first performance was murder, Moorman spent the next 10 years rubbing her crotch on the composition's grave. In collaboration with her partner in crime, Nam June Paik, Moorman incorporated many other element's into Cage's piece that were not only counter to the original intentions, but deeply distasteful to the composer's rather puritanical approach to the world. There's an old story about how Cage harshly disciplined Julius Eastman after his young student ruined one of his performances (one of the text pieces) by reading a piece about undressing a man and having homosexual sex. "The freedom in my music is not the freedom to be irresponsible!" was Cage's supposed scold to Eastman. Similarly, Moorman began disregarding aspects of Cage's score (which included non-musical sounds like garbage can lids, tin whistles, gravel, shouts, and radio), lengthening certain elements, and including her own ideas. As the piece grew and morphed, Moorman began reading texts involving sexual assault, contraception, tapes of her having an orgasm, and talk of menstruation, as well as long snippets from the Beatles and other emerging rock bands. Cage felt the politicized work to be not in the tradition as he had created it. Piekut initially sides with Moorman, rightly pointing out that the white males of the traditional avant garde pretty much dispensed with the idea of experimentation as shock around the same time that women, minorities, and homosexuals began getting a foothold in society, effectively slamming the door of "shock value" in their face before they could have their turn. But then, Piekut does an interesting thing. He takes the turnaround and turns it around again. In a later turn of events, Moorman was arrested for performing Nam June Paik's "Opera Sextronique," which involved Moorman stripping down to partial nudity during the performance, which led to an arrest for violating indecency laws. Though she claimed that she and Paik were in all way collaborators on the composition in previous interviews, and though she claimed her modifications to Cage's piece were in the spirit of collaboration, she disavowed all of this when upon the witness stand. It was Paik's composition. I just did what I was told. I'd never dream of tampering with the composer's intention. Of all the chapters, this one is the most contradictory at the end, as it seems to argue both sides of the coin. It's a fascinating discussion, though.
The epilogue, which barely cracks into the confluence of Iggy Pop and the Ann Arbor-based ONCE Group and his subsequent rock-based experimentation is very interesting, but reads like a trailer for the sequel in the closing credits of the movie you finished watching. He suggests that "someone" needs to write the book about the confluence of rock and experimentalism before saying outright that "it would be very difficult." Indeed.
Like "No Such Thing As Silence," "Experimentalism Otherwise" succeeds so handily because it focuses tightly on pinpoint events and precise moments, rather than trying to explain everything everywhere. Although it gets pretty heavy with the academic jargon and theoretical constructs, it passes the smell test for me because, after all the critical theory terminology is stripped away, I can boil each chapter down to a core sentence or two that makes sense. As such, it's a big success. It changed my thoughts not only about music I care strongly about, but also about the ways it can be discussed. Highest possible recommendation.
Take the opening piece, about John Cage's disastrous encounter with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Leonard Bernstein. As part of his series on New Music, Bernstein conducted Cage's "Atlas Eclipticalis," along with pieces by Feldman, Brown, and Wolff and others, for the benefit of a member crowd that was none too interested. The dominant narrative is that the Philharmonic players intentionally sabotaged Cage's work (he likened them not to spoilt children, but rather to deliberately malicious mafiosi). In what is easily the most theory-heavy portion of the book (a bit of a slog for me and my little ant-brain), Piekut breaks down several mitigating circumstances that prevent such a clear-cut I'm-the-good-guy-they're-the-bad-guys approach. Looking at interviews and reports of the time, we find that Bernstein was less than enthusiastic about presenting this "New Music," which he didn't like or respect. The performers saw it as a threat to their talent and the work-a-day discipline (the score called for long stretches of non-playing). Cage was seen as effeminate, and not able to interact with the band or play with them. But through all of these mitigating circumstances (which may or may not add up to Piekut's verdict in your mind), the author comes up with a pretty new point, one that had floated in the back of my head for some time. Cage, though brilliant, though amazing, isn't the freedom-loving free spirit he's often portrayed as, but is more of an authoritarian didact in the way he likes his works performed. As such, he "depended upon a performer who had already internalized the expectations of the composer," rather than a young upstart who might want to put his own ideas (inferior ones, it's implied) into the work. It's no wonder that Cage had a stable of stock performers who "got him" and who could reproduce his seemingly anarchic scores with an almost clockwork regularity, whether it's David Tudor or Malcolm Goldstein or others. It sort of explains why Cage's pieces often have a certain inbound rhythm or sound or feel to them, especially the canonical pieces, or at least allows us to think about his processes in a different way. Piekut doesn't excuse the Philharmonic or Bernstein, but does help us to get a different look at why the event might have unfolded the way it did.
The book follows this path, taking an event with an assumed set of reasons, and uncovering mitigating circumstances. Henry Flynt's public boycott of Stockhausen's "Originale" feels to me like the weakest of the four pieces maybe because I, with my in inbound prejudices, find Henry Flynt to be a bit of a twerp. I'm not opposed to anyone protesting an injustice if they see it as truly damaging, and Piekut goes into his involvement with African American musics and his work with the Workers World Party and related political movements to explain why his view of Stockhausen is seen through the crimson lenses of perceived Imperialism and the dominance of Eurocentric thinking in the Avant Garde. I can see his point...the avant garde was assuredly quite lily-white at the time (as the next chapter notes), and Stockhausen was pretty clear about his taste in high art vs. "peasant" musics. Fine, so Stockhausen wasn't someone I'd want to spend a lot of time with. But two things pop up here for me: 1. high art of any kind doesn't change society as much as you'd like to hope, and even less does it reinforce existing standards. If you want to go after Imperialism (a worthy foe), I'd start with more direct causes of the injustice; 2. trying to stop something from happening brings about less positive change of the time you seek than creating something new. A more effective counter-protest might have been some jazz or roots music coming from across the street; 3. the carnival-like nature of the Stockhausen piece insured that most people would think this was part of the show, and 4. this is a bit dickish of me to say, but I'd rather listen to Stockhausen's worst piece than Flynt's finest hour. It's not even a competition. That's, of course, the conundrum of living in the world and trying to be moral. The people on the side of the angels are often insufferable boors, while the worst of them can play a mean ring-modulator.
Part three takes us through the formation and quick flameout of the Jazz Composers Orchestra, led by Bill Dixon, Archie Shepp, Amiri Baraka, and others, and their difficulty in creating a viable avant garde/jazz sponsorship, performance, and distribution network. As mentioned above, the overbearing whiteness/Eurocentrism of the avant garde of the time, not to mention the prevailing idea that even the most "out" free jazz was not avant garde so much as some roots holler for drinkin' and dancin' made for a steep climb for the JCO. Despite an integrated organization (Carla and Paul Bley, Michael Mantler, Roswell Rudd, and others sat in meetings alongside Shepp, Sun Ra, Marion Brown, Baraka, and Dixon), there was confusion over not only what the goals were, but even what obstacles they faced. Piekut nicely dissects the two dominant approaches to understanding race after WWII...the "color-blind" idea favored by white musicians who basically called things the '60s equivalent of "post-racial," and the "race conscious" approach favored by black musicians, who knew the full extent of what was at stake. There's a lot of interesting stuff in this chapter, but I must admit, and maybe it's my own prejudices as well, but this chapter felt like it was imported from another book. A book I'd like to read, to be sure, but it was the only one of the four that approached things from a mostly cultural and monetary standpoint. Tied with Flynt's work with labor groups, the middle two sections form a core of economic and quality-of-life concerns, while being framed by two chapters dealing with Cage, which mostly cover aesthetics.
Chapter four is about Charlotte Moorman and more specifically about her many performances of John Cage's "26' 1.1449" For A String Player," a chance-generated piece that requires unimaginable mental and physical dexterity to play. As noted, Cage often asked his player to play in a manner that goes against classical cello training, in which the pressure and angle of attack of the bow and fingering goes against decades of neural programming that is the results of decades of "classical" cello practice. Moorman approaches the piece with great difficulty, and of her first performance of it, Cage analogized her performance to a "murder" of his composition. If that first performance was murder, Moorman spent the next 10 years rubbing her crotch on the composition's grave. In collaboration with her partner in crime, Nam June Paik, Moorman incorporated many other element's into Cage's piece that were not only counter to the original intentions, but deeply distasteful to the composer's rather puritanical approach to the world. There's an old story about how Cage harshly disciplined Julius Eastman after his young student ruined one of his performances (one of the text pieces) by reading a piece about undressing a man and having homosexual sex. "The freedom in my music is not the freedom to be irresponsible!" was Cage's supposed scold to Eastman. Similarly, Moorman began disregarding aspects of Cage's score (which included non-musical sounds like garbage can lids, tin whistles, gravel, shouts, and radio), lengthening certain elements, and including her own ideas. As the piece grew and morphed, Moorman began reading texts involving sexual assault, contraception, tapes of her having an orgasm, and talk of menstruation, as well as long snippets from the Beatles and other emerging rock bands. Cage felt the politicized work to be not in the tradition as he had created it. Piekut initially sides with Moorman, rightly pointing out that the white males of the traditional avant garde pretty much dispensed with the idea of experimentation as shock around the same time that women, minorities, and homosexuals began getting a foothold in society, effectively slamming the door of "shock value" in their face before they could have their turn. But then, Piekut does an interesting thing. He takes the turnaround and turns it around again. In a later turn of events, Moorman was arrested for performing Nam June Paik's "Opera Sextronique," which involved Moorman stripping down to partial nudity during the performance, which led to an arrest for violating indecency laws. Though she claimed that she and Paik were in all way collaborators on the composition in previous interviews, and though she claimed her modifications to Cage's piece were in the spirit of collaboration, she disavowed all of this when upon the witness stand. It was Paik's composition. I just did what I was told. I'd never dream of tampering with the composer's intention. Of all the chapters, this one is the most contradictory at the end, as it seems to argue both sides of the coin. It's a fascinating discussion, though.
The epilogue, which barely cracks into the confluence of Iggy Pop and the Ann Arbor-based ONCE Group and his subsequent rock-based experimentation is very interesting, but reads like a trailer for the sequel in the closing credits of the movie you finished watching. He suggests that "someone" needs to write the book about the confluence of rock and experimentalism before saying outright that "it would be very difficult." Indeed.
Like "No Such Thing As Silence," "Experimentalism Otherwise" succeeds so handily because it focuses tightly on pinpoint events and precise moments, rather than trying to explain everything everywhere. Although it gets pretty heavy with the academic jargon and theoretical constructs, it passes the smell test for me because, after all the critical theory terminology is stripped away, I can boil each chapter down to a core sentence or two that makes sense. As such, it's a big success. It changed my thoughts not only about music I care strongly about, but also about the ways it can be discussed. Highest possible recommendation.
May 19, 2018
review of
Benjamin Piekut's Experimentalism Otherwise
- The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - Dec 29, 2015 - Jan 6, 2016
This is just the beginning of my review. Read the full thing or nothing will ever change in this world ever again & no-one will ever be immortal.: full review: "Experimental, Ism; Other, Wise": https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
It's a good thing I have off work for another 6 days or I'd have a very hard time even beginning to approach writing a review of this. The subject of experimental/avant-garde music is so near & dear to yrs truly that any bk on the subject is bound to stimulate a detailed response from me. The emphasis on New York is of considerably lesser importance but then the author has this to say in his Introduction:
"This study is situated in New York City during 1964. That means that other important formations of experimentalism—most important, those in San Francisco and Ann Arbor—come up only tangentially here" [..] "There is no deep reason for this; my book is about New York, not those other places. In fact, I maintain that there is nothing special about the New York stories that I discuss in this project—they are simply a way in, a collection of opportunities to explore experimentalism in the most ordinary fashion." - p 2
Such a 'narrow' focus also enables Piekut to make a detailed examination w/o having to get into 'the larger picture' in too dissipating a way & he does a truly excellent job of it. At 1st, I was a bit annoyed by his stance but it was hard not to be won over by his scholarliness.
When I'm reading a bk, I write pencilled notes inside the front cover referring to specific pages where I've marked the passage to be quoted or otherwise mentioned. If I take more notes than the inside front can accommodate than I usually move to the inside back cover. After that, it's usually to the end page. That was the case here. These notes are the merest reminders of what's on my mind. Another person reading them wdn't find much. My note for the above-quoted p2 is: "Cage rc'vd well at Tudorfest". What that has to do w/ New York City isn't immediately apparent.
What it does have to do w/ is that the 1st chapter in Experimentalism Otherwise is entitled "When Orchestras Attack! John Cage Meets the New York Philharmonic wch focuses nicely on deepening the historic record of the New York Philharmonic's negative response to performing Cage's "Atlas Eclipticalis" on February 9, 1964. It's often the case that when I'm reading a music-related bk I also listen to relevant recordings & read their liner notes. That was the case here insofar as I was listening to the 3 disc collection called Music from the Tudorfest - San Francisco Tape Music Center 1964 from the liner notes in wch it's written that:
[San Francisco Chronicle's Alfred] "Frankenstein's insightful comments are especially noteworthy if one considers the notorious performances of Atlas Eclipticalis (also played simultaneously with Winter Music in its electronic version) by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center two months earlier as part of a series of concerts titled "The Avant-Garde." In contrast to the performances at the Tape Music Center, the reception of the same work was far from favorable. As reported by Calvin Tomkins, shortly after the first amplifed sounds emitted from the loudspeakers, audience members muttered angrily and left their seats; roughly half of the audience had left the hall by the time the work ended. Taking his bows after the work's second performance Cage heard what he first thought was "the sound of escaping air," which he quickly realized was hissing by members of the orchestra. During the third performance some of the musicians whistled into their contact microphones, played scales, and purportedly smashed electronic equipment." - http://www.newworldrecords.org/album....
I was also listening to the Mode Records 3 disc release of "Atlas Eclipticalis" w/ "Winter Music" & reading those notes. Mode does a phenomenal job of releasing excellent recordings of music that's of profound importance to me including a vast catalog of Cage works that they, apparently, hope to one day make complete. I wish them the best. In a review of the CDs presented on Mode's website it's written:
"Historically, performances of Atlas eclipticalis have been prone to insurrection and mutiny. Leonard Bernstein's performances in 1963 created one of the biggest scandals in the New York Philharmonic's history." - http://www.moderecords.com/catalog/00...
&, as I recall, the liner notes put forth something similarly indicting of the NYP. While I'm completely sympathetic to Cage's philosophical & compositional approaches, I'm also deeply indebted to Piekut's careful 'fair hearing' of the Philharmonic's side of the story. Piekut is the only source I've come across (other than original NYC articles) who doesn't just automatically take Cage's side & demonize the orchestra.
"Cage disagreed, however, with Bernstein's original plan to end the concert with an improvisation by the orchestra. "Improvisation is not related to what the three of us are doing in our works""
Bernstein replied w/:
"What, for example, makes you think that our orchestral improvisation should in any way constitute a "comment" on your work, and that of your colleagues? What, again, gives you the idea that everything in this part of the program must be confined to the realm in which you work? The overall idea is music of chance; and there are chance elements in your work, as well as those of Brown and Feldman, as well as in total improvisation. We are trying to have as comprehensive a look at the aleatory world as is possible in half a subscription program; and it seems also to me that improvisation is an essential fact of such a look." - p 31
I think there're merits to both arguments altho I think that associating improvisation w/ "chance" is a bit misleading. It seems to me that Cage's concern was that his music & Brown's & Feldman's wd be overly conflated w/ improvisation wch wd give the audience an 'easy-way-out' for pseudo-understanding the work. As such. I'm ultimately more sympathetic to Cage's position & suspect Bernstein of some slight disingenuousness. Still, in the interest of fairness, it might've been better if Mode had quoted Bernstein a tad in their "Atlas Eclipticalis" notes.
On a related note, I have the Columbia Masterworks ML 6133 record, "Leonard Bernstein Conducts Music of Our Time" (released 1965), wch is from the era under discussion & wch includes Ligeti's "Atmospheres", Feldman's Out of "Last Pieces", Austin's "Improvisations for Orchestra & Jazz Soloists", & Four Improvisations by the Orchestra. According to the liner notes re the latter:
"The most radical of the four pieces on this disc, "Four Improvisations by the Orchestra," was composed at the moment of the recording. In other words, it is almost one hundred percent improvised. "The orchestra and I are going to compose on the spot," said Leonard Bernstein to the audience in Philharmonic Hall, when he and the orchestra first improvised in public. "Nothing has been fixed or decided upon in advance except two or three signals for starting and stopping. Otherwise, every note you hear will have been spontaneously invented by the New York Philharmonic, with its conductor serving as a kind of general guide, or policeman.["]"
Now, I'm very glad to have this record in my collection & I just relistened to the "Four Improvisations" again to refresh my memory. They're 'ok', expertly played, but the conducting so obviously sculpts it & the 'good taste' of the players does too. For me, in order for an improvisation to be truly interesting there has to be the chance of something more unpredictable. No player in the Philharmonic was likely to go against the grain of Bernstein, the maestro, no wind player was going to circlebreathe the same note throughout the whole piece ignoring the conductor's cues. As such, these pieces are only 'improvisations' in a limited sense - just as most jazz is w/ its head, hierarchical solos, & tail structure.
Piekut places importance on Michael Nyman's experimental music - Cage and beyond (1974) as do I. I read it sometime between the end of 1976 & the beginning of 1978. I was 23 for most of 1977 & turned 24 in September. It was a yr of great musical discovery for me. Below's a list of the records I got that yr:
1977 - 67
0444 “Live Peace in Toronto” - The Plastic Ono Band
0445 “Songs of the Humpback Whale”
0446 “Fate in a Pleasant Mood” - Sun Ra
0447“Astro Black” - Sun Ra Traded to Pat
0448 “The Magic City” - Sun Ra
0449 “Gerd Zacher - Organ” - Englert, Feldman, Zacher, Cage
0450 “Cage; Schnebel” - ensemble musica negativa
0451 “‘Round Midnight, etc..” - Sun Ra, etc..
0452 “Live at Montrose August ‘76” - Sun Ra, etc..
0453“Smoke Dreams” - Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band Given to Doug
0454“Elton Dean” Given to Doug
0455 “The Only Jealousy of Emer” - Yeats/Lou Harrison
0456 “Musical Experiences” - Jean Dubuffet
0457 “Quintette for Piano & Strings; Three Moods” - Leo Ornstein
0458 “Collages / Revelation & Fall” - Gerhard / Davies
0459 “Le Voyage; La Reine Verte; Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir; etc..” - Pierre Henry
0460 “The East Village Other Electric Newspaper”
0461“Coney Island Baby” - Lou Reed Given to Lamar
0462 “Corrected Slogans” - Music Language
0463 “27’10.554” / The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even...” - Cage / Duchamp/Knaack - Knaack
0464 “1st Concerto / Todtentanz” - Chopin / Liszt - Brailowsky - The Phialdelphia Orchestra - Ormandy
0465 “Chopin” - Brailowsky
0466 “Music from the Morning of the World” - Balinese Gamelan
0467 “Cowell; Cage; Johnston; Nancarrow” - Robert Miller
0468 “Transmutation; 2 Tetragrams” - Dane Rudhyar - Marcia Mikulak
0469 “Electronic Music” - Koenig; Pongrácz; Riehn
0470 “Zyklus; Klavierstuck X” - Karlheinz Stockhausen
0471 “Strauss Waltzes - Vienna Blood, Artist’s Life, Sweetheart Waltz, etc..” - Johann Strauss (78)
0472 “Serenade / Hungarian Dance #5” - Schubert / Brahms {?}
0473 “Chopin Polonaises 1 to 6” - Artur Rubinstein
0474 “Nutcracker Excerpts” - Tchaikovsky
0475 “Violin Concerto” - Tchaikovsky
0476 “Horowitz plays Chopin”
0477 “Elvis’ Golden Records” - Elvis Presley
0478 “Slyvia; Coppélia” - Delibes
0479“Cinderella - Suites 1 & 2” - Prokofieff Sold
0480 “Lieutenant Kije / Song of the Nightingale” - Prokofieff / Stravinsky {?}
0481“Hawaiian Favorites” - Harry Richards & his Islanders Sold
0482“Overtures” - Strauss; Rossini; Lehar; Weber; Nicolai; Beethoven Sold
0483 “Heifetz Plays” - Gluck; Rimsky-Korsakov; Godowsky; Dvorák; Brahms; Ravel; etc..
0484 “John McCormack sings Irish Songs”
0485“Band of Gypsies” - Hendrix Returned
0486 “Klavierkonzert Nr 4” - Beethoven - Pollini - Böhm-Wiener Philharmonic
0487 “Piano Sonata #2 - Concord, Mass., 1840-60” - Charles Ives - Gilbert Kalish
0488 “Kurzwellen” - Karlheinz Stockhausen
0489 “Oral / Synaxis” - Ivo Malec / Maurice Ohana
0490 “Musics for Piano, Whistling, Microphones and Tape Recorder” - Michael Snow
0491 “Glass Harmonica” - Beethoven; Naumann; Tomaschek; Röllig; etc.. - Hoffmann
0492 “Music with Changing Parts” - Philip Glass
0493“Enigmatic Ocean” - Jean Luc Ponty Sold
0494 “14 Waltzes” - Chopin - Brailowsky
0495 “2nd Symphony” - Beethoven - Monteux - San Francisco Symphony Orchestra
0496 “Akrata; Achorripsis; Polla Ta Dhina; ST10” - Iannis Xenakis - Simonovitch, etc..
0497 “Metastasis; Pithoprakta; Eonta” - Iannis Xenakis
0498 “NY City R & B” - Cecil Taylor/Buell Neidlinger
0499 “Zoot Allures” - Frank Zappa
0500 “From 12 Etudes in Minor Keys” - Alkan
0501 “Farewell Symphony; Trumpet Concert / Toy Symphony” - Haydn / Leopold Mozart
0502 “Anarchy in the UK; I Wanna be Me” - Sex Pistols (12”EP)
0503 “The Piano Music of Henry Cowell”
0504 “Electric Sound” - Sonic Arts Union (Lucier, Ashley, Behrman, Mumma)
0505 “Dawn & Dusk in the Okefenokee Swamp” - Environments
0506 “The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore & Optimum Aviary” - Environments
0507 “Ensemble Pieces” - Christopher Hobbs; John Adams; Gavin Bryars
0508 “The Sinking of the Titanic; Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” - Gavin Bryars
0509 “La Caccia” - Walter Marchetti
0510 “Live Electronic Music Improvised” - MEV; AMM
"In Michael Nyman's influential formulation, a set of "purely musical considerations" sets off experimentalism from its close cousin, the avant-garde. Experimentalism, he writes, offers fluid processes instead of static objects; antiteleological procedures instead of goal-driven works; new roles for composers, performers, and listeners instead of the hierarchies of traditional art music; notation as a set of actions rather than as a representation of sounds; a momentary evanescence instead of a temporal fixity; an ontology that foregrounds performance over writing; and a welcoming of daily life instead of its transcendence." - p 5
While I 'have to say' that Nyman's experimental music was a great companion to the music I was listening to in 1977, I also 'have to say' that I find the above distinctions to be more idiosyncratic of Nyman than otherwise useful. In other words, "experimental music" is music that involves experimentation & "avant-garde music" is music that's on the 'cutting edge' of new developments. IMO, both terms are mostly interchangeable altho I think an argument cd be made that not all experiments are cutting edge (imagine music performed using an attempted improvement in violin tuning pegs). Then again, there's plenty of music that gets labeled "experimental" & "avant-garde" that, IMO, is neither but is, instead, an imitation of earlier music that was. Personally, I've chosen to use the term "avant-garde" infrequently b/c of its military associations since I'm anti-military.
Lest the reader think that Piekut adopts Nyman's "influential formulation", we then come to this:
"Rather than reinscribing the usual distinction made between American experimentalism and European avant-gardism, I use the two terms interchangeably here because doing so otherwise would naturalize a difference that has been discursively produced." - p 14
Piekut is very much an intellectual in what's usually an academic sense of highly informed by specialized contemporary thinkers:
"My approach to these matters is inspired above all by the work of Bruno Latour, a philosopher of science associated with actor-network theory (ANT), I proceed from Latour's formulation of the term network: it does not describe the shape of the social formations under study but rather the methods used to understand them and the movements of translation they effect. When studying a network, it is important to identify everything that has an effect in a given situation. These effects reveal a web of connections among people, technologies, texts, and institutions. It is a heterogeneous network—these are things of different kinds, and thus their connection necessarily requires translation." - p 8
Piekut's emphasis on scientific philosophy helps identify his point-of-view (POV) as, perhaps, less that of a person exclusively focused on what're usually considered to be issues of music theory & more that of a general analyst. This method of calling attn to "a web of connections" can be a way of highlighting elements of socio-economic privilege that might be 'invisible' from a less general, more myopic 'music-only-centric' perspective.
"That is why it is crucial to understand a network as heterogeneous, as something far more complex than a simple social network of composers and critics who get each other gigs. Dispersal and durability measure relative strength, so the portable persistence of articles, scores, books, and recordings assumes paramount importance, especially when they end up in authoritative sites of knowledge production such as archives and university libraries." - p 10
I questioned Nyman's distinctions between "experimental" & "avant-garde" above, so I do a similar thing here; Is it still a network then? Yes, I think so.. & the more deeply established the network any given composer/performer/critic has access to, the more establishment they are - even if they're 'anti-establishment' otherwise. Such an observation becomes important as the reader is led thru various manifestations of experimentalism in different cultural milieus.
Piekut has the intellectual's carefulness in language: "Because I agree with Foucault's description of power relations as both "intentional and nonsubjective,"" (p 10). Note that the word used is "nonsubjective" rather than 'objective'. This is another valuable distinction to me insofar as I find both 'objectivity' & 'subjectivity' flawed as concepts.
"Comparing Moorman's Second Annual Avant-Garde Festival and Dixon's October Revolution in Jazz reveals the different kind of resources that could be mobilized on behalf of each festival. Moorman, an assistant to the concert producer Norman Seaman, could draw upon her experience and considerable contacts in concert promotion to attract reporters and critics from several newspapers, national glossy magazines, news film, and radio."
[..]
"Dixon produced the event with little more than his telephone and a list of hungry and eager musicians, and he later recalled incurring debts to both his phone company and his local grocers in the weeks preceding the festival. (Indeed, the fact that the power company cut the cafés electricity on the day of the first concert indicates the precariousness of the situation.)" - p 12
Moorman was white, Dixon was black, the cards were definitely stacked against the latter. That sd, there were signs of the times that were more favorable. Take, eg, Tom Wilson, a black music producer who supported an amazing motley crew of vigorously original musical acts. Irwin Chusid of WFMU has even created a website in his memory ( http://www.producertomwilson.com/ ) decades after Wilson's 1978 demise. As Michael Hall puts it in his January 6, 2014 article for the Texas Monthly:
"Without this producer, Bob Dylan would not have broken through like he did—effectively bringing on the swinging sixties and changing music forever. Without this producer, Simon and Garfunkel might have quit before they ever got started, the Velvet Underground might have stayed underground, Frank Zappa might have spent his career recording on hapless independent labels, and jazz greats Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor would definitely have labored longer in obscurity than they already did. This producer helped them all find their voices and realize their visions, revolutionizing American music. He was a Harvard graduate. He was a Republican. He was a black guy from Waco, Texas."
Benjamin Piekut's Experimentalism Otherwise
- The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - Dec 29, 2015 - Jan 6, 2016
This is just the beginning of my review. Read the full thing or nothing will ever change in this world ever again & no-one will ever be immortal.: full review: "Experimental, Ism; Other, Wise": https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
It's a good thing I have off work for another 6 days or I'd have a very hard time even beginning to approach writing a review of this. The subject of experimental/avant-garde music is so near & dear to yrs truly that any bk on the subject is bound to stimulate a detailed response from me. The emphasis on New York is of considerably lesser importance but then the author has this to say in his Introduction:
"This study is situated in New York City during 1964. That means that other important formations of experimentalism—most important, those in San Francisco and Ann Arbor—come up only tangentially here" [..] "There is no deep reason for this; my book is about New York, not those other places. In fact, I maintain that there is nothing special about the New York stories that I discuss in this project—they are simply a way in, a collection of opportunities to explore experimentalism in the most ordinary fashion." - p 2
Such a 'narrow' focus also enables Piekut to make a detailed examination w/o having to get into 'the larger picture' in too dissipating a way & he does a truly excellent job of it. At 1st, I was a bit annoyed by his stance but it was hard not to be won over by his scholarliness.
When I'm reading a bk, I write pencilled notes inside the front cover referring to specific pages where I've marked the passage to be quoted or otherwise mentioned. If I take more notes than the inside front can accommodate than I usually move to the inside back cover. After that, it's usually to the end page. That was the case here. These notes are the merest reminders of what's on my mind. Another person reading them wdn't find much. My note for the above-quoted p2 is: "Cage rc'vd well at Tudorfest". What that has to do w/ New York City isn't immediately apparent.
What it does have to do w/ is that the 1st chapter in Experimentalism Otherwise is entitled "When Orchestras Attack! John Cage Meets the New York Philharmonic wch focuses nicely on deepening the historic record of the New York Philharmonic's negative response to performing Cage's "Atlas Eclipticalis" on February 9, 1964. It's often the case that when I'm reading a music-related bk I also listen to relevant recordings & read their liner notes. That was the case here insofar as I was listening to the 3 disc collection called Music from the Tudorfest - San Francisco Tape Music Center 1964 from the liner notes in wch it's written that:
[San Francisco Chronicle's Alfred] "Frankenstein's insightful comments are especially noteworthy if one considers the notorious performances of Atlas Eclipticalis (also played simultaneously with Winter Music in its electronic version) by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center two months earlier as part of a series of concerts titled "The Avant-Garde." In contrast to the performances at the Tape Music Center, the reception of the same work was far from favorable. As reported by Calvin Tomkins, shortly after the first amplifed sounds emitted from the loudspeakers, audience members muttered angrily and left their seats; roughly half of the audience had left the hall by the time the work ended. Taking his bows after the work's second performance Cage heard what he first thought was "the sound of escaping air," which he quickly realized was hissing by members of the orchestra. During the third performance some of the musicians whistled into their contact microphones, played scales, and purportedly smashed electronic equipment." - http://www.newworldrecords.org/album....
I was also listening to the Mode Records 3 disc release of "Atlas Eclipticalis" w/ "Winter Music" & reading those notes. Mode does a phenomenal job of releasing excellent recordings of music that's of profound importance to me including a vast catalog of Cage works that they, apparently, hope to one day make complete. I wish them the best. In a review of the CDs presented on Mode's website it's written:
"Historically, performances of Atlas eclipticalis have been prone to insurrection and mutiny. Leonard Bernstein's performances in 1963 created one of the biggest scandals in the New York Philharmonic's history." - http://www.moderecords.com/catalog/00...
&, as I recall, the liner notes put forth something similarly indicting of the NYP. While I'm completely sympathetic to Cage's philosophical & compositional approaches, I'm also deeply indebted to Piekut's careful 'fair hearing' of the Philharmonic's side of the story. Piekut is the only source I've come across (other than original NYC articles) who doesn't just automatically take Cage's side & demonize the orchestra.
"Cage disagreed, however, with Bernstein's original plan to end the concert with an improvisation by the orchestra. "Improvisation is not related to what the three of us are doing in our works""
Bernstein replied w/:
"What, for example, makes you think that our orchestral improvisation should in any way constitute a "comment" on your work, and that of your colleagues? What, again, gives you the idea that everything in this part of the program must be confined to the realm in which you work? The overall idea is music of chance; and there are chance elements in your work, as well as those of Brown and Feldman, as well as in total improvisation. We are trying to have as comprehensive a look at the aleatory world as is possible in half a subscription program; and it seems also to me that improvisation is an essential fact of such a look." - p 31
I think there're merits to both arguments altho I think that associating improvisation w/ "chance" is a bit misleading. It seems to me that Cage's concern was that his music & Brown's & Feldman's wd be overly conflated w/ improvisation wch wd give the audience an 'easy-way-out' for pseudo-understanding the work. As such. I'm ultimately more sympathetic to Cage's position & suspect Bernstein of some slight disingenuousness. Still, in the interest of fairness, it might've been better if Mode had quoted Bernstein a tad in their "Atlas Eclipticalis" notes.
On a related note, I have the Columbia Masterworks ML 6133 record, "Leonard Bernstein Conducts Music of Our Time" (released 1965), wch is from the era under discussion & wch includes Ligeti's "Atmospheres", Feldman's Out of "Last Pieces", Austin's "Improvisations for Orchestra & Jazz Soloists", & Four Improvisations by the Orchestra. According to the liner notes re the latter:
"The most radical of the four pieces on this disc, "Four Improvisations by the Orchestra," was composed at the moment of the recording. In other words, it is almost one hundred percent improvised. "The orchestra and I are going to compose on the spot," said Leonard Bernstein to the audience in Philharmonic Hall, when he and the orchestra first improvised in public. "Nothing has been fixed or decided upon in advance except two or three signals for starting and stopping. Otherwise, every note you hear will have been spontaneously invented by the New York Philharmonic, with its conductor serving as a kind of general guide, or policeman.["]"
Now, I'm very glad to have this record in my collection & I just relistened to the "Four Improvisations" again to refresh my memory. They're 'ok', expertly played, but the conducting so obviously sculpts it & the 'good taste' of the players does too. For me, in order for an improvisation to be truly interesting there has to be the chance of something more unpredictable. No player in the Philharmonic was likely to go against the grain of Bernstein, the maestro, no wind player was going to circlebreathe the same note throughout the whole piece ignoring the conductor's cues. As such, these pieces are only 'improvisations' in a limited sense - just as most jazz is w/ its head, hierarchical solos, & tail structure.
Piekut places importance on Michael Nyman's experimental music - Cage and beyond (1974) as do I. I read it sometime between the end of 1976 & the beginning of 1978. I was 23 for most of 1977 & turned 24 in September. It was a yr of great musical discovery for me. Below's a list of the records I got that yr:
1977 - 67
0444 “Live Peace in Toronto” - The Plastic Ono Band
0445 “Songs of the Humpback Whale”
0446 “Fate in a Pleasant Mood” - Sun Ra
0447
0448 “The Magic City” - Sun Ra
0449 “Gerd Zacher - Organ” - Englert, Feldman, Zacher, Cage
0450 “Cage; Schnebel” - ensemble musica negativa
0451 “‘Round Midnight, etc..” - Sun Ra, etc..
0452 “Live at Montrose August ‘76” - Sun Ra, etc..
0453
0454
0455 “The Only Jealousy of Emer” - Yeats/Lou Harrison
0456 “Musical Experiences” - Jean Dubuffet
0457 “Quintette for Piano & Strings; Three Moods” - Leo Ornstein
0458 “Collages / Revelation & Fall” - Gerhard / Davies
0459 “Le Voyage; La Reine Verte; Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir; etc..” - Pierre Henry
0460 “The East Village Other Electric Newspaper”
0461
0462 “Corrected Slogans” - Music Language
0463 “27’10.554” / The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even...” - Cage / Duchamp/Knaack - Knaack
0464 “1st Concerto / Todtentanz” - Chopin / Liszt - Brailowsky - The Phialdelphia Orchestra - Ormandy
0465 “Chopin” - Brailowsky
0466 “Music from the Morning of the World” - Balinese Gamelan
0467 “Cowell; Cage; Johnston; Nancarrow” - Robert Miller
0468 “Transmutation; 2 Tetragrams” - Dane Rudhyar - Marcia Mikulak
0469 “Electronic Music” - Koenig; Pongrácz; Riehn
0470 “Zyklus; Klavierstuck X” - Karlheinz Stockhausen
0471 “Strauss Waltzes - Vienna Blood, Artist’s Life, Sweetheart Waltz, etc..” - Johann Strauss (78)
0472 “Serenade / Hungarian Dance #5” - Schubert / Brahms {?}
0473 “Chopin Polonaises 1 to 6” - Artur Rubinstein
0474 “Nutcracker Excerpts” - Tchaikovsky
0475 “Violin Concerto” - Tchaikovsky
0476 “Horowitz plays Chopin”
0477 “Elvis’ Golden Records” - Elvis Presley
0478 “Slyvia; Coppélia” - Delibes
0479
0480 “Lieutenant Kije / Song of the Nightingale” - Prokofieff / Stravinsky {?}
0481
0482
0483 “Heifetz Plays” - Gluck; Rimsky-Korsakov; Godowsky; Dvorák; Brahms; Ravel; etc..
0484 “John McCormack sings Irish Songs”
0485
0486 “Klavierkonzert Nr 4” - Beethoven - Pollini - Böhm-Wiener Philharmonic
0487 “Piano Sonata #2 - Concord, Mass., 1840-60” - Charles Ives - Gilbert Kalish
0488 “Kurzwellen” - Karlheinz Stockhausen
0489 “Oral / Synaxis” - Ivo Malec / Maurice Ohana
0490 “Musics for Piano, Whistling, Microphones and Tape Recorder” - Michael Snow
0491 “Glass Harmonica” - Beethoven; Naumann; Tomaschek; Röllig; etc.. - Hoffmann
0492 “Music with Changing Parts” - Philip Glass
0493
0494 “14 Waltzes” - Chopin - Brailowsky
0495 “2nd Symphony” - Beethoven - Monteux - San Francisco Symphony Orchestra
0496 “Akrata; Achorripsis; Polla Ta Dhina; ST10” - Iannis Xenakis - Simonovitch, etc..
0497 “Metastasis; Pithoprakta; Eonta” - Iannis Xenakis
0498 “NY City R & B” - Cecil Taylor/Buell Neidlinger
0499 “Zoot Allures” - Frank Zappa
0500 “From 12 Etudes in Minor Keys” - Alkan
0501 “Farewell Symphony; Trumpet Concert / Toy Symphony” - Haydn / Leopold Mozart
0502 “Anarchy in the UK; I Wanna be Me” - Sex Pistols (12”EP)
0503 “The Piano Music of Henry Cowell”
0504 “Electric Sound” - Sonic Arts Union (Lucier, Ashley, Behrman, Mumma)
0505 “Dawn & Dusk in the Okefenokee Swamp” - Environments
0506 “The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore & Optimum Aviary” - Environments
0507 “Ensemble Pieces” - Christopher Hobbs; John Adams; Gavin Bryars
0508 “The Sinking of the Titanic; Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” - Gavin Bryars
0509 “La Caccia” - Walter Marchetti
0510 “Live Electronic Music Improvised” - MEV; AMM
"In Michael Nyman's influential formulation, a set of "purely musical considerations" sets off experimentalism from its close cousin, the avant-garde. Experimentalism, he writes, offers fluid processes instead of static objects; antiteleological procedures instead of goal-driven works; new roles for composers, performers, and listeners instead of the hierarchies of traditional art music; notation as a set of actions rather than as a representation of sounds; a momentary evanescence instead of a temporal fixity; an ontology that foregrounds performance over writing; and a welcoming of daily life instead of its transcendence." - p 5
While I 'have to say' that Nyman's experimental music was a great companion to the music I was listening to in 1977, I also 'have to say' that I find the above distinctions to be more idiosyncratic of Nyman than otherwise useful. In other words, "experimental music" is music that involves experimentation & "avant-garde music" is music that's on the 'cutting edge' of new developments. IMO, both terms are mostly interchangeable altho I think an argument cd be made that not all experiments are cutting edge (imagine music performed using an attempted improvement in violin tuning pegs). Then again, there's plenty of music that gets labeled "experimental" & "avant-garde" that, IMO, is neither but is, instead, an imitation of earlier music that was. Personally, I've chosen to use the term "avant-garde" infrequently b/c of its military associations since I'm anti-military.
Lest the reader think that Piekut adopts Nyman's "influential formulation", we then come to this:
"Rather than reinscribing the usual distinction made between American experimentalism and European avant-gardism, I use the two terms interchangeably here because doing so otherwise would naturalize a difference that has been discursively produced." - p 14
Piekut is very much an intellectual in what's usually an academic sense of highly informed by specialized contemporary thinkers:
"My approach to these matters is inspired above all by the work of Bruno Latour, a philosopher of science associated with actor-network theory (ANT), I proceed from Latour's formulation of the term network: it does not describe the shape of the social formations under study but rather the methods used to understand them and the movements of translation they effect. When studying a network, it is important to identify everything that has an effect in a given situation. These effects reveal a web of connections among people, technologies, texts, and institutions. It is a heterogeneous network—these are things of different kinds, and thus their connection necessarily requires translation." - p 8
Piekut's emphasis on scientific philosophy helps identify his point-of-view (POV) as, perhaps, less that of a person exclusively focused on what're usually considered to be issues of music theory & more that of a general analyst. This method of calling attn to "a web of connections" can be a way of highlighting elements of socio-economic privilege that might be 'invisible' from a less general, more myopic 'music-only-centric' perspective.
"That is why it is crucial to understand a network as heterogeneous, as something far more complex than a simple social network of composers and critics who get each other gigs. Dispersal and durability measure relative strength, so the portable persistence of articles, scores, books, and recordings assumes paramount importance, especially when they end up in authoritative sites of knowledge production such as archives and university libraries." - p 10
I questioned Nyman's distinctions between "experimental" & "avant-garde" above, so I do a similar thing here; Is it still a network then? Yes, I think so.. & the more deeply established the network any given composer/performer/critic has access to, the more establishment they are - even if they're 'anti-establishment' otherwise. Such an observation becomes important as the reader is led thru various manifestations of experimentalism in different cultural milieus.
Piekut has the intellectual's carefulness in language: "Because I agree with Foucault's description of power relations as both "intentional and nonsubjective,"" (p 10). Note that the word used is "nonsubjective" rather than 'objective'. This is another valuable distinction to me insofar as I find both 'objectivity' & 'subjectivity' flawed as concepts.
"Comparing Moorman's Second Annual Avant-Garde Festival and Dixon's October Revolution in Jazz reveals the different kind of resources that could be mobilized on behalf of each festival. Moorman, an assistant to the concert producer Norman Seaman, could draw upon her experience and considerable contacts in concert promotion to attract reporters and critics from several newspapers, national glossy magazines, news film, and radio."
[..]
"Dixon produced the event with little more than his telephone and a list of hungry and eager musicians, and he later recalled incurring debts to both his phone company and his local grocers in the weeks preceding the festival. (Indeed, the fact that the power company cut the cafés electricity on the day of the first concert indicates the precariousness of the situation.)" - p 12
Moorman was white, Dixon was black, the cards were definitely stacked against the latter. That sd, there were signs of the times that were more favorable. Take, eg, Tom Wilson, a black music producer who supported an amazing motley crew of vigorously original musical acts. Irwin Chusid of WFMU has even created a website in his memory ( http://www.producertomwilson.com/ ) decades after Wilson's 1978 demise. As Michael Hall puts it in his January 6, 2014 article for the Texas Monthly:
"Without this producer, Bob Dylan would not have broken through like he did—effectively bringing on the swinging sixties and changing music forever. Without this producer, Simon and Garfunkel might have quit before they ever got started, the Velvet Underground might have stayed underground, Frank Zappa might have spent his career recording on hapless independent labels, and jazz greats Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor would definitely have labored longer in obscurity than they already did. This producer helped them all find their voices and realize their visions, revolutionizing American music. He was a Harvard graduate. He was a Republican. He was a black guy from Waco, Texas."
May 14, 2014
Just getting into it. In 2012, the Cage cenntenial year, I played in several concerts dedicated to Cage and his ideas. Before that I had been an admirer of of Cage's writings and (especially "Indeterminacy"), but never a full-fledged acolyte. "Atlas Eclipticalis" and "Cartridge Music" were among the pieces I took on for the concert stage, which makes the first part of this book really interesting for me. My approach to soundmaking has always been "unprofessional," that is, not only amateur but personally opposed to making music, as a career.
Piekut's analysis of the New York Philharmonic's infamously bad performance of "Atlas Eclipticalis" is deeply academic, nuanced, and, above all, revealing (lots of personal anecdotes from those involved) -- which makes it difficult to "take sides," even with one's own personal experience to add to the conversation. After my centennial year with Mr. Cage, it occurred to me, fully for the first time, that he truly did not care about the outcome of performances of his music in terms of producing artistic "sound objects."
Thanks to Piekut's work, I find out that I am at least partially wrong in that assessment. On the one hand, Piekut points out that Cage had, through experience, come to a more or less improvisatory approach to his own music, as practiced by himself and his close associates like David Tudor. Within that approach there was a definite aesthetic at work. This was something he could not allow the players in the New York Phil, as the author points out, due to a number of artistic, personal and even socioeconomic differences with the musicians. As Piekut points out, the irony of the situation is that the "disruptive" musicians, the "professionals" who supposedly didn't respect Cage's ideas, were in truth more concerned with pure sound than the one man in the room who'd made himself famous as concerned with sound.
The performance of "Atlas" I was involved in (with San Francisco's sfSound ensemble) did not involve any amplification, unlike the New York Phil performance, which, by all accounts was at a loudness level never before encountered by most of those in the hall. Our performance of "Cartridge Music," however, was more in that kind of sonic ballpark, and it's amusing to me to consider the differences in not just audiences but performers then and now. (Allowing that I was not the only "non-professional" in the mix.) A lot of our ears have caught up to Mr. Cage, who is quoted by Piekut: "I am certain... that this piece will eventually evoke gratitude since it embraces 20th century horror transforming it."
Anyway. I can't wait to get into the October Revolution part of this book!
Piekut's analysis of the New York Philharmonic's infamously bad performance of "Atlas Eclipticalis" is deeply academic, nuanced, and, above all, revealing (lots of personal anecdotes from those involved) -- which makes it difficult to "take sides," even with one's own personal experience to add to the conversation. After my centennial year with Mr. Cage, it occurred to me, fully for the first time, that he truly did not care about the outcome of performances of his music in terms of producing artistic "sound objects."
Thanks to Piekut's work, I find out that I am at least partially wrong in that assessment. On the one hand, Piekut points out that Cage had, through experience, come to a more or less improvisatory approach to his own music, as practiced by himself and his close associates like David Tudor. Within that approach there was a definite aesthetic at work. This was something he could not allow the players in the New York Phil, as the author points out, due to a number of artistic, personal and even socioeconomic differences with the musicians. As Piekut points out, the irony of the situation is that the "disruptive" musicians, the "professionals" who supposedly didn't respect Cage's ideas, were in truth more concerned with pure sound than the one man in the room who'd made himself famous as concerned with sound.
The performance of "Atlas" I was involved in (with San Francisco's sfSound ensemble) did not involve any amplification, unlike the New York Phil performance, which, by all accounts was at a loudness level never before encountered by most of those in the hall. Our performance of "Cartridge Music," however, was more in that kind of sonic ballpark, and it's amusing to me to consider the differences in not just audiences but performers then and now. (Allowing that I was not the only "non-professional" in the mix.) A lot of our ears have caught up to Mr. Cage, who is quoted by Piekut: "I am certain... that this piece will eventually evoke gratitude since it embraces 20th century horror transforming it."
Anyway. I can't wait to get into the October Revolution part of this book!
February 4, 2020
Brilliantly detailed account of the meeting of free jazz, experimentalism, Fluxus music with black activism, feminism and sexual politics. Absolute necessity for anyone wanting to understand the specific nexus of the avant garde that was New York in the 50s though 70s.
December 19, 2020
"What was experimental music," this book begins by asking. Piekut makes it a more interesting question than it might first seem. Most readers might have their own preconceptions, but Piekut's project---in an oversimplified summary---is specifically to argue against a dominant conception (surrounding John Cage and his followers) by providing vivid histories of all the experimental musics Cage didn't like. The picture that emerges is quite rich.
My main issue with the text is that it still feels a bit too much like the dissertation it emerged from, in the way that the chapters really are separate case studies towards a single point. But, the chapters are engaging reading, and the introduction is mercilessly essential.
My main issue with the text is that it still feels a bit too much like the dissertation it emerged from, in the way that the chapters really are separate case studies towards a single point. But, the chapters are engaging reading, and the introduction is mercilessly essential.
October 22, 2015
Really interesting study on the limits of experimentalism, through a series of case studies into different happenings in New York throughout 1964. What I found refreshing about this book is the way Piekut instilled a reality into the New York avant-garde through "actually existing experimentalism" which is far from the idealistic accounts often given. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the Jazz Composers Guild because it highlighted the often overlooked avant-garde jazz scene.
January 10, 2015
Velit voluptatem quia adipisci neque perferendis laborum velit. Et voluptatem aperiam unde. Nobis officiis aliquid. Et qui soluta nisi neque quasi.
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