SIGNAL TO NOISE: MUSIC AND THE ECLIPSE OF MODERNISM By MATTHEW FRIEDMAN A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History written under the direction of T.J. Jackson Lears and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Signal to Noise: Music and the Eclipse of Modernism By MATTHEW FRIEDMAN Dissertation Director: T.J. Jackson Lears There was danger in the modern American soundscape; the danger of interruption and disorder. The rhetoric of postwar aural culture was preoccupied with containing sounds and keeping them in their appropriate places. The management and domestication of noise was a critical political and social issue in the quarter century following the Second World War. It was also an aesthetic issue. Although technological noise was celebrated in modern American literature, music and popular culture as a signal of technological sublime and the promise of modern rationality in the US, after 1945 noise that had been exceptional and sublime became mundane. Technological noise was resignified as "pollution" and narrated as the aural detritus of modernity. Modern music reinforced this project through the production of hegemonic fields of representation that legitimized the discursive boundaries of modernity and delegitimized that which lay outside of them. Postwar American modernist composers, reconfigured as technical specialists, developed a hyper-rational idiom of "total control" which sought to discipline aural disorder and police the boundaries between aesthetically- acceptable music and sound and disruptive noise. Leveraging the authority of the academy and the concert hall, they banished the danger in an idiom of total control that inscribed inviolable aesthetic boundaries that separated music from its other. The avant- ii garde of the 1950s and 1960s introduced noise to the spaces of 20th century music and interrupted these boundaries, destabilizing the aural and aesthetic territories of modernism. Denying the authority of rationality and compositional intent, the avant- garde did not subsequently re-territorialize these spaces, producing a rupture in the discourse of modern music that shattered its hegemony and contributed to its eclipse by the end of the 1960s. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project is the product of an extended conversation that I have been having with friends, family and colleagues since the day I became aware of music. That I was finally able to crystalize my musings in this form is largely due to the support and guidance I received from the members of my committee: Ann Fabian, Alison Isenberg, and Nancy Rao. I am particularly grateful to my advisor, Jackson Lears, whose advice, "you can't just write about stuff," focused my questions and inspired me to listen more closely and to dig deeper into the meanings contained in music and the aural environment around us. It is no overstatement to say that I could not have completed this project without his guidance, and the help of my committee. I benefited from the enormous archival wealth of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Getty Institute, the Library of Congress, Columbia University's Butler Library, the Music Library of the University at Buffalo, and la Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. In particular, I am very grateful for the assistance I received from Alexander Magoun at the David Sarnoff Library in Princeton, Greg MacAyeal at the Northwestern University Music Library and Richard Boursey at the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale University. I retained my sanity and motivation largely thanks to the support and enthusiasm of my friends and colleagues. Regular jam sessions with Jim Livingston, which would alternate between twelve-bar blues and intellectual explorations into the more abstruse realms of cultural theory and history, helped me hone my chops in historical analysis and on the electric guitar. My studio collaboration with Mike Rashkovsky and Julia Dranov, iv musicians of great talent and passion, kept me from imagining that sound and music were mere theoretical abstractions. My colleagues and coworkers at Rutgers-Newark, above all, Christina Strasburger and Lisa Toniolo, offered support and encouragement when the demands of research, writing and teaching became almost overwhelming. I must thank three of my oldest friends: Harris Breslow who inspired me to listen to the music in noise on his stereo in his Clanranald apartment many years ago, and Alan Conter and Ameene Shishakly, who read chapters and offered advice and ideas from outside of the boundaries of both the United States and the academy. I owe a particular debt to my friends and graduate school colleagues Christopher Mitchell, Liz Gloyn, Andrew Daily, Allison Miller, Eric Barry and Alejandro Gomez del- Moral. In casual conversation, over beers, and in the Rutgers History Theory Reading Group, this extraordinary community of scholars helped to validate my ideas, pointed me in new and fruitful directions and encouraged me to push through the limits of discourse into "the soft bits" of cultural history. I cannot thank them enough for their genius, enthusiasm, humour and friendship, and I can only hope that, in some way, I returned the favour. I have dedicated this project to the memory of my parents, Nancy Salter and Joe Friedman. They made me all that I am. Together, they taught me to read and to love books, stories, music and history. I would never have conceived of pursuing my doctorate without their encouragement, and I would have had neither the intellectual means, nor the motivation to pursue it to its completion without their unbending confidence in my abilities and their love. They were present at this project's inception and it is the deepest regret of my life that they are not here to see its completion. v Finally, I must express my deepest love and gratitude to Molly Giblin. My partner in all things, her ideas, knowledge and scholarship are as much a part of this project as are my own. She never doubted that I would complete this task even when my confidence flagged. She allowed me to howl in frustration when I hit the wall and felt that I could go no further, only to gently push me past every obstacle with encouragement and keen critique. She has read and reread every chapter, and every word and sentence bears her mark. Her belief in me and my work never failed, and this project would not have been possible without her limitless love and confidence. vi DEDICATION For Nancy Jean Salter and Joseph Aaron Friedman vii CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................ iv INTRODUCTION: Music and its Other ...................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: A Fierce-Throated Roar ....................................................................... 19 CHAPTER 2: Music of the Future ............................................................................. 67 CHAPTER 3: New Musical Resources .................................................................... 112 CHAPTER 4: An Aural Plague ................................................................................ 161 CHAPTER 5: Total Organization ............................................................................ 210 CHAPTER 6: At Play in the Sound Field .................................................................. 266 CONCLUSION: No Sounds are Forbidden .............................................................. 325 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................... 340 viii 1 INTRODUCTION MUSIC AND ITS OTHER There was only silence. David Tudor sat at the piano at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York on a damp August night in 1952. The concert, to benefit the Artists' Benevolent fund, featured compositions by avant-garde enfant terrible John Cage, his colleagues from the Greenwich Village avant-garde music scene Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and 18-year-old Christian Wolff, and French composer Pierre Boulez. Henry Cowell's work The Banshee, composed in 1925, but still fresh and challenging 27 years later, would conclude the performance. Tudor premiered a new piece by Cage, erroneously listed as "Four Pieces" in the concert program. 4'33" was a single work in three movements of various lengths determined by chance. "I was looking at sheets of music paper scored for piano—two staves—with measures of four beats and the structural delineations given by the constant tempo," Tudor later recalled. "So I was looking at the first movement and I was turning pages because I was reading the score in time."1 However, the pianist did not play as he carefully followed the score. "This is a piece in three movements during all three of which no sounds are intentionally produced," Cage had specified.2 The audience, "made up partly of sophisticates of the avant-garde, partly of local music lovers, and partly of vacationing members of the New York Philharmonic," grew 1 John Tudor, "Interview with Peter Dickinson, Ibis Hotel, London, July 26, 1987," in Peter Dickinson, ed., CageTalk: Dialogues