EXQUISITE MIND, EUPHORIC KNOWING:

SOUND,

LANGUAGE, AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN

EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND

CONCEPTUAL ART AFTER 1960

by

KATE CAVANAUGH DOYLE

Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Susan McClary

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Music

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

May, 2018

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the dissertation of

Kate Cavanaugh Doyle

candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy*

Committee Chair Susan McClary

Committee Member Francesca Brittan

Committee Member Georgia Cowart

Committee Member Vera Tobin

Committee Member Robert Walser

Date of Defense February 26, 2018

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES 2

LIST OF FIGURES 3

LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES 4

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 5

ABSTRACT 7

INTRODUCTION 9 Radical Intelligence

CHAPTER 1 35 Sonorous Mind: Meredith Monk’s Voice-from-Within

CHAPTER 2 63 Consciousness and Communication in Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Transmissions

CHAPTER 3 90 Yoko Ono and the Art of Conceptual Sound

CHAPTER 4 116 Music as Translation: The Sound of Hanne Darboven’s Endless Writing

BIBLIOGRAPHY 145

1

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1 Diagram of the Dissertation 30

2

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 George Brecht, Drip Music (Drip Event) (1959) 15

Figure 2 Trajectory of the Event Score 16

Figure 3 Sol LeWitt, Objectivity (1962) 18

Figure 4 Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs (1965) 19

Figure 5 Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face) (1981) 21

Figure 6 Carolee Schneemann, Eye Body #20 (1963) 25

Figure 7 Linda Montano, Lying: Dead Chicken, Live Angel (1972) 25

Figure 8 Joan Jonas, Nova Scotia Beach Dance (1971) 26

Figure 9 Meredith Monk, Education of the Girlchild (1973) 26

Figure 10 Radical Intelligence Model 32

Figure 11 Yoko Ono, Painting to Be Stepped On (1960) 98

Figure 12 Yoko Ono, To George: Poem No. 18 (1961) 112

Figure 13 Hanne Darboven, Konstrukionen New York (1966-67) 122

Figure 14 Robert Smithson, A Heap of Language (1966) 124

Figure 15 Sol LeWitt, Serial Project 1 (ABCD) (1966) 125

Figure 16 Hanne Darboven, Diary NYC: February 15 until March 4, 1974 127

3

LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES

Example 1 Excerpt from Meredith Monk, Dolmen Music 43

Example 2 Excerpt from Meredith Monk, Dolmen Music 49

Example 3 Excerpt from Meredith Monk, Dolmen Music 50

Example 4 Excerpt from Meredith Monk, Dolmen Music 52

Example 5 Excerpt from Meredith Monk, Dolmen Music 54

Example 6 Excerpt from Pauline Oliveros, Sound Patterns 71

Example 7 Excerpt from Pauline Oliveros, Sound Patterns 73

Example 8 Excerpt from Pauline Oliveros, Sound Patterns 74

Example 9 Excerpt from Pauline Oliveros, Sound Patterns 75

Example 10 Excerpt from Pauline Oliveros, Sound Patterns 76

Example 11 LaMonte Young, Composition 1960 #7 103

Example 12 Yoko Ono, Secret Piece 103

Example 13 Yoko Ono, Fish Piece 104

Example 14 Yoko Ono, Earth Piece 105

Example 15 Yoko Ono, Tape Piece 1 (Stone Piece) 106

Example 16 Yoko Ono, Clock Piece 107

Example 17 Yoko Ono, Collecting Piece 108

Example 18 Yoko Ono, Bell Piece 109

Example 19 Yoko Ono, Wall Piece I 110

Example 20 Yoko Ono, Three More Snow Pieces for solo or orchestra 114

Example 21 Excerpt from Hanne Darboven, Op. 17a, Wunschkonzert 132

4

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Beyond Words

It is impossible to express the depth of my gratitude for the tremendous people in my life.

In the following I will make a brief attempt.

Thank you to my advisor and treasured mentor, Susan McClary, through whose visionary teaching and scholarship I learned to listen differently, inquire intelligently, and write genuinely. Thank you to my committee members: Francesca Brittan, for introducing me to a history of sound beyond the musical score; Georgia Cowart, for teaching me the craft of writing through her mentorship and our work together in the Capstone courses; Vera

Tobin, for radically expanding my work in new directions; and Robert Walser, for introducing me to formative texts and modes of questioning in cultural theory and historiography. My work is indebted to the excellence of their teaching, the innovations of their scholarship, and their ever-generous support.

Thank you to the Case Western Reserve University Department of Music for their generous support of my doctoral studies and my research at the Library of Congress.

Thank you to Libby Smigel at the Library of Congress for her support, knowledge, and collaboration. Thank you to the CWRU College of Arts and Sciences for generously supporting me through the College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Seminar, and thank you to the leaders of this seminar, Daniel Goldmark and Martha Woodmansee. Thank

5 you to my wonderful colleagues in the Department of Music at CWRU, especially my cohort – Peter Graff, Kate Rogers, and Brian Wright – and my classmates in the

Musicology Dissertation Seminar. Special thanks to my colleague and writing companion, Peter Graff.

Thank you to Helen Carnevale for her unfailing support, generosity, and joyful companionship. Thank you to Michele Shauf for her guidance, encouragement, and friendship. Thank you to my parents, Andrea and Jack Doyle, for their loving support, and for instilling in me the joy of pursuing a passion for learning and the arts through their own example. Thank you to my brothers, John and Tom Doyle, whose good humor, discipline, and integrity inspire me to be a person of dedication every day – grá / gáire / neart.

6

Exquisite Mind, Euphoric Knowing:

Sound,

Language, and Consciousness in

Experimental Music and

Conceptual Art After 1960

Abstract

By

KATE CAVANAUGH DOYLE

This dissertation considers the relationship between sound, language, and consciousness in the work of four artists associated with experimental music and/or Conceptual art communities after 1960. The first half of the dissertation explores the music of composers

Meredith Monk and Pauline Oliveros, who treat and compose sound as a communicative language independent of traditional notions of lexicon and grammar. My discussion of

Monk centers on her Dolmen Music (1979), in which she distills lexicon into syllabic sound, embraces the use of sympathetic call and response, and validates the voice as a sophisticated interface. Chapter Two analyzes Oliveros’s treatment of linguistic sounds as complex sonorities and engages with the composer’s models of sonic transmission in two of her earlier works, Sound Patterns (1961) and Sonic Meditations (1974). The second half of the dissertation considers the relationship between sound and written language and writing practice in the work of Yoko Ono and Hanne Darboven. In Chapter

7

Three, I examine Ono’s prose scores presented in her 1964 proto-Conceptual collection,

Grapefruit. I argue that Ono enacts a reconceptualization not just of musical performance, but of the experience of sound and listening, and I attempt to illustrate the idiosyncratic and previously unacknowledged contributions of Grapefruit to the history of music. Chapter Four explores the musical compositions of Hanne Darboven, a

Conceptual artist and composer known for her extensive collections of handwritten material displayed in books and across gallery walls. My analysis considers the artist’s translation of her visual writing work to musical scores as a meaningful representation of sensory act and conceptual process.

To understand and situate this work, I engage with cognitive linguistics, media and communication studies, histories of art, as well as musicology. Ultimately, I offer a vocabulary through which to understand this innovative conceptual work and aim to illuminate the implications of these repertoires for histories of sound, models of intelligence, and theories of communication.

8

INTRODUCTION

Radical Intelligence

In their 1981 book Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, Rozsika Parker and

Griselda Pollock engage in dialogue with Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking feminist critique of art history written ten years earlier, “Why Have There Been No Great Women

Artists?” Nochlin proposes that the consideration of social, cultural, and economic circumstances of women artists may prompt a questioning of reception models not only for a particular group of scholars but for art in general:

… the so-called woman question, far from being a peripheral sub-issue, can become a catalyst, a potent intellectual instrument probing the most basic and “natural” assumptions, providing a paradigm for other kinds of internal questions, and providing links with paradigms in other fields.1

Parker and Pollock respond by suggesting an overhaul of the discipline altogether. While

Nochlin contends that a feminist critique might lead to a reevaluation of the field, Parker and Pollock argue that we cannot begin to make that critique until we reconsider the parameters of our reception and analysis. What we need, they say, is “a radical reform, if not a total deconstruction of the present structure of the discipline in order to arrive at a real understanding of the history of women and art.”2

1 Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Art and Sexual Politics, eds. E. Baker and T. Hess (New York: Macmillian, 1973), 2. Originally printed in 1971. 2 Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 47-48.

9

I take both Nochlin’s and Parker and Pollock’s concerns about critique and deconstruction into consideration throughout the following study, an exploration of creation and reception of sound and language structures in the work of artists Meredith

Monk, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, and Hanne Darboven. My project takes special interest in instances where these structures overlap, particularly in moments when sound structures act as language or language structures facilitate sound. While I argue that the compositions of each artist are in themselves radical, I find that the reception of this work is also a radicalizing project. Here, I place my argument at the balancing point between

Nochlin’s and Pollock and Parker’s discussions. Specifically, I ask: what is it about the way that these artists engage with sound and language that makes their work innovative, and what established models do we need to deconstruct in order to fully comprehend these innovations?

While my analysis of composition and reception does not always relate to the fact that my case studies are women, it sometimes considers (and celebrates) their work in relationship to traditions and identities related to women, and it always invests in the kind of revisionary possibilities that Nochlin associates with feminist critique. I situate the work of these artists within a wider narrative of disciplinary deconstructions after the mid-twentieth century, a period when artists and intellectuals turned a critical eye and ear on a culture increasingly based on transactional expression, consumerism, and mass marketing. Cultural theorists and authors such as Marshall McLuhan discussed communication predominated by print and visual media as they considered a different system based on sound, one associated with older, more holistic forms. This work coincided with a turn toward the sonic in art culture, to a moment in which sound

10 experiments such as John Cage’s provided a basis for dynamic challenges to aesthetic norms. Throughout the following introduction, I trace the trajectory of these critical considerations and their overlap with music and visual art at the mid-century and the immediately following decades. Then, I explain my methodology for examining the work in this study. My approach is rooted in discussions such as Nochlin’s and Parker and

Pollock’s: one indebted both to feminist critiques of the work itself and radical deconstructions of normative modes of reception.

A Turn Toward Sound at the Mid-Century

Beginning in the 1940s, the Canadian critical theorist Marshall McLuhan looked critically at media structures in contemporary North American life. Intrigued by the language and imagery employed by advertising agencies, McLuhan published his

Mechanical Bride (1951), a study of the effect of consumer media on the modern mind.

He took particular concern with the interaction of gendered images, narrative, and technology. In 1962, McLuhan wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of

Typographic Man, which explores the relationship between media dissemination and cognitive structures. McLuhan argues that the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press in the mid-fifteenth century led to a drastic re-structuring of human cognitive organization, and that this change – a prioritization of print media over oral transmission – had resulted in increased value of sight over sound.3 Moreover, McLuhan writes, print culture’s linear mode of communication eliminated holistic, fluid transmission of information achieved

3 See: Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1962).

11 by a culture rooted in sound.4 In what McLuhan calls “acoustic space,” humans communicate via sound, voice, and gesture, and transmission is collaborative rather than transactional and individualized.5

McLuhan associates the domain of acoustic space with ancient culture and non- literate peoples.6 In relying on collective oral transmission, he contends, these cultures enact the “human sensorium” (a holistic sense of engaged mind and body), and thus the acoustic space in which they live enables a deeper connection both to nature and to God.7

He ultimately concludes that in returning to oral culture, society returns to its essential self, one invested in community, sound, spirituality, and natural life.8

McLuhan was not alone in his turn toward ancient and Eastern cultures as a way forward for modern Western society in the 1960s. Throughout the United States but particularly on the East and West Coasts, counter-culture communities turned to Hindu and Buddhist religious traditions, Eastern art culture, and cyclic notions of time that marked many non-Western philosophies. Artists and intellectuals also engaged in studies of myth and ritual, and many embraced the interest in hermetic and esoteric traditions that had been present in the avant-garde since the early twentieth-century. Joseph

Campbell’s multi-volume study of ancient cultures, The Masks of God, was widely disseminated among artistic circles at the time, as was Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred, a text on poetry from around the world. The writings of esoteric thinker

G.I. Gurdjieff, who had traveled extensively throughout the United States in the first half

4 See Seth Kim-Cohen’s discussion of McLuhan in: Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non- Cochlear Sonic Art (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009), 92. 5 See: McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 6 See: McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy. 7 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 35. 8 Kim-Cohen, 93-94.

12 of the twentieth century, were first published (posthumously) in the 1950s through 70s.

Artists took up Gurdjieff’s and his pupil P.D. Ouspensky’s studies, which included discussion of oral transmission, non-verbal communication, and spiritual expression. The

Buddhist scholar D.T. Suzuki gave lectures in New York during his residency at

Columbia University in the 1950s, and these events had a prominent impact on 1960s intellectual culture in the United States. His work was a major influence for many artists, including the composer John Cage.

Cage had begun studies of Indian music and philosophy with Gita Sarabhai in the

1940s, several years before he attended Suzuki’s lectures on Zen Buddhism. In 1951,

Cage’s student Christian Wolff brought his teacher a copy of the I Ching, and this text radically changed the direction of Cage’s composition moving forward. Used for centuries in the Eastern world as a divination text and structural model for all areas of art and life, the I Ching became a central principle in Cage’s chance compositions. For Cage, utilizing the generative processes of the I Ching could reflect the randomness of sound production in the natural environment.9 His system of chance procedures afforded him a means to organize sound, and he taught this method to his students through a series of sound and performance experiments in his class at the New School for Social Research in

1958. The course, which attracted a diverse group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers living in New York, served as a collaborative space for students with and without musical training to attempt new innovations in experimental composition.

9 James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 97.

13

Performing Language as Sound

Out of Cage’s class came formative work for Fluxus, a group of interdisciplinary artists inspired and informed by Cage and the early twentieth-century avant-garde Dada movement, particularly the principal Dadaist figure Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp and the

Dadaists rooted their work in an aesthetic/ideology/practice of “anti-art,” a term developed by Duchamp to describe work that challenged the typical conventions of

European art culture.10 Members of Cage’s class who would eventually be associated with Fluxus took up the idea of anti-art as a central tenet of their own work while focusing specifically on performance. As they engaged in experiments in Cage’s class, they began to write down performance instructions – simple, minimal notations in verbal form.

Hannah Higgins, Fluxus scholar and daughter of Fluxus artist Dick Higgins, writes that George Brecht was the first to create a set of instructions eventually known as the “Event Score,” and she argues that these forms were “the most durable innovation to result from Cage’s class.”11 Event Scores offered instructions for a set of actions but were essentially open to interpretation.12 Unlike the instructions for Happenings, which dictated complex, highly theatrical spectacles, Events (and Event Scores) were minimalist and able to be realized many times according to the interpretation of the performer. They focused on everyday actions and, in drawing attention to or framing these actions, transformed routines of daily life into performances for contemplation.13 The minimal

10 For more on Dada see: Dorothée Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2010) and Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann, eds., Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). 11 Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 2. 12 Marianne Beck, “Fluxus in Love,” in Fluxus Scores and Instructions: The Transformative Years, ed. Jon Hendricks et al. (Catalog for Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark, 2008), 9. 13 Ibid.

14 quality of Event Scores allowed not only for flexibility but also for consideration of a simple form of language. This design was intentional; many artists modeled their instructions on the koan, a short statement or aphorism used within Buddhist pedagogy.14

David Doris, writing about the adoption (and adaptation) of the koan in experimental circles, argues that the form embodies a technique of kanna Zen, or “the Zen of the contemplation of words.”15 Just as the consideration of a koan might alter one’s state of consciousness, the practice of an Event Score invites a meditation on the actions of everyday life.

Figure 1 George Brecht, Drip Music (Drip Event) (1959)

Because the Event Score provides only a model for consideration rather than a specific set of instructions for a dictated performance (as in Happenings), it offers a presentation of language designed to be both contemplated and transcended. Throughout the execution

14 David T. Doris, “Zen Vaudeville: A Medi(t)ation in the Margins of Fluxus,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (West Sussex, UK: Academy Editions, 1998), 99. 15 Ibid., 100.

15 of the performance instructions, language transforms from object to performance (see fig.

2). The linguistic model, then, functions as the framing mechanism through which the performer/spectators’ attention is drawn to potential aesthetic, performative, spiritual, and subversive elements of ordinary routines.

Isolates and Self-Conscious Event Score Frames Performance Action as Enactment of (Language) Mechanism for Event Concept Language Contemplation

Figure 2 Trajectory of the Event Score

These considerations (via the enactment of language) allow a concept to be expressed in three-dimensional, living form. Moreover, the isolation and framing of daily routines as performance enables an analysis of these actions in relationship to social and political identities and narratives. Framing by means of language and performance creates distance between routines and lived experience – a space where life becomes art – and, in turn, results in opportunities for critical evaluation. The everyday becomes a concept, along with the sound, gesture, and language that accompanies it.

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Language as Art Object

“The studio is again becoming a study,” the artist and critic Lucy Lippard wrote of the burgeoning Conceptual art movement in 1966.16 By the late 1950s, the domination and commodification of the Abstract Expressionists made the visual art world seem overly commercialized to many of its members, and a new movement emphasizing concept over material product was offered as a viable way forward. Proto-Conceptualists from a transnational sphere, including Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, and On Kawara, created works which eschewed traditional forms in preference for idea. The Conceptual movement had established centers in New York, Japan, Germany, Britain, Eastern

Europe, and Argentina by the mid-1960s.17

In their efforts toward an art that prioritized concept over product, Conceptualists turned to language as a primary medium. Artists such as Ono, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt,

Hanne Darboven, Ian Wilson, and others presented language as an art object. Often, they presented linguistic forms through serial procedures. The use of the word “serial” in visual art has been employed in different ways throughout art history and criticism, though it most often refers to a compositional system marked by sequential processes of repetition and permutation of visual or conceptual elements.18 LeWitt’s Objectivity

(below), an early Conceptual art work, represents a typical serial process in that it

16 Lucy R Lippard, Six Years: The DeMaterialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 42. 17 See: Lippard, DeMaterialization. 18 Serial art, or art that is composed via serial procedures, shares a commonality with musical serialism in that both forms/procedures involve a systematic treatment of visual/musical elements. Serialism in visual art, however, does not necessarily adhere to particular common principles such as the twelve-tone technique, but rather usually varies from artist to artist according to the system that she or he has established for her/himself. For more on serialism in Conceptual art, see Rorimer’s chapter “Systems, Seriality, Sequence” in New Art in the 60s and 70s (referenced in Chapter 4). For more on serialism in postwar music and art in general, see: M.J. Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe (referenced in Chapter 4).

17 repeatedly presents a word (“objectivity”), and each repetition is marked by a permutation (in this case, a different height or depth from the piece’s base surface).

Figure 3 Sol LeWitt, Objectivity (1962)

LeWitt divides the word into five parts, and these divisions are presented in five descending rows with top rows expanding out from the base surface and lower rows receding away from the viewer. As “objectivity” is broken down into syllables, pieces of language become sculptural entities. The work transforms language into object through the process of fragmentation and repetition. Joseph Kosuth similarly presents language as aesthetic entity with his One and Three Chairs (1965), in which he exhibits an object, a black-and-white photograph of the object, and a typed dictionary definition of the object alongside one another. The work reflects both an interest in relationships between the physical and conceptual and a reliance on linguistic and serial procedures.

18

Figure 4 Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs (1965)

This work correlates with what Alexander Alberro calls “linguistic conceptualism,” a trend in art in which “language displaces the visual.”19 Alberro cites ideas presented in

Kosuth’s writings as essential to the exploration of aesthetic priorities in postmodern art.

Kosuth, who helped to form the American iteration of the British-founded Conceptual art collective Art&Language, published his influential essay “Art After Philosophy” in

1969.20 Peter Osborne highlights the artist’s emphasis on the integration of philosophy in artistic production and notes the “linguistic turn” of Kosuth’s Conceptualism.21

19 Alexander Alberro, “Reconsidering Conceptual Art, 1966-1977” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge: MA: MIT Press, 1999), xxxvi. 20 The Art&Language movement was accompanied by a periodical (Art-Language), which was designed to act as a print conversation for the artists in their community. The first edition was published in May of 1969 with the subtitle, “The Journal of Conceptual Art”; the second came in February of 1970 and listed Kosuth as the American editor. 21 Peter Osborne, “Conceptual Art and/as Philosophy,” in Rethinking Conceptual Art, eds. Michael Newman and Jon Bird (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 48, 56. Osborne argues that, though certain

19

As Conceptual art’s adoption of language as art object often resulted in a critical look at linguistic structures, several artists associated with the movement turned their focus to the relationship between language, subjectivity, and gendered image. Blake

Stimson argues that artists such as Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Mary Kelly challenged traditional language presentations through their engagement with linguistic material and social ideologies. For Stimson, these artists:

… theorize language beyond the purely analytic and formal, situating it within a synthetic, discursive practice determined by a system of control and domination – from this perspective, language is perceived as in and of itself the very medium by which ideological subjectivity is always already constructed … these artists and others in the 1970s argue that language is inextricably bound to ideology.22

Barbara Kruger, who worked as a graphic designer for Condé Nast Publications in the late 1960s, began to juxtapose language and graphic images associated with mass consumerism in her own independent visual work. After moving to Berkeley to teach at the University of California in 1976, she studied the writings of Walter Benjamin and

Roland Barthes and was working full-time as a visual artist by the late 1970s.

Conceptual artists were strongly invested in the study of philosophy while others were not, all took some claim in the philosophical implications of their work’s emphasis on idea over aesthetic commodification. 22 Blake Stimson, “The Promise of Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art, A Critical Anthology, xxviii.

20

Figure 5 Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face) (1981)

In juxtaposing iconic imagery and graphic language with subversive concept, Kruger challenges predominant visual and linguistic narratives concerning women, consumerism, and power. Holzer and Kelly similarly offer presentations of language and rhetorical forms that complicate standard conceptions of gender and social ideologies.

Reclaiming Performance

As Kruger worked with the design materials that would later result in her juxtaposed images and McLuhan wrote critically about the interaction between media and communication, the study of linguistics as an academic discipline was growing in the

United States. A primary influence on the direction of linguistics in the second half of the twentieth century was Noam Chomsky, who, from the late 1950s on, developed a theory of language as a set of rules related to the generation of grammar. Chomsky proposed that

21 these rules effectively constitute a “universal grammar”; in other words, that such rules are innately part of the human brain. Inherent in Chomsky’s theory was the idea that some sentences are grammatical (fitting within the model of universal grammar) and others are not (those that do not fit within the model). Syntactical structures that subvert normative grammar patterns through intentional or non-intentional linguistic performance, then, held no significant place of value in Chomsky’s study.23 In general,

Chomsky ignored the performative aspect of language production; his theory of grammar instead focused on theoretical rules.24

By the 1970s, a number of linguists, some of them Chomsky’s students, were publishing papers arguing against Chomsky’s generative grammar theories by stating that language development was tied to the entire cognitive system, including the perception and processing of sensory phenomena. Other linguistic scholars working at this time focused specifically on the aspect of language production that Chomsky disregarded: performance. Robin Lakoff, who had been Chomsky’s student, worked within the field of sociolinguistics and proposed parallels between gender and language production. Eve

Clark and Jean Burko-Gleason, working primarily in psycholinguistics, turned to the study of language acquisition by infants and children.25 Although Lakoff, Clark, and

Burko-Gleason used different methodologies to consider language, their studies attended to and legitimated the everyday use and production techniques inherent in linguistic performance, a topic pushed to the peripheries by Chomsky and others. Moreover, their

23 Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistic Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 98. 24 Ibid. 25 See: Robin T. Lakoff, Language and Women’s Place (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); Eve V. Clark, The Ontogenesis of Meaning (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1979); Jean Berko, “Word Association and the Acquisition of Grammar,” Child Development 31 1 (1960).

22 research often focused on domains of language production by women and children, and they analyzed performance in association with gender identities and activities related to motherhood. This work marked a turn toward the consideration of performance within women’s ordinary routines of communication and living.

The attention to linguistic performance in the everyday lives of women coincided with an explosion of women’s work in performance art during the second half of the twentieth century. Despite the potential implications of Conceptualism’s shift to idea over material craft, many women involved with Conceptualist experiments in the 1960s and

70s continued to place the body and gestural processes at the center of their work. The anchoring of idea within the space of physical being became characteristic of repertoire produced by women in experimental art communities on the East and West Coasts.

Artists who came from a dance background – in particular, Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda

Childs, and Meredith Monk – provided models that combined skilled crafting of gestural form with concept. In a prose companion piece to The Mind is a Muscle (1968), Rainer writes that her work is the result of “obsessions of imagination” that enact a dialogue between her contempt for traditional notions of dance and her love of the body – its

“actual weight, mass, and unenhanced physicality.”26 Ultimately, her concern is the illumination of everyday gestures and the interaction between performance and ordinary objects.27 Similarly, Monk explores the physical body in her earliest public work, 16

Millimeter Earrings, during which she acts as a screen for projected images. Her body becomes concept and medium, Monk contends, writing: “With the concept I had in 16

Millimeter Earrings I realized that anything in my life could be used as material: my hair,

26 Yvonne Rainer, “Statement,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, 60. 27 See: Rainer, “Statement.”

23 my body, my crossed eyes, anything about me physically or mentally … I could objectify it … It was taking anything of my being and making that a plastic material, like paint.”28

For a number of artists, a reclaiming of mythic tropes and ritual traditions centered performances involving the body. Moira Roth cites Carolee Schneemann’s performances of Eye Body in several New York lofts during the early 1960s as a precursor of the myth trend, though she notes that it was not until the rising women’s liberation movement in the 1970s that Schneemann understood the feminist implications of this work.29 By the early 1970s, Roth writes, Schneemann, Rainer, Monk, Oliveros,

Linda Montano, Joan Jonas, and other artists on the East and West Coasts were using mythic imagery and performing rituals connected to women’s traditions. Many of these artists studied texts on mythology circulated at the time (such as Campbell’s The Masks of God), and some, including Rainer, traveled to study the ritual performances of other cultures in person.30

28 Isla Leaver-Yap, “Interview with Meredith Monk,” April 19, 2010, https://voiceisalanguage.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/text-meredith-monk-interviewed-by-isla-leaver-yap/. 29 Moira Roth, “Introduction,” in The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance in America 1970-1980 (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1984), 22. 30 Ibid., 21.

24

Figure 6 Carolee Schneemann, Eye Body #20 (1963)

Figure 7 Linda Montano, Lying: Dead Chicken, Live Angel (1972)

25

Figure 8 Joan Jonas, Nova Scotia Beach Dance (1971)

Figure 9 Monk, Education of the Girlchild (1973)

Roth argues that the use and adaptation of myth in these works took one of two forms.

For some artists, myth enabled a means to perform an autobiographical and personal narrative. For others, myth and ritual allowed for focus on universal community instead

26 of the individual.31 Monk, for instance, distanced her work from “confessional” formats and sought to portray stories that a universal audience would understand.32 In either case, community and networking remained essential to the creation and dissemination of work by women at this time. Southern California became an important site of women’s collectives such as Judy Chicago’s Womanhouse and Pauline Oliveros’s ♀ Ensemble, groups associated with the tenets of the women’s liberation movement. Even in the case of artists who did not cultivate or participate in specifically woman-focused organizations, performance series or exhibitions curated by women still offered a vital space for their work to be presented. Lucy Lippard’s Number Shows, for instance, were a major advocacy effort for women in the art world.33

Subverting Language, Sounding Language: Monk, Oliveros, Ono, Darboven

While much of the work of this time used performative and graphic presentations of language to challenge existing mechanisms of rhetoric and social narrative, other artists turned specifically to sound to engage with linguistic models and networks for communication. The four artists studied in this dissertation – Monk, Oliveros, Ono, and

Darboven – embrace many of the trends prevalent in their diverse professional communities: an emphasis on physical gestures and practices, a critical consideration of imbedded power structures, the use of ritual mechanisms, and a challenge to traditional notions of form and composition. The ways that they employ these processes by engaging

31 Roth, “Introduction,” 23. 32 Leaver-Yap, “Interview with Meredith Monk.” 33 Lippard’s Number Show Series was a traveling exhibition that featured new work by women such as Laurie Anderson, Hanne Darboven, Adrian Piper, etc. See: From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Number Shows 1969-74, ed. Cornelia Butler et al. (Afterall Books, 2012).

27 with sound, however, illuminate new possibilities for the consideration of linguistic structures.

Not all four artists are necessarily concerned with communicating; while Monk and Oliveros actively construct a system for communication with their colleagues and community, Ono, in her earlier work, and Darboven, throughout her career, explicitly state that their work has nothing to do with expression. Yet all four artists engage with language material and production processes in a manner that challenges typical notions of linguistic and conceptual structure. By communication, I mean an act – specifically, the transmission of information from one being to another or others. By language, I mean a system. This system can take many different forms, but the predominant system that has emerged throughout the course of human history has at its foundation lexicon

(vocabulary comprised of morphemes, or words) organized into structures of syntax (or grammar).

Monk, Oliveros, Ono, and Darboven subvert traditional language forms, challenge the notion of what language can or should be, reconsider the tie between language and communication, and present language as both performance and art object.

Although at times there is some overlap, each artist essentially enacts her re-visioning of language differently. Monk develops a “language for the voice,” one reliant on the potential for variation and nuance in vocalizations. Her vocal language is deeply connected to a vocabulary of physical gesture, which she developed during her training as a dancer. Oliveros similarly grounds communication in the voice and body and attempts to effect transmission through elements of gesture, non-lexical sound, clairvoyance, and extra-sensory perception. Her scores such as those featured in the collected work Sonic

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Meditations (1974) simultaneously make use of morphemes and syntactical structures through their prose instructional format and attempt to transcend lexical forms as a means of attaining different levels of consciousness. Ono also uses prose scores, though not as a means of accessing a greater channel of communication. Rather, the instruction of sound- making acts is intended for fulfillment only within a conceptual space, as “music for the mind.”34 Darboven eschews communication in favor of language as an object for contemplation. Her language system, however, takes on new communicative significance when she begins to translate her work to musical notation in the early 1980s. These artists create new structures for interactions between sound and semiosis.35

This dissertation has two parts. In the first two case studies – centered on Monk and Oliveros – I consider sound structures in relation to traditional notions of spoken language and speech-sound transmission. Both artists create expressive systems based on the voice and body intended to access deep models of communication. Their performances use paralinguistic elements, particularly sound and gesture, as a means of expression. Many of these elements resemble those that writers like McLuhan, Gurdjieff,

Campbell, and Rothenberg associate with expressive and communicative techniques found in ancient and esoteric forms. In both topic and composition, then, Monk and

Oliveros both draw from mythpoetics, ritual, and oral transmission. In the second set of case studies – centered on Ono and Darboven – I explore the concept of sound in relation to notions of written language and writing production. Both artists detach language model

34 See: Yoko Ono, “For the Wesleyan People,” in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 144. 35 This dissertation does not engage significantly with semiotics terminology, though engagement with these terms and concepts could certainly be applied in a wider project. In this specific study, I isolate my analytical methodology to linguistics terminology and language concepts as means for understanding sound structures.

29 and communicative method in a manner typical of Conceptualist work. Their work uses specific linguistic systems (in Ono’s case, lexical language; in Darboven’s case, language based on number constructions) as means for both visual and sonic contemplation.

Table 1 Diagram of the Dissertation

Relationship to Linguistic Artist Innovation/System Presentation Result Production Developed and Non-lexical voice Monk performed among language Language ensemble members System as Speaking Prose instruction Vocal, vibrational, Communicative scores; enacted Oliveros clairvoyant Process among ensemble transmission members Sound perception, Prose instruction Ono transmission, reception Language scores as concept System as Writing Physical writing Conceptualizing Number-based Darboven process translated Process language to musical score

The design of the four case studies also sheds light on the transnational proliferation of alternative language work and Conceptualism after 1950. Monk and Oliveros were exclusively based in the United States, while Ono divided time between New York,

Tokyo, and London, and Darboven, though living primarily in Hamburg, was part of the

New York-based community of Conceptual artists. A study of Ono’s and Darboven’s work and professional circles reveals overlapping networks in Conceptualism in the international sphere. A consideration of all four artists reveals the importance of experimental and Conceptual communities in the United States.

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Radical Intelligence

This dissertation explores Monk’s, Oliveros’s, Ono’s, and Darboven’s composition of sound and language structures and the ways in which this work can be understood as inciting alternative conceptions of communication and/or consciousness.

While much of the study centers on analysis of the structures themselves, I also spend time considering the critical reception of these structures – from both a review of contemporary criticism and my own participatory engagement. I argue that understanding the ways in which these repertoires are received allows us not only to consider the work’s engagement with language systems but to envision non-traditional models of knowledge and intelligence.

These artists are not exclusive in borrowing from myth and ritual mechanisms, remembered experiences, and alternative models of linguistic production; we as listeners also potentially use these channels as frames of reference, consciously and/or unconsciously. We may intentionally or inadvertently subvert our own normative modes of understanding and reception. When Lippard writes that she physically “feels” the process of Darboven’s writing as she looks at it hanging on a wall, she identifies a quality in the artist’s work that transcends normative reception of the art object and communicates an embodied presence. Similar testimonies appear in a survey of critical writing on Monk’s, Oliveros’s, and Ono’s repertoires; in relating their processes of grappling with the sound and/or linguistic constructions presented to them, critics and authors reveal a great deal through the metaphors, mechanisms, and models by means of which they attempt to describe this work. The combination of artist innovation and audience reception forges a model of intelligence that functions outside of standard

31 paradigms. Because of the potential for this process to subvert traditional modes of thinking and understanding, I refer to it as radical intelligence.

Radical Intelligence: enabled by the composition and Composition reception of sound Reception structures at the nexus of performance/art object

Figure 10 Radical Intelligence Model

The most crucial aspect of this model, perhaps, is the consideration of a language model that both shares or represents information yet simultaneously allows for a space of unknowing or impossible knowledge. When Monk composes dramatic pieces that have a kind of narrative yet use no recognizable lexicon, she offers a language that shares meaning without transmitting concrete information. Similarly, Oliveros’s instructions in

Sonic Meditations facilitate communicative transmission separate from concrete entities of knowledge; Ono’s scores instruct for a conceptualization that separates sound from sensory experience; and Darboven’s writing embodies language distinct from modes of expression. In the work of these artists, information-sharing and ambiguity exist in synchronization.

The extent to which each repertoire engages with sound as an instrument of activism varies. Sonic Meditations provides an example of direct engagement with

32 activist purpose, as Oliveros clearly states that the work was designed for healing in light of the political and social upheaval of the late 1960s. Monk and Ono use performance to engage alternative spiritual centers in their early repertoires and turn to more direct political statements in their later work. Darboven often appears removed from social issues, though her installation and collection work reveal a central concern for political narratives.36 Regardless of each artist’s investment in social or political cause, I contend that the potential for radical intelligence in their repertoires offers a critical re-visioning of normative language structures.37 By engaging with subversive notions of sound and language, Monk, Oliveros, Ono, and Darboven propose a notion of communication and consciousness that does not rely on the concrete information-sharing of a transactional economy. Their languages facilitate knowledge between and beyond objective certainty, validate meaning in both conceptual and physical processes, and invest in the mind’s capability for transcending standard paradigms of thinking and being.

In her article on Darboven from 1973, “Hanne Darboven: Deep in Numbers,”

Lippard recounts the critic John Anthony Thwaite’s comment that the artist’s work

“degenerates into a kind of Higher Knitting, with the female qualities of patience, detail, and not much else.” Was Darboven “a pioneer or a Penelope of the twentieth century?”

Thwaite asks, to which the artist reportedly responded: “I prefer Penelope. What an accomplishment!”38 The sound and language structures that Monk, Oliveros, Ono, and

36 See: Hanne Darboven: Hommage à Picasso, ed. Valerie L. Hillings (Deutsche Guggenheim, 2006), 70- 72. 37 For a broader discussion of politics and experimental music, see: Christian Wolff, “On Political Texts and New Music” in Contiguous Lines: Issues and Ideas in the Music of the ‘60s and ‘70s, ed. Thomas DeLio (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985). 38 Lucy R. Lippard, “Hanne Darboven: Deep in Numbers,” in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, Lucy R. Lippard (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1976), 195. Originally published in Artforum 12, No. 2 (October 1972).

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Darboven use within their work are not absurd or nonsensical; rather, they inspire a different mode of reception, consideration, and thinking. Thus, I take my starting point for analysis from Susan McClary’s statement about Laurie Anderson’s work: “If her music resists analysis as we practice it in the academy, it is not necessarily because her pieces are faulty according to universal, objective criteria, but rather because her premises are different.”39 In these artists’ challenge for expansion beyond normative modes of communication and consciousness, they reach for new spaces of understanding, more euphoric places of being, and other exquisite states of mind.

39 Susan McClary, “This is Not a Story My People Tell: Musical Time and Space According to Laurie Anderson,” in McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

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CHAPTER 1

Sonorous Mind: Meredith Monk’s Voice-from-Within

“Music coiling in on itself, waves of voices, repetition in movement, swells, vertigos,” writes critic Guy Scarpetta in his description of Meredith Monk’s vocal composition;

Her voice can split in two, multiply itself, become nasal, guttural, ventral, explore all registers at once. Plunge to the heart of regression, of babble, of animal rumbling, and suddenly rise into the most miraculous, heavenly, vibrating intensity … It’s completely mad. It touches what is deepest within you.1

With these words, Scarpetta evokes the primal space in which critics have placed Monk throughout much of her career. Writing about Monk often resides at a nexus of ideas concerning expression, rationality, sound, and gender. Marianne Goldberg, for instance, offers this explanation of the artist’s work: “For [Monk] the process of structuring a piece is beyond thought … a deeper kind of insight, not necessarily thought knowledge … Her music produces a deep, internal, sensation-feeling experience.”2 Similarly, John Perrault contends that Monk is “not afraid of the irrational imagination,” and Signe Hammer says that Monk exemplifies “a feminine mode … a primitive mode, one shared supposedly with children.”3

1 Guy Scarpetta, “Meredith Monk: Voyage to the Limits of the Voice,” Art Press International 32 (October 1979). Reprinted in Meredith Monk, ed. Deborah Jowitt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 96. 2 Marianne Goldberg, “Personal Mythologies: Meredith Monk’s Education of the Girlchild,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory No. 1 (1983). Reprinted in Jowitt, Meredith Monk, 50. 3 John Perreault, “Monk’s Mix,” Artscanada, April (1968). Reprinted in Jowitt, Meredith Monk, 25. Also see Signe Hammer, “Against Alienation: A Postlinear Theatre Struggles to Connect,” The Village Voice (1976). Reprinted in Jowitt, Meredith Monk, 69.

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Monk circulated within a large community of artists producing work in the 1960s and 70s that explored alternative ideas of communication and consciousness, ones that allowed access to spiritual, intellectual, and performative activities outside traditional

Western paradigms. These artists’ creative work had counterparts in literature, psychology, and philosophy, fields in which scholars advocated for a rupture of standard linguistic models and understandings of mind. Much of this work took form in avant- garde performances, counterculture lifestyles, and renewed interest in esoteric writings aligning with New Age spiritual practices.4

In this chapter, I argue that Monk presents a re-visioning of language models through her vocal sound structures, and I examine the ways in which we may assess the communicative notion in Monk’s composition through the lens of cognitive innovation and development.5 By suggesting that Monk’s creative concept, as well as its performance-reception model, enacts intelligence, I aim to complicate our historical notion of competence in regard to linguistic development, vocal expression, and rational thought. Ultimately, I comment upon the ways in which Monk's works have been understood, the mechanisms through which they are described, and the significance of

Monk's vocal expression as communicative framework.

4 See: Stephanie Barron et al., Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant- Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Wouter J Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (State University of New York Press, 1998). 5 Thanks to Vera Tobin for providing me with the vocabulary and concepts to develop my analysis of Monk’s work in terms of linguistic and cognitive structures. Thanks to Francesca Brittan and Vera Tobin for helping me to understand historical perceptions of the relationship between sound and linguistics.

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A Resonant Reclaiming

In 1966, Monk began to experiment with a “vocabulary that was actually built on

[one’s] own voice … a language for the voice.” 6 Over the course of the next decade, she created her first series of dramatic pieces that were intended to communicate a narrative yet used no recognizable lexicon. The voice, Monk wrote in an essay for the Painted

Bride Quarterly in 1976, could be a “tool for discovering, activating, remembering, uncovering, [and] demonstrating the primordial and pre-logical consciousness.”7 While composing her piece Education of the Girlchild (1973), Monk says that she discovers

“the voice of the 80-year-old human, the voice of the 800-year-old human, the voice of the 8-year-old human … the voice of the oracle, the voice of memory.”8 The composition of Our Lady of Late (1972) prompts Monk’s finding of “the naked voice, the female voice in all its aspects: gradations of feeling, nuance, rhythm, quality … the voice as the vehicle for a psychic journey.”9

Critics’ use of childhood metaphors to describe Monk’s vocal language is in part connected to Monk’s own thematic material. In her piece Quarry (1976), for instance, the artist takes on the role of a small child, lying on the floor under a quilt. “I’m hungry, I’m tired!” she shouts. The words become somewhat distorted as she repeats them over and over in a high-pitched voice, creating a kind of ostinato. A woman comes to Monk’s side to comfort her. A mother-child relationship is established here, through the actions of the characters, the visual presentation, and the difference in their vocal register. Monk often

6 Meredith Monk, “Notes on the Voice,” Painted Bride Quarterly 3 No. 2 (1976). Reprinted in Jowitt, Meredith Monk, 56. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid.

37 performs as a child, sometimes playing adult roles within the same piece to depict the process of ageing. In Education of the Girlchild, Monk transforms from child to adult to elderly woman; a similar transition occurs in Monk’s opera Atlas (1991).

In her study of art, women, and archetypes, Annis Pratt suggests that many artists who are also women work according to “unvention” – “an act of tapping a repository of knowledge lost from Western culture but still available to the author and recognizable to the reader as deriving from a world with which she, at some level of her imagination, is already familiar.”10 These acts are “products of the rediscovery of lost knowledge through intuition and imagination.”11 Estella Lauter associates this kind of rediscovery with the adoption of myth and mythic structures by visual artists and authors in the twentieth century. She cites the feminist revision of patriarchal myths as a primary strategy for the formation of cultural meaning and collective consciousness.12

The reclaiming of myth, ritual, and feminine-associated tropes was an important practice in women’s performance art communities in New York and Los Angeles during the 1960s and 70s. In celebration of the rituals and routines of ordinary women’s lives, these artists used objects and themes that evoked a space of the home (including household items and childhood games).13 Motherhood and domestic practices had long been dismissed as non-serious subjects, even by many mid-century artists who led the way in presentations of everyday life through art and performance. Monk moved within these performance communities and worked alongside artists such as Lucinda Childs and

10 Annis Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 177. 11 Ibid. 12 Estella Lauter, Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth-Century Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 3. 13 See: Moira Roth, The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, 1970-1980 (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983).

38

Carolee Schneemann through her involvement in the New York Downtown scene and the

Judson Dance Theater.

Monk’s work, from her very early pieces to her current repertoire, reflects the reclaiming of the feminine and maternal. Her first public solo piece, 16 Millimeter

Earrings (1966), explores tropes of female life and sexuality. Using household items as props and instruments, she engages in the kind of woman-centric narratives championed by women’s art collectives at the time. Pieces like Education of the Girlchild, Quarry, and Atlas explicitly trace stories of girl- and womanhood. These works present the domestic space of home and celebrate ritual and ceremony within women’s communities, and Monk’s work as a whole engages with themes of childhood, artistic maturation, and mythic journeys of enlightenment.

Lauter argues that language resides at a unique place within the relationship of feminist reclaiming and myth because myth often relies on language yet simultaneously transcends it.14 The strategy of artists in the twentieth century who reclaim myth, Lauter contends, is an inclination to rescue the woman’s consciousness that has been repressed – a kind of experiential archeology – and to question the idea that all communication structures need be associated with concrete meaning.15 In the following sections, I illustrate the ways in which Monk exemplifies Lauter’s concept of reclaiming processes in her work with sound and language, namely, through the dissolution of speech-sound into music, the use of expressive mechanisms associated with parent-child communication, and an embrace of semiotic ambiguity. By eschewing codified lexical structure and grammatical mechanisms while simultaneously validating dramatic

14 Lauter, Women as Mythmakers, 3. 15 Ibid, 8.

39 narrative, Monk negotiates a mythic space between language and unknowing. Though

Monk’s choice of narrative – that of the female quest or journey for enlightenment – corresponds to Lauter’s conception of myth in art-making practices, it is her evocation of sonorous experience that allows for another mythmaking device – one rooted in our collective sonic memory.

Archeologies

Monk comes from a long line of vocalists, and her childhood was full of diverse musical training and exposure. She is the daughter of Audrey Zellman Monk (stage name

Audrey Marsh), a singer of ballads and popular songs who became known in the late

1920s and 30s as a radio star. In the 1940s and 50s, Marsh performed on television singing jingles for commercials. Both of Marsh’s parents were musicians; her father, who had emigrated from Russia, was a cantor and recitalist, and her mother was a pianist.

They taught music lessons and ran their own school in Harlem.16 A number of Monk’s works, including Ellis Island (1981) and American Archeology #1: Roosevelt Island

(1994), deal with familial experiences of journey and immigration through music.

Monk’s first musical experiences were in Dalcroze eurythmics. She later studied piano and performed in a variety of musicals and children’s theater productions. While in high school, she composed “little piano pieces” and became intensely interested in folk music. “I loved the very sad ballads,” she says; “something about that honesty and directness in folk music is something that I feel is still a value in what I want my music to

16 “Audrey Marsh Papers,” New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts, http://archives.nypl.org/mus/20395

40 be.”17 Monk went to Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied dance with Beverly

Schmidt Blossom and participated in voice lessons and opera workshops. At Sarah

Lawrence, Monk was able to develop a practice of vocal and gestural work that would become a trademark of her professional career. In 1966, she moved to a loft in Lower

Manhattan and had a revelation “[that] changed my life basically – which was that the voice could be like an instrument. That I could find a vocabulary built on my own voice, the way you do with movement … that within the voice were male and female, were different ages, were characters and landscapes and different ways of producing sound.”18

Upon arriving in New York, Monk associated with Judson Dance Theater members such as Lucinda Childs and Carla Blank, and she befriended artists and musicians connected with Fluxus and other avant-garde circles. Monk says that she strongly identified with the Downtown community because it was accepting of the kind of interdisciplinary work she had done at Sarah Lawrence:

I came in the mid-sixties so … there had been this big impulse downtown of visual artists doing dance pieces and dance artists doing plays and poets writing music. There was this whole impulse of people trying to get past the limitations of their forms and they all had the same belief – push through the boundaries – and it was in some ways really supportive. I went to Sarah Lawrence, and when I was in school I was in the music department, the voice department and the dance department and I was also doing some theatre, performing. So I was getting some glimpses of how I could put these things together – my love of singing, movement, objects. I would do these crazy pieces there. So when I came to New York it was like this great affirmation of what I had glimpsed – that there were a lot of people thinking in the same way … There was a spirit of anything’s possible, which I’ve tried to maintain in my life.19

17 “Meredith Monk Finds Her Own Vocabulary,” Interviews, Wondering Sound, http://www.wonderingsound.com/feature/meredith-monk-interview/. 18 Ibid. 19 Ruth Saxelby, “Blondes Interview Meredith Monk,” Dummy Magazine, http://www.dummymag.com/Features/blondes-interview-meredith-monk-touch-is-what-we-re-in-danger- of-losing.

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Monk was particularly drawn to the Downtown scene’s directness in communication and disintegration of boundaries – both disciplinary and conceptual.20 Artists in Monk’s social circle – James Tenney, Philip Corner, Malcolm Goldstein – and in the Judson

Theater group were among those invested in the deconstruction of formal paradigms and traditional forms. After she founded her own performance company, The House, Monk began to experiment with similar artistic experiments in a group context.

Monk’s Turtle Dreams (1983) reflects the deconstructive aesthetic embraced by her artistic community through its disintegration of lexical material into pure sound. The piece is performed by four vocalists (who stand in a line and move with coordinated gestures) and an organist. The first vocalist presents the text (“I went to the store”), which gradually dissolves each time the phrase is repeated over a recurring ostinato articulated by the organ. 21 (See ex. 1, next page)

20 “Interview with Meredith Monk,” Artforum, https://www.artforum.com/words/id=35276. 21 The following examples are my own transcriptions; Monk does not usually notate her work. This notation provides a visual representation of Monk’s sound structures, but other graphic systems might serve just as well.

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Example 1 Excerpt from Meredith Monk, Dolmen Music (1979) (Transcription by Kate Doyle)

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After she sings the full text in a high register over the opening ostinato, Monk repeats the phrase over and over and alters emphasis on particular syllables almost every time.

Irregularity of prosody contributes to the obliteration of phonological regularity. The other vocalists join Monk in sounding syllables (“ba ba ba”; “lo lo”’ etc.) with wailing voices while the organ continues. Monk emerges from the texture, singing with a widely- quavering vibrato. We vaguely hear the phrase, “I went,” but the oscillating voice obscures the closure of “went” to a more open sound of “waan.” Here, the quickening of the vibrato and faster repetitions of her syllables read as imperative, imploring. One of the male vocalists sings “ah no” with swelling wails.

A chorus begins as the vocalists sing in near unison on the syllables “he he he.”

They pause, and the organ simultaneously continues the ostinato and imitates the vocals with close dissonant intervals. After the organ returns to articulate only the repeated pattern, the voices re-enter and sound long, siren-like wails. Monk sings “I went to the he-pe-te” – a reminder of the words from the beginning of the piece, now disintegrated into non-denotative syllables. She continues with vocals reminiscent of bird-calls, which grow in volume over a period of several minutes. After a moment of near silence (the organ and voices drop out and only the sound of footsteps moving is audible), another vocalist enters calling “ahoo, ahoo” and begins to vocalize faster and faster, her voice panting. Monk and the other singers join her with syllables on “fa” and long, low wails.

At the culmination of this chorus, Monk sings brightly, nearly shrieking, “I went to the –” followed/overlapped by another vocalist ending her phrase on a ringing “ah!” The chorus sings in discordant harmony, their voices swelling and crying. They eventually cease, and the organ ends the work alone.

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While the compositional structure of this piece can be understood according to postmodern deconstructionist mechanisms and language break-downs, the sound-world of Turtle Dreams and Monk’s repertoire in general clearly connects to something deeper

– to the kind of experiential reclaiming-work that Lauter discusses. From Deborah

Jowitt’s description of Monk singing "in a proper-little-girl-voice" in which she "inserts unexpected pauses, as if her brain has gotten stuck," to Guy Scarpetta’s explanation of

Monk's music as "the heart of regression, of babble," critics explain Monk's language to their readers through associations with perceptions of infantile phonology and romanticized renderings of children's early speaking trials and games. In using language like “unpitched, guttural qualities or speech-like patterns” and “primitive sounds [of] … inchoate utterance”22 to describe the vocalizations in Monk’s Education of the Girlhood,

Atlas, Quarry, Dolmen Music, and Turtle Dreams, critics simultaneously evoke sounds found in protoconversation, a device of infant-parent communication and a state in which emotional information is communicated not with lexicon but rather through sonic exchange.23 A consideration of these processes in relationship to historical notions of intelligence and cognitive ability provides another framework for understanding the cultural implications of Monk’s repertoire.

During a child’s linguistic development, speech conventions are learned by imitation of and experimentation with sounds and sound combinations.24 Infants create

"novel utterances" by play with sounds that will eventually become phonemes –

22 Jowitt, Meredith Monk. 23 Niki Powers and Colwyn Trevarthen, “Voices of Shared Emotion and Meaning,” in Communicative Musicality, eds. Steven Malloch and Colwyn Trevarthen (Oxford University Press, 2009), 209. 24 Usha Claire Goswami, Cognitive Development: The Learning Brain (New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 2008), 148.

45 individual speech-sound elements in vowel and consonant forms. Newborn babies produce sounds aurally similar to vowel phonemes. As they progress to two and three months of age, infants begin to create sequences that act as precursors to consonant phonemes. Four- to six-month-olds are especially diverse in their sound production, vocalizing trills, growls, and other novel speech-sounds. Babies seven to ten months gradually enunciate more complex sequences of vowel and consonant phonemes in a stage known as "canonical babbling.”25

Monk's vocalizations potentially associate with sounds from all of these stages – trills, long vowels, combinations of syllables, growls, proto-speech, panting, and crying.

The extensive palette of her sound-world parallels the larger repertoire of sounds that infants and young children use in their period of aural experimentation during the language development process. There are around 600 consonant phonemes and 200 vowel phonemes recognizable to the human brain, yet language patterns often use only a fraction of them (the English language uses about forty). When infants are developing during their first year, they use a wide variety of both phonemes and novel sounds for communication purposes. As they become increasingly reliant on the norms of language, the scope of their sound production becomes streamlined, thus reducing the diversity of phonemes and other expressive sounds.26 Parents, teachers, and caregivers involved in this developmental process often use infant-directed speech, commonly known as

“parentese.” This type of prosody exaggerates particular syllables, word boundaries, or speech patterns to inform the child of aural combinations that are norms of the

25 Goswami, Cognitive Development, 148. 26 Ibid., 148-149.

46 language.27 Monk’s vocalizations, too, use a distinctive prosody, but hers often constitutes a kind of inverse parentese in that it subverts regular patterns of syllabic emphasis and sentence structure. In her prosody, word boundaries are made vague, enunciation patterns conflict, and syllabic inflection is turned upside-down.

Protoconversation, a discourse form related to parentese, is characterized by efforts at sympathy, also referred to as attunement or mutuality, through vocal games, call and response patterns, gestural relating, and other preverbal expressive mechanisms. In their ability to detect and reflect subtle changes in sound and gesture, infants intuitively enact rituals of expressive relating.28 That is, they are already able to actively participate in the rhythms and contours of conversation together with their caregivers long before they can say a single word in their first language. These acts are considered adaptive, necessary communication channels between caretakers and children, and they provide a framework into which the words and grammar of their languages later flow. Just as Monk considers her language to be understandable to all peoples, protoconversation characteristics (patterns of pitch, rhythm, timing, and timbre) are fairly uniform throughout the world.29

Stephen Malloch and Colwyn Trevarthen theorize the parent/infant communication model as a system of narrative in which what they call “pulse” and

“quality” interact. Pulse is the process through which behaviors (both vocal and gestural) occur in time; within these processes, caretakers and infants coordinate their communication with each other. Quality refers to the “modulated contours” of

27 Goswami, Cognitive Development, 148. 28 Powers and Trevarthen, “Voices of Shared Emotion and Meaning,” 209. 29 Ibid.

47 expression, particularly the intensity and direction of the gesture or vocal line, as well as psychoacoustic features like timbre, dynamic, and pitch.30 Monk uses these same expressive idioms as a normative communication device between performers, and between performers and audience.

In her 1979 work Dolmen Music, Monk creates an environment in which performers exemplify possibilities of response, sympathy, flow, and sharing of emotion similar to Malloch and Trevarthen’s concept of protoconversational discourse production.

Dolmen Music is performed by five vocalists who sit in a circle, facing one another.

When two or more vocalists sing together, they look to each other, as in conversation.

Their faces are expressive as they vocalize, and they lean into the circle and toward one another in coordinating gestures. The vocalizations in Dolmen Music are consistent with

Monk’s other vocal work, comprising mostly vocables, trills, wails, and cries. Like Turtle

Dreams, Dolmen Music functions as a cycle of phrases repeated over and over – a compositional structure that provides a clear basis for narrative reliant on conversational elements analogous to pulse and quality. Structure and variation is dictated by subtle adjustments in timbre, pitch, and energetic line between performers. The ostinato-like repetition of the same phrase with increased variation illustrates the sonic complexity attained by sensitivity to minute alteration. In more diverse sections, the increased difference in intervallic pattern, dynamic, and speed provides for sections of intensification. Quick acceleration and increased dynamics make for rapid response from performer to performer and illustrate the potential for refined modifications through sympathy.

30 Stephen Malloch and Colwyn Trevarthen, “Introduction,” in Communicative Musicality, 4.

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The performers of Dolmen Music exemplify characteristics of pulse in their coordination with one another, particularly through the sensitivity with which they adapt their vocal lines to match or respond to a fellow vocalist. An exchange between two vocalists at the beginning of the piece illustrates this kind of sympathetic correspondence.

Example 2 Excerpt from Monk, Dolmen Music (Transcription, Doyle)

Here, a vocalist (marked Alto) enters with a rising interval. She holds the highest note of her sequence, then wavers by semitone for several beats. A second vocalist (marked

Mezzo-Soprano) imitates the alto vocalist’s melodic pattern and semitone waver, then merges to hold a long tone. Gradually, they adjust the pitch waver with increasing regularity so that the semitones sound in rapid articulation. The enactment of pulse through sympathetic correspondence in this example is twofold. First, an attempt at imitation occurs as the mezzo-soprano mimics the alto’s melodic line. Then, the two

49 voices adjust the timing of their patterns to coordinate and keep a level of attunement, or sympathy, through synchronization.

On several occasions throughout the piece, one voice breaks from the alternating patterns in a display of vocal exploration – similar to the way, I argue, that Trevarthen and Malloch describe infants as experimenting with sounds and patterns in the development of linguistic maturity. One instance occurs about halfway through the work, when two lower-range voices (marked Tenor and Bass) vocalize a simple intervallic pattern followed by a section of speech-like vocal patter.

Example 3 Excerpt from Monk, Dolmen Music (Transcription, Doyle)

This pattern/patter sequence is repeated several times. With each repetition, tenor and bass vocalists increasingly vary their patter by expanding pitch space and timbral complexity. By the end of the section, the patter more closely resembles speech, almost hinting at the possibility of words.

Perhaps the most striking example of linguistic exploration occurs directly after the sequence described above. Over the lower-range vocalists’ pattern/patter, three higher-range vocalists (here marked Soprano, Mezzo-Soprano, and Alto) repeat a rising

50 melodic phrase, which increases in volume and speed with each iteration. At the highest dynamic and tempo, the soprano vocalist breaks away and vocalizes a high, nasal cry that becomes an expressive wail at its most climatic point. She continues as the other vocalists gradually fade and begins to elaborate on her intervallic pattern. (see ex. 4, next page)

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Example 4 Excerpt from Monk, Dolmen Music (Transcription, Doyle)

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Using both vowels and consonant sounds and speech-like patter idioms, the soprano vocalist explores a wider and wider pitch space and experiments with new timbres and rhythms. She vocalizes the highest parts of her range with a series of shrieks and falls to her lowest growling tones. Articulations at mid-range become almost lexical but fall short of actual words.

These sequences of sympathetic coordination and vocal experimentation are made effective by psychoacoustic features of timbre, dynamic, and pitch – features that, within the domain of infant preverbal narrative, Trevarthen and Malloch refer to as quality. In

Dolmen Music, the complex layering of timbres, subtle movement of dynamic, and fluctuation between vowel- and consonant-heavy syllables, among other sonic elements, enable interest and variation in the vocal narrative. One example occurs during the last moments of the piece, when the five vocalists use a range of timbres and syllable types to create variation and interest. (see ex. 5, next page)

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Example 5 Excerpt from Monk, Dolmen Music (Transcription, Doyle)

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In the above example, the tenor vocalist articulates a melodic pattern alternating between vowel and consonant sounds at a high dynamic and register. The soprano vocalist enters with a nasal whine rapidly repeating in undulations and alternating from high-register cries to low croaking. The other female vocalists (here marked Mezzo Soprano and Alto) begin a percussive call and response pattern on the syllable “wi.” All three of the higher- range voices gradually change their syllables to a nasal “ah,” which then becomes “we- laow” and eventually a rapid high-register articulation of the syllables “wa-wa.” The transformation of syllables and timbres with an escalation in dynamic and tempo over time creates a section of aural interest and complex sonic narrative. The passage ends with bell-like repetitions of vowel syllables by all vocalists. Each voice begins to stretch, holding their syllable articulations longer and longer until every vocalist merges together in sonic mutuality. In this moment, the sound-space becomes wide and resonant; the timbral and syllabic softening and the increased length of vowels enables a horizontal stretch in the movement of the musical line.31

As illustrated through the examples above, Monk’s use of timbral interest and complexity, alternation and variation in syllabic length and vowel/consonant content, changes in dynamic and tempo over time, performance of mutuality, and employment of call and response mechanisms all correspond with the elements of quality and pulse that

Trevarthen and Malloch identify in protoconversation and infant/caretaker communication patterns. Monk retains language rooted in the pre-lexical as productive

31 In Dolmen Music, consonant-heavy articulations between voices are usually alternated in more percussive movement, while vowel-heavy lines are eventually blended with other voices in sympathetic mutuality. This is also the case in infant and infant-directed speech, in which about ninety-five percent of vocal energy is spent in the production of vowels. Vowels and vowel-heavy syllable combinations are most conducive to subtle adjustments in energy and can aptly communicate changes in emotive intensity through timbre and resonance (See Trevarthen, Communicative Musicality).

55 communication and highlights the expressive potential of non-verbal sound. In the following sections, I offer a framework in which to situate the conceptual components of

Monk’s structures; in particular, how we might begin to understand the possibilities of

Monk’s vocal compositions as communicative devices within the context of history and reception.

Mythic Concept

The network of experience from which Monk draws corresponds to both critical writing about the artist and Monk’s own descriptions of her work as a channel of the primordial voice. While this process of reclaiming sonic memory may be intuitive for

Monk,32 her statements in interviews and articles show that she was actively thinking about communication and meaning when she came to New York in the mid-1960s. In an interview with theater scholar Bonnie Marranca, Monk recounts formative influences at the beginning of her career: “I was … reading a lot of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff at that time. In that way of thinking, they are talking about different centers – spiritual center, intellectual center, physical center. I was thinking, How do I make a theatre that manifests those centers that is also an affirmation of the audience’s abilities?”33

The writings of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and his pupil and collaborator P.D.

Ouspensky, as well as works by other esoteric philosophers, were an important influence on a community of twentieth-century artists who sought out alternative forms of spiritual

32 When I asked Monk about the basis for her vocal language during a conversation we had several years ago, she stated that her vocalizations come solely from inner inspiration while sitting at the piano or in rehearsals. However, many critics and scholars have suggested that Monk also borrows sounds from non- Western musical traditions. 33 Bonnie Marranca, Conversations with Meredith Monk (New York: PAJ Publications, 2014), 5.

56 practice and enlightenment. Born around 1870 in Armenia, Gurdjieff had traveled extensively throughout United States and taught a large number of devoted pupils before he died in 1949. His work experienced a revival between 1950 and 1970, when most of his major works were published posthumously. In his writings, Gurdjieff considers methods of communication, and, like other esoteric scholars, he cautions against a noncritical acceptance of standard linguistic models. He believed that grammatical writing practice actually obscures reason and rational meaning rather than conveying it.34

The speech practices of the modern world, Gurdjieff wrote, cannot possibly access “exact knowledge,” or, by his definition, true communication understood through spiritual enlightenment. The following passage from Gurdjieff’s teachings explicates the contradiction between standard speech practices and the transference of knowledge:

For an exact study, an exact language is needed. But our ordinary language in which we speak, set forth what we know and understand, and write books in ordinary life, does not do for even a small amount of exact speech. An inexact speech cannot serve an exact knowledge … Our wrong use of words and the qualities of the words themselves have made them unreliable instruments of an exact speech and an exact knowledge, not to mention the fact that for many notions accessible to our reason we have neither words nor expressions.35

In Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff discusses the flaws of speech practices that depend on literal meaning.36 Ancient hermetic thinkers and spiritual leaders,

Gurdjieff says, succeeded in conveying knowledge through an expression of narrative reliant on allegorical devices and oral transmission.37 Gurdjieff espouses a

34 Johanna Petsche, The Gurdjieff/de Hartmann Piano Music and Its Esoteric Significance (Boston: Brill, 2015), 13. 35 George Gurdjieff, Views from the Real World: Early Talks of Gurdjieff as Recollected by His Pupils (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1973), 60. 36 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1950), 737-38. 37 Ibid.

57 communication model tied to this tradition: one invested in myth, shared experience, and non-definitive linguistic paradigms as the access points to deeper kinds of knowledge.38

Monk similarly aligns communicative power in myth and individual interpretation. Commentators on the artist’s work often emphasize her ability to communicate and connect with an audience while simultaneously resisting category or definition. For Tobi Tobias, Monk’s work is “suggestive rather than literal,” and Gregory

Sandow advises that the viewer “let the images wash over you and add them up at the end.”39 Statements from Monk indicate that her narrative does not require the literal comprehension of lexical form; she wants an audience “to have room to be able to move around within the level of connotation of meaning.”40 She writes: “[The] voice is a wonderful instrument for dealing with emotions that we don’t have words for … [to] get between the emotions that we can catalogue.”41 Nagrin of The House (Monk’s vocal company) says that the goal of Monk’s work is “not to understand the work but to receive it.” 42

According to music cognition researchers Ian Cross and Iain Morley, music and language originated from a single communication system.43 Both function at a

“phonological” level, in which the cognitive system discerns lexical items in speech sound and various entities in musical composition (motifs, rhythmic patterns, harmonic trajectories), and a “meaning” level, in which cognitive processing devices interpret

38 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, 737-38. See also: 350-51. 39 See: Tobi Tobias, “Arrivals and Departures,” 54; Gregory Sandow, “Review,” 132. In Meredith Monk, Jowitt. 40 Monk, “Notes on the Voice,” 56. 41 Ibid. 42 Marianne Goldberg, “Personal Mythologies,” 52-53. 43 See: Ian Cross and Iain Morley, “The Evolution of Music: Theories, Definitions, and the Nature of the Evidence,” in Communicative Musicality, 63.

58 meaning via associations and experience.44 The difference between the phonological level and the meaning level, Cross and Morley contend, is the transference of factual, concrete information or “truth values.”45 The level of ambiguity remains much higher in protoconversation and music. Yet these expressive systems still enact meaning and can communicate items of knowledge in sophisticated ways. Monk’s vocalizing is an example of communicative meaning-making that exists apart from the transference of factual knowledge. Her work offers access to what Cross and Morley identify in music as

“floating intentionality,” a space in which meaning from expression relies on context and memory.46 For Monk, this meaning-space allows the audience room in which to receive the kind of communication that Gurdjieff defines as true understanding. The artist’s insistence on flexibility in meaning and her emphasis on the obtainment of knowledge through open reception rather than objective understanding represent tenets of the esoteric tradition with which she was familiar.

Through sonic expression of the mechanisms used in protoconversational discourse and in myth-based, non-objective communication paradigms, Monk incites shared remembrance. Her work relies on the collective memory of experience and the mythologizing of representation, and, with this reclaiming process, Monk blurs the divisions between language and music. She offers an alternative conception of intelligence: one based on sympathy not priority, potential not fact. “No ‘story’ emerges from this body of work,” Lauter writes in her study of visual art and myth; “What does emerge, however, is an image of relationships among orders of being that is extremely

44 Cross and Morley, “The Evolution of Music,” 63. 45 Ibid., 63-67. 46 Ibid.

59 fluid without being disintegrative … What we miss in terms of story, we gain in terms of stimulation to imagine a new way of being.”47

The “new way of being” that Lauter describes of feminist myth-art applies to

Monk’s repertoire in that it allows us not only to consider an engagement with alternative language systems but to envision a connection of those systems to non-traditional models of intelligence and knowledge. To understand this work as communication and language is to allow the mind to identify new structures of meaning and information-sharing. Monk is not exclusive in borrowing from myth and ritual mechanisms, remembered experiences, and alternative expressive forms; we as audience members and listeners also potentially use these channels as frames of reference. We may consciously and/or unconsciously subvert our own normative modes of understanding and reception. The combination of artist innovation and audience reception thus forges a model of intelligence that functions outside of normative modes.

While Monk’s vocalization has been read by some critics as primitive, its effectiveness may actually come from a rather more sophisticated process: the deconstruction of language concepts and syntaxes. Those critics who consider Monk’s work regressive seem to compare it to their knowledge of what they view as a more cultivated system of communication. But one can respond to Monk’s work intelligibly through the understanding that known properties of language are being deconstructed, subverted, or eschewed entirely. One way to comprehend this concept in the context of linguistic development is through the lens of Mark Turner and Giles Fauconnier’s theory of emergent structure, a creative cognitive phenomenon in which expert facility with

47 Lauter, Women as Mythmakers, 19.

60 conventional forms can lead to the production of work that virtuosically subverts these forms.48 Turner contends that “creativity and novelty depend on a background of firmly anchored and mastered mental structure.” 49 Once a firm foundation of meaning networks has been built, novel forms known as emergent structures begin to arise. Ultimately, it is the knowledge of convention and cognitive “blending” that allows us to manipulate material and create novelty.50 Turner defines this process as eventual learning, and writes that subversion of formal structures results in “much richer networks” of meaning.51

Thus, within the conservative, relatively stable paradigm of language blend, Monk’s vocalizing is an emergent concept.

This notion can be used to assign agency to an artistic process in that it renders impressions of conceptual lack into knowledge of intentional subversion. The problem with applying it to creative work such as Monk’s, however, is that in doing so, we assume a superiority of one kind of knowledge over another. The equation of Monk’s deconstruction of lexical and syntactic material with sophisticated concept potentially separates intellectual maturity from the material that is being subverted and deconstructed. In other words, our analysis of Monk’s use of expressive forms becomes a process of appropriation rather than one that possesses agency from its inception. This conceptual trajectory may be counter to Monk’s process, as the artist contends that her expressive material, “comes from within.”52 In many ways, then, Monk’s work validates

48 Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 49 Mark Turner, The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the Human Spark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 382. 50 Ibid., 392. 51 Ibid., 61. 52 Conversation with the author.

61 the intellectual sophistication inherent in the forms with which critics associate her repertoire.

When Monk composes dramatic pieces that have narrative yet use no recognizable lexicon, she offers a language model that shares meaning without transmitting concrete information. In her work, information-sharing and ambiguity exist in synchrony. Her vocal language facilitates knowledge between and beyond objective certainty, validates meaning in both conceptual and gestural processes, and invests in the mind’s capability for transcending standard paradigms of thinking and being. With

Monk, what we miss in terms of concrete knowledge, we gain in expressive possibility.

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CHAPTER 2

Consciousness and Communication in Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Transmissions

Pauline Oliveros grew up immersed in a world of sound, one in which the hum of cicadas and the murmur of conversation became a captivating musical landscape. She decided early on that she would become a musician, in keeping with her mother and grandmother, both pianists and teachers.1 When her mother brought home an accordion with the intention to learn it herself, Oliveros, enthralled with the kinds of sounds the bellowed instrument could project, quickly adopted it as her own.2 Her accordion teacher instructed her to produce frequencies between tones, a technique that had a lasting impact on Oliveros’s sonic imagination and her innovations as an electronic sound artist.3

As a young person, Oliveros says, she was aware of the space that resonated within her – “an altered state of consciousness full of inner sounds that engaged my attention and eventually made me want to compose.”4 This attentional process would become the cornerstone of her compositional work and her sound exercises for guided practice, eventually known as Deep Listening. Oliveros’s early composition in the electronic studio gave way to work in which she invited the listener to assume an active part in the piece’s construction, and she began to compose her works in prose rather than

1 Heidi Von Gunden, The Music of Pauline Oliveros (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1983), 3. 2 Alan Baker, “An Interview with Pauline Oliveros,” American Mavericks, American Public Media, originally published January, 2003, http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/interview_oliveros.html. 3 Von Gunden, The Music of Pauline Oliveros, 4. 4 Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2005), xv.

63 traditional notation. These prose scores direct participants in an exploration of the sonic landscapes around and within them.

Oliveros’s repertoire, while not yet a frequent subject of analytical scholarship, has had several notable champions within musicology, music theory, and composition.

The first of these was Heidi von Gunden, a composer and Oliveros’s former student, who published a book in 1979 on the life and work of her teacher titled The Music of Pauline

Oliveros. In 2007, gender studies scholar Martha Mockus published Sounding Out:

Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality, a consideration of Oliveros’s life and work in relationship to her lesbian identity. Aside from these books dedicated solely to Oliveros, a number of essays, dissertations, and interviews examine the composer’s repertoire.

Susan McClary’s article “Different Drummers: Interpreting Music by Women

Composers,” for example, explores Oliveros’s music in relationship to her creative philosophy and writings on women in composition.

In this chapter, I explore two of Oliveros’s works composed in the 1960s and 70s, respectively: Sound Patterns (1961) and Sonic Meditations (1974). During this decade,

Oliveros engaged with a diverse community of artists, intellectuals, scientists, and poets living in California. Many of her friends and colleagues participated in the counterculture’s rupture of standard literary forms, aesthetic ideals, and methods of communication. Through their creative output, scientific investigations, philosophical writings, and poetic verse, they explored and advocated for an alternative idea of consciousness, one that allowed access to spiritual and intellectual activities outside

Western paradigms. Oliveros, at this time and throughout the remainder of her career, similarly challenged traditional modes of thought.

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Like the work of other composers who place emphasis on the responsibility of the listener and use an unconventional notation style,5 Oliveros’s repertoire creates new opportunities to think about the nature of musical analysis. In that she transcends standard models of musical convention, analyses of her work need also go beyond typical limits.

The composer notates Sound Patterns, the earlier of the two works that I explore, with a self-devised graphic system. Sound Patterns, however, is designed to be performed for an audience, so analysis of the work may rely on more conventional methods of score study and listening.

However, for Sonic Meditations, a book of guided exercises notated in prose, the analysis becomes as much about our own input, listening, perception, and understanding as it is about the composer’s methods and intentions. The work is not structured for a traditional performance venue in which there is a divide between performers and audience; rather, it is constructed for participation. To develop an analysis of Sonic

Meditations, then, I practiced these exercises with a group of colleagues and relied on my own active, engaged experience.6 Everyone who was present for the exercises

5 These composers include John Cage, Yoko Ono, LaMonte Young, and many others. Please see Introduction and Chapter 3. 6 Thank you to Paul Abdullah, Sophie Benn, Peter Graff, Susan McClary, Kate Rodgers, and Nick Stevens for participating in Sonic Meditations. Note: Other scholars have presented methodologies that embrace the phenomenal and participatory musical experience. Susan McClary’s work has advocated for the importance of physical experience and cultural identity in musical analysis. Christopher Small argues for a receptive mode that embraces participatory experience or “musicking.” Nina Eidsheim’s recent work on avant-garde operatic composers expands the traditional conception of music as a single-sensory experience to one that includes the physical manifestations of sound as vibrational material. Music theorist Ellie Hisama similarly advocates for a complex blueprint of layered meaning and perception; her work on filmmaker Isaac Julien establishes an exemplar for music theory built on the consideration of identity and cultural signifiers as elements of sound. See: McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Christopher Small. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998); Nina Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Ellie Hisama, “The Sonic Imagination of Isaac Julien” (unpublished paper, presented at the Musicology Colloquium, Case Western Musicology Colloquium, Cleveland, OH, December 2016).

65 participated, and each of us became many things at once: performers, listeners, improvisers, and communicators. Reception became participatory practice. Speaking for myself, I perceived sound through both auditory channels and vibrational feeling; responding to Oliveros’s instructions became a whole-body experience. Listening to the exercises meant that I was simultaneously enacting them.

My analysis of Oliveros’s work draws from these conceptions of multi-sensory and participatory reception but specifically focuses on communication and consciousness as a point of departure for the consideration of sound and form. I consider the sound structures created and guided by Oliveros as mechanisms of communication and channels of expressive potential. Just as Eidsheim’s perception of the musical work spans beyond the purely auditory, my approach to communication invests in the space outside of grammar and lexicon. I argue that Oliveros communicates not only in a multi-sensory mode but on different levels of consciousness, and I examine the historical and cognitive signifiers that allow us to understand this innovation. In doing so, I illuminate little- explored connections between Oliveros’s work and the literary community in California in the 1960s. “Open ears are a direct connection to everything that is,” Oliveros wrote in

1968. My analysis contemplates Oliveros’s statement, to consider sound as both medium for communication and connection to expanded notions of human consciousness.

Feeling, Phoneme, Form

Oliveros’s early years as a student and artist were marked by close musical collaboration within interdisciplinary communities. Dissatisfied with her undergraduate music education in Houston, Texas, the town where she was born, Oliveros had moved to

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San Francisco in 1957 in search of new cultural horizons. She eventually joined the composition seminar of Robert Erickson held at San Francisco Conservatory; there, she met experimental composers and musicians Terry Riley, Lauren Rush, Ramon Sender, and Stuart Dempster.7 Erickson was a pioneer of tape music composition, and he often composed using environmental sounds and extended techniques that challenged the typical domains of instrumentation.8 He suggested that Oliveros form an improvisation group with Riley, Rush, and Dempster, and the group began to meet weekly to work and improvise. They often recorded and broadcast their sessions on KPFA, San Francisco’s independent radio station and an important influence on Oliveros’s development as a composer.9 She writes that it was through KPFA that she discovered music from outside of America and Europe, Henry Cowell’s avant-garde compositions, and other new music from Europe and the East Coast.10

Oliveros began composing with electronics in 1959. Her mother had given her a tape recorder as a birthday present six years earlier, and she used it to record sounds of her surrounding environment. She often left it on her windowsill to capture the soundtrack of life outside.11 In 1961, Oliveros received an invitation from Sender to work with him at his newly created electronic music study in the attic of the San Francisco

Conservatory. Oliveros and Sender began a concert series called Sonics, which featured

Oliveros’s and Sender’s music, as well as new works by Terry Riley and others in the

7 Erickson was a pioneer of tape music composition, and he often composed using environmental sounds and extended techniques that challenged the typical domains of instrumentation. 8 For more on Erickson, see: David W. Bernstein, ed., The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 9 Alan Baker, “An Interview with Pauline Oliveros,” American Mavericks, originally published January 2003, http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/interview_oliveros.html. 10 Ibid. 11 Von Gunden, The Music of Pauline Oliveros.

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San Francisco experimental music community. This and other collaborations eventually led to the creation of the San Francisco Tape Music Center.12 Oliveros, Sender, and others became deeply integrated into the larger avant-garde community in San Francisco; they shared their home at 321 Divisadero Street with the experimental choreographer

Anna Halprin and her dance company, The Dancers’ Workshop. Sender wrote that the

Tape Music Center became interested in happenings because of Halprin (they collaborated with Halprin’s company in a city-wide happening in 1963).13 Oliveros composed a number of multi-media pieces at this time, including one in collaboration with Dancers’ Workshop dancer Elizabeth Harris: Two From Seven Passages.

Yet Oliveros’s interdisciplinary collaborations in San Francisco actually began years earlier. In 1957, Oliveros wanted to compose with a text by a living poet, and she went to the Poetry Center at San Francisco State in search of a collaborator. There, she met the Center’s director, Robert Duncan, who offered her his own poems. She set

Duncan’s poems “An Interlude of Rare Beauty” and “Spider Song,” as well as “Song

Number Six” from the poet Charles Olson’s Maximus series, and collected them under the title Three Songs in 1957.14 Duncan liked Oliveros’s setting of his text, and Oliveros developed a connection with both him and his longtime partner, the painter Jess Collins.

Duncan and Collins introduced her to the poetry community in San Francisco and to the work of Charles Olson.15 Oliveros once described her relationship with them in an interview: “I became friends with [Duncan and Collins] and went to their house very

12 Pauline Oliveros, “Memoire of a Community Enterprise,” in The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde, ed. David. W. Bernstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 82. 13 David W. Bernstein and Maggi Payne, “Interview with Ramon Sender and William Maginnis,” in The San Francisco Tape Music Center, 62. 14 Von Gunden, 10. 15 Ibid., 11.

68 often and went to events that were happening in the Bay area with Robert and other poets. So I met a lot of [poets], such as Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer. So it was a very interesting time. Robert was a very important connection for me with the world of poetry.”16

Duncan, Olson, Blaser, and Spicer were among the Black Mountain Poets, a group of poets associated with Black Mountain College. Olson led the poetry department there, and in 1950, he published the essay Projective Verse, which became a kind of manifesto for the group. Projective Verse advocated for open poetic forms structured by cycles of breath and syllabic sound rather than traditional models of meter and rhyme.

Olson saw poetry as rooted in sensory phenomena, accessible by close listening to syllables and attention to energetic flow. He used the term “kinetics” to describe the transfer of energy channeled by the poet in the creation of form.17 This process of energetic shaping, Olson contended, comes from perception inherently connected to the auditory and tangible senses: “Verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of the ear and the pressure of the breath.”18 Within this ebb and flow of breath and energy, Olson placed the syllable, the perception of which connects auditory sense and cognitive ability. “Let me put it baldly,” he wrote: “The two halves [of composition] are: the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE / the HEART by way of the BREATH to the LINE.”19

16 David W. Bernstein and Maggi Payne, “Interview with Pauline Oliveros,” in The San Francisco Tape Music Center, 99. 17 Charles Olson, “Projective Verse (1950),” The Poetry Foundation, originally published October 13, 2009, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/essays/detail/69406. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid.

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We have no direct evidence that Oliveros was aware of Projective Verse, but through her association with Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser, she kept the company of poets whose work exemplified its tenets. The engagement with language as an auditory/tangible/sensory phenomena related to the structuring of expression comprised an essential element of the community’s aesthetic. In his foreword to the letters of

Duncan and fellow poet Denise Levertov, Albert Gelphi writes that the Black Mountain

Poets found form “in a spatial arrangement of phrases and lines on the page improvised so as to graph or score the measured movement of consciousness in the process of articulation.”20 Language was immersed in a larger “field of experience,” one concerned with the phenomenal and psychological as much as the verbal.21

When Oliveros composed the piece Sound Patterns in 1961, she had just written

Time Perspectives, her first full electronic and tape work. For Sound Patterns, she wanted to embody electronic sound: “Fresh from my first tape piece and my experience of listening to electronic music, I decided to treat the voices as ‘instruments.’ I wanted the chorus to sound electronic. Instead of text I explored vocal sounds or mouth noises and invented a notation for these sounds.”22 The piece is written for a cappella mixed chorus, and Oliveros notates the sound with approximate pitch location and precise rhythmic and metrical indications. Noteheads are arranged on two horizontal lines per part.

20 Albert Gelpi, “Introduction: The ‘Aesthetic Ethics’ of the Visionary Imagination” in The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, ed. Robert J. Bertholf and Albert Gelpi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), xi. 21 Ibid. 22 Oliveros, “Memoire of a Community Enterprise,”83.

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Example 6 Excerpt from Pauline Oliveros, Sound Patterns (Darmstadt: Edition Tonos, 1964)

Von Gunden writes that the timbres within the piece correspond to four types of electronic noise: white noise, ring-modulated sounds, percussive envelopes, and filtered techniques.23 To evoke these electronic sounds, Oliveros uses a variety of phonemes and syllables, as well as extended techniques employing the hands and body.

The importance of Oliveros’s translation of electronic sound into the expression of the physical body and voice cannot be overemphasized. Just as Olson and Duncan infuse the poetic verse with the resonance of the breath and the reverberating syllable, so does Oliveros root the sound of oscillators and amplified objects in the corporeality of the voice, mouth, and hands. Her radical placement of electronic sonorities into the physical body offers creative currency in the investment of phenomenal consciousness so prevalent in that historical moment.

Sound Patterns balances the priorities of sound, syllable, form, and breath in ways that resemble Olson’s description of successful verse – albeit through very different

23 Von Gunden, 26.

71 means. Around and within her electronic-inspired figures, Oliveros creates kinetic flow with gesture, rhythm, and dynamics. Breaths and pauses structure time and form.

Variation in timbre enabled by corporeal manipulations of the mouth and hands sculpt three-dimensional syllabic material. Oliveros employs rapid changes in dynamics and rhythmic durations to create development of line and energy. The first four measures, for instance, introduce the piece with a breath expulsion. A downward gesture marks the passage of sound from the soprano voice part to alto, tenor, and bass. As the line falls from sopranos to tenors, note durations become shorter while the rhythm becomes more complex. This effect results in a quickening tempo and a sense of physical tumbling through the musical space. The line lands upon the bass’ long, held note, which serves as an energetic incubator for the building of momentum. From its preparation in the bass note, the line springs nimbly upward through the voice parts with the articulation of a short cluck of the tongue. We expect the sound’s passage to traverse from tenors to altos to sopranos, but the sopranos, stepping on the heels of the altos, sing just before them.

The altos, then, articulate their note last, leaving the energy suspended. (see ex. 7, next page)

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Example 7 Excerpt from Oliveros, Sound Patterns

These syllabic sounds produced by the voice and body resemble language while simultaneously subverting it. They are the kinds of sounds that words are made of – the ingredients of words – but they are combined in ways that never resolve as words in any natural language.24 As a result, Oliveros draws our attention to the phonology of these sub-words, and the texture and pitch of the sound itself.25

Oftentimes, Oliveros combines these phonetic syllables in ways that evoke the texture and intonational contours of human conversation. One such conversational section, in which voice parts exchange short, pointed notes, begins several moments into the piece. The relatively sparse texture highlights an alternating interchange.

24 Here, I use the term natural language in the sense that it is used in the field of linguistics: a communication system that has evolved naturally through human use and repetition. 25 Thanks to Vera Tobin for her insight and help with linguistic terminology and concepts.

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Example 8 Excerpt from Oliveros, Sound Patterns

At measure 27, the sopranos hold a long vowel and the other voices imitate with their own held notes. The exchange becomes a buzzing chorale.

74

Example 9 Excerpt from Oliveros, Sound Patterns

Though without words or grammar, this section resembles the structure of conversation through turn-taking, inquiry and response patterns, and other prosodic signifiers. Here,

75 the music communicates at a level above language; it evokes the prosody of dialogue but avoids dependence on lexicon.26

After a fermata at the end of measure forty (the close of the “chorale”), an upward glissando in the altos and tenors through clenched teeth incites the sopranos’ effervescent sforzando, sung with fluttered lips. This spine-tingling sonic combustion of sound sets the piece in rapid motion once again. The form retraces its steps through a return to conversant texture with an improvisational detour at measure forty-six (singers are asked to pop their lips or cluck their tongues five times at any point throughout the measure).

The piece ends similarly to how it began: with an expulsion of air, punctuated by a final cluck of the tongue.

Example 10 Excerpt from Oliveros, Sound Patterns

26 For more on intonation units and phonotactic construction in conversation, see Wallace Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

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The production of these sounds through the physical body facilitates timbral interest, and this variety of timbres, in turn, allows for an endless catalog of syllabic material. Oliveros delivers her phonemes through glissandos, tremolos, and trills, and this sound is sometimes further manipulated by covering the mouth with hands, snapping fingers in front of the lips, or clucking the tongue. She meticulously presents these directives, along with a vowel pronunciation guide, at the beginning of the score. Her articulation of

“electronic” syllabic and phonetical sound rooted in the mouth and body bridges verbal convention and sensory consciousness. The composition evokes the form and sounds of language without actually becoming it.

Deep Transmission

Oliveros’s investment in the phenomenal experience aligns with efforts toward alterative consciousness at the beginning of the 1960s. Artists and intellects who looked to Eastern spiritualties, occult practices, and esoteric doctrines for enlightenment sought to reconcile their philosophies with the reality of their contemporary lifestyles. Composer

Gordon Mumma writes that 1960s California was a locus of occult and alternative thinking – “part of the spiritual legacy – and politics – of California.”27 He includes

Oliveros as part of this legacy, as well as composer Alvin Lucier, and notes their uses of electronic media as a channeling of occult power.

Oliveros would have been exposed to esoteric and occult philosophy through her friendship with Duncan, a devoted student of occult, hermetic, and other esoteric texts.

Duncan had grown up in a theosophical household and studied the works of writers such

27 Gordon Mumma, Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 91.

77 as Helena Blavatsky and Hermes Trismegistus. Such texts, as well as sources addressing magic, alchemy, and mysticism, were a part of the occult resurgence of the 1960s counterculture. As the decade progressed, Oliveros increasingly studied texts that circulated in this community. Von Gunden points to Oliveros’s period of martial arts lessons with karate instructor and theoretical physicist Lester Ingber, as a moment of significance for Oliveros’s philosophical study.28 By this time, Oliveros had taken a faculty position at the University of California San Diego Department of Music at the invitation of her former mentor Robert Erickson.29 Von Gunden writes that the new department enthusiastically forged interdisciplinary collaboration; she cites Erickson’s collaboration with the psychologist Diana Deutsch in a series of experiments concerning cognition and hearing.30

Oliveros worked closely with Ingber, and together, they delved into studies of consciousness, myth, psychology, and ritual.31 They became familiar with the psychological texts of Carl Jung; Joseph Campbell’s series on myth and ritual, The Masks of God; Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred, a translation of poetic texts from around the world; and The Psychology of Consciousness, an influential text about the relationship between psychology, intuition, and alternative states of consciousness by

Robert E. Ornstein, a psychologist and scholar working in California at the time.32 Ingber had developed his own theory of consciousness based on his study of meditation, physics, and karate, and on processes of analysis and intuition.33

28 Von Gunden, 88. 29 Oliveros took a position at UCSD in 1967. 30 Von Gunden, 88. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 91.

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Jung, Campbell, Rothenberg, and Ornstein all address elements of non-Western philosophy, esoteric thought, and ritual in relationship to consciousness and communication. Jung’s studies of synchronicity, psychic energy, dreams, and spiritualism, particularly those in The Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult

Phenomena (his doctoral dissertation, later published in his collected works) consider non-verbal communicative methods characteristic of esoteric and occult traditions, including extrasensory perception, clairvoyance, and telepathy.34 In the first chapter of

The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, Campbell argues that mythology and ritual enact an awakening of the consciousness to the mysteries of the universe. Creative artists enable this process through communication reliant on the mechanisms of ritual and mythopoeics rather than concrete, information-based language: “to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across a void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another.”35 Rothenberg, like Campbell, asserts the validity of alternate communicative means. He particularly validates the holistic communications of ritual and poetry-performance from indigenous cultures around the world.

These expressive traditions, writes Rothenberg, are not “primitive” in the sense that the modern world has deemed them, but rather complex, highly meaningful paradigms of feeling and thought. Appreciating such expression requires a simple reconceptualization of value system. When spirituality, dreams, and ritual become as

34 See: Carl Jung, The Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena, originally published 1903. 35 Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology Vol 4 (New York: Penguin Books, 1991, originally published 1968), 92-93.

79 valuable as technological development and industrial expansion, they no longer seem primitive.36 The most prominent mechanism of these poetic forms, Rothenberg contends, is their delivery by song, chant, or other ritualistic presentation. The words of the piece are not primary to the comprehension of the poem, but rather amalgamate into the entirety of the holistic experience – song, dance, and music.37 Rothenberg’s book, first published in 1968, includes a section of poetry composed in the 1960s (including a poem and drawing by Robert Duncan’s partner, Jess Collins). Rothenberg writes that holistic communicative and poetic devices are being reclaimed by contemporary artists and poets.

Those mechanisms include communication/delivery via the voice, a holistic process of

“image-thinking” non-adherent to the causality of rationalist logic, eschewal of the performer/spectator division, “intermedia” elements such as song and non-verbal sound, the poet as a “shaman” or “seer,” and “the animal-body-rootedness” of “primitive” poetry, or the “recognition of a ‘physical’ basis for a poem within a man’s body – or as an act of body and mind together, breath and/or spirit.”38

Ornstein similarly argues for more holistic idea of communication and consciousness. When we live in only one level of consciousness, he writes, we miss an enormous amount of sensory and conceptual material. Such awareness of a multi-faceted consciousness can be found in very old, traditional belief systems: “the ancient one of the traditional, esoteric psychologies.”39 He contends that that channels of communication can be mapped onto two “modes of knowing,” one based on the structures of reason, the

36 Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, originally published 1968), 19. 37 Ibid., xxi. 38 Ibid., xii-xiii. 39 Robert Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness (San Francisco: Freeman, 1972).

80 other on intuitive experience.40 The verbal state limits cognitive reception, while the vocabulary of the unconscious provides access to new worlds of possibility. Ornstein discusses communication in terms of ritual practice and transmission through sensory perception. He counts gesture, movement of the body, and vocal tone among means of

“unconscious” communication, and he adds that sonic resonance and frequencies of vocal sound “stimulate parts of the mind which normally go untouched.”41

Oliveros puts these ideas about consciousness and communication into practice through her work composed in the early 1970s. She had begun working with the dancer and T’ai Chi master Al Chung Liang Huang in 1969, and, with him, she practiced meditation, breathing exercises, and long, slow drone improvisations on her accordion.

Out of this practice she formed the ♀ Ensemble, a group of women who met regularly to participate in meditative improvisation exercises focused on the production of drones and attention to subtly shifting partials.42 As the Ensemble’s work progressed, Oliveros writes, a change occurred: “Rather than manipulating our voices or instruments in a goal oriented way in order to produce certain effects, we began to allow changes to occur involuntarily, or without conscious effort, while sustaining a sound voluntarily. It is an entirely different mode. It requires the elimination of opinions, desires, and speculations.”43 Oliveros saw receptive consciousness as a key component of the new creative and musical process. For her, a relationship between attention and awareness

40 Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness, x. 41 Ibid., 59. 42 Pauline Oliveros, Software for the People: Collected Writings 1963-1980 (Baltimore, MD: Smith Publications, 1984), 148. 43 Ibid., 148-149.

81 came to enable this compositional method; attention facilitated focused concentration and discernment, and awareness allowed a breadth of sensory experience and perception.44

Oliveros began writing exercises to guide the ♀ Ensemble’s listening and improvisation practices, and, as she composed, she became interested in studying the cognitive effects of these practices.45 In 1974, she published her exercises under the name

Sonic Meditations. The work consists of twenty-five exercises, many of them with variations, notated in the form of prose instructions. Each exercise facilitates the creation of sound, the imagination of sound, the attention/aural awareness of sound, and the memory of sound.46 The introduction to the pieces sets out a number of Oliveros’s goals and priorities, including the reclaiming of “ancient forms.” She stresses the idea of communication and connection, particularly “communication among all forms of life, through Sonic Energy” and “the healing power of Sonic Energy and its transmission within groups.”47 These goals are directly related to the communicative networks produced through the exercises. Oliveros situates this communication in a non-verbal space; she notes that the ♀ Ensemble found that the absence of verbal mechanisms in meetings enhanced the effects of the exercises. Rather than relying on structures of syntax and grammar, Sonic Meditations enables communication by the transmission of sound and sound “images” and the connections resultant from acute listening and participatory procedures.

Many exercises are spent listening to one’s breath, the sonic atmosphere of the natural landscape, or the sound of the physiological body. In the first exercise, “Teach

44 Oliveros, Software for the People, 139. 45 In 1973, Oliveros received a research fellowship through the Project for Music Experiment at UCSD. 46 Oliveros, “Introduction” in Oliveros, Sonic Meditations (Smith Publications, 1974). 47 Ibid.

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Yourself to Fly,” Oliveros instructs participants (seated in a circle) to observe their breathing, then to allow a vocal tone or tones to emerge gradually from increasingly audible breath. Development in vocal intensity allows for palpable vibrations throughout the body. “Always be an observer,” Oliveros instructs. Participants continue vocalizing as long as possible and until the sound naturally ceases. The timing of each component of this exercise – the beginning of audible breath, the introduction of vocal sound, the gradual fall of sound production – emerges from a kind of unspoken choreography.

Participants must sense how to time the trajectory of their vocalizing, for Oliveros’s instructions provide no specificity in terms of coordination. Each person makes individual decisions regarding her or his actions, but these decisions often merge into the collective consciousness of the group.

When my group performed this piece, we were intensely aware of the sound and timing of our fellow participants. Because the piece is not coordinated verbally or by pre- set design, we relied on subtle sensory cues from the group. Every audible breath, small shift in volume, or slight variation in resonance becomes amplified. We learned to sense, by a sort of auditory feeling, the sounds and actions of the group as a whole.

Throughout Sonic Meditations, Oliveros often asks us to remember and

“reinforce” these sounds (by Oliveros’s definition, “reinforce” means to “strengthen or sustain”).48 These actions, in turn, allow for connection with the sound source – the environment, oneself, or another participant(s). In the exercise “Environmental

Dialogue,” participants become aware of sounds within their environment. They reinforce this sound by reproducing it “vocally, mentally, or instrumentally.” The participants

48 Oliveros, “Environmental Dialogue” in Sonic Meditations.

83 continue to connect with their sounds, and if they lose their sound source, they are to wait for connection with another. This reinforcing action allows for a synthesis between participant and sound source to be initiated and maintained, thus creating a kind of dialogue, as the title of the exercise intimates.

Oliveros uses the term “image” in conjunction with sound or pitch to refer to sounds reinforced and retained by auditory memory. In a number of exercises, these sound images become transferable entities intended to be shared either aurally (through vocalizing) or mentally (through telepathy). Such a process occurs in the third exercise,

“Pacific Tell/Telepathic Improvisation,” in which Oliveros instructs participants to mentally form a sound image. Each person then attempts to clairvoyantly transmit that sound image to another person in the group. If participants hear a sound other than their own, they are to assume that that have received a sound image through telepathy, and they may then realize that sound via vocalization or articulation on an instrument.

Oliveros evokes a number of telepathic methodologies here. The first is the forming of a

“sound image,” an entity analogous to the image that communicators are asked to visualize before telepathic transmission. Such an image creates a clear vision in the head of the “sender” to be shared with the “receiver.” Oliveros asks participants to accept that their images will transmit to the receiver. This directive represents another aspect of the telepathic process: the identification and visualization of the receiver. After sending the sound image, the participant clears her mind in order to receive a transmission. In other words, the sender becomes the receiver. Oliveros defines this reception as a sound image entering the mind that is different from the one originally conceived. “Pacific

Tell/Telepathic Improvisation” tests the power of concentration and aural memory. When

84 another participant produces a sound image that s/he has received, it can be difficult to retain one’s own image. The result is an attempted negotiation between realized and imagined sounds; a juxtaposition of audible and mental images.

The exercise “Zina’s Circle,” translates the idea of transmission into touch. As in telepathic communication, a transmitter is selected, but this time, the message is transferred through physical signaling. Participants begin, as in every exercise, by breath observation. They then join hands and explore the physical space of their environment by extending their arms out, then inward. The transmitter proceeds to send a physical signal by squeezing the hand of the person beside her. In this directive, Oliveros evokes the metaphor of electric energy, as she instructs the squeeze to be sharp, “to resemble a light jolt of electricity.” She instructs for the pulse to travel around the circle fluidly; this effect is facilitated by a quick pace of transmission “so quick that it happens as a reflex.” The transmitter is instructed to shout “Hah” at the same time s/he squeezes the recipient’s hand. In the last directives, Oliveros indicates that the circle should aim to transmit and receive as quickly as possible. This speed allows for a build of kinetic energy that assists in the production of pulse. The bodily and temporal coordination of pulse enables a dissolution of physical boundaries. As the group becomes more adept at transmitting the jolt, it becomes one collective body through which a unified pulse runs.

In “Zina’s Circle,” physical boundaries dissolve to effect an integrated physical experience. Several other exercises similarly work to melt boundaries or containers. In the exercise “One Word,” lexical structures become pure sound. Participants articulate and repeat a word, each time lengthening different syllables or parts of the word. Various members of the group divide or lengthen syllables differently, resulting in the complete

85 liquescence of the word into a new sonorous entity comprised of timbre, rhythm, and pitch. Here, a contained lexical structure transforms into a fluid entity of aural material.

The word becomes distorted past the point of recognition. Participants attend to the sonorous quality of syllables rather than lexical meaning, and sound becomes the expressive concept. In one realization I conducted with my colleagues, we took the word

“chandelier” and developed a piece improvising on its various parts: “shh,” “n-duh,”

“lier, lier, lier” and so on. Some of the sounds were pitched, others were not, but all became motives.49

Sonic Meditations documents Oliveros’s ideas about sound, attention, community, and communication. It shares philosophies with the texts that Oliveros studied before and during its composition – a view of consciousness that expands beyond the individual ego, an openness to communication inclusive of holistic and ritual-based mechanisms, and an investment in esoteric, non-Western, and anti-rationalist traditions. Oliveros’s emphasis on attention and breath in exercises like “Teach Yourself to Fly” reiterates her interest in non-Western spiritual practice. Exercises such as “Pacific Tell/Telepathic Improvisation” use sound as images for transmission in a way similar to the mythopoetic and ritual practices that Rothenberg describes. Oliveros emphasizes the sonorous quality of syllables in exercises like “One Word”; Olson and Duncan made a similar argument for the recognition of syllable and breath in poetic language.

The alternative modes of thought that these exercises espouse and enact place new emphasis on modes of creativity and expression. In Technologies of Intuition, Jennifer

Fisher writes that postmodern discourses of art reclaim the value of intuition as

49 Thanks to Susan McClary for her insight and help with articulating the effect of this exercise.

86 knowledge. This knowledge becomes central to artistic production due to its acceptance of “extra-rational means of understanding” and the ability to receive and process information “beyond rational or verbal consciousness.”50 The mechanisms by which this knowledge is obtained goes through sensory channels denied in Cartesian separation of body and mind – sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste, as well as extra-sensory perception, are not denied but rather allow for “inner voice” or clairvoyance.51

Oliveros’s work embraces these alternative and intuitive modes of knowledge. In her essay “The Noetics of Music,” she calls for “the conscious training of intuition and feeling as well as observational and analytical skills.”52 For Oliveros, this production of knowledge is integrally tied to community and to joint participation in the creative process. “My music is interactive music,” she says; “It is interactive in the sense that participants take a share in creating the work rather than limit themselves to merely interpreting pitches and rhythms.”53 Oliveros links the training of intuition with an awareness of other’s roles in the creative and musical process. She sees a collaborative and intuitive practice as the future of music, and to this practice she ascribes a particular responsibility to composers who are also women. “Women must really assume responsibility and take charge of this change,” she says, “Out of the united inner voices of women will come the music of the millennium – the music that we need to find balance and harmonious relationships in our society.”54 Oliveros identifies women, whom she associates with the music of traditional rites of passage, as the keepers of communal

50 Jennifer Fisher, “Introduction” in Technologies of Intuition, ed. Jennifer Fisher (Toronto, CA: YYZBOOKS, 2006), 11. 51 Ibid., 12 52 Oliveros, “The Noetics of Music” in Software for the People, 131. 53 Pauline Oliveros, Sounding the Margins (Deep Listening Publications, 2010), 4-5. 54 Ibid., 11.

87 music-making procedures. 55 Women and men both contain intuitive as well as analytical dimensions, she argues, but the inclusion of women in traditionally male-dominated disciplines indicates a reclaiming of this other mode of being – “an inclusion of intuition as a complementary mode of creativity.”56

In her embrace of a collaborative process, an expressive network built on sensory perception rather than words and syntax, and an investment in intuitive cognition,

Oliveros argues convincingly for an expansion of consciousness, creativity, and communication. For her, expression through the sonorous quality of syllables and the gestural, prosodic, and even perhaps clairvoyant elements that reside under the umbrella of paralanguage is not nonsense; rather, it functions by specific methods embraced by alternative thinkers in Oliveros’s cultural moment. The paradigms of traditional Western art music are not enough, she contends. Rather, we should open our minds to a new comprehension of art’s function, aesthetic values, and knowledge systems that embrace older, more communal forms of understanding. Acute attention to sensory perception and awareness of inner voice, she suggests, accesses intelligence beyond the single-faceted mind.57 Because her work enacts these arguments, Oliveros offers us a valuable challenge as analysts. To consider her repertoire, we benefit from opening ourselves to greater possibilities of experience and perception. Oliveros eschews the standard models of

Western art music, so we as analysts must look beyond traditional methods of comprehension. The reward is great; Oliveros teaches us that the limits of our

55 Oliveros, Sounding the Margins, 11. 56 Oliveros, “The Importance of Women as Composers” in Software for the People, 136. 57 See: Sounding the Margins and Software for the People.

88 understanding are far broader than we think. To analyze Oliveros’s music is to consider possibility.

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CHAPTER 3

Yoko Ono and the Art of Conceptual Sound

Following Yoko Ono’s performance at the Sōgetsu Art Center of Tokyo in 1962, the critic Donald Richie published an unfavorable review in Gejutsu shinchō, a Japanese art magazine. Richie criticized Ono’s work as “old-fashioned” and “amateur.” “She would strike a match to light a fire, she would bang on the piano. Just these simple gestures would fill up a couple of hours,” he wrote; “Anyway, Ono did not demonstrate any originality. All her ideas are borrowed from people in New York, particularly John

Cage.”1 Toshi Ichiyanagi, a composer and Ono’s then-husband, offered a rebuttal in the same journal. “Yoko Ono was criticized for ‘stealing ideas’ in her work … This is however, a simple mistake,” he stated, and explained:

The first piece, A Piano Piece to See the Skies, which Ono played by herself, began with the repetition of sounds inaudible to humans. It proceeded to the repetitions of sounds that reached the sky, and concluded with the repetitive breathing that necessarily results from an energetic performance. Setting aside the discussion on the quality of the work, it is clear that this three-part piece had nothing to do with John Cage’s silent piano composition 4’33”. It was conceptually different.2

The idiosyncratic concept to which Ichiyanagi refers is manifested in Ono’s prolific body of sound-work, visual art, film, writing, and performance created between 1960 and

1 Donald Richie, “Stumbling Front Line: Yoko Ono’s Avant-Garde Show,” Geijutsu shinchō, (July 1962) Reprinted in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971, ed. Kyle Bentley (New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 2015), 122. 2 Toshi Ichiyanagi, “Voice of the Most Avant-Garde: Objection to Donald Richie,” Geijutsu shinchō, (August 1962). Reprinted in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971, 124.

90 today. As a member of the Fluxus circle in New York and the burgeoning postwar avant- garde scene in Japan, Ono worked on the forefront of artistic innovations in the second half of the twentieth century. Still, Ono’s role in the history of art and culture remains under-examined, even contentious. Ono recalls in an interview that after she released her

1966 Film No. 4 (Bottoms), a five-plus minute film comprised of close-up shots of human buttocks: “All my avant-garde friends dropped me because I got a tremendous amount of attention and reviews … this nice avant-garde artist couple had a dinner party and the wife told me, ‘My husband feels like you sold out and we’re not inviting you for dinner

… ”3 Ono’s marriage to John Lennon in 1969 further thrust her into the public eye. After

Lennon became involved in some of her avant-garde work, she was vehemently criticized and, later, accused of “breaking up” the Beatles. Her work as a political and environmental activist has only amplified these criticisms.4

Ono’s work is gradually gaining greater recognition. Since 2000, several retrospectives and accompanying essay collections have focused on her life and work.

YES Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: Between the Sky and My Head, and Yoko Ono: Half a Wind

Show were compiled as part of exhibitions at the Japan Society Gallery of New York in

2000-01, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in 2008 and

2009, and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 2013, respectively. In 2015, MoMA held of retrospective of Ono’s work from 1960-1971 and published a companion anthology, Yoko

Ono: One Woman Show. The curators of the exhibition, Klaus Biesenbach and

3 Joy Press, “A Life in Flux,” in The Wire, no. 146 (April 1996), cited in Jörg Heiser, “Against the Wind, Against the Wall: Yoko Ono’s Music,” in Yoko Ono: Half a Wind Show, ed. Ingrid Pfeiffer et al. (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle, 2013), 167. 4 One only needs to travel down the Pennsylvania Turnpike to witness this criticism of Ono firsthand; near Bedford, PA, an area in which coal mining is a primary source of income, a billboard for an anti- environmental regulation organization created in 2014 shows a picture of Ono and reads: “Would you take energy advice from the woman that broke up the Beatles?”

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Christophe Cherix, began their acknowledgements with the following statement: “Today, though Ono’s name is widely known, the remarkable depth and foresight of her early work has not previously been investigated in a focused exhibition.”5 An additional important source on Ono’s early work and biography is Midori Yoshimoto’s Into

Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (2005), in which a chapter centers on

Ono.

Despite this work, musicological scholarship on Ono remains limited, and writing on the artist’s sound-work by musicologists and music critics largely centers on her recorded albums produced after 1968. Undoubtedly the small scale of this scholarship is due in part to the fact that Ono is just now receiving recognition for her contribution to musical work with Lennon and other artists. On June 14, 2017, for example, the National

Music Publishers Association awarded Ono the Centennial Song Award and, for the first time, formally acknowledged Ono as a co-writer of the song, “Imagine” (previously attributed solely to Lennon). At the awards ceremony, NMPA played an excerpt from a

BBC interview with Lennon in 1980 during which he explained his debt to Ono in the writing of the song. “The lyric, and the concept, came from Yoko,” Lennon said. “Those days, I was a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution. But it was right out of Grapefruit, her book. There’s a whole pile of pieces about ‘Imagine this’ and ‘Imagine that.’”6

Ono self-published the book to which Lennon refers, Grapefruit, on July 4, 1964, and she sold copies of the book that summer on the street of the Ginza district in Japan

5 Biesenbach and Cherix, “Acknowledgements,” in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971, 7. 6 Patricia Garcia, “After 46 Years, Yoko Ono Finally Credited as One of the Songwriters of Imagine,” Vogue, June 15, 2017, http://www.vogue.com/article/yoko-ono-songwriting-credit-imagine.

92 during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Grapefruit comprises a compilation of Ono’s instruction scores (or Event Scores), a type of prose format favored by Fluxus-associated artists, composed between 1953 and 1964. The book divides into five parts: Music,

Painting, Event, Poetry, and Objects. Additional scores were added for Grapefruit’s formal publication by Simon and Schuster in 1970. Each section features instruction scores pertaining to their respective categories.

Those scholars who have written about Grapefruit in the sources mentioned above come from the perspective of art history and criticism, and they generally apply the same analytical paradigms to the Music Scores as they do to the scores in the rest of the book. This approach offers valuable comparisons, yet, in that the Music Scores deal with sound production and reception rather than primarily visual material, they warrant a different kind of consideration. In this chapter, I examine the Music Scores presented in

Grapefruit and argue that Ono enacts a reconceptualization not just of musical performance as many of her Fluxus colleagues did, but of the experience of sound and listening through an engagement with language and consciousness. Through analysis of these scores, I remark on Ono’s philosophy concerning sound as both material and concept, I consider Ono’s revolutionary notions of communication, sonic consciousness, and knowledge, and I attempt to illuminate the unique and previously unacknowledged contributions of Grapefruit to the history of music and Conceptualist work.

Seeds

Ono was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1933. Her father made a successful living as a banker, and her mother came from imperial lineage; thus, Ono had a privileged early

93 upbringing in Japan and in the United States, where her father sometimes did business.7

She attended the very best schools and was trained in both Western classical music and traditional Japanese art forms.8 Ono recalls that she was interested in composition, but her father contended that the field was too difficult for women.9 In 1951, against her father’s wishes, Ono entered the philosophy department at Gakushūin University as its first female student.10 “I was much happier,” Ono said in an interview in 1986, “I was a bookworm and it’s nicer to read books.”11 She transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in

1954 and took composition lessons in the style of Schoenberg and Berg. Ono recalls that her teacher was dismissive of her work, saying: “Well look, there are some people who are doing things like what you do, and they’re called avant-garde.”12 She left Sarah

Lawrence and eloped with Ichiyanagi the following year.13

Ono become involved with the New York avant-garde scene after she moved to the city with Ichiyangi in 1956. Alexandra Munroe, a scholar and curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum, writes that Ono came to New York during a period of particular interest in Eastern philosophy and art.14 Many artistic movements adopted

Asian aesthetics and Zen philosophy after the Second World War, and artists drew on the works of philosophers who came from Asia to lecture at American universities and

7 Alexandra Munroe, “Introduction: Spirit of YES: The Art and Life of Yoko Ono,” in YES Yoko Ono, ed. Alexandra Munroe et al. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. for the Japan Society Gallery, 2000), 14. 8 Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 80 and Munroe, “Yoko Ono’s Bashō,” 89. 9 Melody Sumner, ed. The Guests Go in to Supper (Oakland, CA: Burning Books, 1986), 172-173. Ono’s father, who had initially dreamed of a career as a musician, wanted Ono to become a pianist, then, later, an opera singer. See: Munroe, “Introduction: Spirit of YES,” 14. 10 Munroe, “Introduction: Spirit of YES,” 15. 11 Sumner, The Guests Go in to Supper, 173. 12 Ibid. 13 Munroe, “Introduction: Spirit of YES,” 16. 14 Ibid.

94 institutions.15 One such philosopher was D.T. Suzuki, of whom John Cage became a prominent disciple. Ono and Ichiyanagi met Cage in 1957 at a D.T. Suzuki lecture at

Columbia University, and Ichiyanagi subsequently attended Cage’s class at the New

School. Ono became integrated into the artistic and social circle of her husband’s classmates and Cage’s colleagues.16

Cage taught tenets of Suzuki’s Zen philosophy throughout his classes at The New

School for Social Research in New York between 1956 and 1958, and these classes were later regarded as a central influence on the next generation of artists. Attendee Allan

Kaprow began what he called “Happenings,” elaborate multi-media performances, while students such as George Brecht and Dick Higgins created minimal, contemplative works closely aligned with the Zen aesthetics that Cage espoused. Brecht and other artists later associated with the name Fluxus developed the Event Score, a new model not only for musical notation, but for performance itself. Event Scores presented ordinary, routine actions (like eating lunch, tuning a violin, or replacing a lightbulb) as performances worthy of attention and contemplation.17 While the “Happenings” created by Cage,

Kaprow, and Rauschenberg were highly theatrical, scripted, and logistically complex, the performances corresponding to Event Scores were brief, straightforward, and performable by anyone.

15 Munroe, “Introduction: Spirit of YES,” 17. 16 Ibid. Munroe writes that this group of artists was interested in Ono and other Japanese artists as “mediums of a non-Western, anti-rationalist aesthetic.” In an interview with Ono in 2012, Munroe notes that both she and Ono had trouble when discussing Ono’s relationship to Asian aesthetics, for: “Ono scoffed at being cast in some outmodeled Orientalist suit.” Munroe clarifies that Ono worked to actively rebel against certain tenets of traditional Japanese culture. She recounts Ono saying that Cage was unhappy with her not being a traditional Japanese woman, particularly when she chose to leave Ichiyanagi. See: Munroe, “Yoko Ono’s Bashō,” in Yoko Ono: Half a Wind Show, 87-88. 17 Alison Knowles, cited in Marianne Beck, “Fluxus in Love,” in Fluxus Scores and Instructions: The Transformative Years, ed. Jon Hendricks et al. (Catalog for Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark, 2008), 9.

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The simplicity and accessibility of the Event Score allowed for a change in the performance/audience paradigm and a reflection upon the concept of performance. In the production of their scores, Fluxus artists channeled the aesthetic of Dadaist Marcel

Duchamp, who stated that “any creative act could only be completed by the spectator.”18

For Duchamp, the presentation of the everyday as creative entity (art object, performance, etc.) allowed for the consideration of that entity as a concept. Duchamp famously enacted this principle when he exhibited his urinal-sculpture Fountain (1917), later regarded as a primary instigator of the shift toward Conceptualism in visual art.

Event Scores similarly isolated ordinary actions and presented them as performances. Just as Duchamp showed commonplace objects as sculptures, Fluxus artists offered routine rituals and tasks as performances worthy of study and contemplation. In doing so, they separated the everyday from its usual presentation, and thus allowed for the action to be regarded in a new way.

Ono and Conceptualism

In December of 1960, Ono held the first event of a six-month series of performances at her rented loft on Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan. The series was co-curated by LaMonte Young and featured artists who were later included in Fluxus:

Young, MacLow, Higgins, Simone Forti, and Henry Flynt. Cage, Duchamp, Jasper

Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Peggy Guggenheim also attended performances at

Ono’s loft.19 Though the space was Ono’s, Young frequently minimized his co-curator’s role, and while Ono participated in the works of her guest artists, she did not perform her

18 Munroe, “Introduction: Spirit of YES,” 18. 19 “Chambers Street Loft Series,” in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 48.

96 own material.20 She did, however, display a number of her visual pieces throughout the loft; these were early versions of what would become her Instruction Paintings.21

Ono remembers that in 1961, she received a call from a friend with news of a performance series led by George Maciunas, an attendee at Ono’s events.22 Maciunas had apparently recruited many of the artists who performed in the loft series.23 Shortly thereafter, Maciunas contacted Ono to ask if she would present a solo exhibition at his

AG Gallery on Madison Avenue. She showed her Instruction Paintings, a series of paintings that were accompanied by instructions in the style of the Event Score.24 Each work called for the viewer to participate or perform an action as part of the piece. In

Smoke Painting, for instance, visitors were instructed to burn holes in a piece of canvas with a cigarette or candle. The painting was complete when it was destroyed. In Painting

Until It Becomes Marble, Ono instructed viewers/participants to cut from an accordion- fold book or paint over it with sumi ink until the paper was gone or covered.25 Other works further engaged with participation, concept, and destruction of the material work.

20 Bruce Altshuler, “Instructions for a World of Stickiness: The Early Conceptual Work of Yoko Ono,” in YES Yoko Ono, 65, and Yoshimoto, Into Performance, 86. 21 Altshuler, “Instructions for a World of Stickiness,” 65. 22 Yoko Ono, “Summer of 1961,” in Fluxus Scores and Instructions, 39. 23 Ibid. 24 Yoshimoto, Into Performance, 88. 25 See: “Paintings and Drawings by Yoko Ono,” in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 58.

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Figure 11 Yoko Ono, Painting to Be Stepped On (1960)

Ono is considered by many art scholars as a forerunner of the Conceptual movement in that her work deals with art entities as concepts.26 These scholars focus primarily on Ono’s Instruction Paintings and other visually-aligned work as examples of her conceptual approach, though a vital aspect of Ono’s Conceptualism is its manifestation in performance. At the opening of her exhibition at the AG Gallery, for example, Ono not only presented verbal instructions but read them aloud, thus enacting a performance style in which the language of Event Scores took on a new sonic dimension through oral transmission. Ono performed painting as a concept, and she performed it by sounding language.

26 Altshuler, “Instructions for a World of Stickiness,” 65. In her introduction to The Dematerialization of the Art Object, a central text on the history of Conceptual art, Lucy Lippard cites Ono’s pieces from the 1960s as “independent proto-Conceptual work.” Yoshimoto cites Ono’s use of language in her instruction scores as similar to Conceptualism.

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Ono’s solo recital at Carnegie Hall in November of 1961 further represents her conceptual sensibilities transposed to performance. The event featured pieces such as A

Piece for Strawberries and Violin – during which the choreographer and dancer Yvonne

Rainer stood up, sat down, ate strawberries, and smashed a pile of dishes accompanied by a tape recording featuring sung wails and moans – as well as AOS – To David Tudor, an opera performed by Ono, who experimented with vocalizations over audio playback.27

The recital reflected Ono’s nuanced approach to sound production that would characterize her performances moving forward.

In 1962, Ono traveled to Japan to join Ichiyanagi, who had moved there earlier to compose and work. Yoshimoto notes that Ono felt she needed a change from the rules and restrictions of the art scene in New York.28 Ono produced a significant amount of work while in Japan and her artistic development flourished; although she intended to stay only several weeks, she ultimately remained there for over two years.29 Art historian

Reiko Tomii writes that Japan had experienced a transition to globalism after World War

II, and the country rapidly became part of an international cultural environment.30 The work of the Gutai group and On Kawara’s “printed paintings” prompted a trend in

Japanese art more invested in concept than in material. A growing conceptualism and rise

27 See: “Works by Yoko Ono,” in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 68. 28 Yoshimoto, “1962-1964,” in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 79. Numerous scholars note Ono’s resistance to codified movements. Ono’s memory of Maciunas’s efforts to organize the Fluxus community under a common identity in her essay, “Summer of 1961,” provides an example of the artist’s viewpoint: “George said that we had to have a name for this movement that was happening. ‘You think of the name,’ he told me. I said, ‘I don’t think this is a movement. I think it’s wrong to make it into a movement.’ To me, ‘movement’ had a dirty sound – like we were going to be some kind of establishment. I didn’t like that. So I didn’t think of any name. The next day, George said, ‘Yoko, look.’ He showed me the word ‘Fluxus’ in a huge dictionary. It had many meanings, but he pointed to ‘flushing.’ ‘Like toilet flushing!’ he said laughing, thinking it was a good name for the movement. ‘This is the name,’ he said. I just shrugged my shoulders in my mind.” See: Yoko Ono, “Summer of 1961,” in Fluxus Scores and Instructions, 40. 29 Yoshimoto, “1962-1964,” in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 79. 30 Reiko Tomii, “Concerning the Institution of Art: Conceptualism in Japan,” in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s (New York: The Queens Museum of Art), 15.

99 in anti-art practices, argues Tomii, were part of postwar Japan’s intellectual restructuring.

Contemporary art moved from state-sponsored museums to independently-owned galleries and performance centers like the Naiqua Gallery, the Hi-Red Center, and the

Sōgetsu Center.31

Ichiyanagi arranged a concert for Ono at the Sōgetsu Center, and Ono gave her first solo recital in Japan there in May of 1962.32 She performed a number of pieces from the Carnegie Hall Recital but also added works, including Lighting Piece, during which she sat in front of the piano, lit a match, and waited for it to extinguish, and Audience

Piece for LaMonte Young, in which performers stood at the front of the stage and stared, silently, at the audience. Yoshimoto writes that Ono centered the concert on the theme of kehai, or vibration, and on the image of the Buddha’s half-closed eyes: “Ono wished the audience to seek out something ineffable, such as vibration, and to both view the world before them (the performances) and look into their inner words, inhabiting a state of being symbolized by the Buddha’s meditative gaze.”33

In 1962, as part of her recital at the Sōgetsu Art Center, Ono exhibited a series of instructions written in Japanese on pieces of white paper that hung in the lobby. The

31 Tomii, “Concerning the Institution of Art, 17, and Yoshimoto, Into Performance, 3. 32 Yoshimoto, “1962-1964,” 79, and “Works by Yoko Ono,” in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 84. Yoshimoto notes that Ono’s performance in Japan was highly-anticipated by the growing avant-garde community, and over thirty Japanese artists joined her to participate in the event. 33 Yoshimoto, “1962-1964,” 79. Yoshimoto writes that Ono’s performances pioneered new directions of contemporary art in Japan and that she was instrumental in connecting Japanese avant-garde artists with the Fluxus circle in New York. Still, her work received much negative press (from writers such as Donald Richie) for her dimly-lit stage, repetitive performances of simple actions (like sweeping the stage with a broom), and barely-audible vocal experiments. She subsequently fell into a depression and worried that she was negatively affecting Ichiyanagi’s career. While recovering from her illness, Ono received a visit from Anthony Cox, an American admirer of her work. She and Cox married in 1963, and Ono gradually rejoined the artistic community. In February of 1964, she premiered a number of new works at the Naiqua Gallery: Touch Piece, in which audience members were simply instructed to “touch each other,” and 9 A.M. to 11 A.M., later renamed Morning Piece for its performances in New York. See: Yoshimoto, Into Performance, 1; Yoshimoto, “1962-1964,” 80.

100 instructions corresponded to her Instruction Paintings, which she had shown at the AG

Gallery during the year prior. Ono asked Ichiyanagi to copy the instructions so that the handwriting was not her own; this way, she could further distance herself from the physical production of the text and allow the viewers to contemplate the concept of the instruction.34 The manifestation of the material (here, painting) into idea (here, conveyed by text instructions) illustrates Ono’s investment in conceptualism over visual production.35

The Music Scores in Grapefruit, published by Ono’s own imprint in 1964, reflect the engagement with concept, attention, and sound prioritized in Ono’s performances throughout the early 1960s in New York and Japan. Compiled throughout the central years of her development and maturation as an artist – from her education at Gakushūin to her Tokyo events – they reflect Ono’s formation of an aesthetic philosophy and her awareness of sound as an integral part of the conscious experience. In the following sections, I offer a discussion of Grapefruit in the context of experimental notation,

Fluxus, and Conceptual art as well as a close analysis of the Grapefruit Scores informed by Ono’s concern with the issues of language, listening, and conceptualism throughout her early repertoire.

34 “Works of Yoko Ono,” in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 84. 35 Altshuler, “Instructions for a World of Stickiness,” 68.

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Music, Reconsidered

In her essay “To the Wesleyan People” from 1966, Ono defines her work as

“practice” rather than music.36 To her definition of practice she assigns the word Gyo, a type of meditative contemplation in the Zen Buddhist tradition.37 She also uses the word in a retrospective statement about Grapefruit from 2009: “Grapefruit was a book of instructions for others … Those pieces which are apparently impossible to perform are very much related to Gyo in Zen Buddhism.”38 Within her practice of Gyo, sound becomes the primary focus of contemplation. Ono contends that, for her, sound is purely conceptual. “The only sound that exists to me is the sound of the mind,” she writes in her

Wesleyan essay, “My words are only to induce music of the mind in people.”39

While Ono worked within the Fluxus circle and created Event Scores, the priorities of the Grapefruit Music Scores align more closely with aspects of

Conceptualism and formal Conceptual art. A particular relevance of the Fluxus Event

Score was its application of anti-art and Dadaist aesthetic to musical performance, but

Ono’s scores prioritize attention to material – in the case of her work, sonic material – rather than concentrating on the subversion of performance settings and mechanisms.

LaMonte Young’s Composition 1960 #7, for example, initially appears as similar to

36 Yoko Ono, “For the Wesleyan People,” published as insert in Judson Gallery Presents The Stone by Anthony Cox, Sound Forms by Michael Mason, Eye Bags by Yoko Ono, Film Message by Jeff Perkins, Air: Jon Hendricks (New York: Judson Gallery, 1966). Reprinted in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 144. This essay was written as a “footnote” to a lecture given by Ono in January of 1966 at Wesleyan University. Jon Hendricks writes that it is “one of her clearest writings about her artwork and philosophy.” See: Jon Hendricks, “1964-1966,” in Yoko Ono: Ono Woman Show, 129. 37 Ibid. 38 Yoko Ono, “Statement,” in Word Events, eds. John Lely and James Saunders (New York: Continuum, 2012), 303. 39 Ono, “For the Wesleyan People,” 144.

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Ono’s Secret Piece (1953), the first of the Music Scores in Grapefruit, yet Secret Piece centers on a unique action.

Example 11 LaMonte Young, Composition 1960 #7 (Reprinted from An Anthology)

Example 12 Yoko Ono, Secret Piece

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When comparing the two scores, we see that Ono’s includes more instructions. As in

Composition 1960 #7, Secret Piece participants play and hold a note, but they do so with the accompaniment of nature sounds at dawn. This collaboration necessarily requires active attention to the surrounding soundscape. Like Ono’s other scores, Secret Piece emphasizes less what one might do with sound, and more with attending to the sound that already exists.

Ono’s scores that instruct for a consideration of sound that cannot actually be realized (physically heard or produced) further engage with sound material as concept.

With 4’33”, Cage complicates the idea of performance, music, and silence by asking his audience to listen while the performer sits motionless at the piano. Ono challenges us to listen beyond the audible soundscape. In her program notes to a recital given in Kyoto the same month that Grapefruit was published, Ono describes her conceptual music as

“insound,” or “really in-within-inner-non-un-insane-crazed … ”40 Thus, in Grapefruit, we find instructions for impossible or near impossible listening, to sounds only meant to be imagined.

Example 13 Yoko Ono, Fish Piece

40 “Grapefruit,” in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 100.

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Example 14 Yoko Ono, Earth Piece

Because we cannot immediately hear the singing of fish, Ono asks us to conceptualize these vocalizations and, advancing the mental exercise still further, to record this imagined sound. The instruction to “tape” implies a documenting process and a practice of remembering that which we only conjure. Earth Piece instructs for a related exercise;

Ono specifically asks us to “listen,” though the listening is directed toward a sound not audible to the naked human ear. Again, this sound resides in the conceptual realm, in a music of the mind.

Lippard writes that Conceptual artists emphasized an open-ended aesthetic in their work and, as part of this aesthetic, they ignored the restrictions of space and time. The delight in impossible actions or unknowable entities, Lippard says, is of a

“quintessentially ‘Conceptual’ manner.”41 Similarly, Ono questions the limitations of a closed form: “Isn’t a construction a beginning of a thing, like a seed? Isn’t it a segment of a larger totality, like an elephant’s tail? Isn’t it something just about to emerge – not quite structured – never quite structured … like an unfinished church with a sky ceiling?”42

One of her instructions for Blue Room Event (first performed as Disappearing Piece in

41 Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” xxi. 42 Ono, “For the Wesleyan People,” 145.

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196643) offers a visual example of the Conceptual open form. On a piece of white paper,

Ono draws a horizontal line, and underneath it writes: “This line is part of a very large circle.”44 Ono instructs for the conceptualization of an expansive form, an open structure that travels beyond the bounds of the material piece. In Tape Piece I, Ono challenges us to consider a comparable situation, but with sound instead of sight.

Example 15 Yoko Ono, Tape Piece 1 (Stone Piece)

If for Blue Event we conceptualize a line that extends indefinitely in space and time, in

Tape Piece 1, we imagine the sound of a process that occurs over thousands of years. We might practically realize this piece by setting a tape recorder next to a stone and documenting the ambient noise in the time it takes for the tape to run out, but that does not seem to be Ono’s intention. In keeping with her practice of Gyo, she instructs us to imagine a sonic experience over indefinite time and space, and to contemplate an impossible act. Ono writes that her conceptual work “makes it possible to explore the invisible, the world beyond the existing concept of time and space.”45

43 Altshuler and Yoshimoto, “Works,” in YES Yoko Ono, 84. 44 Ono, “This is Part of a Very Large Circle,” for Blue Room Event, Reproduced in YES Yoko Ono, 87. 45 Munroe, “Yoko Ono’s Bashō,” 88.

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Ono often presents the duality between mind and body as an unfolding process that takes place with sound, over time, enabled by memory. In those scores that do instruct for sound to be realized, audible sound becomes a concept through the meditative practice of Gyo. A statement from Ono provides insight into her thinking on this process:

“I think it is possible to see a chair as it is … But when you burn the chair, you suddenly realize that the chair in your head does not disappear.”46 What exists as a physical entity

(in Ono’s example, a chair) stays in the memory – a conceptual space – after the material being is destroyed. Similarly, many Grapefruit scores, such as Clock Piece, instruct the reader to listen to a realized sound, then to retain the memory of that sound after the heard sound ceases to exist.47

Example 16 Yoko Ono, Clock Piece

Ono instructs us to listen to the realized sounds of a clock ticking, then to remember those sounds by making repetitions of the ticks in our minds. As we repeat the regular

46 Ono, “For the Wesleyan People,” 145. 47 Clock Piece is catalogued under Event Scores in Grapefruit, but because it deals with sound and listening, I argue that it can be considered a musical score and have included it in my discussion here.

107 intervals of the ticking clock in our memory, the sound transfers from physical, realized space into concept. Ono furthers the parameters of the clock exercise in Collecting Piece.

Example 17 Yoko Ono, Collecting Piece

Here, we are asked to remember more sound over a larger period of time and, unlike

Clock Piece, to manipulate the timing of our recounting. We examine sounds amassed over the course of a week and experiment with their chronology. Sound and memory become scraps that we reorder and collage, all within a conceptual space.

Challenging our memories to an even greater extent, Ono blurs the distinction of realized and conceptual listening by experimenting with the memory of sound throughout different layers of consciousness in Bell Piece.

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Example 18 Yoko Ono, Bell Piece

After listening to a realized sound (a bell) for a specific duration of time, we are to retain the memory of the sound. Ono then instructs us to change the dynamic of the sound – not the actual sound itself, but the sound that now resides in our memory. In the next instruction, we diminish the sound by conceptualizing a softer dynamic (pianissimo), and by moving the sound from our memory to our unconscious (dreams). In the fourth directive, the sound becomes very faint; it has now nearly been forgotten.

Ono’s alignment of dynamics and consciousness gives us a sense not only of diminishing sound, but of moving through space. As the sound of the bell travels from present memory to something forgotten and becomes softer, it seems to be getting further away. Here, we witness the power of Ono’s physical/conceptual paradox; the instructions deal with sound as conceptual matter but retain a sense of spatial orientation. A variation

109 of this construction occurs in Wall Piece I, in which Ono similarly engages in space and sound.48

Example 19 Yoko Ono, Wall Piece I

As in Bell Piece, realized sound becomes conceptual matter, though here the impossibility of the instruction facilitates the transition – we can whisper actual sound, but the sound is not audible through two walls without technological aid. Spatial barriers preclude reception of sound other than our own. The whispering of the other participant, then, exists in the space of the imaginary.

What most enables the process from realized to conceptual, however, is the acute attention to sensory material required in the Grapefruit scores. For Ono, attention involves an isolation of the senses and a struggle for perception. In her Wesleyan essay, she recounts the story of a friend who learned that a celebrated poet was color-blind.

After hearing of the poet’s condition, Ono says, her friend understood why the poet’s work was so strong: because his vision is not blocked by color. Ono muses on this story:

48 Wall Piece I is catalogued under Event Scores in Grapefruit, but because it deals with sound and listening, I argue that it can be considered a musical score and have included it in my discussion here.

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“After unblocking one’s mind, by dispensing with visual, auditory, and kinetic perceptions, what will come out of us?” “See little, hear little, think little,” she concludes.49 Ono believes that art should not attempt to duplicate life, for life is a constant bombardment of mass information and sensory immersion. Art, rather, provides an opportunity for isolation and refinement of the senses. This, says Ono, explains why her Events are so different from Happenings; while Happenings exists as an amalgamation of the arts, an Event enables “an extraction from various sensory perceptions.”50 Ono’s expectation for attention also explains why, for instance, her stage remains dimly-lit throughout her performances; as Ichiyanagi writes in his rebuttal to

Richie, Ono expects her audiences to struggle in the darkness.51

Ono’s transmission of her work corresponds to her emphasis on attention, perception, and refinement. Her contribution to An Anthology of Chance Operations, a book of Event Scores and other music, poetry, and writings by published early Fluxus artists in 196352 provides an analogy to her dimly-lit stage in that it aligns with her philosophy of searching under or through covering (See fig. 1). The piece, which she presents under the heading “Poetry,” limits our intake of material (in this case, language) so that we may focus on the information revealed and make our own conceptual expansions outside of the realized.

49 Ono, “For the Wesleyan People,” 146-147. 50 Ibid, 145. 51 Ichiyanagi, “Voice of the Most Avant-Garde,” 124. 52 The poet Jackson MacLow and composer LaMonte Young, both connected with Cage’s circle, compiled An Anthology of Chance Operations in 1961, but it was not published until 1963.

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Figure 12. Yoko Ono, To George: Poem No. 18 (1961) (Reprinted from An Anthology, 1961)

In Grapefruit, Ono allows for these expansions through the use of minimal, simple language. She writes that Grapefruit is composed in the “spirit” of the haiku form.53 Ono was not alone in her use of this model; David Doris, writing on Fluxus and

Zen aesthetics, notes that Fluxus artists as a whole borrowed heavily from Asian poetry and Zen philosophies of language. Fluxus artists’ scores resemble koans, pedagogical concepts consolidated into short statements that allowed for direct, unmediated communication.54 Ono’s work, Doris writes, is especially indicative of “the more

53 Ono, “Statement,” 303. 54 David T. Doris, “Zen Vaudeville: A Medi(t)ation in the Margins of Fluxus,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (West Sussex, UK: Academy Editions, 1998), 99.

112 hermetic, intuitive aspects of Zen.”55 The idea that transmission relies more on perception than on production comprises a primary characteristic of Ono’s communication, one found in both Zen Buddhism and hermetic philosophy – an idea is received when the audience is prepared to understand it. This process necessarily requires an active consciousness and, often, participation. Ono’s audience does not passively receive her work, but rather, as Ichiyanagi argues, they must “seek it out.”56

This emphasis on reception, attention, and acute perception in the transmission of sound aligns closely with Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations exercises and later Deep

Listening work. Both artists explain their work as a practice that facilitates the training of mental attention and physical perception to consider the transmission of sound at the very fringes of audibility. Yet there is a difference in their ultimate goals. Olivero’s practice always invests in the potential for sound to be part of a communicative process – even if it is transmitted clairvoyantly. In exercises such as Oliveros’s Pacific Tell/Telepathic

Improvisation, participants are instructed to mentally form a sound and attempt to telepathically transmit it to another person, then to physically realize that sound through the voice or with an instrument. For Ono, however, a consideration of sound and sonic transmission usually remains in the conceptual. Three More Snow Pieces serves as an example.

55 Doris, “Zen Vaudeville,” 113. 56 Ichiyanagi, “Voice of the Most Avant-Garde,” 124.

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Example 20 Yoko Ono, Three More Snow Pieces for solo or orchestra

How do we send the sound of snow to another person? Do we mail a recording; do we send notation on a staff? If the sound of snow is only to be imagined in our minds, as we know is the case in many of Ono’s scores, do we send words; are we able to send it at all?

In meditating on this dilemma, we engage with questions of listening, we contemplate the issue of transmission, and we consider the idea of communication.

In his essay, “Absence and Presence in Yoko Ono’s Work,” Klaus Biesenbach relays Ono’s recounting of a formative moment in the development of her artistic philosophy:

She remembered a musical composition exercise that she had been given in kindergarten in Japan, and it became her habit to translate sounds into musical notes. She soon realized, however, that the complicated patterns that she heard could never be captured exactly. Confronted with the beauty of the experience, she felt, ‘You don’t have to transpose. There is another way of doing it.’57

57 Klaus Biesenbach, “Absence and Presence in Yoko Ono’s Work,” in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 33.

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Ono’s scores in Grapefruit offer possible alternatives to transposition by prompting a conceptualization of listening and sound. The precise attention and mental discipline that her instructions require enhance the ability to remember and manipulate sound in our memories. Just as Conceptual art allows us to look at visual material differently by questioning fundamental assumptions about reception and creation of an art object, Ono revolutionizes hearing and sound production.

Furthermore, Ono insists on the role of sound as an aesthetic entity and a key part of the human consciousness. She separates concept from physical sensing/hearing and, in doing so, incites a radicalization of normative listening practices. The Grapefruit scores go beyond mid-century subversions of performative and compositional norms; they actively aim to establish a new sound-practice. Thus, Grapefruit represents a vital exploration of sound that transcends all traditional notions of composition in the history of music.

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CHAPTER 4

Music as Translation: The Sound of Hanne Darboven’s Endless Writing

From her first showing at Joseph Kosuth and Christine Kozlov’s Landis Gallery in 1971, Hanne Darboven’s hand-written tomes of numbers and letters – displayed in books and sprawling across gallery walls – have attracted praise and awarded her a place in the history of the Conceptual art movement. Lucy Lippard, a primary author of this history and an early champion of Darboven’s, writes of the artist’s “mesmeric sincerity and vigor,” and other critics reflect near-rapturously upon Darboven’s prolific, quasi- obsessive volumes of permutational number sequences.1 The artist’s use of writing as a medium and her adherence to serial structures emerges as an exemplar of conceptual practices codified in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Despite her establishment in the history of visual art, Darboven often associated her work with other disciplines. When asked what she did in her professional life,

Darboven would frequently answer, “I write,” “I make music,”2 or, more specifically: “I write mathematical prose. I write mathematical music.”3 She was initially trained as a musician; growing up in Hamburg, Germany, she studied to become a pianist.4 She later changed her path and pursued a formal education in painting and drawing. From that point on, Darboven remained professionally entrenched in the world of visual art, yet her

1 Lucy R. Lippard, “Hanne Darboven: Deep in Numbers,” in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, Lucy R. Lippard (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1976), 195. Originally published in Artforum 12, No. 2 (October 1973). 2 Sibylle Omlin, “My Work Ends in Music: Hanne Darboven’s Notations as Musical Works,” Parkett 67 (2003), 1. 3 Ingrid Burgbacher-Krupka, Hanne Darboven: The Sculpting of Time (Reihe Cantz, 1994), 51. 4 Lippard, “Deep in Numbers,” 192.

116 work continued to draw on the structures learned throughout her early musical training.

She expanded on her incorporation of music after 1980, when she first translated her numerical writing into musical scores explicitly designed for performance. Darboven’s writing has since been sounded by experimental musicians and composers across the

United States and Europe.

Following a pioneering essay on the artist penned by Lippard in 1973,5 a number of scholars and curators have written on Darboven’s life and work. Ingrid Burgbacher-

Krupka, in collaboration with Reiche Cantz, published a book of Darboven’s early drawings and her work Friedrich II (1986), as well as three short pieces on Darboven’s ideologies and an interview with the artist. Hanne Darboven/John Cage: A Dialogue of

Artworks (Joachim Kaak and Corinna Thieroff, eds.) juxtaposes the drawing work of

Darboven and Cage alongside several essays on Conceptual art practices in general. Dan

Adler published an in-depth study of Darboven’s massive writing and found object installation Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983 (Cultural History 1880-1983) (1980-1983), and

Verona Berger, a former editor of the German news periodical Der Spiegel (many covers of which Darboven included in her installations), wrote a biography of Darboven featuring interviews with the artist’s colleagues in New York and Germany. In 2015, the visual artist and doctoral student Andrea Jespersen completed a dissertation titled: “Mind

Circles: On Conceptual Deliberation – Hanne Darboven and the Trace of the Artist’s

Hand.” Jespersen seeks to complicate Lippard’s theory of Conceptual art as a

“dematerialization of the art object” (a phrase first used in Lippard’s anthology of

5 Lippard, “Deep in Numbers.”

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Conceptual art published in 19736) by arguing that material practice was/is an essential component of Conceptual artists’ dissemination of ideas. The first half of the dissertation focuses on the hand-made qualities of her own Conceptual practice, and the latter half discusses Darboven’s work as an example of the presence of material product in

Conceptualism. Simultaneously, Jespersen provides an examination of Darboven’s writing practice as a reflection of the artist’s consciousness. Other sources on Darboven include German- and English-language essays accompanying exhibitions of Darboven’s work.

While the above scholars do not offer an analysis of Darboven’s music, several authors have provided essential writings on the technical construction of Darboven’s composition, namely: Gerd de Vries, a musicologist and former curator of the Paul Mainz

Gallery, Wolfgang Marx, a professor of music at University College Dublin and one of

Darboven’s former collaborators, and Sibylle Omlin, an independent curator and art critic. A transcribed discussion between Omlin and de Vries, as well as an essay by Marx, are included in the facsimile of Darboven’s Opus 60, Hommage à Picasso. Omlin also wrote a piece on Darboven’s composition (“My Work Ends in Music: Hanne Darboven’s

Notations as Musical Works”) for Parkett, a British contemporary art periodical. All three authors’ discussions focus on the temporal aspects of Darboven’s scores.

Throughout the following chapter, I attempt to reconcile Darboven’s musical composition with her writing work and practice. Jespersen contends that when she looks at Darboven’s scores: “I do not need to hear the music; instead, I look and see a pencil

6 See: Lucy R Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” in Six Years: The DeMaterialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Lucy R. Lippard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xii. Originally published by Praeger (New York) in 1973.

118 drawing reflecting an active mind-consciousness.”7 Contrary to Jespersen’s statement, I argue that sound is an essential aspect of Darboven’s writing. It is not incidental that the artist chose to turn her visual writing pieces into sound; rather, her musical scores are a conscious translation and reconceptualization of her work. I explore these scores as representations of Darboven’s concept and creative process.

In particular, my analysis considers the ways in which the psychophysical elements of Darboven’s writing become audible through a translation to sound. The repetitive musical motifs that result from Darboven’s conversion of numbers to notes represent her endlessly-writing hand and the infinite permutations of her conceptual system; thus, by listening to Darboven’s scores, we hear the artist’s physical and intellectual processes. To better explicate the association between writing, sound, and consciousness, I draw from Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1985). I explore Kittler’s discussion of speaking and writing practices based on acoustics and optics, and I place Darboven’s scores against Kittler’s theories of writing and communication. I also consider Darboven’s musical work within the history of serial processes and aesthetics in post-war visual art and music. This consideration allows me to make connections between the repetitive aural effect of Darboven’s writing and the permutational structures at work in her scores. Ultimately, I aim to illustrate the importance of Darboven’s translation of writing to sound on the overall understanding of her concept and work.

7 Andrea Jespersen, “Mind Circles: On Conceptual Deliberation: Hanne Darboven and the Trace of the Artist’s Hand” (PhD diss., Northumbria University, 2015), 166.

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Gridlines

Hanne Darboven was born in Munich in 1941 to Kirsten Darboven and Caesar

Darboven, a chemist who had inherited a successful coffee manufacturing company.8

Hanne grew up primarily in Hamburg, with the exception of a year at Klein Bünstorf in

Lower Saxony, where her family sought refuge during the war. Several days before their escape, a bomb had struck only several yards away from their home.9 Darboven and her siblings had the benefit of relative prosperity compared to their largely-impoverished community, though they still reckoned with the consequences of a war-torn country. In her biography, Verona Berger writes that Darboven suffered significant emotional turmoil as a child; she was extremely withdrawn and, though intelligent, experienced trouble in school due to intense home-sickness and feelings of distress.10

The young Hanne learned to play the piano by ear from her father’s recordings of

Mozart and Beethoven, and she drew constantly.11 After an unsuccessful attempt to attend a boarding school with her sister, she returned home to her parents’ house and attended the Hamburg-Volksdorf Walddörfer School, which emphasized music and the fine arts.12 There, she withdrew into painting and practicing the piano.13 In 1962,

Darboven began formal art studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg.14

She was significantly influenced by a trip in 1964 to the German art exhibit documenta 3,

8 Verona Berger, Hanne Darboven: Boundless (Ostfildern, Ger: Hatje Cantz Verlag: 2015), 20. 9 Ibid., 22. 10 See: Berger 20-34. Lippard also notes in her 1973 article that Darboven had “a complicated childhood”; See: Lippard, “Deep in Numbers,” 192. 11 Berger, 28. 12 Ibid., 38. 13 Ibid. 14 Valerie L. Hillings, “A Portrait of the Artist: Hanne Darboven’s Hommage à Picasso,” in Hanne Darboven: Hommage à Picasso, ed. Valerie L. Hillings (Deutsche Guggenheim, 2006), 41.

120 where she first experienced the work of Almir Mavigner.15 Mavigner was a Brazilian artist living in Germany whose pieces utilized serial processes and grid structures, and

Darboven was able to study with him at the Hochscule in Hamburg after he joined the faculty there in 1965.16

Darboven moved to New York in 1966; Lippard notes that this was the first time the artist was truly on her own.17 At first, she worked entirely on grid-like drawings in her small apartment on 90th and First Avenue and ventured out only to go to galleries and to buy large reams of graph paper.18 Darboven met the Conceptual artist Sol Lewitt at the

Landis Gallery in the fall of 1966, and he became Darboven’s companion and connection to the art world of New York.19 LeWitt introduced her to his artist friends, including Carl

Andre, Eva Hesse, and Lippard herself. Darboven’s stay in New York, which extended from 1966 to 1968, represents a key formative period of her artistic identity. She became associated with the contacts that enabled her to gain a footing in the international art community – her first public shows were in New York, and she established a name for herself as part of the burgeoning Conceptual movement. She also developed the beginnings of a number system that would come into fruition in 1968 and dictate her work from that point forward.20 This work, in turn, impressed and influenced LeWitt and others in Darboven’s growing circles of colleagues.21

15 The documenta festival was founded in 1955 by Arnold Bode, a visual artist and architect who had been banned from working by the Nazis. Bode held the festival in his hometown, Kassel, and initially presented works that had been considered “degenerate” by the Nazis: Picasso, Kandinsky, and other Fauvist, Expressionist, Cubist, and Futurist works. The festival, and the artists who were associated with it, worked with the intention of forging a new artistic and aesthetic spirit for Germany. 16 Hillings, “A Portrait of the Artist,” 42. 17 Lippard, “Deep in Numbers,” 193. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 194. 20 See: Lippard, “Deep in Numbers,” 193 and Hillings, 42. 21 Ibid.

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The artist’s first public exhibition at the Landis Gallery represented the early vestiges of this all-encompassing conceptual structure. Her system consisted of numbers, expressed numerically or in written English or German words, and organized into a “base order” of axial and diagonal symmetry.22

Figure 13 Hanne Darboven, Konstrukionen New York (1966-67) (Hanne Darboven Stiftung, Hamburg. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2018)

Lippard calls these pieces “permutational drawings” because the numbers and lines are part of a self-sustaining model with many possibilities for construction.23 In a letter to her family from 1967, Darboven explains her system: “Everything is based on: Numbers, the small multiplication table. Numbers in permutations, in progressive, symmetrical, and

22 Darboven cited in: Anne Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 167. 23 Lippard, “Deep in Numbers,” 185.

122 mathematical sequences; shifted angles, numbers, and multiplications of numbers and angles, all in mathematical permutations. I find this fascinating, being rather ignorant of mathematics.”24

Darboven’s numerical system resonated with the process-oriented and structural impulse present in what would become known as the Conceptual art movement of the late

1960s and early 1970s. Following the inclusion of language in paintings and collages by the Cubists and Dadaists, the reprioritization of the material word in the poetry of the

Surrealists, and the prose event scores by Fluxus artists such as Yoko Ono and George

Brecht, Conceptual artists relied on language and signs as a medium in place of traditional representational strategies.25 Anne Rorimer writes that, unlike the artists associated with these other movements, Conceptual artists used language in a way that came to “govern, rather than simply take part in, aesthetic form and content.”26

Representative works include Robert Smithson’s A Heap of Language (1966), a pencil drawing of words relating to language and linguistics; Joseph Kosuth’s Proto-

Investigations (1965-67), a series of objects displayed next to a presentation of their dictionary definitions; and Ian Wilson’s visual sound poetry, works in which oral communication is presented “as an object.”27

24 Cited in Rorimer, 167. 25 See Rorimer’s chapter “Medium as Message/Message as Medium” in New Art in the 60s and 70s. 26 Rorimer, 71. 27 See Rorimer’s discussion of these works in “Medium as Message/Message as Medium.”

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Figure 14 Robert Smithson, A Heap of Language (1966)

The Conceptual art community increasingly used serial processes and structures, often in association with mathematics and/or language. Early serial works include Sol LeWitt’s

Objectivity (1962) and Serial Project 1 (ABCD) (1966), for which he created a permutational system. LeWitt conceived of serialism in art as a sequential process; for him, serial works were “multipart pieces with regulated changes … to be read by the viewer in a linear or narrative manner (12345; ABBCCC; 123, 312, 231, 132, 213, 321)

…” 28

28 Cited in: Anne Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001). See Rorimer’s chapter “Systems, Seriality, Sequence” in New Art in the 60s and 70s. Rorimer also cites Darboven’s work as an example of serial processes in visual art.

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Figure 15 Sol LeWitt, Serial Project 1 (ABCD) (1966)

By LeWitt’s estimation, the conceptual system becomes a self-perpetuating drive behind the work; it removes the need for representation and for reconceptualization of each individual piece. In his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967), a defining document of the Conceptual art movement, LeWitt establishes a methodology for serial processes:

To work with a plan that is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity. It also obviates the necessity for designing each work in turn. The plan would design the work. Some plans would require millions of variations, and some a limited number, but both are finite. Other plans would imply infinity. In each class, however, the artist would select the base form and rules that would govern the solution of the problem.29

Lippard contends that LeWitt’s statement was almost certainly influenced by Darboven’s work and ideology.30 Her number system became self-perpetuating, just as LeWitt’s serial models were; the endless sequences of numbers eliminated a responsibility to develop an idea for every new work. Rather, each subsequent piece was connected to the

29 Rorimer, 155. 30 Lippard, “Deep in Numbers,” 194.

125 last, and, thus, every piece was part of a large, over-arching structure. In a document disseminated as part of her showing at the Landis Gallery the same year as LeWitt’s

“Paragraphs,” Darboven writes: “A system becomes necessary. How else could I in a concentrated way find something of interest which lends itself to continuation? My systems are numerical concepts which work in terms of progressions and/or reductions, a kind of musical theme with variations.”31

Around 1968, Darboven began to use the dates of the German calendar as a basis for her number structures. This allowed her an extensive catalog of numerical possibilities rooted in an established model that was inherently connected to history and time. In this system, Darboven adds the digits of a particular date, with the exception of the first two digits of the calendar year. The last two digits of the calendar year are added separately; all other digits are considered together as one number. Thus, for the calendar date 11.3.1971 (European-system notation for March 11, 1971), the formula would read as 11 + 3 + 7 + 1. The sum of the equation, 22, becomes what Darboven calls the

Konstruction, or “K,” of the system.

Darboven repeats a similar process for every calendar date of an entire century to create forty-two Konstructions (forty-two sums of digits). She notates this prolific supply of numbers resulting from her Konstructions in numerals or in word form, just as she did in her early grid drawings from 1966-67. Additionally, she often includes the word heute

(today), which she then sometimes crosses out to signify the passing of time throughout the course of her writing. Examples of these notations are represented in her “diaries,” large volumes of writing in wave-like forms where traditional text would normally be,

31 Burgbacher-Krupka, 38.

126 accompanied by the date and signature “heute.” Darboven also includes the formula and sum for the Konstructions of the two dates in the following example.

Figure 16 Reprinted excerpt from Hanne Darboven, Diary NYC: February 15 until March 4, 1974 (New York: Castelli Graphics, 1974)

In her 1972 article on Darboven, Lippard argues that while the artist’s system can readily be discerned by the viewer, it remains the “least interesting” aspect of the composition.32

Indeed, despite Darboven’s statement that she “writes mathematical prose,” she also says that her writing is unrelated to “real mathematics”:

I only use numbers because it is a way of writing without describing (Schreiben, nich beschreiben) . . . I choose numbers because they are so steady, limited, artificial. The only thing that has ever been created is the number. A number of something (two chairs, or whatever) is something else. It’s not pure number and

32 Lippard, “Deep in Numbers,” 195.

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has only meanings. If I were making it up I couldn’t possibly write all that. It has to be simple to be real writing.33

Her number-language is, Darboven clarifies, a written practice devoid of semiotic representation and, instead, the embodiment of pure act; “I write, but I describe nothing,” the artist says.34 When Darboven was first working with her calendar system in the late

1960s, she described her creative process as the following: “Not knowing any more of days, time; just take every day’s mathematical index, a great invention, fiction. No inquiry, no exploration, just to search into something between everything for a time while time is going on . . . something to do, contemplation, action.”35

Kittler’s description of the latter nineteenth-century phenomena of free composition and psychophysical writing experiments provides a valuable framework against which to consider the reception of Darboven’s writing work in terms of sensory experience and expressive meaning. Kittler argues that in this era, writing took on a meaning of its own; specifically, through its material and physical qualities.36 In new educational curricula, the “free essay,” a writing practice designed for students to openly compose their conscious thoughts on paper, was introduced, and education eschewed efforts of true learning and instead emphasized “how productive the child is with its language.”37 In the late nineteenth-century laboratory, psychophysical experiments explored the rote memorization of otherwise meaningless syllables and letters. Hermann

Ebbinghaus, the German psychologist, memorized large catalogs of syllable

33 Lippard, “Deep in Numbers,” 187, 190. 34 Burgbacher-Krupka, 9. 35 Lippard, “Deep in Numbers,” 193. 36 Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks: 1800/1900, Michael Metteer, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). Originally published in German by Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1985. See in particular: 177-346. 37 Ibid., 185.

128 combinations and randomly generated numbers; a little over a decade later in the laboratory of experimental psychologist and Harvard professor Hugo Münsterberg, two assistants (one of them Gertrude Stein) experimented with the reading aloud and dictation of syllables.38 The result of these educational reforms and experiments was a collection of written language separate from contextual meaning, or, as Kittler writes: “a treasury of the signifier whose rules were entirely based on randomness and combinatorics.”39

In these language production practices, the sensory pleasure of writing overcame the need for meaning and hermeneutics.40 Those whose thoughts troubled them – such as patients of psychoanalysis – wrote endlessly to appease their minds and to experience, on one hand, a sense of productivity; on the other, a kind of physical release. Kittler recalls the case of Nietzsche, who, while at the sanatorium at Jena, was content so long as he had writing pencils, and psychoanalysis patients who contended that writing was a more

“productive” alternative to other forms of therapy.41 Such writing practices became both pleasure and responsibility. The unedited transcription of one’s consciousness and/or the dictation of randomly-generated syllable or number combinations resulted in language production that was both “motoric” and connected to the sensory.42

In that it functions according to a set structural concept, Darboven’s writing practice was not free, nor was it necessarily the product of random combinatorics; however, the sensory and psychophysical qualities that Kittler describes of these other writing practices relates to both the reception of Darboven’s work and the artist’s own

38 Kittler, 225-226. 39 Ibid., 210. 40 Ibid., 304-309. 41 Ibid., 182; 312-313. 42 Ibid., 326. Kittler quotes the experimental pedagogue Wilhelm August Lay here.

129 accounts of her process. Lippard says that Darboven never read except through the sensation of her writing practice; “by experiencing the words or numbers physically.”43

In between her number projects, Darboven often copied literature or dictionary entries, or by transcribing recorded interviews.44 The rejuvenating process of writing allowed

Darboven to experience “[the] handwritten transfer of content-laden form into lived form.”45 Lippard’s description of her reaction to Darboven’s number-writing provides further testimony of the sensory qualities of the artist’s work:

When John Chandler and I saw the graph paper drawings in the winter of 1966/67, we felt that ‘the illegible but fundamentally orderly tangle of lines connecting point-to-point is felt by the mathematical layman more than it is understood rationally or visually.’ We also compared her drawings to Braille: ‘They pass directly from the intellectual to the sensuous.’ We grouped her with Sol LeWitt, which was obvious, and with Carl Andre and [Eva] Hesse, as artists who ‘saturate their outwardly sane and didactic premises with a poetic and condensatory intensity that almost amounts to insanity.’46

The curving lines in many of these pieces – such as those in Darboven’s diary from 1974

(See Fig. 4) – Lippard calls “brainwaves.”47 Darboven describes her experience of writing similarly to Kittler’s writers: “Still each time I have to write, it becomes so calm and so normal. There is no story there, nothing to figure out, not a secret, but still exciting. I feel myself not thinking what other people think, but what I think. I write for myself, there is no other way. Going on is the enormous thing I do.”48 Her writing becomes a manifestation of this consciousness.

43 Lippard, “Deep in Numbers,” 187. “I write, but I do not read,” Darboven once stated. 44 Ibid., 192. 45 Burgbacher-Krupka, 40. Burgbacher-Krupka cites Darboven in one of the artist’s letters to Lucy Lippard. 46 Lippard, “Deep in Numbers,” 194. 47 Ibid., 186. 48 Ibid., 191.

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Number Music

The transfer of Darboven’s written “brainwaves” and numerical systems to music doubles the psychological and embodied resonances of her writing practice. Every motivic musical structure is based on her Konstructions, or number models, derived from the Gregorian calendar. In Darboven’s musical system, each note corresponds to a particular digit.49 She uses special staff paper – essentially the treble staff with digits written beside each line and space – for clarity in the transfer from system to system.50

Gerd De Vries and Omlin explain that Darboven translates her numbers to notes by equating notes with Konstructions (the sum of the calendar dates according to

Darboven’s system). Notes are placed on the staff as following: (Konstuction)0 = D, (K)1

= E, (K)2 = F, (K)3 = G, etc.51 Digits with two numbers are expressed as an interval according to the following model: (Konstruction)11 = E-E, (K)12 = E-F, (K)13 = E-G, etc.52

49 Burgbacher-Krupka, 41; FN 9. Burgbacher-Krupka cites Franz Meyer, Ein Monat, ein Jahr, ein Jahrhundert. Arbeiten von 1968 bis 1974 (Basel: Kunstmuseum, 1974). 50 Gerd de Vries with Sibylle Omlin, “Hanne Darboven: My Work Ends in Music,” in Hanne Darboven: Hommage à Picasso, 58. 51 Ibid., 57. 52 Ibid.

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Example 21 Excerpt from Hanne Darboven, Op. 17a, Wunschkonzert (1984) (Hanne Darboven Stiftung, Hamburg. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2018)

The faint vertical gridlines on Darboven’s staves are similar to those used in Darboven’s early drawings from New York (See fig. 1) and indicate a consistent structure upon which Darboven conceives of both visual work and scores.

Around the time that Darboven began composing musical compositions, she enlisted the help of Friedrich Stoppa, a church musician, to orchestrate her work for

132 larger ensembles.53 De Vries writes that Darboven’s first one to eighteen opuses were transcribed carefully and exactly, though, after Op. 18, Stoppa began to experiment with adding “free voices” (additional melodic lines on top of the melodies dictated by

Darboven’s Konstructions) to every piece, until the artist’s compositions were “scarcely recognizable.”54 After Stoppa’s death, Darboven began collaboration with the composer

Friedrich Marx.55 While Marx stays more true to Darboven’s structures, he still significantly changes the original piece by adding rhythmic organizations and additional forms, and sometimes he borrows forms and techniques from other composers to orchestrate the scores.56 Performances of Darboven’s early work, then, represent truer examples of her compositional voice; though the autograph scores for all of her opuses retain her original structures before their manipulation by her collaborators.

The motivic structures and repetitive gestures found in Darboven’s music make audible the motoric and sensory experience of the artist’s writing practice. Throughout her pieces, continuous lines alternate between rising arpeggios and periods of low notes, some of which form small intervals that move downward. The rhythms consist of steadily moving note values of equal length. As Marx and de Vries note about Darboven’s music in general, the rhythm is theoretically irrelevant in that the work is structured by the melodic contour, which corresponds to the number system. Yet the rhythmic values retain importance to the performance of the pieces in they convey a steady progression of time

53 De Vries/Omlin, 58. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 See Marx’s description of his process of adding rhythms, etc. to Darboven’s scores in: Wolfgang Marx, “Hanne Darboven’s Time Music,” in Hanne Darboven: Hommage à Picasso, 70-72.

133 and a regular, repetitive system. The simplicity of time-based structures allows for focus on the melodic contour.

Just as Lippard writes that the specifics of the system are not the most interesting aspect of Darboven’s visual work, the details of the transfer from numbers to notes do not altogether dictate the effect of the translation from writing to sound. The listener who is not aware of the placement of the Konstructions on the musical staff may still readily hear the repetitive rhythms, the contours of rising and falling arpeggio figures and intervallic motifs, and the steadily-moving line. What matters most about this music, I argue, is the translation of Darboven’s writing process to musical gestures, and the implications that this translation has on the representation of Darboven’s concept. These musical gestures sound the motoric physicality and constant rhythms of Darboven’s writing life.

Minimalist Gesture/Serial Procedures

The result of Darboven’s translation of number system to notes is a repetitive structure of intervals that functions by no form except for the model derived by the calculation and permutation of calendar dates. In that the musical line corresponds to the progression of days, de Vries and Marx argue that Darboven’s music is essentially about time – an opinion shared by many art scholars writing on the artist’s visual work. Marx says that because of the nature of Darboven’s formal system, her music does not merely structure a perception of time, but presents time literally; in many of her works, “the piece ends when all the days of the century are used.”57

57 Marx, 70.

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Because Darboven’s number system results in the manifestation of extended time structures within her music, Marx associates Darboven’s scores with minimalist music.58

This seems an apt connection, as the sense of perpetual time inherent in Darboven’s music sounds akin to the gradual movement and repetition found in the work of composers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, etc. Similar to these composers’ repertoires, Darboven’s music contains apparent and audible structures, repetitive motifs, and a sense of process. The physical performance of Darboven’s scores and those of the minimalists require a repetitive gestural motion to articulate steady, repeated rhythms.

Much of this music necessitates mental stamina as well; performers must be aware of the subtle changes in harmony and phrasing procedures. John Harle writes that performing minimalist music is a “constant physical challenge” reliant on “raw, unquestioning energy.”59 Performers of Darboven’s music describe the experience similarly. When discussing his performance of Darboven’s Op. 17a and 17b (which totals around 100 minutes of music), Oliver Coates says that playing Darboven’s scores, while grueling, feels like “serendipity . . . a perpetual sense of becoming. . . the physical labor pours into constant patterning.”60

Yet there are a number of significant differences between Darboven’s scores and minimalist works. Darboven’s music, while seeming to possess the sense of timelessness that experimental music critic Kyle Gann describes as a quintessential tenet of minimalist

58 Marx, 70. 59 John Harle, “Performing Minimalist Music in The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, ed. Keith Potter et. al (New York: Routledge, 2013), 382. 60 Anton Spice, “Interview with Oliver Coates,” Vinyl Factory, October 30, 2015. https://thevinylfactory.com/features/100-minutes-of-minimalism-hanne-darboven-oliver-coates- whitechapel-mathematical-music/.

135 music,61 actually represents a very exacting sense of time. It is not suspended, but rather, utterly aware of the passing of time as represented by the steady progression of days to which the scores correspond. Additionally, Darboven’s melodic structure differs from the gradual processes of composers like Glass or Reich. In Glass’s work, for instance, simple harmonic motifs repeat and slowly, gradually transition over time. The changes in

Darboven’s melody occur much more rapidly – the intervals shift from note to note, with a repeated note occurring only when there is an identical double-digit in the number

Konstruction. There is actually little to no repetition of motifs in Darboven’s scores, because every motif is a different day. The audible result is something that sounds more like an etude, with its methodical and repetitive gestures and quickly-changing motifs.

While the ostinato-like effect of the driving rhythmic motor in Darboven’s music has prompted a reception history that associates it with the minimalist music genre, the permutational and serial structures found in the artist’s compositions operate according to a pre-conceived numerical system strongly reminiscent of serial music. The procedure behind Darboven’s composition – driven by her Konstruction system – aligns closely with the serial aesthetic adopted by LeWitt and other Conceptual artists. M.J. Grant argues there has long been an overlap between serialism in music and the visual arts, particularly during the postwar and early postmodern eras.62 Grant cites Conceptual artist

Mel Bocher’s correlation of musical serialism with serial processes in Conceptual art as well as artist and critic John Coplans’ discussion of serialism in art and music from 1968.

61 Kyle Gann, “Introduction: Experimental, Minimalist, Postminimalist? Origins, Definitions, and Communities,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, ed. Keith Potter et. al (New York: Routledge, 2013), 7. 62 See: M.J. Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe (New York: Cambridge University Pres, 2005).

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Notably, Coplans differentiates the use of serial structures between visual art and music; he writes that in visual pieces the serial process is readily accessible, while in music, it is obscured. For Coplans, this difference allows for serial music to “correlate more directly with minimal music,” thus creating a perceived divide between serialist art and serialist musical compositon.63

Growing up and educated as an artist in Germany, Darboven was closely associated with artists influenced by serial aesthetics in Germany and the international art community. Darboven’s teacher Almir Mavignier, whose work she first admired while attending the 1964 documenta festival, was a member of Zero, a group formed in 1957 by artists Heinz Mack and Otto Piene as an effort to create a new beginning for German art after World War II. 64 Mavignier became associated with Zero after attending the Ulm

School of Design in Ulm, Germany, where he studied with Max Bill, an artist and designer, and Max Bense, a philosopher and literary critic. Both Bill and Bense were interested in the relationship between structures in aesthetics and mathematics.65 In 1961,

Mavignier formed New Tendencies, a collective of artists interested in mass production, serial processes, and communications as well as Bense’s theories on art and mathematics.66

M.J. Grant writes that the interest in structures and mathematics in visual art was influential on serial composers in the postwar and early postmodern periods. After World

63 Grant, Serial Music, 172. See also: Coplans, “Serial Imagery, Definition,” Artforum (1968), 35. 64 Zero eschewed the prevalent trend of Abstract Expressionism and instead adopted a more minimal aesthetic. The group was based in Germany but held exhibitions in France and Italy and attracted artists from all over Europe and Latin America, including Mavignier. See: Vallerie Hillings et al., Zero: Countdown to Tomorrow (Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2014). 65 Armin Mendosch, New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961-1978) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 33-36; 82-83. 66 Ibid., 4.

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War II, he writes, the constructivist principles of abstraction theorized by visual artists like Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian were appealing to a wide community of artists, musicians, and intellectuals: “Arts associated with constructivism . . . found a new beginning not in the prehistory of expression, but in understanding the make-up and perception of structure, an understanding which allowed them to construct a new order.”67 This created not only a different paradigm for musical composition, but also a new model for expression in sound – one for which signs and structures served as significant communication. Just as Bense equated abstraction with mathematics, the mathematical processes of serialism enabled an abstraction of musical sign-making.68

The theories and the aesthetic trends prevalent in the work of Darboven’s teacher and his postwar artist and intellectual associates provides an important key to understanding Darboven’s number-language both in light of the artist’s written visual artwork and within the context of her sound compositions. The history of Darboven’s education illuminates the potential impetus for the structures of her writing work, and it helps to situate her compositional system in a broader cultural scope. Ultimately, however, the possibility for signification in Darboven’s serial structures becomes subsumed by the resultant effect of the system’s execution – meaning is transferred to the sound of Darboven’s music and the living act of its performance. Her music captures the duality of systematic infrastructure and highly-embodied aesthetic; the subtle nuance of its ever-shifting intervallic motifs reflects the expansive breadth of combinatorial possibilities enabled by Darboven’s calendar system, while the repetitive gestures of the steadily-moving rhythms mimic her repeated distillation process of writing again and

67 Grant, 35. 68 Grant includes a discussion of Bense. See: Grant, 145-147.

138 again to constantly release and discover her own consciousness. The system of numbers and dates is liquefied into sound waves and physical gestures, and Darboven’s continuously-writing hand is replaced with the hand that holds the bow to sound hundreds of notes.

Noise and Voice

According to Kittler, an inarticulate, psychotic sound accompanied the sensorial writing practices of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He recalls Nietzsche, who heard a roaring scream behind him while he sat at his desk and engaged in a flow of writing.69 This inarticulate sound continued from Nietzsche to the Dadaist coffeehouse performances of the nineteen-teens and twenties during which the overlapping of randomly-voiced syllables resulted in a cacophony.70 In these cases, Kittler says, language is divorced from signification and dissolves into noisy material – writers are

“released from all ‘effort’ to ‘distinguish single words in the confusion of voices’; just as in the coffeehouse words drown in the noise of the self-produced confusion of the four artists’ voices.”71

Here, Kittler’s mention of distinguished words in relation to sound refers to his comparison of “discourse networks” between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the key differentiation being the importance placed on meaning and the role of optics and acoustics. In the former network, emphasis moved from learning to read via the rote copying of sacred

69 Kittler, 184. 70 Ibid., 302. 71 Ibid. Kittler cites Daniel Paul Schreber here.

139 texts to learning via phonetics, or the isolation of syllabic sounds and aural-based reading comprehension. Conversely, in the latter network, individual sounds once carefully produced were replaced with the blur of noise. The meticulously-constructed syllabic sounds of the late eighteenth century were obliterated by free and psychophysical writing’s inarticulate sounds, and authorship dissolved into meaninglessness. Kittler writes that Daniel Paul Schreber, who wrote memoirs during his stays at psychiatric hospitals, “takes dictation from his demons,” and Gertrude Stein, taking dictation from her colleague at Münsterberg’s lab, becomes an automaton.72

Darboven’s writing, though literally “saying nothing,” is nevertheless not entirely abstract or without meaningful reference: “I investigate my formulas which I build myself, almost to the point of saturation with knowledge – and then I do them,” the artist states.73 De Vries argues that Darboven’s work is informed by an extensive sense of history and culture and cites her inclusion of material remnants – postcards, found objects, photographs – alongside or within her writing work as evidence of her oeuvre’s base in historical meaning. As part of Opuses 17-18 (Wunschkonzert), for example,

Darboven includes greeting cards, each one presenting a different Christian confirmation.

Jespersen, within her dissertation, presents a list of nearly fifty writers, philosophers, scientists, and artists (Gertrude Stein among them) who Darboven references in her work.

Indeed, the impetus for Darboven’s system – the Gregorian calendar – situates the artist’s system in historical space and time; “All these dates that I work with, every date, for that matter, is naturally filled with history,” she says.74 In an interview with Burgbacher-

72 Kittler, 302. 73 Cited in Rorimer, 168. Gerd De Vries also makes this point. See De Vries/Omlin, 59. 74 Cited in de Vries/Omlin, 59.

140

Krupka, Darboven asserts that she is informed by history and philosophy but simply no longer has a need to concern herself with the theories of others; now, she says: “I am writing my own work.”75

Citing one of Darboven’s letters to her – “It’s exhausting. It’s good. It’s idea. It’s idea. It’s good. It’s exhausting.” – Lippard calls Darboven’s language “Gertrude-

Steinian.”76 Indeed, Darboven adopts the mechanisms of psychophysical writing that

Stein also uses, yet, like Stein, she organizes these mechanisms into a product of authorship, and they transcend the incoherence of combinatorics while also embracing its material. Darboven’s writing may seem automatic, but it stems from a self-determined system fluent in the language of philosophy and aesthetics. It is the execution of the system that becomes automatic; the concept retains intellectual agency. Her motoric writing, then, is not taking dictions from demons, but rather, exists as an independent practice that fulfills a consciously-conceived model. Kittler writes that the practitioners of free writing lack agency in part because they do not re-read the writing that flows out of them.77 In going back to her writing and reconsidering it as musical scores and sound,

Darboven enacts a re-reading process that separates her work from incoherent combinatorics. Moreover, the sound of Darboven’s writing manifested in the performance of her musical scores differs significantly from Nietzsche’s “psychotic noise” because her composition exactly organizes and articulates the gestures of her writing – each number becomes a note, and exists as its own entity. Darboven thus reconciles the liquidation of language into sound with the motoric and visual gestures of

75 Burgbacher-Krupka, 69. 76 Lippard, 192. 77 Kittler, 227.

141 repetitive writing practice. In this way, the intellectual resonances of her sonic translation of writing become an essential part of the work in part because it doubly emphasizes the agency of her conceptual process. Darboven’s “rereading” of her writing into musical scores only furthers her creative process and enhances the sonorous qualities present in her writing from the beginning – from the musical “theme and variations” of her number system to the palindromic form of her Steinian letters.

In his discussion of Darboven’s scores, Marx writes: “This is not a primarily emotional or dramatic music; obviously it is dominated by purely structural means.”78

Yet, by understanding the connection to histories of writing, sound, and psychology within Darboven’s art and music, we can perceive drama and emotion in the artist’s embodiment of physical and cognitive processes. The music lays bare the personal, intimate reality of Darboven’s daily writing practice and exhibits, as Lippard describes of her writing, a captivating and sincere look into the artist’s psyche. While the system itself may say nothing, the writing and its translation to sound conveys a meaningful sensory and intellectual act.

“Think of it as a new way”: Analysis as Practice79

Darboven’s musical scores allow us to contemplate the meaning and conceptual implications of her practice – a devotion to writing – through sound. The Grapefruit scores similarly represent a conceptualizing project, though in Ono’s case, the project is more pedagogical; the artist directly aligns her work with meditative practice. Oliveros’s

78 Marx, 73. 79 With gratitude to Susan McClary for our discussions about the questions we ask of musical scores and practices. “Think of it as a new way” taken from McClary, “This is Not a Story My People Tell: Musical Time and Space According to Laurie Anderson,” in Feminine Endings.

142 practice also focuses on meditation, however, her scores instruct for the transmission of sound as a communicative device for healing and interconnection. Monk’s work, while not reliant on prose or scores, similarly facilitates connection with sound through a practice of sonorous expression.

Just as Ono’s scores mean to prompt Gyo – in the artist’s terms, a meditative process tied to conceptualizing sound production and listening acts – analysis of Ono’s,

Monk’s, Oliveros’s, and Darboven’s repertoires (and experimental repertoires in general) may also participate in this reflective practice. Questions necessary to address the infrastructures of sound in these scores prompt disciplinary and paradigmatic reflection:

Why examine prose instructions or fragments that produce sound only in a conceptual state as the subject of close theoretical analysis? How do we analyze meditation as a compositional structure? What are the parameters for analysis of scores that produce no actual sound, music that sounds an endless catalogs of dates, sonic transmutations enacted through mental transmissions, or wordless dialogues facilitated by vocal gestures?

Our attempt to answer these questions is worthwhile not only because it further legitimates the repertoires of these artists, but because it works toward a perpetual reconsideration of the frontiers of our discipline and our models for understanding sound and musical practices/forms. Moreover, considering the relationship between sound, language, and consciousness in these repertoires – which I have attempted to do in this project – connects this work to the ideas in which its creators and their associated communities were invested: esoteric knowledge (Monk, Oliveros, Ono), holistic communication (Monk, Oliveros), sound and language as concept (Ono, Darboven),

143 sound as expressive device (Monk, Oliveros), alternative notions of language (Monk,

Oliveros, Ono, Darboven), and sound as an essential aspect of human consciousness

(Monk, Oliveros, Ono, Darboven). From these artists’ work, we can consider and complicate the relationship between sound and semiosis.

An introspective practice of analysis might thus contribute to the radicalizing of intelligence models and paradigms of communication, expression, and aesthetics. Monk,

Oliveros, Ono, and Darboven challenge boundaries of musical composition, communication, language, notation, and listening practice, and they revolutionize what it means to compose music, to transmit aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional information, and to express oneself in sound. When we take seriously the work of their sound-practice, the real radical work begins. Old paradigms of expression and creativity are revaluated through our analysis and participation – we shed tired frameworks and ready ourselves for a new practice of listening.

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