DOCSLIB.ORG

Charlotte Moorman's New York Avant Garde Festival, Experimentalism, and U.S

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Charlotte Moorman's New York Avant Garde Festival, Experimentalism, and U.S "If You're in the Avant Garde, You're in the Wrong War": Charlotte Moorman's New York Avant Garde Festival, Experimentalism, and U.S. Politics of the 1960s The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Schmid, Caitlin Rose. 2019. "If You're in the Avant Garde, You're in the Wrong War": Charlotte Moorman's New York Avant Garde Festival, Experimentalism, and U.S. Politics of the 1960s. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42029835 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA “If You’re in the Avant Garde, You’re in the Wrong War”: Charlotte Moorman’s New York Avant Garde Festival, Experimentalism, and U.S. Politics of the 1960s A dissertation presented by Caitlin Rose Schmid to The Department of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Music Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April, 2019 ! 2019, Caitlin Rose Schmid All rights reserved Professor Carol J. Oja, Advisor Caitlin Rose Schmid “If You’re in the Avant Garde, You’re in the Wrong War”: Charlotte Moorman’s New York Avant Garde Festival, Experimentalism, and U.S. Politics of the 1960s Abstract “‘If You’re in the Avant Garde, You’re in the Wrong War’: Charlotte Moorman’s New York Avant Garde Festival, Experimentalism, and U.S. Politics of the 1960s” is the first book- length study to spotlight Charlotte Moorman’s New York Avant Garde Festivals (1963-80) and their sensational events, understated Happenings, chamber music, action music, and mixed media of every kind. Drawing on newly available materials from the Charlotte Moorman Archive at Northwestern University, interviews with art world members and scholars, and embodied knowledge procured from my recreation of an avant-garde festival, I emphasize sound and its producers within an intermedial framework in order to reinstate Moorman’s annual event as one critical epicenter of a multifaceted “1960s avant-garde”—an unstable roster of people, ideas, things, pieces, allegiances, and values. The sum of fifteen years of Festival production and practice becomes a lens through which to view the larger art world’s internal negotiations over its responsibility to social justice and political activism during a period of countercultural upheaval in the United States. This work further contributes to the study of musical avant-gardes by constructing a model for experimental writing that seeks to mirror the ethos of the subject matter within the context of a humanities dissertation. Grounded in a distinctive methodology that incorporates elements of Actor-Network Theory, intersectional feminist musicology, and art world theory, each chapter takes the form of an “Assemblage” made up of discrete non-linear units of text. Individual units follow human and non-human actors, and track networks of activity and iii influence linking 1960s American experimental festivals to contemporary notions of race, gender, education, activism, and citizenship. When juxtaposed, the collective Assemblages allow for narratives that intertwine, contradict, and celebrate the New York Avant Garde Festival’s radical resistance to the scholarly gaze. The implications of my methodology are as significant as my topical findings: this project is also about the possibilities inherent in scholarship as a creative and experimental act. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments vi List of Figures vii Introduction 1 Assemblage: Festival 24 Balloon Ascension: Festival 26 Component 1: Festival / fes•ti•val / !fest"v"l / 29 Component 2: YAM Festival, Tudorfest, Here2 Festival 45 Component 3: Another Kind of Festival: FluxFest Kit 2 59 Component 4: A Quiet Revolution, or A Festival of Learning 66 Component 5: In the Spirit of the Avant-Garde 78 Assemblage: Island 83 Balloon Ascension: Island 85 Component 1: Through an Archival Lens 88 Component 2: “Things Did Not Go Swimmingly”: Race, Ethnicity, and the 100 Seventh Festival Component 3: Ward’s Island 112 Component 4: The Avant-Garde and Social Justice 121 Component 5: The Day the Music Died, or The New York Pop Festival (1970) 131 Component 6: No Nudity or Heavy Politics 146 Component 7: The Museumification of the Avant-Garde 154 Assemblage: Cello 160 Balloon Ascension: Cello 162 Component 1: The Many Cellos of Charlotte Moorman 164 Component 2: On Trial: Gendered Understandings of Moorman and Her Music 176 Component 3: The Avant-Garde as Music? 186 Component 4: Notations (1969) 203 Component 5: The Death of the Avant-Garde: The 15th Annual Avant Garde 215 Festival of New York Component 6: The Rebirth of Charlotte Moorman 224 Conclusion 232 Bibliography 248 v Acknowledgements Howard Becker’s sociological theory of art worlds centers the group of people who contribute time, labor, resources, and energy to producing the kind of art an art world is known for. This dissertation, at its core, is about an art world; I would like to begin by thanking my own. My advisor, Carol Oja, and my committee, Brigid Cohen, Sindhu Revuluri, and Anne Shreffler have shown me only trust and encouragement as I pursued this topic that, my students assure me, is not music. I am more grateful than I can say for your collective mentorship: you have taught me to be a discerning and generous scholar. My thanks as well to the faculty of the Harvard Music Department who led seminars, provided feedback, and supported me at every turn. Kate van Orden, Carolyn Abbate, Kay Shelemay, Ingrid Monson, Emily Dolan: every day brings a new realization of my scholarly debts. David Crook, my thesis advisor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Nikki Melville, my advisor at Carleton College, are the reasons I’m a musicologist today. The Harvard Music Department community has consistently impressed me with its kindness and engagement. The members of the American Music and Music and Politics dissertation groups have made my work better not only through their thoughtful critiques of my writing, but because they allowed me to read and learn from their own; thank you to Katie Callam, Lucy Caplan, Alex Cowan, Monica Hershberger, Felipe Ledesma-Núñez, Emily MacGregor, David Miller, Isi Miranda, Sam Parler, Annie Searcy, Henry Stoll, Michael Uy, and Micah Wittmer. Thank you to the many, many graduate students, faculty, and staff who, in the name of Fluxus, have chopped vegetables, thrown croutons, eaten salad off tables, painted oranges white, sewed oranges to umbrellas, eaten oranges whole, smashed crackers, smashed piñatas, smashed violins, painted faces silver, attached rubber gloves to trumpets, blended vi newspaper articles, stripped down to underwear, waited for babies, blown bubbles, and held ice cubes. One thousand thank yous to FluxFest 2016 performers Katie Callam, Grace Edgar, Walker Evans, John Gabriel, Monica Hershberger, Kelly Hiser, Krystal Klingenberg, Olivia Lucas, Sam Parler, Matt Leslie Santana, Tom Scahill, and Dan Tramte. The conclusion of my dissertation is a thinly-veiled ode to your friendship. I am also grateful for the Department’s amazing staff: Lesley Bannatyne, Chris Danforth, Kaye Denny, Karen Rynne, and Charles Stillman. Eva Kim and Nancy Shafman: you run the best scholarly salon in Boston. This dissertation was made possible by the generosity of librarians and archivists. My particular thanks to Scott Krafft and Sigrid Perry at the Charles Deering McCormick Special Collections Library at Northwestern University, and to Kerry Masteller and Liza Vick at Loeb Music Library at Harvard University. I am also grateful for the financial support of the Harvard University Music Department, the Charles Warren Center for American Studies, and the John Cage Research Grant from Northwestern University; this work is immeasurably better for the time I was given to spend discovering, contemplating, and processing the far reaches of the experimentalists’ archives. Finally, all my gratitude and love to the most supportive family a graduate student could ask for. To my parents, Tom and Sharon, and my brother Jake—my first line for advice, affirmation, and the feeling of home. To Maureen Burns, Bethany Kasper, Haven Leeming: you’re my family, too. To the women of my extended cohort who inspire me daily: I could not have done this without Monica Hershberger, Krystal Klingenberg, Steffi Probst, Emily MacGregor, and Lucy Caplan. To Rose and Tom, Alicia and Cox, John and Mal, and Elly, who are always willing to share their holidays with my writing sessions. And, of course, to Tom: this dissertation is for you. vii List of Figures Figure 1: [Jorge Castaneda Leon], “Charlotte Moorman performs Yukihisa Isobe’s 1 Balloon Ascension,” Balloon, 1969. Figure 2: [Jorge Castaneda Leon], “Charlotte Moorman performs Yukihisa Isobe’s 26 Balloon Ascension,” Festival, 1969. Figure 3: [Jorge Castaneda Leon], “Charlotte Moorman performs Yukihisa Isobe’s 85 Balloon Ascension,” Island, 1969. Figure 4: [Jorge Castaneda Leon], “Charlotte Moorman performs Yukihisa Isobe’s 162 Balloon Ascension,” Cello, 1969. Figure 5: “Charlotte Moorman performs Yukihisa Isobe’s Balloon Ascension,” Color 232 slide, 1969. viii Introduction Fig. 1: [Jorge Castaneda Leon], “Charlotte Moorman performs Yukihisa Isobe’s Balloon Ascension,” [October 5, 1969], Photographs from the 7th Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York in the Charlotte Moorman Archive (AS9), Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries, Evanston, Illinois. A helicopter circled over Ward’s Island in the East River on September 28, 1969: the first day of the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival organized by cellist, mixed-media artist, and impresario Charlotte Moorman. Look up! Hot dogs rained down from the sky.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Electronic Music
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by The Research Repository @ WVU (West Virginia University) Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2018 Rethinking Interaction: Identity and Agency in the Performance of “Interactive” Electronic Music Jacob A. Kopcienski Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Part of the Musicology Commons, and the Other Music Commons Recommended Citation Kopcienski, Jacob A., "Rethinking Interaction: Identity and Agency in the Performance of “Interactive” Electronic Music" (2018). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 7493. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/7493 This Thesis is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Thesis in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Thesis has been accepted for inclusion in WVU Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports collection by an authorized administrator of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Rethinking Interaction: Identity and Agency in the Performance of “Interactive” Electronic Music Jacob A. Kopcienski Thesis submitted To the College of Creative Arts at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Musicology Travis D.
    [Show full text]
  • Too Many Notes: Complexity and Culture in Voyager Lewis, George E
    Too Many Notes: Complexity and Culture in Voyager Lewis, George E. Leonardo Music Journal, Volume 10, 2000, pp. 33-39 (Article) Published by The MIT Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lmj/summary/v010/10.1lewis.html Access Provided by University of California @ Santa Cruz at 09/27/11 9:42PM GMT W A Y S WAYS & MEANS & M E A Too Many Notes: Computers, N S Complexity and Culture in Voyager ABSTRACT The author discusses his computer music composition, Voyager, which employs a com- George E. Lewis puter-driven, interactive “virtual improvising orchestra” that ana- lyzes an improvisor’s performance in real time, generating both com- plex responses to the musician’s playing and independent behavior arising from the program’s own in- oyager [1,2] is a nonhierarchical, interactive mu- pears to stand practically alone in ternal processes. The author con- V the trenchancy and thoroughness tends that notions about the na- sical environment that privileges improvisation. In Voyager, improvisors engage in dialogue with a computer-driven, inter- of its analysis of these issues with ture and function of music are active “virtual improvising orchestra.” A computer program respect to computer music. This embedded in the structure of soft- ware-based music systems and analyzes aspects of a human improvisor’s performance in real viewpoint contrasts markedly that interactions with these sys- time, using that analysis to guide an automatic composition with Catherine M. Cameron’s [7] tems tend to reveal characteris- (or, if you will, improvisation) program that generates both rather celebratory ethnography- tics of the community of thought complex responses to the musician’s playing and indepen- at-a-distance of what she terms and culture that produced them.
    [Show full text]
  • Live Performance
    LIVE PERFORMANCE LIVE PERFORMANCE AND MIDI Introduction Question: How do you perform electronic music without tape? Answer: Take away the tape. Since a great deal of early electroacoustic music was created in radio stations and since radio stations used tape recordings in broadcast, it seemed natural for electroacoustic music to have its final results on tape as well. But music, unlike radio, is traditionally presented to audiences in live performance. The ritual of performance was something that early practitioners of EA did not wish to forsake, but they also quickly realized that sitting in a darkened hall with only inanimate loudspeakers on stage would be an unsatisfactory concert experience for any audience. HISTORY The Italian composer Bruno Maderna, who later established the Milan electronic music studio with Luciano Berio, saw this limitation almost immediately, and in 1952, he created a work in the Stockhausen's Cologne studio for tape and performer. “Musica su Due Dimensioni” was, in Maderna’s words, “the first attempt to combine the past possibilities of mechanical instrumental music with the new possibilities of electronic tone generation.” Since that time, there have been vast numbers of EA works created using this same model of performer and tape. On the one hand, such works do give the audience a visual focal point and bring performance into the realm of electroacoustic music. However, the relationship between the two media is inflexible; unlike a duet between two instrumental performers, which involves complex musical compromises, the tape continues with its fixed material, regardless of the live performer’s actions. 50s + 60s 1950s and 60s Karlheinz Stockhausen was somewhat unique in the world of electroacoustic music, because he was not only a pioneering composer of EA but also a leading acoustic composer.
    [Show full text]
  • In 1976, the Artist and Philosopher Adrian Piper Wrote a Manifesto
    The prints in this exhibition have survived thanks Funding for this exhibition has been received in to Charles Rue Woods, a member of the Happy part from the generous support of the Graham Arts School of Manuscript Illumination. His Foundation for the Advanced Studies in the Fine generosity and willingness to discuss his time Arts, and Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts. working with Varble have been essential to this project, and I am grateful for his friendship. I Edited by Paul Brown also thank Ree Wilson for his recollections and Designed by Ethan Fedele for the loan of Varble’s early print. Support for the preparation of the video has been provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. This exhibition would not have happened without Paul Brown’s enthusiasm. It has been an honor to work with him to bring some of Varble’s work to Kentucky, where it will remain. Upon completion of the exhibition, the xerographic prints will be donated to the Stephen Varble’s Faulkner-Morgan Archive in recognition of its Xerographic Dreams important work preserving Kentucky’s LGBT histories. –DAVID J. GETSY David J. Getsy David J. Getsy is the Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His books include Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale, 2015), Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (Yale, 2010), and the anthology of artists’ writings, Queer In 1976, the artist and philosopher Adrian Piper wrote a (MIT, 2016).
    [Show full text]
  • Paint Cuba with Robert Burridge
    Bob Burridge Get ready for a highly energized painting workshop where spontaneity is used. Robert Burridge, a noted award-winning Industrial Designer who, afer twenty-five years in the corporate world, focused his life to painting everyday. Burridge attributes his success to his education from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, his stint as an adjunct professor at Cooper Union in New York City, and in 1966, his Fluxus Paint Cuba With art performances with Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Jim McWilliams and Charlotte Moorman. His work hangs in Robert Burridge permanent collections of international embassies, corporate galleries and art colleges. His solo museum exhibitions We personally love our chosen destinations; Most of our venues are listed in the received positive attention, so he was invited to exhibit his paintings at the book 1000 Places to See Before You Die by Patricia Schultz. We have selected Smithsonian Folklife Circus Arts Festival colorful routes, unique hotels, colonial era haciendas, exquisite dining, and in Washington, DC. amazing venues reflecting the uniqueness of each area we visit. Our hope is that each of our travelers and artists will return home with a lasting impression and rewarding memories of the colorful cultures, and the beautiful lands of Central and South America. Explore Amazing Places is very excited to offer a wonderful international art workshop and travel opportunity to Cuba with Robert Burridge, November 30th - December 10th, 2020. Experience history as we stay in the the Hotel Nacional, Be welcomed into gorgeous Casa Privadas of Cuban artists in the colonial city of Trinidad. Tour Tobacco farms in the beautiful Vinales Valley and enjoy the warm white sands of Playa Ancon.
    [Show full text]
  • FROM the EDITOR Triumphs and Tests Which Seem to Bombard All of Us
    FROM THE EDITOR triumphs and tests which seem to bombard all of us. How much he took from me cannot be Mow can Ithank you all for giving me the measured--but you all gave me back my wherewithal to start fresh again after such a confidence and my energy. brutal act of burglaw? D have a new system going, and instead of getting a scanner, I got a Iwant to let you know that by the first of 1997,l zip drive to ensure that my backup is secure. I probably will go on line with Umbrella news, have been working very hard to reconstruct dated material, and announcements. More mailing lists, my own personal documents, but about that in a small issue in December. Ithink it still takes more time than I have right now. If it is time to get the "news" out as quickly as any of you know people who have not received possible, and leave the reviews for the print Umbrella and should, please let me know. A few medium. We shall see, but i am learning WTML people have responded to the gap, and I have (the editing system for websites) and when that re-instated their subscriptions. Yet I have is mastered, then we shall go ahead and see persevered and have a reasonable amount of what we can do for all of you. It is my documents in order, at Ieast to suit the time--although everyone is getting online, as needs of the moment. Then when 1 am not witnessed by hours when 1 cannot get on line at thinking, Irealize what more I have lost.
    [Show full text]
  • Nam June Paik Papers
    Nam June Paik Papers A Preliminary Finding Aid Kathleen Brown, with additions and revisions by Christine Hennessey and Hannah Pacious This collection was processed with support from the Smithsonian Collection Care and Preservation Fund. 2012 Smithsonian American Art Museum, Research and Scholars Center PO Box 37012, MRC970 Washington, D.C. 20013-7012 http://www.americanart.si.edu/research/ Table of Contents Collection Overview ........................................................................................................ 1 Administrative Information .............................................................................................. 1 Scope and Contents........................................................................................................ 2 Arrangement..................................................................................................................... 3 Biographical note............................................................................................................. 2 Names and Subjects ...................................................................................................... 3 Container Listing ............................................................................................................. 5 Series 1: Biographical Material, circa 1957-1999..................................................... 5 Series 2: Correspondence, 1959-2006.................................................................... 6 Series 3: Financial and Legal Records, circa 1966
    [Show full text]
  • Christian Wolff: an Aesthetic of Suggestion George E
    Christian Wolff: An Aesthetic of Suggestion George E. Lewis When Christian Wolff and Robyn Schulkowsky came to my Columbia University office in October 2012 for a chat about this project, I greeted them with a YouTube video they had never seen before: a performance of the concluding work on this CD, Duo 7 from 2007. After some discussion it was determined that the video was apparently made by an audience member from a 2011 performance in Buenos Aires. “We’ve played this piece many times,” Schulkowsky laughed. “That’s a funny little piece.”1 Indeed it was, and the performance was a fortuitous introduction to a conversation that I’ve reflected upon here. Robyn Schulkowsky’s path to new music seems as fortuitous as one could imagine. Since the early 1990s she has lived in Berlin, but her musical career began in South Dakota. She applied to the Eastman School of Music, but “my parents wouldn’t let me go because it was in New York State.” So she ended up going to “new music school,” as she fondly recalled. “I wasn’t expecting anything. I didn't know anything. I just wanted to be a percussionist. I’d had maybe twenty private lessons.” But she wound up as an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, one of the most exciting scenes in the emerging American new music of the 1970s, where fellow percussionist Steven Schick was a classmate, along with the trombone-violin duo of Jon English and Candace Natvig, clarinetist Michael Lytle, percussionist Will Parsons, and the African- American electronic music composer Richard McCreary, who later taught synthesis techniques to Muhal Richard Abrams and me at Governors State University near Chicago before becoming an ordained minister.2 Moving to New Mexico, Schulkowsky teamed up with saxophonist Tom Guralnick, doing improvised music concerts and organizing a concert series that brought in Anthony Braxton and Alvin Lucier, among others—“Besides us, there was nobody doing that kind of thing there”—as well as performing with the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra and teaching at the University of New Mexico.
    [Show full text]
  • Untitled) 1961, That Spewed Shaving Cream, Grand Central Moderns Gallery, NYC
    Critical Mass Happenings Fluxus Performance Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958-1972 By: Geoffrey Hendricks ISBN: 0813533031 See detail of this book on Amazon.com Book served by AMAZON NOIR (www.amazon-noir.com) project by: PAOLO CIRIO paolocirio.net UBERMORGEN.COM ubermorgen.com ALESSANDRO LUDOVICO neural.it Page 1 Critical Mass: Some Reflections M O R D E C A I - M A R K M A C L O W Icons of my childhood were the piles of red-bound copies of An Anthology that my father, Jackson Mac Low, received for having edited and published it. Despite his repeated declarations that he was not a part of George Maciunas's self-declared movement, my father's involve- ment in the first Fluxus book left him irrevocably tangled in it. I myself seem to have been influenced by my father's experimental, algorithmic approach to poetry, and ended up a computational astrophysicist, studying how stars form out of the chaotic, turbulent interstellar gas. I think there was some hope that with this background I might explain the true, or correct, meaning of the term "critical mass." Unfortunately, as a scientist, I have no special access to truth, and correctness depends entirely on con- text. Let me explain this a bit before discussing the term "critical mass" itself. Science is often taught as if it consisted of a series of true facts, strung together with a narrative of how these facts were discovered. The actual practice of sci- ence, however, requires the assumption that nothing is guaranteed to be true except as, and only so far as, it can be confirmed by empirical evidence.
    [Show full text]
  • David Tudor in Darmstadt Amy C
    This article was downloaded by: [University of California, Santa Cruz] On: 22 November 2010 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 923037288] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37- 41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Contemporary Music Review Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713455393 David Tudor in Darmstadt Amy C. Beal To cite this Article Beal, Amy C.(2007) 'David Tudor in Darmstadt', Contemporary Music Review, 26: 1, 77 — 88 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/07494460601069242 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494460601069242 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Contemporary Music Review Vol. 26, No. 1, February 2007, pp. 77 – 88 David Tudor in Darmstadt1 Amy C.
    [Show full text]
  • Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-Garde NOTES on the UNDERGROUND
    INVISIBLE CITY Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde NOTES ON THE UNDERGROUND 252 Sid Sachs 253 Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde Notes on the Underground Sid Sachs In the mid-twentieth century, Philadelphia was a publishing center, its populism epito- mized by Curtis Publishing Company’s The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies Home Journal and Walter Annenberg’s TV Guide and Seventeen. The everyday American worldview—the Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth versions of America—originated from these publishers. These were not aristocratic visions but, rather, the iconography of popular culture (as defined by sociologist Herbert Gans).1 In addition to Annenberg’s Triangle Publications and Curtis, Philadelphia was home to J.B. Lippincott, smaller specialty publishers such as Chilton and Cypher Press, and many others.2 Over these years, Philadelphia culture produced artifacts variously affiliated with the Beat writers, pulp fiction, experimental poetry, popular music, and a proto-punk ethos. Indeed, Philadelphia encompassed many worlds, from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania and its elite Quaker satellite schools to Philip Barry’s patrician Tracey Lords; it brooked an even darker proletarian underworld. David Lynch noticed this chthonic condition during his Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) years in the late 1960s and Sun Ra decried the city, saying, “To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth, and that was Philadelphia, which is death’s headquarters.”3 That sinister underbelly was best illustrated by David Goodis, an important pulp-fiction writer.
    [Show full text]
  • Christian Wolff in Interview Invited Paper Given for Christian Wolff at Orpheus, Orpheus Research Centre, Ghent, Belgium, 28 and 29 September 2015
    Christian Wolff in Interview Invited paper given for Christian Wolff at Orpheus, Orpheus Research Centre, Ghent, Belgium, 28 and 29 September 2015 Virginia Anderson, Experimental Music Catalogue Abstract For the conference: In 1972–3, the American composer Barney Childs began work on a book of interviews with modern composers. Unfortunately, Childs could not find a publisher for the book and abandoned the project. The interviews have remained, unpublished and almost unseen, for over forty years. This paper will introduce Childs’ interview with Wolff in June 1972. Here Wolff and Childs discuss their concerns, including composition (his recent composition Burdocks), performance, and education. As I have just received this interview, this paper will have no definitive conclusions. It will, rather, examine the interview as time capsule, as a kind of research expedition. Update, 6 March 2017: The present paper appears as it was given in 2015, as a spoken text. Since this conference paper, I have received all of Childs’ interviews, and have now almost finished editing the original interviews before writing contextual essays for the final publication of his book and the realisation of his dream. Thanks so much to Christian Wolff for his support of this early stage of this project and to William Brooks, convenor of the Christian Wolff Study Days, who always gives me the best advice regarding experimental music and its research. Paper: Well, as the abstract implies, this isn’t actually a formal research paper. It’s more like the beginning of research. For years I’ve known of this interview, and a number of others, but only two weeks ago I was able to get access to it.
    [Show full text]