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Jani Christou's Strychnine Lady (1967)

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Jani Christou's Strychnine Lady (1967) 1 Jani Christou’s Strychnine Lady (1967): the development of an interpretative strategy in the context of the interdisciplinary ideas surrounding its genesis by Maria Yerosimou A Thesis submitted for the Degree of PhD in Music Department of Music Goldsmiths, University of London October 2014 2 Declaration of Authorship I, Maria Yerosimou, declare that this thesis and the work presented in it are my own and have been generated by me as the result of my own original research. Signed: ……………………………………………………………………………. Date: ………………………………………………………………………………. 3 Acknowledgments It would not have been possible to complete this project without the help and support of the kind people around me, as well as the funders that supported this work over the years, to only some of whom it is possible to give particular mention here. First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Keith Potter, for his unwavering support and encouragement over the years, as well as his broad-minded guidance and his valuable advice, which made this an inspiring, thoughtful and rewarding experience. I am most grateful to my parents and family for their unequivocal support in all my aspirations over the years. Without their love I would not have been able to fulfil this challenging journey. I gratefully acknowledge the valuable help of Mrs Sandra Christou who kindly allowed me to access the Jani Christou archive in Athens, Greece. This thesis was supported by the Cyprus State Scholarship Foundation and the Leventis Foundation, and therefore I would like to show my appreciation to both. I would like to express special thanks to Alexandros Yallouros for being there and immensely supporting me, to Panagiotis Pentaris for the encouragement and the long academic conversations, and to all my friends, especially Marina Tourkolia, for their ongoing emotional support. I would also like to thank Tim Rutherford-Johnson for his help with proofreading in the final weeks. 4 Abstract The present thesis offers a holistic analysis of Strychnine Lady, a work created by the Greek composer Jani Christou (1926–70) in 1967. This work belongs to Christou’s last compositional period, during which he experimented with a personal art form that involves stage performance, mythical archetypes, dramatic elements and avant-garde materials and means. At this time, he also introduced new concepts, such as metapraxis and protoperformance, in order to engage with elements of the unconscious, influenced, in particular, by the field of analytical psychology as shaped by the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung (1875–1961). The thesis works on two levels: one, an analysis of primary material referring to archival findings and the score of Strychnine Lady itself; and two, the identification of links with the theories of others via my own use of secondary sources towards a clarification of the relationship of these theories to the work. Hence, I aim at situating Christou in the 1960s through a comparison between him and two other well-known composers of that era who appear to have similar practices, John Cage (1912–92) and Mauricio Kagel (1931–2008), as well as offering a comparison between Strychnine Lady and the experimental music-theatre of the 1960s. Furthermore, I seek to clarify Christou’s compositional concepts with reference to Strychnine Lady through an in-depth analysis of his personal writings found in his archive, and I present connections with other, non-musical theories by which, I argue, he was influenced. These theories predominantly concern the concepts of Jung and Mircea Eliade. Furthermore, this study argues that these areas of thought, commonly regarded as ‘non- musical’, become, in an important sense, musical in Christou’s late works. In addition, I identify spiritual elements in Strychnine Lady and present links between several of its aspects and spiritual practices. Finally, the thesis also provides an extended critical analysis of the work’s score, which follows Christou’s new, personal and ground- breaking music notation system. It is important to mention that this is the first dedicated study to explore Strychnine Lady both holistically and critically, and one of the very few attempts thus far to research Christou’s output in depth. Hence, its importance lies in the concern to confirm the composer’s posthumous reputation in the 21st century via research that will, it is hoped, make a significant contribution to improving understanding of the composer’s late works. 5 Table of contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................................................... 3 ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................................. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................................. 5 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ......................................................................................................................... 8 EXAMPLES ................................................................................................................................................... 8 TABLES ....................................................................................................................................................... 9 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................... 10 NOTES TO THE READER ....................................................................................................................... 14 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION AND CONTEXT ........................................................................................ 15 BIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................................... 16 A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF JANI CHRISTOU’S OUTPUT AS A WHOLE ............................................................................... 18 THE ISSUE OF THE LOST (?) WORKS. ................................................................................................................ 26 CHAPTER 2: THE RESEARCH ................................................................................................................. 29 ABOUT THIS THESIS ..................................................................................................................................... 29 THE ISSUES AND CHALLENGES ........................................................................................................................ 30 The lack of previous research ............................................................................................................ 30 As a conclusion: the approach of this thesis ...................................................................................... 34 RESEARCH SOURCES .................................................................................................................................... 34 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................................. 50 CHAPTER 3: CHRISTOU AND THE 1960S ............................................................................................... 51 CHRISTOU: A PIONEER OR A MYTH? ................................................................................................................ 51 COMPARISON: JANI CHRISTOU, JOHN CAGE, AND MAURICIO KAGEL ..................................................................... 57 Musical conception ............................................................................................................................ 58 Performance conceptions .................................................................................................................. 61 The metapraxis issue ......................................................................................................................... 63 Cage, Kagel and metapraxis .............................................................................................................. 65 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................... 66 CHAPTER 4: JANI CHRISTOU’S THEORIES AND THEIR PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS ......................... 68 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................................................... 68 THEORIES AND PHILOSOPHY .......................................................................................................................... 69 THE REALISATION OF THESE IDEAS IN CHRISTOU’S OUTPUT .................................................................................. 70 THE PHOENIX PRINCIPLE ............................................................................................................................... 73 THE LUNAR EXPERIENCE AND THE LUNAR PATTERN ............................................................................................ 74 PRAXIS AND METAPRAXIS: THE METAPRAXIS ISSUE ............................................................................................. 79 The issue ...........................................................................................................................................
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