On my kitchen counter there is a bright yellow stain I have yet to succeed in excising. It keeps a record of my failures: some patches are different shades; there are faint scratch marks on its surface; in one corner I made an inroad. Streaks stretch beyond a new border, reaching out to the old one, but falling short and fading into the all-subsuming mock granite texture of the surface beneath. It is true that the stain has a history in the discursive sense, but this is not why it fascinates me. In the material sense, it is a history: a residue of steams and vapours; of a hand sometimes too frail to bear the weight of a jar of turmeric; of a puddle of hot oil; of a certain surface tension; of the smells, sights and sounds of a little rent in the fabric of south Manchester that slipped away while I was not looking. Histories have a habit of calling us to action, too. Every so often, I scrub at the stain.
What if notation is something like a turmeric stain? A residue of thought, of processes, of people, of memories, and with it, a call to action the consequences of which it also accumulates. I don’t intend a metaphor, I mean for real. A real, material residue that stretches out towards us; that invites us to do things. Those things make time. Generate it. Leak it. Envelop us in it. 1/2 colegno tratto; three ps; faster bowing than usual. Fall. Fall again. Fall harder. Now fall longer. Begin movement 1 (not you, you), where the leakage clots and thickens, and eddy currents make little sparks along its surface. Broader histories, too. Barthes’ sanctioned babel, if you want it. Fade back to the mock-granite: make clefs, striate pitch, spatialize time. Ask for notes. Repeat, but get faster, then get slower. Pause. Rest. Say 3 ps (but faster than usual).
These are some thoughts I wrote about Rob’s String Quartet, Aur, shortly after I first heard it in 2020 or so. I found them incidentally, while I was rummaging around in my documents for other things, but I had been fretting since his death that so little had been said or written about such a wonderful body of work, and when I stumbled across these I thought it might be nice to put them out there. Please forgive the flowery language; this was intended for a much smaller audience.
There is a particular knot for tying mooring lines on canal-sides; it is called a taught line hitch. When the boat is not trying to escape, the line is loose enough to account for changes in the depth of the water, such that it may rise and fall without sinking. If the boat should lurch out, conspiring with the wind or the backwash of another boat passing, the knot rapidly tightens. Since I have already embarked on the project of making new names for everything, the only way back is to make new things from old names.
Aur is a taught-line hitch tethered to itself. It yearns to break free; it struggles in glissandi. It thrashes around quite desperately and frantically, and in so doing it tightens its own lines. This piece demands turntables; because if it is to circumscribe itself, it stands to reason that it must circumscribe history, too. We might suspect they would stretch outward with some recognizable sample or turntablist techniques, but they yearn to meet the string quartet, just as the string quartet yearns to escape. If everything yearned a little less, they might break free. The line is at its loosest when movement stills.
Nonetheless, I empathize deeply: there is a certain comfort in cocoons generated by yearning. I think about goal-orientation. I am convinced that this is a goal-oriented piece; only, that the goal is out of its reach, and if it were ever to make a convincing move toward it, it would be a different piece entirely. Let me concretize this a little: each voice forms an assemblage constantly pushing against its own boundaries, making renewed efforts; trying something different, but always somehow the same: first awake and shimmering; now tender, now confused; later, clinging; remembering, forgetting. Perhaps we try it differently, but we always try it.
Ian Pace’s article is the latest in a new genre decrying the state of higher education apropos of a threat from insidious ideological meddling. On this occasion, the focus of the fear-machine’s ire is the field of music, and particularly the apparent side-lining and condemnation of the Western classical tradition in history and analysis. Pace seems to inhabit a pedagogical and research world that I simply do not recognize. By means of some small illustration, I can point to the day I read his article and drafted this response as entirely routine in my life as a fairly unremarkable music PhD student. I spent most of the morning re-reading and marking up a paper on Beethoven, Czerny and Liszt that I think I might want to refine and submit to a musicological journal. Later, I silently attended an undergraduate survey of Western classical music, with a view to observing the way such a vast expanse of history might be taught.
I only dedicate these hours of each already hectic week to such an enterprise since, supposing I get a job in the field at all, I anticipate being asked to teach such a thing myself sooner or later with near-certainty. Pace will be surprised to learn, then, that we went the entire class without indicting anybody for ‘ideological crimes.’ Perhaps those who have read Pace’s article will be inclined to assume I attend the last great bastion of tradition, nestled away fighting the ‘good fight,’ and fortified against an unrelenting barrage of condemnations from the wider academic community. The truth is that this is simply the bread and butter of what so many of us continue to do, perhaps alongside other things, day in day out, more or less everywhere. The other truth is that it’s no bad thing to decide not to continue to do it.
‘In the UK, it seems these history courses are at least offered if not required at most institutions.’
In the UK, it seems these history courses are at least offered if not required at most institutions, and often from multiple angles with different degrees of depth and breadth. The history of Western classical music is baked into most of the offerings at the Royal Holloway, from whence another ‘dissenter’ recently resigned. Pace’s own institution, City University, offers no less than four courses relating to Western art music in the first year alone. Incidentally, the University of Oxford has seven required modules in relation to Western classical music, while Cambridge offers nine. Given their frequency, I find it rather implausible that all these courses are available as a sort of clandestine guilty treat for scholars carrying out otherwise maligned research, but this is exactly what it seems Pace would have us all believe. The picture in the US is fairly similar, and any brief glance at the faculty pages of most institutions will tell you the study of Western classical music is very much alive here.
When it is not being sidelined, Pace argues, there is too much context at the expense of analysis and listening. To get to the meat of it, l want to start by turning first to an aspect of his overview of how we got into this apparently interminable position. Pace singles out developments in ethnomusicology as one of three sources. He tell us that they are ‘hostile to aesthetic value judgments, recoiling from the hierarchical nature of this, despite evidence of musical hierarchies and value judgments existing in most societies and cultures.’ Ethnomusicology is the study of musical cultures other than our own. When we enter into a space the rules of which we do not grasp and could only hope to learn superficially in short order, it is in my view absolutely reasonable to suspend our judgement. Their reticence to judge is also in a context Pace does not really remark upon: the aristocratic explorers of yesteryear, swanning off to judge the cultural activities of others, contributed significantly to the ideological underpinnings and justifications for all manner of horrific colonial enterprises, the after-affects of which permeate Western society and the racial hierarchies it perpetuates. In the United States, the historical-political conditions for which Pace simply does not account, this is all the more accentuated because the consequences of ongoing and historical racism are so very visible and impossible to deny. Modern ethnomusicologists, while many fall short, are right to be as mindful of this legacy as they can. If they are serious and ethical, they are reporting and reflecting on what is taking place before them, not on the degree to which the music being produced conforms to their own tastes or the priorities of the cultural landscapes they bring with them.
‘When we enter into a space the rules of which we do not grasp… it is in my view absolutely reasonable to suspend our judgement.’
None of that, of course, has anything to do with the non sequitur forming the second part of Pace’s argument: the fact that musical hierarchies and value judgements exist in many of the societies or subcultures they are researching has no bearing on their own methodology. It is true, with good reason, that approaches avoiding clear value judgements often appear in historical musicology as well. The purpose of having undergraduates study the late 12th and early 13th century organum of Notre Dame, for example, doesn’t really have anything to do with organum per se. Rather, it’s a good exercise in developing a toolkit for coming to an understanding of a music unlikely to immediately resonate. To be candid, much of it sounds faintly ridiculous to the modern Western ear, but to say as much is besides the point. What we’re interested in is how to situate it historically and to understand the material and social conditions from which it emerged, and by whom and why it was appreciated enough to have been preserved in the first place.
‘The analysis is in some cases the easy bit; the hard work is the why and the wherefore.’
This involves analyzing the music on its own terms, reference to the historical record, and an understanding of its purpose. Even coming to an appropriate method of analysis for a particular piece of music requires an understanding of the society from which it came. Context and analysis support each other, and one is very often amplified at the expense of the other because that is simply the most appropriate way to proceed relative to the subject at hand. Of course, analysis can tell us that Notre Dame Organum is based Gregorian chant. It can tell us the musical functions of all the parts and how they contribute to the texture. With enough examples, we could and should deduce all manner of musical facts about the way one note follows another. However, if we did not also know, by way of trivial example, that the music was sung as part of the rituals of the Catholic mass and so had to be a certain length and no longer, we would have difficulty coming to reasonable assumptions as to why the melismas are set so short. The analysis is in some cases the easy bit; the hard work is the why and the wherefore.
To this day, we are struggling with Philippe de Vitry’s utterly esotoric 14th century motet Cum statua / Hugo / Magister invidie. Detecting the isorhythm is basic nuts and bolts theory that then allows us to deduce the structure of the piece. The musicological questions following on from that are exactly and precisely about context. Is the very obvious tripartite form connected to the religious nature of the text? Why did he chose to borrow from such an obscure chant, and was it as obscure at the time as it is now? Who on earth is Hugo and why is de Vitry so upset with him? Who in his audience might have known enough to connect the dots? Was it important that they understood him or is it deliberately obscurantist? What can the answers tell us about the culture of written music at the turn of the ars nova? It seems to me that the questions proliferating from the analysis must inevitably be given more weight on many occasions than analysis itself, and this is all the more the case when we are humble enough to acknowledge that we often lack the tools to appropriately map the territory before us. In order to do so, we need to turn to context to begin thinking – slowly, carefully, and arduously – about how and to what ends we might develop them.
‘If musicology is not to be an exercise in simply confirming the values and priorities of dominant cultures, this seems to me worth interrogating even if we don’t necessarily go all the way with those who are doing so.’
Where ethnomusicologists, as Pace suggests, turned ‘their disciplinary approaches to practices within Western classical music itself,’ they did so largely with a view to its place in contemporary culture and not the past. This is important to note because present-day reception of the famous composers of old is not the same as it was at the time the music was written. If musicology is not to be an exercise in simply confirming the values and priorities of dominant cultures, this seems to me worth interrogating even if we don’t necessarily go all the way with those who are doing so. Pace raises Christopher Small’s notion of the symphony concert as a ritual ‘celebration of the “sacred history” of the Western middle classes,’ as if such an observation would immediately rankle us. Perhaps it would raise the ire of somebody who has never thought twice about the values such concerts propagate, but it is surely interesting and worthwhile to examine how and why the immediately recognizable norms of classical concert-going emerged.
Is it not curious how different they are from concerts of the same music in different historical periods, and indeed, how different they are from the performance practices and audience behaviours surrounding other musics in the present day? One can continue to say, if they so wish, that the music is worth celebrating in this exact way. One can do so without imagining that their reasoning is magically exempt from codes of behaviour that evidently arose with and from within western bourgeois culture. It is no secret, of course, that the audiences of classical concerts continue to be predominantly the white middle classes, and the reasons for this include not only the prohibitive costs of tickets but also a natural and understandable uncertainty as to what to do. Little wonder when, in stark contrast to most other types of performance, even the question of when to clap does not always have an immediately obvious answer to the uninitiated.
This leads me to a further point. Pragmatics aside (employment, getting into graduate school, and so on), there is no serious philosophical reason beyond personal interest why the subject matter ought to be one thing and not another. Pace suggests that a deep analysis of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven can help us understand why they stand out among so many other forgotten composers within the tradition. He suggests that it ‘can be immensely enriching for the ears and the mind, sharpening one’s focus and perception.’ While Pace’s concerns about the sidelining of this music are for the most part a figment of his imagination, what would be the problem with giving students options? Can we not just as well enrich minds and sharpen perception by explaining why the music of Miles Davis stands out among many fans of Jazz? Or what makes a good rapper apropos of what the audiences of rap music value? Or why we ought necessarily to build historical narratives pivoting around ‘great men,’ at all rather than teach in such a way that acknowledges the more-or-less silent incremental contributions of people whose names we will never know? There are all manner of other things that might interest music students that we can offer to teach instead or in addition without really losing anything except what many of the gatekeepers demand we all know. Towards the end of his article, Pace protests that ’there is no need to assert any superiority of a Western classical tradition,’ as though he hasn’t spent the entire article heavily implying just such an assertion, but if he does not feel a need, why then is it so necessary to feel slighted by such suggestions?
All of this to say that ultimately, when we are teaching the history of western classical music, it’s best if the point is more the how than the what. Having a student gain the ability to identify the very clear differences and similarities between Czerny and Liszt through listening and score study is a happy side effect of a wider purpose: helping them to figure out how they might go about any analysis in a way that is sensitive to the music in question and its cultural context no matter what it is. It’s the transferable thinking skills, and not the specifics, that are the most important to imbue. I don’t see the purpose of encouraging students to simply identify those arbitrary aspects of a given piece of music that we have decreed are evidence of its objective value. Is it not better to say that these are some of the things that the audiences of this music value, and this is how you can hear and discuss them, and here is a way we might consider the social structures that gave rise to them? At worst, we risk perpetuating wrong-headed views of other musics, alienating students whose passion for music originates from elsewhere, and perpetuating the structural inequalities of the academy. At best, we risk churning out very knowledgeable idiots. That is, intelligent people who are nonetheless incapable of the kind of self-reflection that recent events in the musicological world have shown we are in desperate need of.
‘Jackson’s ‘cancellation’ suddenly starts to look much more like the predictable and correct professional consequences of saying racist things.’
I’m thinking here particularly of the response to Professor Philip Ewell’s critique of the theories of Heinrich Schenker, which are still held in high esteem particularly in the United States. Pace seems in my most generous interpretation to have misunderstood the whole sorry saga from start to finish. He introduces his readers to Ewell’s work with a contextless quote, ’Beethoven was little more than an ‘above average composer,’’ but does nothing to explain how Ewell arrived at this position or why. Unfortunately, I cannot think of a reason for its inclusion in the article in this way except to drive his audience to indignant pearl clutching. There is no characterization of Ewell’s work here to contest, because there is no characterization of it at all. A scholar suggests in the course of his research that Beethoven wasn’t to his way of thinking particularly special – who cares? In fact, good. Musicology is a collective intellectual endeavour in which disputes and fierce disagreements are to be had collegiality and in the spirit of the pursuit of knowledge. It is not seminary for the Church of Beethoven. If Pace is seriously concerned about the exorcism of value judgements from musicology and theory, hadn’t he ought to welcome the provocation in any case? The correct and proper mechanisms to provide a counter-argument to Ewell are well understood by all. Why provoke outrage through reductio ad absurdum in national newspapers rather than engage his arguments in the appropriate academic way through the channels that we have available for this precise purpose?
As it happens, the ideal just outlined is not at all well represented in the events following Ewell’s conference talk on Schenker’s racism and its implications for music theory. The Journal of Schenkerian Studies, which Pace paints as somehow having been the victim of this scandal and not the perpetrator, released responses to Ewell in a way that frankly fell well short of the professional and ethical standards expected of a reputable academic journal. To take probably the most egregious example, Prof. Timothy Jackson suggested in his response that Ewell’s critique was motivated by antisemitism, remarking that it should be contextualized “in the much larger context of Black-on-Jew attacks in the U.S.” He went on to suggest in possibly the most racist line I’ve read in a contemporary academic journal that Ewell “is uninterested in bringing Blacks up to ‘standard’ so they can compete.” On the face of it, it is almost a relief to learn that the issue had not been subject to peer review. It is absolutely true, as Pace suggests, that these responses led to denunciations. He does not, however, tell us why, preferring instead to simply summarize the content of the issue as ‘very critical of Ewell’s arguments.’ Once you know what was actually said, however, Jackson’s ‘cancellation’ suddenly starts to look much more like the predictable and correct professional consequences of saying racist things. It is also true that there were lawsuits, but Pace’s framing implies that the lawsuits were against those connected to the journal, and not against some of those who dared criticize it as was actually the case.
In many senses, the reaction to Ewell’s paper, and indeed Pace’s misunderstanding of it, constitutes a very good example of an idea he’d doubtless be quick to brush aside. This is white fragility in action: Ewell, a black man, suggested that a means of analysis that a group of white men hold very dear is racist, and without a moment’s self-reflection, they run to barricades to express their outrage, announce their indignation and secure their victimhood. This also speaks to the wider ‘culture war’ debate such as it is. It’s not that this particular tradition is being ‘cancelled’, it is simply having to make some space for other things. The ‘culture war’ right again and again blow every little thing out of all proportion, summoning all kinds of imaginary slights with which to rail against with the indigence of a toddler faced with the prospect of sharing.
‘The Spectator… is a bastion of the intellectual wing of the British hard right.’
The Spectator has been one of many fronts from which such indignation has been repeatedly expressed. It is a bastion of the intellectual wing of the British hard right. As if to preempt me, Pace suggests the issue is wider than ‘simple disputes between ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives,’’ but I think we’ve done this rodeo enough times by now to know that this ‘war’ is only really being fought by one side. The ‘invent a cultural problem and become enraged by it’ trope has been a fixture of right-wing propaganda since the War on Christmas if not before. This is the paper that was happy to publish Lionel Shriver’s article propagating the white supremacist ‘great replacement theory,’ and is of course the home of Rod Liddle, a font of fractal bigotry who once deigned to give us all “a quick update on what the Muslim savages are up to.”
The Spectator’s readership will find catharsis in Pace’s latest contribution, however little they might care for music education more generally. Being neither in the field nor particularly inclined to fact-check anything that raises their blood pressure, they will very likely believe him, too, and this has consequences for the already-embattled endeavor to teach the humanities to anyone outside of a small and incredibly wealthy elite. For the last decade, the very same biting austerity cuts that destroyed music in state pre-tertiary education have been championed by this very paper as part of a wider attack on ‘soft subjects’ in the ‘culture war.’ Gone, too, are many of the local libraries Pace tells us was his starting point in coming to enjoy classical music in the first place. He is correct to decry these devastating cuts in public spending, but his doing so does not change the fact that he is playing to a gallery largely of their most ardent supporters.
‘Why would it be so bad to acknowledge the presence of historical and continuing structural prejudice in our field?’
This response has not addressed nearly all of the points Pace presents. As is often the case, it can take far longer to pull apart an argument than to make it in the first place. However, I hope my small contribution goes some way in correcting at least certain parts of the record and serves as one among many helpful responses from diverse and contrasting perspectives that I expect will be forthcoming and look forward to reading. I will end with some questions for Ian Pace that I suppose I have been, in my own way, asking throughout. If Western classical music is both truly in need of defending, and truly worth defending, why do we need to be so precious about it? Why must we so sensitively leap to dismiss even the most cautious of criticisms? Why would it be so bad to acknowledge the presence of historical and continuing structural prejudice in our field? Nobody is cancelling Beethoven by considering the potential ways his music could be sexist, or racist, or classist, or used to any of those ends. Why would it be so bad to let dissenting voices give us pause and consider how we might do things differently? Why, if we truly do disagree, can we not do so collegiately, in good faith, with rigour and in the spirit of our shared passion and joy for music? Why do we have to do it like this?
In a thin strip of woodland running alongside a rugby field, there is (or at least, there was) a bog. A friend and I once found a purpose there. We were to build a bridge from one side to the other. We spent most of the morning gathering the longest fallen branches we could find. The branches were meticulously sorted into piles of comparable length. Then, with myself thigh deep in the putrefied mud, and my friend standing on the top of the incline delineating bog from land, we carefully lowered the longest branches first, lengthways, in a number of columns just wide enough to accommodate a small pair of feet.
Climbing out of the bog and onto the freshly laid branches was an extremely delicate exercise: so as not to sink them with carelessly distributed weight, I first stretched my arms across them as far as possible. Then, torso grazing flat against the knots and bark, I slowly pulled myself along until my legs were free of the viscous body beneath. From there on out, it was a simple matter of taking each pile of branches across the partially built bridge and placing them in the bog. As long as nobody stood still for too long, the branches held, and by early evening, the two of us could cross from one side to the other and back again with relative ease.
Readers will not be surprised to hear that by the time of our return the following week, the bog had ingested our bridge. So, we spent most of the morning gathering the longest fallen branches we could find. The branches were meticulously sorted into piles of comparable length. Then, with one of us knee deep in the putrefied mud, and the other standing on the bank, we would carefully lower the longest branches first, lengthways, in a number of columns just wide enough to accommodate a small pair of feet. As the weeks went by, our methodology incrementally changed. Our improvisations became architectures. Elaborate, serious, obsessive. Layered with the ossified debris of one failed approach after another.
Eventually, we settled on a widthways configuration. This took many more branches, but they did not need to be particularly long, the route across was less treacherous, and neither one of us would need to climb in for the initial phases. We started to tie one branch to the next with vegetation. First, single strands, and then by twisting two, three, four stems for greater strength. Later came posts, driven deep into the bog, and melded to the structure with mud and knotted sticky-weed. For a time, ten, twenty, then perhaps even thirty pairs of branches with y-shaped offshoots near to the top would form crude supports for a grid of beams hovering precariously an inch or two above the bog. Twigs, leaves and detritus would be thatched across to fill the gaps. This was our most complex design and the most laborious to execute, but it was among our least successful. Unlike our more instinctual attempts, it failed to take advantage of the surface tension nature had gifted us. The vertical branches leaned and sank with our steps and the thatch slipped away underfoot. Eventually, we went back to an older way. I can’t remember what our last bridge looked like.
In pondering our persistence in the few days since this series of non-achievements came to mind, I’ve come to realize that many of my recent frustrations are born of a sense of passing time that we did not possess; a need for an imminent solution whose success predicates some other success, or is the means to some greater ends. We just kept building, repairing, re-building, failing and building again. We registered our lack of progress with a degree of nonchalance I think back upon with envy. This is not to suggest our little forays into amateur civil engineering were for their own sake: ultimately, we really did want to build a lasting bridge that people could use to cross the bog. In spite of our sincerely held instrumentalist aims, it was nevertheless only incidental to our purpose that the bridge was completely unnecessary. It was perfectly possible, after all, to get from one side to the other simply by walking a little further along the edge of the field before entering the woodland. At the top of the slope emerging from the far side of the bog were spiked railings barring the way to an unremarkable South Manchester street.
After the success of our first record, James Wood and I are back in the studio under the moniker Aulich/Wood Trio, producing a new free improvisational extravaganza complete with jazz/electronic/dubstep/garage rock influences. At the same time, I’m working with violist, experimental performer and composer, Adam Sangster to produce a new work for Viola and Electronics. Since my master’s degree is now complete, I feel more free to share the works and recordings I submitted as part of my portfolio.
A recording of Richard Craig‘s excellent live performance of my latest finished work Condensation (Strike Work) for solo flute is available for listening below:
The piece was performed as part of a concert held at St. Paul’s Hall in Huddersfield on the 29th of February, 2016.
With a view to uncovering the political implications of notational, technological and musical innovation in composer–performer relationships within Western art music, this paper examines three disparate works: Christian Wolff’s Duo for Pianists II (1958); Brian Ferneyhough’s Unity Capsule (1975); and Georg Hajdu’s Schwer… unheimlich Schwer (2009). By first exploring two innovative 20th century works, Duo for Pianists II and Unity Capsule, the paper establishes a framework for a discussion of the political and ethical dimensions of composer–performer relationships in relation to the 21st century innovation manifest in Schwer… unheimlich Schwer (2009). This multidimensional examination draws on Warren’s (2014) examination of the relationships between ethics and music, Godlovitch’s (1998) philosophy of performance, and research carried out by practitioners such as Couroux (2002), Schick (2006) and Eigenfeldt (2011; 2014). The paper concludes that all three pieces demonstrate the potential for notation to have strong political implications, and that composers are ultimately responsible for the political implications of the performance experience.
A photograph of George Brecht’s Water Yam (1963) “WaterYam” by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.
In a 1993 interview, Nam June Paik (Wijers, 1993, p. 9) stated that ‘In a nomadic, post-industrial time we are more experience-oriented than possession–oriented’. Essentially, Paik was positioning Fluxus as a manifestation of changing attitudes towards the function of art and artists among its adherents in the wake of economical and societal transformation from industrial to post-industrial models. Although Fluxus was a loose, international movement spanning multiple decades (Smith, 1998, pp. 14-32), for the sake of understanding the motivations of Fluxus members in relation to Paik’s statement, the scope of this essay is limited to the rough time and location of its conception. The varying ideological strands from which Fluxus artists developed their output, including the concept of ‘experience-oriented’ art, are perhaps best understood as part of, and/or in reaction to the emergence of what Paik refers to as a ‘nomadic, post-industrial society’. In particular, the experiential elements and wider implications of the work and discourse of George Maciunas, George Brecht and Alison Knowles can be explored in the light of their societal and economic context.
As first hypothesized by Inglehart in 1977, and summarized by Wright (1978, p. 270-273), the economies of America and Europe can be characterized as the result of a slow shift in values from materialist to post-materialist. A ‘satiation of basic material needs’ (Wright, 1978, p. 270) led to the prioritization and, subsequently, the increased commodification and value, of creative and intellectual ideas at the expense of economic and physical security among the educated middle classes. This aspect of post-industrialist society is linked to art-as-commodity; that which is frequently exchanged and accrues value among collectors, critics and galleries according to the status it has been given by market forces (Gimpel, 2000, p. 51).
Lushetich (2011, p. 73) theorizes that artists recognizing ‘the need to get away from… art that privileges aloof spectatorship’ associated the divorce between experience and meaning ‘common to work characteristic of the Fordist era’ with commodity fetishism (in this context, a distancing between artist, as producer, and audience, as consumer). Fluxus, and to varying extents, Experimentalism, Pop Art, and Happenings, movements with which it shared symbiotic relationships, (Higgins, 2002, p. 163) were partially provoked by a move ‘against the artificial separation of producer or performer, of generator and spectator’ (Maciunas, 1962, cited in Hendricks, 1988, p. 23).
Brecht’s Water Yam was a series of events published in their first form in 1963 by George Maciunas (Higgins, 2002, p.163). Among them was Drip Music, which ‘may occur by chance or by choice and in accordance with almost any circumstances’ (Higgins, 2002, p. 46). In the presentation and marketing of Water Yam, ‘the high cost of culture is problematized’ through the use of ‘cheap materials,’ which result in ‘low costs’ to the participating audience (Higgins, 2002, p.164). Maciunas’ influence in the publication is clear. The design of the box was in keeping with the ‘principle that the kits should be cheap, disposable and unprecious’ (Higgins, 2002, p.163). Many of Brecht’s event scores (such as Keyhole event, 1962, Higgins, 2002, p. 22) were handwritten, and bore his signature; the printed versions, such as those in Water Yam did not, and sometimes omitted his name altogether (such as the selection in Higgins, 2002, p. 103), paralleling Maciunas’ advice to Ben Vautier: ‘don’t sign anything’ (Maciunas, 1964 cited in Hendricks, 1988, p. 133).
Alongside other Fluxus associates, Brecht attended Cage’s class on ‘Experimental Composition’ from 1958 to 1959 (Ouzounian, 2011, p. 201). Shortly after meeting Cage, Brecht wrote the essay “Chance-Imagery,” advocating chance as a method through which an artist is allowed to ‘transcend personality, culture and, ultimately, self’ (Brecht, 1957, p. 23 cited in Ouzounian, p. 208). Brecht’s event scores expanded upon Cage’s concept of the sound event placed in time, with ‘more generalized structures in which sound is one element among many’ (Ouzounian, 2011, p. 206). Including but not exclusive to Water Yam, Brecht’s ‘event scores’ exemplify this experiential, multisensory model; as ‘psychophysical structures’, (Brecht, 1991– 2005, p. 165 cited in Ouzounian, p. 206) the scores sought to highlight aspects of a ‘unified whole’ arbitrarily arrived at by chance.
Ouzounian (2011, p. 208) refers to Three Aqueous Events as an explicit example, a performance of which reveals the state of the performance material ‘as arbitrary points within a continuous field’, to the performer (in this case, equally an observer) who ‘ideally… experiences his or her own place within this continuum’. Thus, the score in itself does not embody but propagates the text; it serves as a prompt for performance, which in turn serves as a prompt for the perception of an event that already exists outside of the immediate context.
As put by Kotz (2005, p. 12), the event score often provides a ‘linguistic frame that directs attention to pre-existing phenomena’. In this way, Three Aqueous Events allows works to ‘disappear into the everyday’, (Dezeuze, 2006, p. 60) resonating with Maciunas’ aim to remove boundaries between art and life (Maciunas, 1962, cited in Hendricks, 1988, p. 23). However Brecht’s plan to sell Sink (1962) under 3 different guises highlights his acceptance of the multiple modes of perception that might be projected onto a given work (Dezeuze 2006, p. 61). According to Dezeuze (2006, p. 61), Brecht prepared 3 adverts for Village Voice, one advertising the sink as a sink, describing its condition and style, the other as a more possession-oriented sculpture and finally as an experiential prop sold with access to incidental events in which it might participate.
The ‘propositions’ of Alison Knowles resonate with the aims of Brecht’s event scores (Robinson, 2004, pp. 98-99). Each proposition is overtly multisensory, with ‘elements of chance incorporated into the temporal framework’ (Robinson, 2004, p. 99). Knowles was the only artist from within the Fluxus proper to include actual brands in her works (Robinson, 2004, p. 101). Although this draws her aesthetic concerns superficially closer to Warhol in his aspiration to create work transcending class barriers (Grudin, 2010, p. 3), by placing the brand name in a more experiential context, the connotations to which the commodity in question generally apply are subverted rather than framed. In Nivea Cream Piece (1962), the universally recognized product becomes ‘strange or even abject under the intense focus of its enactment’ (Robinson, 2004, p. 203). The sound could invoke squeamishness (Robinson, 2004, p. 203) or even notions of the ‘vaguely erotic’ (Mandl, 2010).
Among Knowles’ most famous ‘propositions’ is The Identical Lunch (c. 1969-1971), which frames the usually public consumption of a very specific meal. Much like Brecht’s ‘Drip Music,’ the performative actions are occurrences from every day life. The performance has both very private and very public aspects; the internal sensory experiences of any performers, and the changing context within which it occurs (Weil and Knowles, 2011). From its conception, Knowles encouraged performers to record their experiences, which were published in a journal in 1971 (Weil and Knowles, 2011), shifting aspects of the private experience to a broader audience. Knowles’ later screen prints of friends performing the piece in a more isolated setting (Weil and Knowles, 2011) represent a different kind of public exposure to the act, divorcing an observer from immediate experiential elements. The prints also overlay the performance with ‘mass imagery’, by way of a prominent Star-Kist logo (Higgins, 2002, p. 157), during an otherwise private lunch, thus exposing the performer to the public in an equally divorced way.
Knowles’ Been Rolls (1963), consisting of ‘fourteen tiny paper rolls’, with arbitrary bean-related facts, ‘including people named Bean, proverbs and stories and beans, bean recipes and ads for L.L. bean’ as well dried beans, were all presented in a ‘found tea tin’ (Robinson, 2004, p. 103). The tea tin was labelled according to the designs of George Maciunas. The label places it among the Fluxus “anti-commodities” along with many of Maciunas’ Fluxkits (Robinson, 2004, p. 103). Robinson (2004, p. 103) highlights the fact that the beans themselves cannot be replicated or mass manufactured exactly from one instance to another. Not only does this subvert the ‘perfect serial sameness of mass produced commodity’, (2004, p. 103) it also incorporates a kind of chance procedure in the physical properties of each bean, and the subsequent parameters of any given experience. The level of physical engagement Bean Rolls permits its audience (Higgins, 1998, p. 67) is also congruent with the Fluxkit concept.
Maciunas’ Fluxkits are collections of items inviting the ‘private explorations of a viewer’ (Higgins, 2002, p. 31). Subsequently, much like Bean Rolls, and Brecht’s Three Acquious Events, the Fluxkits often create a situation whereby audience and performer are one. Fluxus 1, assembled by Maciunas, contains ‘objects, visual work and essays by thirty-nine artists’ (Higgins, 2002, p. 53). The multiplicity of primary sensory information that the items convey is outlined by Higgins (2002, p. 53); a napkin and medical glove to touch, a tune and words to sing and portraits to view are just a few examples. As in Three Acquious Events, Drip Music,Sink, Bean Rolls, and The Identical Lunch, Fluxus 1 assimilates everyday objects without transforming or framing them in such a way as to impede their normal use; a prime example of Maciunas’ aim to obtain ‘”art” experiences from everyday occurrences,’ (Maciunas, c. 1963-4, cited in Philpott, n.d.) as oppose to creating it using the everyday as source material.
A contrasting Fluxkit, which contains a single, purpose-made object, is Maciunas’ Smile Machine (1970-72); a sprung metal contraption forcing the wearer to ‘smile’ while enduring the taste of ‘blood and metal’ (Higgins, 2002, p. 50) and physical discomfort, inducing a phenomenological experience unique to anatomical attributes of the mouth of the wearer. The work perhaps also serves as a political statement; a commodity sold to force a distorted external symbol with incompatible inward associations, fitting Robinson’s (2004, footnote no. 17) definition of a Fluxus ‘anti-commodity’. Fluxpost (smiles) (1978) is a series of stamps depicting unflattering smiles (Higgins, p. 48-50). Higgins (2002, p. 50) views Fluxpost (smiles), experientially in the light of Smile Machine, invoking an awareness of the inside of the mouth. Other readings of the work view it as a critique of Capitalism, ‘betraying specific class, cultural or racial associations’ (Higgins, 2006, p. 282) with regard to the condition of the teeth relative to their bearers, an observation Higgins does not outright dismiss. The former component of the work is perhaps triggered by foreknowledge of Smile Machine; the latter by foreknowledge of Maciunas’ political angle and the cultural landscape from which the work was conceived.
Fluxiosity (1966) is demonstrative of Maciunas’ ‘ambivalent relations’ towards Capitalism (Sell, 1998, p. 6). The work outlines a ‘Fluxus HQ,’ in New York, multiple international centres from which the former might disseminate it’s ideals, a list of commodity goods, ‘like a bill of sale’ and, finally, a list of participating artists (Sell, 1998, pp. 6-8). The ‘Fluxus HQ’ to which Maciunas referred didn’t literally exist, but was rather an ‘imagined centre’ (Sell, 1998, p. 6). ‘Fluxshops were set up in the US, France, and the Netherlands’ (Smith, 1998, p. 29) and the multiplicity of distribution outlets, with mail order warehouses in the US and Europe (Smith, 1998, p. 29) may be, in part, what Paik was alluding to with his use of the word ‘nomadic’. Through its mail order system, Fluxus and associated publishers attempted to subvert the ‘highly centralized distribution system of the art world’ (Paik, 1978, cited in Smith, 1998, p. 29). Paik could have also been referring to the locational independence of Fluxus pieces from art galleries, concert halls or, in many cases, any particular geographical location, that made this method of distribution more viable.
Prior to Fluxioity, Maciunas’ works had employed ‘more straightforwardly leftist rhetoric’, (Sell, 1998, p. 6) which resonated more closely with the aforementioned views of Lushetich on Fluxus as a reaction to commodity art, and on Maciunas’ original conception of Fluxus as, in part, an attack on it (Saper, 1998 p.150). The Purge Manifesto of 1963 was more outwardly iconoclastic, calling on his peers to ‘purge the world of bourguois sickness… professional and commercialized culture’ (Higgins, 2002, p. 95), as was Fluxus news-policy No. 6 (1963), calling upon Fluxus artists to commit acts of cultural violence from ‘sabotaging museums’ to ‘creating mayhem’ (Higgins, 2002, p. 95) during rush hour.
The most overt display of iconoclasm to the outside world in Fluxus was the 1964 picket of a concert, within which Fluxus members were billed as performers alongside Stockhausen (Higgins, 2002, p. 72). Although Stockhausen was previously involved in several earlier concerts at the behest of Nam June Paik (Higgins, 2002, p. 71), Piekut (2011, p. 68–71) suggests the picket was as a result of the anti-bourgeois Jazz background of influential Fluxus associate Henry Flynt, combined with continuing events outside of the avant-garde leading to a general increase in anti-art sentiment. Higgins (summarized in Piekut, 2011, p. 68) has characterized the event as the culmination of an ongoing dispute within the Fluxus movement; Maciunas, Flynt and other picketing members viewing it as a ‘politically-motivated anti-art critique’ against those taking part, who saw Fluxus as ‘a socially elastic aesthetic based on individual experience’ (Piekut, 2011, p. 68). Sell (1998, p. 8) offers a more reconciliatory understanding of Higgins’ dichotomy through his reading of Fluxiosity as a manifesto ‘defining…a shared matrix of conceptual paradoxes and structural contradictions within which an individual artist might work’.
At the time of its conception, Fluxus can be understood to have been a multi-faceted umbrella under which artists with some common interests operated. It is not enough to ignore the wide-ranging and contradictory political implications, both overt and connotative, of the body of work generated by Brecht, Knowles, Maciunas and other Fluxus artists, operating within the ‘nomadic, post-industrial society’ Paik refers to: subversion of the art market through alternative models of production and distribution afforded to the Fluxkits, various anti-commodities and artists books such Water Yam as well as the dogmatic, iconoclastic sentiments of the Purge Manifesto and Fluxiosity are to name a few. It is also not enough to consign Fluxus to the status of political movement; not only due to the lack of straightforward ideological consensus, but also because the experiential models that arose, in response to traditional art, invite a more concise analysis of the Fluxus movement. In short, Paik’s statement in relation to the conception of Fluxus describes a displacement from one prioritized mode of perception to another, in reaction to the prevailing cultural and economic norms of the art world as a microcosm of late capitalist society.
[1] It is worth noting that the experiential aesthetic is far older than Fluxus and associated movements. The aesthetic concerns highlighted by philosophers such as John Dewey, who wrote as early as 1934 on experiential modes of perception in art were, however, explored and developed by Fluxus artists (Higgins, 2002, p. 17).
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I have now graduated from UoH but will be returning in September to do a Master’s Degree in Composition. The University did a write-up on me, which can be found here.
Bass clarinetist, and improviser/experimentalist extraordinaire, James Wood and I have finished recording our part-improvised acoustic, electronic and electro-acoustic EP. Details as to the release will be forthcoming!
After a good few months of agonising over mastering and small details, my new record is now released and is available to stream from Bandcamp (embedded below) for free or downloaded for a fiver.
