Experimental Bodies, (Anti-)Political Lives
A roundtable discussion between Bienen Associate Professor of Musicology Ryan Dohoney, musicologist and percussionist Kerry O’Brien (University of Washington School of Music), and musicologist and musician Ted Gordon (Columbia University Department of Music).
“Jill Johnston’s Closet Criticism”
Kerry O’Brien
“This is your local reporter always ‘looking elsewhere’—for the nonthing of the thing—for whatever isn’t settled, labeled, canned, caulked, cherished, claimed, and consumed,” wrote Jill Johnston in December 1967. As a dance and music critic, Johnston had become known for an idiosyncratic writing style, where her attention veered away from formal concerts and toward the details of artists’ everyday lives. She wrote from inside composer La Monte Young’s living room, describing the nonstop sine waves coursing through his home and through her body; she recounted eating mushrooms with John Cage; and she narrated the cliffside lesbian wedding ceremony of Pauline Oliveros—all in weekly installments in the Village Voice.
Johnston rejected the notion that criticism was a secondary artform, subservient to an artist or an artwork. Instead, she aimed to write “closet criticism,” a type of writing that acknowledged her own subject position and drew attention to the quotidian or closeted parts of experience, typically off limits in journalism. Johnston herself was not closeted. By the early 1970s, she was best known as a lesbian separatist and author of Lesbian Nation (1973). For Johnston, the personal was not just political. Personal experience had aesthetic significance that she deemed newsworthy.
“No Ideas But In (Doing) Things: The Politics and Materialities of Alvin Lucier’s Early Works”
Ted Gordon
Alvin Lucier has been widely celebrated as a composer whose works, in the words of one of his students, reveal “the nature of sound itself.” Working with a wide variety of instruments—acoustic, electronic, musical, scientific—Lucier has, since the mid-1960s, composed dozens of scores that instruct performers to engage in various forms of disciplined actions, producing vibratory energies with extreme ranges of frequency and amplitude, creatively transduced between electromagnetic radiation, air, water, and other media. Contemporary performances of Lucier’s early works, such as Music for Solo Performer (1965), often stage this apparent revelation of “sound itself:” electrodes attached to a human performer’s head transduce their brain’s electrical activity into sound, through an electronic “black box” and a set of resonators placed on percussion instruments. In the words of Cristoph Cox, Lucier’s work, following in the tradition of John Cage, “is never about the signifier but always about the sonic real, sonic materiality itself.”
In this talk, I show how this understanding of Lucier’s early works not only avoids addressing the social and political consequences of how this work was developed, financed, and performed (namely, through Lucier’s connections with the cold war military-industrial complex); it also ignores these works’ development of ascetic, self-disciplined practices that valorize a performative co-production of sound between humans and instruments, a natural-cultural process that Lucier imagined as theatrical, playful, and incomplete. Looking carefully at early works and sketches that have been withdrawn or forgotten, I show how Lucier developed practices of performative self-discipline that expanded human capacities for sensing and producing sound—sharing research goals, technologies, methodologies, and materials with the military-adjacent institutions that supplied him with novel technologies. I argue that historically situating Lucier’s work can lead to more ethical performances that foreground social and political, rather than metaphysically transcendent, dimensions of sound.