records ruin the landscape by david grubbs

8/12/2019 Records Ruin the Landscape by David Grubbs

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John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording


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Records Ruin the Landscape


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John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording

2014


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2014 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PRINTED IN THE UNI TED STATES OF AMERICA

ON ACID- FREE PAPER

DESIGNED BY AMY RUTH BUCHANAN

TYPESET IN GARAMOND PREMIER PRO BY

TSENG INFORMATION SYSTEMS, INC.

EPIGRAPH FROM THE SYSTEM BY JOHN ASHBE RY, FIRST

PUBLISHED IN T H R E E P O E M S . COPYRIGHT 1972, 1985,

2008 BY JOHN ASHBERY. ALL RIGHTS RESE RVED. USED BY

ARRANGEMENT WITH GEORGES BORCHARDT, INC. FOR

THE AUTHOR.

LIBRARY OF CONGR ESS CATALOGING- IN- PUBLICATION DATA

GRUBBS, DAVID, 1967

RECORDS RUIN THE LANDSCAPE : JOHN CAGE, THE SI XTIES, AND SOUND

RECORDING / DAVID GRUBBS.

PAGES CM

INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX.

ISBN 978-0-8223-5576-2 (CLOTH : ALK. PAPER)

ISBN 978-0-8223-5590-8 (PBK. : ALK. PAPER)

1. CAGE, JOHNCRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION. 2. IMPROVISATION

(MUSIC)HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 3. AVANT-GARDE (MUSIC)

HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 4. SOUND RECORDINGS. I . TITLE.

ML410.C24G78 2014

780.904DC23 2013041395


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The rejected chapters have taken over. For a long

time it was as though only the most patient scholar

or the recording angel himself would ever inter-

est himself in them. Now it seems as though that

angel had begun to dominate the whole story: he

who was supposed only to copy it all down has

joined forces with the misshapen, misfit pieces that

were never meant to go into it but at best to stay onthe sidelines so as to point up how everything else

belonged together, and the resulting mountain of

data threatens us.

JOHN ASHBERY, The System (1972)


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(ix) (xxiii)

(1) Introduction

(19) Henry Flynt on the Air

(45) Landscape with Cage

(67) John Cage, Recording Artist

(105) Te Antiques rade Free Improvisation and Record Culture

(135) Remove the Records rom exasOnline Resources and Impermanent Archives

(167) (195)

(199) (209)


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Pre ace

What does it mean to come to know a period through its recordings? What does it mean to know a period through the recorded arti acts o

composers and musicians who largely disdained recordings?An early impulse to write this book came rom observing how listenersunderstandings o experimental and avant-garde music rom the 1960schange on the basis o access to sound recordings. Simply put, what circu-lates in recorded orm at a given time helps to delineate a historical land-scape o musical activity. But or many practitioners o experimental music

rom the 1960s, sound recordings register as an odd, counterintuitive object o study. I encountered this rsthand when discussing the project with

a number o musicians, composers, and producers who came o age in the1960s, most o whom remain o the opinion that audio recordings are atbest curiously incomplete representations o their efforts.

I was born in the late 1960s, and I ofen gravitate toward music createdin that decade. Fundamental to my interest in music rom this period isthe challenge o understanding that part o the past that lies just beyondmemorys reach. My ascination with the recent but experientially inacces-sible past ound its rst and most enduring subject in the popular music

o the 1960s. From an early age, I elt that I knew the pop music o thistime through an itinerary o its landmark albums and singles, and througharranging these recordings on an increasingly detailed time line. I your

passion centers on pop music rom the 1960s, it becomes second natureto know by date particular albums or songs or events in the careers o theBeatles or the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan or James Brown. It begins withthe release dates o iconic recordings:Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band in the summer o 1967, Blonde on Blonde in the summer o 1966,

(I Cant Get No) Satis action and Papas Got a Brand New Bag in the


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summer o 1965. Or the rst stirrings o the Velvet Underground, or thedeaths o John Coltrane, Brian Jones, Albert Ayler, and Jimi Hendrix.

My own strongest, most ormative experiences with culture had to do

with objects set adrif, obscure recordings randomly encountered. A pri-mary appeal o records had to do with transcending age and geography. Asa teenager in Louisville, Kentucky, in the early 1980sand with ew op-

portunities to see live music that I truly cared aboutI immersed myselin anzines and punk and post- punk records pressed on tiny, ofen one-offlabels. When youre a high school anzine editor, its extraordinary whatsimply shows up in your mailbox: anarchist literature, Situationist-inspiredaltered comics, micro-sized literary magazines, ussily handwritten broad-

sheets, and obsessive reportage o one local punk scene afer another, to the point where all o these dispatches could come to seem the stuff o ction, were you not holding arecord the potentially enlightening, potentiallymisleading recordin your pulse-quickened hands.

Te objectness o the record was crucial. Chie among reasons or thisis, as the British post- punk group the Fall put it, repetition, repetition,repetition. I needed those multiple listens, those toe- and ootholds.I needed repeated listens to decide whether Public Image Ltds Death

Disco singlean unsettling listening experience or an adolescentwassupposed to be played at 45 or at 33 rpm. I eventually recognized thatDeath Disco was intended to be played at 45 rpm, but John Lydonsbrays and howls were that much more inexplicable and that much moreanimal, and the already-dominant bass that much more satis ying, whenthe song was dra ed down to 33 . Public Image Ltds single was not theonly one or which I was uncertain about the ostensibly correct playingspeed. I needed repetition, repetition, repetition to make sense o various

instructive examples o what at rst blush passed as ormless, unvectorednoise but which eventually resolved itsel into something with memorable,recognizable detailswith aural breadcrumbs and semisecure grips sug-gesting musical orm. I particular records created rst impressions o ran-domness, o scatteringsmysti ying randomness o intent, mysti ying ran-domness o execution, mysti ying purpose in opting to send this recordingout into the world, and ultimate mystication that it ound its way to mymailboxthen subsequent spins, whether at the intended speed or not,

helped to clear the og and to make apparent abstruse musical patterns.


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A hypothetical practitioner o one o the kinds o 1960s experimentalmusic that Im addressing in this book might say that my mistake was to

press orward, through repetitions, endeavoring to accrue meanings. Why

not leave things well enough? Tis individual might argue that the rst lis-ten, disorienting or not, is the experience that will always be the richest,and the most true to the spirit o the work. As the improvising guitaristDerek Bailey mused, I you could only play a recordonce, imagine the in-tensity youd have to bring into the listening.

Beyond repeated listening, a second attraction or me to the record was itscompound, multidisciplinary character. It was never only about music. Terecord presented itsel as a medium or sound, but also as a medium or text,

art, design, and a general con rontation with the world. At the time its rela-tive cheapness to produceas well as the existence o an engaged commu-nity o peers ready and willing to buy the thingmade the record an expres-sive medium with bracing democratic potential. Most o the sel - producedrecords that began to arrive in my mailbox in the early 1980s indeed wereexceptionally multidisciplinary, by which I mean that the artist who wroteand per ormed the music was also likely to be the artist who started and ranthe record label, wrote the press release, designed the records artwork, per-

haps olded or glued the cover, stuck the cover in a plastic sleeve, addressedthe envelope, purchased and licked the stamps, and stood in line at the postoffice. Te handwriting on the cardboard mailer announced itsel as part othe sel same artistic project that included the music.

My experiences are not uncommon among people o my generation,or whom recordingsprimarily in their material orm as singles,s,

cassettes, and compact discshave served as a widely available means otime travel as well as an introduction to geography and the ound object.

Tats why it has always intrigued me to encounter the more extreme nega-tive period attitudes toward recording among creators o experimental andavant-garde music in the 1960s. It is an attitude that is so different rom myown, and rom that o so many curious, sympathetic, hungry listeners or whom seeking out new musical experiences or broadening their culturalknowledge through recorded sound has been one o the most power ulthrough lines in their lives.


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As much as I was introduced to diverse and ar- ung musics through

records, these same records steered me toward living in larger cities, andin turn toward live per ormance. Suddenly, the need to transcend placethrough recordingsas I had elt growing up in Kentuckydid not seemas crucial. When I moved to Chicago in 1990, a number o concerts o ree jazzand improvised music spun me around and thoroughly engaged my imagi-nation. Tis string o stellar live per ormances vividly impressed upon methe reasons so many musicians judge recordings insufficient to the task o

representing their practice, and I came to understand better why an earliergeneration o avant-garde musicians placed such a premium on live per-ormance.Like many others, I was rst attracted to ree jazz and improvised music

through some o the most abstract, otherworldly recordings o Sun Raand his Arkestra. I could make very little sense o them on rst encounter. With albums such as Nothing Is and Its Afer the End o the World , re-

peated listens ofen had the quality o hearing this music or the rst time.

Cacophonous group interjections appeared as unique events. As with myrst encounters with records o idiosyncratic post- punk, I ound the musico Sun Ra rom this period difficult to revisit mentally. I simply had to lis-ten again. One major difference between the two styles was that music thatis largely improvised brings with it an implicit demand, per Derek Bailey,that you attend to a rst listening with maximum ocusjust as the musi-cians themselves are hearing the music or the rst time while playing it.By contrast, much post- punk owes its counterintuitive quality to rough

musicianship, raw editing and overdubbing, and accidents o an especiallyin-the-studio nature.Spending time at concerts o improvised music, I was excited by music

that appeared to ow through its players. I understood these sounds asoscillating between the noncomposed and that which is composed in realtime through wordless negotiation. I loved what this music, in per or-mance, did to my experience o time. It swore to never repeat. Te real-time aspect o improvised musicwhere the length or scale o the piece

isnt known in advanceproved to be an invigorating counterpoint to lis-tening to recordings o improvisations.


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Much o what had seemed inexplicable about improvised music onrecordespecially combinations o musicians in which each player ex-hibits a high degree o autonomy, and where certain types o sonic concate-

nations owe largely to chance and un oreseen collisionsgradually meltedaway as I became more amiliar with the processes by which this music was ofen created. Tere were long-standing groups and musical partner-

ships, such as the Association or the Advancement o Creative Musicians( ), ounded in 1965, and there were eeting rst-time and perhapslast-time encounters between musicians, as was ofen the case when impro-

visers rom out o town per ormed with Chicagos steadily expanding poolo players. Tere were per ormances that bore the marks o high musi-

cianship and years o dedication, and there were sometimes equally thrill-ing seat-o -the- pants, scrappy, smoke- pouring- out-o -ears (brains lockinggears, ailing) per ormances by much younger players who seemed just assurprised as anyone else by the unplanned musical outcomes. Tere wereintriguing hybrid encounters when vastly more seasoned, more condent,and more versatile musicians shared the stage with bold, occasionally ter-ried neophytesmeetings that were all the more compelling by virtueo awkward musical seams and joints and odd matches displayed ront

and center. Tere were per ormances that used experimental systems onotation or agreed-upon verbal road maps, and there were per ormancesin which you could imagine that the players shunned both advance plan-ning and Monday-morning quarterbacking. Tere were per ormances

with both eet unmistakably in a jazz lineage; there were per ormances or which the operative context was the mode o improvised music pioneered

more recently by players such as the British musicians Derek Bailey, EvanParker, and Paul Lytton; and there were per ormances where these over-

lapping traditions o improvisation were extended, subverted, and caughtunawares by younger musicians equally conversant in experimental rockand electronic music.

I am certain that my taking to improvised music in per ormance in theearly 1990s was in part a reaction to purchasing a player and begin-ning to acclimate mysel to living with music in digital orm. Te act obecoming more cognizant o music measured in clock time made live per-

ormances o improvised music increasingly appealing. When listening at

home I suddenly had the experience o knowing the exact duration o a piece o music. Previously I would have rounded off a given duration in


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my head, i I even thought to quanti y the length o a piece. A pop songlasted three minutes; an early rock and roll song said what it needed to sayin two minutes; and an album side ran between feen and twenty- ve

minutes. Tat was all there was to it: the basic units o recorded-musicmeasurement.Te digital display o time on a player was an entirely new experi-

ence. In retrospect, its not as distressing as the omnipresent timeline insofware such as i unes, through which you can tell rom the most cur-sory and innocent o glimpses how much is water under the bridge andhow much is yet to come. With the players time display, actual effort(pushing a button) was required to view both the time elapsed and the

time remaining in a piece o music. Even stranger was the previously un-imaginable seventy-our-minute slice o uninterrupted sound.One o the initial consequences o the player was a propensity to

have music playing in the background, always. Te player was onlyractionally as demanding o ones attention as the increasingly needy-

seeming turntable. Once you cleared the creepy hurdle o getting used todigital blackrecorded silences on being an altogether differentcreature than vinyl s louder, more textured silencesthe reward was

a greater dynamic range, the upshot o which is that it became possibleto listen to more radically quiet music. One could listen to recordings o works by Morton Feldman and not have the troubling suspicion that there were sounds buried in an s grooves that the needle ailed to uncover,

aint attacks obscured by a brush re o sur ace noise. But as listening be-came a more rationalized experience through the digital time display and amore ambient experience through the longer, uninterrupted playthroughso quieter, more abstract music, concerts began to make stronger claims on

my imagination. I was ready or music in which my experience o time wasmore subjective and more immersive, and in which I ound mysel con-ronted with an imperative to listen deeply.I recall the shock that I experienced upon rst hearing Morton Feld-

mans music in per ormance. At the time I had been amiliar with hismusic through recordings. Feldmans death in 1987 was ollowed by a tre-mendous quantity o commercially released recordings o his music, suchthat by the beginning o the present century more than orty ull-length

s o Feldmans work were in print. Digital audioall o thoses with their broad dynamic ranges and running times upwards o seventy


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minutesunquestionably played a role in expanding Morton Feldmanslistenership. In spite o caveats appended to recordings o his work suchas A lower volume setting will produce a more realistic sound level, I

had not experienced Feldmans uniquely hushed music as being radicallyquiet. Tat is, until I heard Steffen Schleiermacher play one o Feldmanslate piano pieces at DePaul University at the close o a program dedicatedto the music o Ste an Wolpe and his students. I was seated in the secondrow, and yet I had the sensation that the individual tones rom the piano were doing their damnedest to travel all that way, and arriving in a stateo collapse rom the nearly insurmountable distance rom the back o thestage. Te previous works in the concert had me leaning back in my seat.

Te Feldman piano piece had me pitched orward, straining to listen, sud-denly aware o the exact physical distance between per ormer and listener;aware o the space o the per ormance, both sonically and visually; aware othe concentration exercised by individual listeners around me; and awaketo the possibilities o music with pro oundly quiet dynamics. Much as Ihad appreciated recordings o Morton Feldmans work, this was an en-counter with his music that could only have occurred in the space o thelive per ormance, and in the presence o the per ormer. Te experience

stuck with me.Persuasive arguments can be made that the current availability o anunprecedented amount o recorded music has contributed to a levelingo musical hierarchies. Records were my entre into multiple musics inChicago ree improvisation, jazz, country, blues, contemporary compo-sition, electronic music, dub re ae, Javanese gamelan. But even as I wasschooling mysel in these orms through recordings, the thing that didmore to level the hierarchies o genre than ling mys in one genre-

ree alphabetical sequence was to meet, usually through the social spaceo the per ormance venue, individuals hailing rom diverse musical back-grounds. Tis proved to be an unanticipated but truly excellent act o themetropolis. Tere was value, certainly, in coming to my own conclusionthat the pleasure taken in listening to (to use the examples that well ndin chapter 1, Henry Flynt on the Air) avant-garde music, country, andblues cant be objectively compared. Te act o meeting skilled jazz players

who loved and respected unschooled, ungainly experimental rock, or ex-

perimental rock olks who had begun to grapple with contemporary composition, or s and record store clerks with an encyclopedic knowledge


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o most orms, or classical olks who had a passion or soul and hip-hop(I might be inventing this) was the single thing that most undamentallyaltered my relationship to music. I learned that there was no reason or

musical li e to be lived like a record store, with discrete sections or rockand pop, jazz, blues, soul, hip-hop, oldies, and classical, and the maximum possible separation between the classical and the pop sections.

/ / /

But . . . ah, the conversations that we have in record stores. Had.I recall a conversation with a visual-artist riend in the A-Musik store

in Cologne, Germany, probably in 1997 or 1998. I was always a bit jeal-ous that this riend, a painter, seemed to have all the time in the world tolisten to music. Musicians dont have that luxury; how can you listen toother peoples music when youre trying to create your own? (I supposethat musicians have all the time in the world to look at images.) On pre-

vious outings with him to record stores, I was amazed at how quickly hecould amass a oot-high stack o vinyl. Cheap albums, expensive albums,legitimate nds, dross. Big-band jazz, unk, industrial music, solo steel-

string guitar music. Stuff to lug back to the studio to listen to while work-ing. Te main thing that I remember is the rapidity with which hed sud-denly return clutching an arm ul o albums.

At the time o this conversation, A-Musik was a tiny, meticulouslycurated basement shop that specialized in the multiple strands o elec-tronic music gathered at the intersection o pop, dance, and experimentalmusics. It was where remix culture and contemporary composition saw eyeto eyeor at least didnt mind sitting shoulder to shoulder. I knew people

who requented A-Musik who were conservatory-trained composers, as well as sel -taught musicians who had ollowed an increasingly amil-iar trajectory rom growing up playing in bands to seeking more ad hocmodes o creating music. A-Musik also had its share o patrons rom athird category o music producersindividuals making real strides in theeld o electronic music who were loath to identi y themselves as musi-cians, in much the same spirit with which Brian Eno listed his occupationon a British passport application as non-musician. It wasnt uncommon

to see a glazed-over musician emerge rom the studio abutting the shop


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(actually an apartment with a spare room), seeking human contact and arespite rom hours spent scrutinizing and manipulating wave orms on acomputer screen. A number o the albums and singles or sale in A-Musik

were recorded on the other side o the wall behind the shops ront counter.Homegrown, truly.Like many record stores, this particular basement iteration o A-Musik

was a social space where knowledge was shared through recommending, lis-tening, and discussing. In 1998, when the team o artist Cosima von Boninand writer Christoph Gurk were asked to program music rom Cologne

or the Steirischer Herbst estival in Graz, Austria, in lieu o concerts they proposed to curate a series o record stores that in turn would organize

their own events and per ormances. Bonin and Gurk argued that the socialspace o the record store was undamental to musical culture in their city,and that people in Graz would learn more about music rom Cologne bybeing able to spend time in a hand ul o Colognes more interesting recordshops. Tis simple idea was the basis or the project 4 Plattenlden rGraz (Four Record Stores or Graz). Steirischer Herbst rented com-mercial space in downtown Graz or a month, and every week a differentrecord store rom Cologne representing a different type o music moved

its stock and its staff to Graz. One week A-Musik brought abstract elec-tronic music to townalong with the opportunity to observe, browse,query, play, listen, agree, disagree, and play the devils advocate.

On that afernoon in A-Musik, the painter riend with all the time inthe world asked me where he should begin with recordings o John Cages

prepared- piano music. I su ested a recording o CagesSonatas and Inter-ludes (194648), together with the Wergo anthologyWorks or Piano and Prepared Piano, Volume I (19431952). My rationale was that it would be

best to pairSonatas and Interludes, the multiple-movement summationo Cages writing or prepared piano, with a compilation o earlier, morebrie attempts at composing or this instrument o his devising. Te riendheld one in each hand and compared them, looking back and orth asi trying to decide which disc was physically heavier. Finally he returnedboth s to the rack and came back with the second volume o theWorks

or Piano and Prepared Piano.I always start with volume two.

As we were leaving the store, he offered an observation that Ive since


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pondered. I there were anything or which Id sell my soul, said the per-son leaving the record store with many pounds o vinyls, it would beto never have to listen to the same album twice.

Im glad that he didnt sell his soul. It turned out to be unnecessary. Justone brie decade afer this conversation, anyone with an Internet connec-tion would never have to listen to the same recording twice. And yet, his

willingness to contemplate an eternal deal speaks to a undamental, wide-spread ambivalence about recorded sound that is expressed by many indi-

viduals and in many orms in this book. Repetition has always been experi-mental musicians most undamental objection to recordings: they are nottrue to the nature o per ormance because you can listen again and again.

What would it mean to not listen to the same recording twice? Whatsthe lure o encountering music in recorded orm, apart rom the possi-bility o repeated listening? With the record enthusiast who doesnt wantto listen to the same record twice we have the opportunity to describe theencounter with music in recorded orm while bracketing the experienceo repetition.

Te recording brings with it a broad array o benetshence the trip tothe record store, the conversation thats structured around particular art-

ists and their recordings, and the exchange o cash or an arm ul o albums.Te recording allows my riend in the example to bring music into hishome, and to start and to interrupt it at any time that he wishes, and atnearly any volume that he desires. He can listen to the spare, restrainedsonorities o Morton Feldman at the proper volume or Metallica, and hecan listen to Metallica at Feldman volume.

Te album is stamped with a datethe date or dates o its recording.Te album is stamped with a second datethe date o its release. Te

recording helps to construct a chronology. It participates in multiple chro-nologies having to do with a given musicians sequence o compositionsand sequence o recordingso songs, o albums. It also participates inchronologies having to do with a particular genre o music, or o a particu-lar producer or record label, or coming rom a particular country, region,city, or neighborhood, or a particular decade, year, month, or day.

Te recording allows the listener to experience the representation o amusical per ormance separated rom the time and space o its originating

event. Te recording allows the listener to experience the representation oa musical per ormance separate rom the physical presence o a per ormer,


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who hereto ore had the possibility, at least in theory, o looking the audi-ence member directly in the eye. Te audience member has become thelistener, no longer a participant, communicant, or even viewer, except in

viewingperhaps studyingthe sanctioned images that accompany therecording. In the late 1960s, at the time that the improvising bass playerGavin Bryars was in the process o becoming the composer Gavin Bryars,he elt the need to absent himsel rom the space o per ormance. He ex-

plained, Te creator is there making the music and is identied with themusic and the music with the person. Its like standing a painter next to his

picture so that every time you see the painting you see the painter as well.Te recording allows the listener a quality o individual, isolated con-

centration that is lacking in the shared space o per ormance. Conversely,the recording allows the listener to be as distracted, as not- present as cir-cumstances or temperaments dictate. Te experience can be as ocusedor as diffuse as the listener desires. I never cease to marvel at the breadtho the spectrum that describes acquaintances listening practices when itcomes to recorded sound. For some, a recording played at home is a distanthue o audio ambience experienced intermittently rom two rooms or twooors away, and or others its akin to attending a mastering session in a

commercial acility, listening with the kind o intensity that you bring tothe nal audition be ore a recording is approved and sent to the pressing plant. For some, speakers go where speakers t: one all the way down here

on the lowest level o a bookshel , partially blocked by a stack o maga-zines, and one practically touching the ceiling; or others, the listener ismeant to sit equidistant rom two speakers that are equidistant rom oneanotherthe listener occupying the third point o an isosceles triangle.

Te recording allows the listener to experience something other than a

representation o an integral musical per ormance. Te recording itsel islikely to be a representation (a copy) o a representation (a composite) o amusical per ormance. As a composite, it can consist o ragments o takesedited together horizontally; it can consist o ragments edited together vertically through overdubbing; it can, and is likely to, consist o somecombination o ragments pieced together both horizontally and verti-cally. As a composite, it can consist o superimposed recordings o thesame sonic event rom multiple sound perspectives; this can be as simple

as a pair o stereo microphones deployed to create a stereo image that moreor less recognizably represents the space in which the musical per ormance


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occurred, or it can be as complex as a large array o microphonesa varietyo different microphones, each selected on the basis o its precise taskaimed at each individual sound source. As a composite, it can include all

variety o postproduction; this can be as basic as the perhaps apocryphaltale o a recording engineers pencil employed in a London studio on May18, 1964, at the behest o producer Mickie Most to give the analog tape aquick, innitesimally small tug to momentarily raise and correct the pitcho a at note in the vocal per ormance in what was otherwise a keeper oa take o the Animals version o Te House o the Rising Sun, or it canbe as advanced (now, via the bend in space by which complex algorithmic

unctions are accomplished with simple keystroke commands) as digitally

altering the pitch, duration, and placement o sound samples, or o re-shaping wave orms through a graphical inter ace by which they are merelyredrawn. Te engineers pencil has become virtual, a pencil-unction.

Te recording allows the listener to experience the presentation o a musi-cal or artistic persona, beginning with the artists name pseudonymous,collective, or occasionally bestowed at birthand including the images packaged together with the recording. Te recording plays its particularrole in the construction o the artists biography. Is this single album or

track the entirety o this artists recorded legacy? Is it one o dozens or hun-dreds or even thousands o commercial recordings on which this artist canbe heard? Was it the breakthrough or the career-ender, a respectable step

orward or an ominous repetition or regression? What percentage o thediscography does it constitute? Did the artist double as producer, labor-ing on both sides o the console? What was the artists relationship to therecord label on which this appeared? Did the bulk o the artists releasesappear on this label, or was this an incongruous one-off? Is this record-

ing a release that was authorized by the artist? Apart rom bootlegs, thinko Howlin Wol s Cadet Concept Te Howlin Wol Album (1969), whose cover consists exclusively o the ollowing text, in stark, generic-

product black on white:

Tis is Howlin Wol s new album.He doesnt like it.He didnt like his electric guitar at rst either.

Perhaps the recording deliberately withholds. It can be crafed to reveal precious little about the artist or the context o its productionand there


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are countless examples o recordings that are that much more meaning ulor affecting on the basis o what they ultimately obscure. Perhaps in orma-tion about the recording artist is simply not available. Te ease o access to

in ormation through the Internet has altered the experience o listeningto recordings or which historical context was previously more difficult toacquire. Tis cuts both ways, and historical context can become a casualtyo online listening, especially owing to incomplete and ofen mistaken in-

ormation attached to audio les circulating on the web. But the web alsomakes in ormation that much more available regarding obscure recordingsthat previously were cloaked in an aura o tantalizingly incomplete details.Tis has been the case with recordings o experimental music, in which an

earlier release might have been the sole circulating recording o the worko a particular individual, but now that artist is represented by a li etimes worth o audio recordings that are easily accessed online.

Te recording allows all o these things to happen, even i you sold yoursoul and never had to listen to the same record twice.

In Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Record-ing , my purpose is to consider the distance between experimental musicin the 1960s and the ways in which this music is experienced at present

through the medium o sound recording. I offer the preceding details omy experience as a listener to stress the role that recordings played in mycoming to various musicsand also to stress the limitations in attendingto certain kinds o musical practice primarily through recordings.


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Acknowledgments

Te origins o this book date to my time in the University o ChicagosDepartment o English, and the manuscript beneted tremendously rom

the input o James F. Lastra and W. J. . Mitchell, as well as the inspirationo the late Miriam Hansen, whose example as a teacher and interlocutor Ido my best to draw upon. I owe a primary debt o gratitude to riends inChicago who simultaneously inhabited the worlds o music and academia:

John Corbett, erri Kapsalis, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, and Rick Wojcik.Much o what I have learned about this books subject comes rom

riends whom I know through music: Nol Akchot, Andrea Bel, Marie-Pierre Bonniol, Ken Brown, Anthony Burr, ony Conrad, Charles Curtis,

Drew Daniel, Claudia Gonson, Christoph Gurk, Mats Gusta sson, NickHallett, Jeff Hunt, Nina Katchadourian, Dan Koretzky, Lawrence Kump ,Zach Layton, Pierre-Yves Mac, Hannah Marcus, John McEntire, BrianMcMahan, Rick Moody, Rian Murphy, Albert Oehlen, Will Oldham,Pauline Oliveros, Jim ORourke, Dan Osborn, Ste ano Pilia, StephenPrina, Quentin Rollet, Atsushi Sasaki, M. C. Schmidt, Mayo Tompson,

aku Unami, Nikos Veliotis, Britt Wal ord, om Watson, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Nate Wooley, and Otomo Yoshihide.

In 2005 I began teaching in Brooklyn Colleges Conservatory oMusic and graduate program in Per ormance and Interactive Media Arts( ). Id like to thank my colleagues Amnon Wolman, John J. A. Jan-none, Jenni er McCoy, Helen Richardson, Nancy Hager, Bruce Mac-Intyre, and Maria Conelli or their commitment to team teaching, inno- vative pedagogy, and interdisciplinary education. At Brooklyn College,it has been a pleasure teaching and learning alongside Julie Agoos, RayAllen, Chlo Bass, Kara Bohnenstiel, Douglas Cohen, D. Edward Davis,

Jason Eckardt, Douglas Geers, Mona Hadler, Mobina Hashmi, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Ben Lerner, Yoni Niv, Zachary Seldess, and Jeff aylor,


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and all o the students, as well as the staff o the Wol e Institute andthe H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute or Studies in American Music. At the

Graduate Center I beneted rom participating in the interdisci-

plinary seminars organized by Claire Bishop and Lindsay Caplan.Much o the material in this book has been presented in preliminary versions at the Experience Music Projects Pop Con erence. Tanks go to

its ounder, Eric Weisbard, or encouraging me to present work there, evenas this work stands at some remove rom popular music studies. From itsbeginning, Ive enjoyed the Pop Con erence as a meeting point o aca-demics and critics where, to put it broadly, popular- press critics are en-couraged to research in greater depth and academics are encouraged to

communicate their ideas in a more compelling ashion. Ive had the goodortune to receive all manner o eedback rom Pop Con erence partici- pants. In this time o diminishing venues or music criticism in print, the

Pop Con erence has given numerous music writers the impetus to go longand deep. Work rom Records Ruin the Landscape has been presented atthe University o Chicago, the University o Chicago Center in Paris, theSchool o the Art Institute o Chicago, the University o oronto, SanDiego, Purchase, Brooklyn College, and the Graduate Cen-

ter, and I thank the organizers o these events.I am grate ul to the ollowing editors, publishers, and translators: Ken Wissoker, Liz Smith, and Jade Brooks (Duke University Press), Karl Bruck-maier (Sddeutsche Zeitung ), Ray Allen and Jeff aylor ( American Music Review), Steve Erickson ( Black Clock), Pablo La uente ( Aferall ), Julian

Weber ( Die ageszeitung ), and Krystian Woznicki ( Berliner Gazette). Anexcerpt rom the chapter Remove the Records rom exas: Online Re-sources and Impermanent Archives appeared in American Music Review.

Tis book was supported by a - 38 Research Award and an art-ists grant rom the Foundation or Contemporary Arts.Tanks are due to the books gracious interview subjects: the late Derek

Bailey, David Behrman, ony Conrad, John Corbett, Kenneth Gold-smith, Lisa Kahlden, erri Kapsalis, and Keith Rowe. At a crucial pointin this books development, Daniel Pearce appeared out o thin air and volunteered as a research assistant. For their assistance with permissions

or images and or the books epigraph, I thank John Ashbery, Karen

Brookman-Bailey, Gene Caprioglio, Emanuele Carcano, Brunhild Fer-rari, Henry Flynt, Marco Fusinato, Olivier Garros, Kenneth Goldsmith,


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/ xxv

D. J. Hoek, Lisa Kahlden, David Kermani, Jak Kilby, Laura Kuhn and the John Cage rust, Alan Licht, Gregory MacAyeal, Barbara Moore, Rebecca

Moore, C. F. Peters Corporation, Eddie Prvost, Archie Rand, and Su-

zanna amminen and Wesleyan University Press. I also thank Anna Rein-hardt or granting permission to quote rom an unpublished letter romAd Reinhardt to John Cage.

Many o the ideas developed in this book took shape through conversa-tions and communications with the ollowing individuals: Jonah Bokaer,Cosima von Bonin, Angela Bulloch, Jeff Clark, Nicolas Collins, AugustoContento, Christoph Cox, ony Creamer, Kevin Dettmar, Diedrich Die-derichsen, David Duncan, Noam M. Elcott, Brunhild Ferrari, Luc Fer-

rari, Josh Gold ein, Giancarlo Grande, Maxime Guitton, Brian Harnetty,Susan Howe, Clark Johnson, . R. Johnson, Devin Johnston, Ken Kat-kin, Seth Kim-Cohen, Philip Leventhal, Alvin Lucier, Lou Mallozzi,Anthony McCall, Diane Pecknold, Benjamin Piekut, Lorraine Plourde,Ann Powers, Alex Ross, Seth Sanders, Felicity Scott, Barry Shank, BennettSimpson, Yuval aylor, Jay Williams, and Knya Zanatta. I would espe-cially like to thank Cathy Bowman, Branden W. Joseph, and Liz Kotz, whogenerously read and responded to work in progress.

Closer to the home ront, thanks are due to my extraordinarily sup- portive parents, William and Susan Grubbs, as well as to Ruth and RogerBowman.

Tis book is dedicated, with love, to Cathy Bowman and EmmettBowman-Grubbs.


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Introduction

Daniel Charles: Records, according to you,are nothing more than postcards . . . John Cage: Which ruin the landscape.

John Cage and Daniel Charles ,For the Birds

M ost genres in experi-mental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were ill suited to be representedin the orm o a recording. Tese various activitiesincluding indetermi-

nate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live elec-tronic music, ree jazz, and ree improvisationwere not only predicatedon being experienced in live per ormance, but they can also be said to haveactively undermined the orm o the sound recording. Music that changes with each per ormance such that individual realizations cannot necessarilybe recognized as a per ormance o a given work (indeterminate music);music whose unbroken movementsand sometimes unbroken stasisextend ar beyond the twenty-minute length o an side (minimalism);

music that is probably not best served by the category music, and whoseinstructions take the orm o intentionally ambiguous, open-ended, poetic


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instructions and descriptions (text scores); music in which a circuitry dia-gram ofen assumes greater importance than a written score (live elec-tronic music); and music that dispenses with composition altogether and

in some cases is described as a non-idiomatic practice ( ree jazz and reeimprovisation)how could these adequately be represented on an?o the extent that one can generalize about multiple practices that are

ofen grouped together with the terms experimental and avant-garde,this is work intended to be encountered in the time and space o its pro-duction, created by individuals whose relationship toward sound record-ing has ranged rom merely uninterested to positively disdain ul. I amchoosing to use the terms experimental and avant-garde in the collo-

quial manner in which they have tended to be used by musicians and lis-teners rom the 1960s orward. In speci ying what is experimental aboutexperimental music, a amiliar re erence point is John Cages evocationo an act the outcome o which is unknown. In his short text Experi-mental Music, Cage explains that ormerly the term had offended him(It seemed to me that composers knew what they were doing and thatthe experiments that had been made had taken place prior to the nished

works, just as sketches are made be ore paintings), but as his perceptual

ocus shifed rom that o a composer to that o a listener, he ound him-sel adopting it enthusiastically.Unlike recordings o works rom most other genres o music in the

1960s, comparatively ew o the recordings o experimental music that are widely and immediately accessible todaymany o which have becomecanonical representations o this periodcirculated at the time they werecreated. Tere simply was little in the way o the in rastructure that wouldlater emerge or producing and distributing this decidedly noncommercial

work. Te sparse number o releases o experimental music that appearedin the 1960s represents an altogether different landscape o musical ac-tivity rom one that would be recognized by subsequent listeners with ac-cess to archival recordings. Tere are isolated examples o artist-directedrecord labels in the 1960s, notably two series o releases directed byCages colleagues Earle Brown (the Contemporary Sound Series) andDavid Behrman (Columbia Records Music o Our ime), and there wasmuch in ormed critical writing in the period (ofen coming rom musi-

cians and composers themselves), but there was nothing resembling thescale o contemporary networks o distribution and dissemination or


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/ 3

recordings. o give an example, Pauline Oliveros is a composer whose workis currently available on dozens o commercially released recordings, butbe ore 1970 her music was represented exclusively by her contributions to

two Music o Our ime compilation albums: Extended Voices and NewSounds in Electronic Music . Sound Patterns, her piece on Extended Voices,lasts a eeting our minutes. By contrast, to celebrate Oliveross eighti-eth birthday in 2012, Important Records released Reverberations, a twelve-

collection containing more than ten hours o her largely unreleasedtape and electronic music rom the 1960s, beginning with a 1961 work omusique concrte that utilizes recordings made in her bathtub and movingthrough thirty- our works created at the San Francisco ape Music Cen-

ter and early electronic music studios at the University o oronto, MillsCollege, and the University o Cali ornia, San Diego.Te task thus emerges to articulate the conceptual distance between

the creation o this music in the 1960s and its historicization and con-sumption in the present. In Records Ruin the Landscape, I have chosen toapproach experimental music through the medium o sound recordingbecause when this work is experienced todayunlike the time o its cre-ationit is most ofen encountered in the orm o a recording. Tis is not

to deny that many o these works (Cages compositions in particular) arestill being per ormed; rather, it is to emphasize our unprecedented accessto recorded materials rom this earlier period. Many listeners today are in-clined to view these materials as unproblematic representations o experi-mental music rom the 1960s. In Records Ruin the Landscape, I consider

what it means or contemporary listeners to construct narratives o experi-mental music in the 1960s through the lens o recordings.

Te majority o these recordings currently in circulation were initially

made available as archival releases, sur acing years or decades afer theirdate o recording. Te rst small waves o these archival releases appearedon s in the 1970s and 1980s. A more signicant number o releases oc-curred in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s owing to the economicso compact discs, which were inexpensive to produce and which sold ora higher list price than s. In the 1990s, nearly every genre o music sawthe introduction o reissue labels that specialized in repackaged and re-mastered releases o out-o - print recordings. Tis ueled an interest in un-

released archival recordings, and experimental music o the 1960s provedto be a particularly rich, varied, underexplored, and ( rom the perspective


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o numerous record labels) underexploited trove. Te ood o archival re-leases on compact disc in the 1990sat the time it seemed like a ood

has since been eclipsed by the number o archival recordings that are avail-able online, whether as purchasable digital les (primarily through artistsand record labels websites) or, especially, as les made available or stream-ing or download ree o charge (through online resources such as UbuWeb,Archive.org, and countless an sites and 3 blogs).

Te cost o schooling onesel in the more esoteric music o this periodand doing so with access to a vastly greater range o materialshas plum-meted to nothing. Consider the example o recordings o per ormances

by the percussionist and live electronic music pioneer Max Neuhaus. Itused to be that i you were interested in Neuhauss realizations o music

FIGURE INTRO.1. John Cage and Max Neuhaus celebrating the release o the Fontana MixFeed (Mass Art Inc.), December 29, 1966. Photographer unknown.


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by Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Sylvano Bussotti, Earle Brown, and Mor-ton Feldman, you would have had to pay dearly or an out-o - print copy ohis Electronics and Percussion: Five Realizations (1968) rom Columbia

Records Music o Our ime series. Its a marvel that Neuhauss work waseven represented on a major label; surely this ranks as one o the most abra-sive and dynamically extreme records ever released by Columbia. (Neu-hauss per ormance o FeldmansTe King o Denmark is aptly and mar-

velously hushed, and the label did justice to the piece by not signicantlyraising its volume level in the mastering process.) Electronics and Percus- sion remained out o print until it was reissued on compact disc by Sony

Japan in 2003and thus could be had a bit more cheaply than a vintage

FIGURE INTRO.2. Cover o Max Neuhaus, Electronics and Percussion: Five Realizations (Columbia Records).


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copy o the original . In 2003 and 2004, archival releases o previouslyunissued per ormances by Neuhaus appeared on three compact discs re-leased by Alga Marghen, an Italian record label that specializes in archival

editions o avant-garde music. Its Fontana MixFeed contains twounreleased per ormances o Cages Fontana Mix as well as the our per or-mances o Fontana Mix that originally appeared on a 1966 on the ob-scure Mass Art Inc. label, whose distribution was considerably more lim-ited than Neuhauss Columbia rom two years later.

Te result is that instead o there being only the one Cage and oneStockhausen realization on the original Electronics and Percussion , sud-denly there are separate, complete s dedicated to six versions o Cages

Fontana Mix and our versions o Stockhausens Zyklus. Listeners can nowexperience an hours worth o Neuhauss per ormances o a single piece.One can imagine that or Cagethat wry, voluble detractor osthis would have been a pre erable orm or a commercial release: multipleiterations o a single indeterminate composition, showing how the piece

varies rom per ormance to per ormance. (Note that this was the case withthe Mass Art Inc. release o Fontana MixFeed [1966], which con-tains our versions o the piece.) Given Neuhauss employment in Fontana

Mix Feed o contact microphones, loudspeakers, percussion instruments,andcrucially eedback, these realizations were undamentally shapedby the physical environment in which they took place. Neuhaus explains:

Although the execution o the score is identical in each o these per or-mances, the actual sounds that make up each realization are completelydifferent as they are determined by which percussion instruments areused, the acoustics o the room and the position o the mikes in rela-tion to the loudspeakers and the instruments at each specic moment.. . . Te actors here are so complex that even i the piece were to be per-

ormed twice in the same room with the same audience, the same in-struments, and the same loudspeakers, it would have completely differ-ent sound and structures each time. It seems something alive.

Neuhauss description is borne out when comparing six recorded ver-sions o the piece executed on an itinerary that ranged rom the Univer-sity o Chicagos Mandel Hall to the University o Madrid to the Cologne

Studios o Westdeutscher Rund unk.Around the time that Alga Marghen issued its threes o Neuhaus


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per ormances, Kenneth Goldsmiths online resource UbuWeb (www.ubu.com) posted or download, ree o charge, digital versions o the avant-garde multimedia magazine Aspen (one issue o which contains record-

ings o Neuhauss per ormances o Fontana MixFeed and FeldmansTe King o Denmark) as well as an 3 o a previously unreleased, two-hourinteractive radio work by Neuhaus entitled Radio Net . UbuWeb subse-quently posted 3 les o the Columbia Electronics and Percussion ,and the album has been available or download in that orm or nearly adecade. Tus in a ew short years Neuhauss solo percussion and live elec-tronics work went rom being represented to a listening public by two

s that had been out o print or more than three decadesand avail-

able only periodically at exorbitant pricesto many times that number orecordings, including multiple realizations o the same composition, someo which are available at no cost to the listener. Max Neuhaus presents us with just one o numerous examples o an artist whose work was repre-sented by a scant ew commercially released recordings in the 1960sitheir work saw release at all in that decade; Neuhaus appears moderately

well represented on record when compared with others in this periodbut or whom archival releases now provide a signicantly more detailed

and more accessible representation o their musical activities.Music o Our ime and the Contemporary Sound Series were two othe most prominent means by which listeners encountered experimen-tal and avant-garde music on record in the 1960s. From 1967 until 1970,composer and musician David Behrman produced the Music o Our imeseries or Columbia Records and its bargain- priced Odyssey label. As anundergraduate at Harvard in the late 1950s, Behrman met Cage and David

udor through the composers Frederic Rzewski and Christian Wolff.

Behrman is an interestingly polyvalent gure, a pioneer in live electronicmusic with a day job (to be precise, it began in 1965 as an overnight job)at Columbia Records. His rst position at Columbia was as tape editor,and his projects included Robert Crafs recordings o Stravinskys worksas well as recordings by the pianist Glenn Gould. Over the course o Behr-mans three years o directing Music o Our ime, he produced recordingso work by, among others, Cage, Feldman, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oli-

veros, Alvin Lucier, Richard Maxeld, Steve Reich, and erry Riley, whose In C

and A Rainbow in Curved Air

became the most commercially success-ul releases in the series. Te Music o Our imes typically had an initial


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shipment o two thousand copies, and most releases sold between threethousand and six thousand copies in their rst year. Tese composers hada valuable, unique ally in Behrman. Te Music o Our ime per ormances

and productions are consistently inventive and on the mark, the breadtho the series is impressive (o note is its embrace o minimalism), and therecords still unction as icons o the period. Behrman, however, eventu-ally could oresee the end o his tenure at Columbia: Te economic reali-ties started getting through to me. Te people in charge o sales had thisterm dollar return per cubic oot, re erring to record stores. Tats aboutas ar away rom music as you can get. Behrman recently summarizedthis period, remarking, I hope that spirit o the Sixties can remain with

me. Recently Bob Ashley remarked that i he per orms a piece o musicand i afer ve minutes the entire audience hasnt walked out, then he hasailed. I thought that was a good expression o protest against the imposi-

tion these days o mass tastes by the superstar culture we have to live in.Te relatively small number o titles produced by Behrman between

1967 and 1970 should be taken as representative o an American avant-garde only in a narrow sense. But as tips o icebergs go, this one is especiallysharp and glistening, and the legacy o the Columbia Music o Our ime

albums is signicant. Even in their out-o - print status, even with increas-ingly daunting prices or increasingly battereds, they serve an impor-tant unction to the many listeners who come to this music at a later date.

In addition to Music o Our ime, the other most reliable source or experimental and avant-garde music on record at this time was Earle BrownsContemporary Sound Series. Brown, together with Cage, Feldman, andChristian Wolff, is primarily known as one o the New York School ocomposers who employed indeterminacy in works dating rom the 1950s.

Browns innovations in notation resulted in compositions that are strikingor their use o open orm and proportional notation. Brown met Cage in1951, moved to New York the ollowing year, and became involved in theProject or Music or Magnetic ape alongside Cage, udor, and Louisand Bebe Barron. Te project produced CagesWilliams Mix and BrownsOctet I , and the experience o working with tape gave Brown the back-ground he needed to land a job as recording engineer at Capitol Records

rom 1955 to 1960.

From 1960 until 1973, Brown served as producer and (artist andrepertoire) director or the Contemporary Sound Series, a group o re-


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leases that rst appeared on the ime record label, and were subsequentlyreissued when the project resumed on Mainstream Records. Between 1961and 1963, Brown produced ten Contemporary Sound Series albums or

ime that include works by Cage, Feldman, Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel,Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, Lou Harrison, Christian Wolff, and Brownhimsel . Te releases highlight both American and European avant-gardes,and while lacking the distribution o Columbias Music o Our ime, theContemporary Sound Series albums were renowned not only or Brownssure curatorial hand but also or their excellent productions, comprehen-sive liner notes, and adroitly designed gate old sleeves.

In 1970, Mainstream reissued the original ten Contemporary Sound

Series albums, and rom 1970 to 1973, Brown produced an additionaleight s or the series. (Mainstream also produced jazz albums andthe sorts o kitschy, difficult-to-classi y, absurdist hi- demonstrationrecords thatunlike the Contemporary Sound Series albumscan stillbe ound at most any thrif store.) Each o the Contemporary SoundSeries albums on Mainstream contains a straight orward thematic ocus,encapsulated in such titles as New Music or Piano(s), New Music fom Lon-don, and New Music fom South America or Chamber Orchestra. wo o

the most important, unprecedented releases that appeared in the revivedseries on Mainstream are Live Electronic Music Improvised , which appor-tions one side each to and (Musica Elettronica Viva), and Electric Sound , which collects works by the Sonic Arts Union: Alvin Lu-cier, Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman. MainstreamRecords ceased operations in 1978, and the Contemporary Sound Seriestitles went out o print or two decades, until the German Wergo labelbegan reissuing the complete eighteen- series in three- anthologies

in 2009. When asked recently about experimental music on record in the1960s, composer ony Conrad reached back across the decades and pro-

vided valuable context: s or 45s or whatever were so removed rom my worldview in the early Sixties that they were almost irrelevant. . . . It was

almost a miracle, in that sense, to nd that an actual o Stockhausencame on the market. Or that an o Ali Akbar Khan came on the mar-ket. oday that seems very quaint, but at that time it was really ascinat-

ing. Conrad recalled owning recordings o Arnold Schoenbergs musicthat appeared on Dial Records in the early 1950s, as well as hearing but not


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owning Robert AshleysTe Wol man, which was released by the journalSource: Music o the Avant-Garde on a ten-inch disc in 1966. Emphasiz-ing the scarcity o experimental music on record, he concluded, Most o

the recordings that I became involved with and that I cherished were popmusic recordings that had to do with just what was on the radio. I oundthat stuff initially very hard to like. It was a big challenge to like easy listen-ing. Tat was probably the hardest thing that I ever overcame. In a specicsense I set about that effort to learn to like this or that in response to myreadingin quoteso Cage.

/ / /

A number o musicians that Ive spoken to about this project acknowl-edged with reluctance the act that much o their musical activity in the1960s would be known through the medium o the recording. I repeat-edly heard that this was not the spirit in which the music was made, nor in

which the recordings were undertaken. Instead o being the most impor-tant outcome o a musical activity, recordings were ofen made or hire,as documents o group dynamics or o eeting encounters, as a means o

getting gigs, and perhaps eventually to sell at gigs. Keith Rowe, longtimemember o the British ree improvisation group , summed up, Ithink we took that quite seriously as an idea, that recordings werereally undesirable.

I composers and per ormers in this period tended to hold sound record-ings in low esteem, John Cage set the standard or antipathy toward com-mercially released recordings o musical works. Cages disdain or records was legendary. He claimed not to have any in his home and repeatedly

spoke o the ways in which records were antithetical to his work. In 1985,he told an interviewer, I dont use records, and I give the example o some-one who lives happily without records. He went on to describe recordsas destroy[ing] ones need or real music. [Tey] make people think thattheyre engaging in a musical activity when theyre actually not. Cages

position cannot be written off as the irritable affectations o an older composer; on January 17, 1950, he wrote in a letter to Pierre Boulez, I am start-ing a society called Capitalists Inc (so that we will not be accused o being

Communists); everyone who wants to join has to show he has destroyed


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not less than 100 discs o music or one sound recording device; also every-one who joins automatically becomes President.

Cages disparagement o records is complicated by a number o basic

acts about his career. He was one o the rst composers to work in themedium o magnetic tape; he was an early and inuential theorist otape opening up a total eld o sound (in the per ormance text 45 or aSpeaker [1954], he notes, Te most enlivening thing / about magnetictape is this: whether we actually do it or not, everything / we do do, say

what were doing, is affected radically, / by it); he was a pioneer o usingrecords in per ormances; he participated in recordings o his works, bothas a per ormer and as a supervisor; and even afer his death in 1992, his

works are sufficiently amenable to the medium o recorded sound to makehim one o the most widely recorded composers o the twentieth century.On the one hand Cages opposition to the xed orm o the record, the

tedium o the medium, could not be more straight orward. It is the expres-sion o a pioneer o works that are indeterminate as regards per ormance,

works that on the basis o their design change signicantly with each itera-tionexcept when they are instantiated in the orm o a recording. One

undamental objection: records dont change. Cage viewed sound record-

ing (the revelation o magnetic tape or him being the potential o work-ing with all sound) andrecords (as objects, as commodities, and above allas xed representations o musical works) as undamentally different enti-ties. For Cage, magnetic tape and commercially released records serveda shared purpose only when treated as a means o manipulating sound, whether through editing and superimposing magnetic tape or throughcollaging and overlaying multiple records in per ormance. Later on in the present book we will see what Derek Bailey meant when he said in an inter-

view, Recordings ne i it wasnt or ucking records. Its difficult toimagine Cage expressing himsel in precisely these words, although thesentiment might have been much the same.

But one also would have expected Cage to acknowledge the potentialembodied by the record as a medium o communication across geographicdistances, to say nothing o time. Cage was an exceptional, tireless corre-spondent and a cheer ully committed internationalist who maintained a vast network o contacts. Tis is the person whose second collection o

writings, A Year fom Monday

, is dedicated o us and all those who hate


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us, that the U.S.A. may become just another part o the world, no more,no less.

Cage demonstrated his dislike o recordsand his contention that his

work is antithetical to the orm o the recordin an instructive writtenexchange in March 1967 with Wesleyan University Press production editorRaymond M. Grimaila. Grimailas proposed cover design or A Year fom Monday eatures a circular pattern with concentric rings that looks likea stylized representation o an. In a letter to Cage accompanying themock-up, he explains, As you can see, I am alluding to music and sound byhaving the graphic design su est a record jacket. Cages response couldnot be more characteristic: I can see that the jacket design is interesting,

but I think the direction taken is not in the spirit o my work which is rela-tively speaking asymmetrical and un ocused. Tis wd. work or La MonteYoung. I would like (seriously) the book title, the line

and my signature printed boldly in three differenttype aces over (pre erably) a map o Mexico or over a calendar or the year1967 or 8 or 1972 (the end o the present critical period) or 2000.

Records may not change, but they do travel. Te record allows or thedistribution o organized as well as disorganized sound. Te record, un-

like the conventionally notated musical score, presents itsel as the dreammedium or the type o individuals that the British composer CorneliusCardew described as people who by some uke have . . . escaped a musi-cal education and . . . have nevertheless become musicians, i.e. play musicto the ull capacity o their beings. Te record is the medium wherethe dichotomies o musician/nonmusician and pro essional/amateur lose

orceexcept when reasserted or the risson o crudeness, or reveling inthe status o the pro oundly amateur or the strikingly nonmusical. How-

ever, lest the preceding quotation would lead you to believe that Cardewhimsel was writing appreciatively o sound recordings, note that later inthe same essay he argues, regarding improvisation, Documents such astape-recordings o improvisation are essentially empty, as they preservechiey the orm that something took and give at best an indistinct hint asto the eeling and cannot o course convey any sense o time and place.

From the perspective o a number o composers and musicians romthis period, it could well seem that, as in the excerpt rom John Ashberys

prose poem Te System (1972), which provides this books epigraph,


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FIGURE INTRO.3. Raymond Grimailas rejected book cover design or JohnCages A Year fom Monday (Wesleyan University Press), March 1967. John Cage

Correspondence, Northwestern University Library Music Library, Evanston, Illinois,Box 7, Folder 1, Sleeve 2. Courtesy Northwestern University Library and WesleyanUniversity Press.


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the rejected chapters have taken over. Recordings that were not previ-ously central to the tale have increasingly become the content o the tell-ing as well as the medium by which it is told. Te angel that, in Ashberys

poem, has begun to dominate the whole story stands revealed as theRecording Angel, and the resulting mountain o data [that] threatens usseems, at present, more or less sel -explanatory.

/ / /

Chapter 1, Henry Flynt on the Air, considers the idiosyncratic composer and musician Henry Flynt as an emblematic gure or this study as a

whole. Apart rom an obscure cassette released in West Germany in 1986,Flynts music did not see commercial release until the turn o the twenty-rst century. Starting in 2001, several independent record labels quickly published ten compact discs o archival recordings o Flynts sel -describedavant-garde hillbilly music, but prior to these releases listeners interestedin the history o 1960s musical avant-gardes knew Flynt primarily as an in-triguingly enigmatic ootnote.

Henry Flynt on the Air argues that successive generations have come

to view musical genres and hierarchies in more uid and less genuec-tive ways, and that this is due in part to listeners unprecedented access torecordings. In 1961, some o the remaining scales ell rom the young musi-cian Henry Flynts eyes when he realized that John Cage was proud o hisignorance o popular music. Four decades later, in a 2004 radio interview,Flynt sounds particularly surprised to hear Kenneth Gold-smith say, Nobody thinks twice about listening to country, blues, andavant-garde music today. Its quite natural to like everything. In the

radio conversation with Goldsmith, Flynt speaks rom experience whenhe takes it as a given that most people who admire the music o John Cageor Karlheinz Stockhausen would have little interest in blues, jazz, rock, or

various kinds o country music. But Goldsmith also speaks rom experi-ence when he argues that the current audience or experimental and avant-garde music takes pleasure in a signicantly broader range o musical stylesthan was true in the early 1960s, when an active hostility to olk and pop

orms compelled Flynt to protest the orthodoxies o avant-garde music.

Te three- hour radio broadcast with Flynt can now be down-loaded as an 3 le rom UbuWeb. Te ease o access to this recording


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illustrates a simple act that undergirds Records Ruin the Landscape: musicthat was accessible only to small, geographically concentrated groups oindividuals in the 1960s can now be heard by what would have been an in-

comprehensibly broad, dispersed audience. John Cage stands as the most inuential gure or the various stripes oexperimentalism covered in this project. A signature challenge or a num-ber o younger composers and musicians in this period was to move beyond Cages legacy, and this was true o artists involved in Fluxus, minimal-ism, live electronic music, and ree improvisation. Chapter 2, Landscape with Cage, delineates the space around Cage at this timehis curiouscelebrityas it details the numerous elds and practices that had their

moment o coming to his work in the 1960s. Te rst hal o the chapter presents an overview o these various disciplines in which one discovers allmanner o responses to Cages example. In addition to music, the presenceo Cages work can be elt in, among other elds, visual art, poetry, dance,and philosophy. In the second hal o the chapter, I look closely at a single work that creatively engages with Cages legacy: Luc Ferraris tape piece Presque rien ou le lever du jour au bord de la mer (Almost Nothing, or Day-break at the Seaside; 196770). Tis work o aural landscape is o particu-

lar relevance to Records Ruin the Landscape as its conversation with Cageis enacted on the terrain o recorded sound. John Cage ulminated against records. He would not have them in hishome. Still, he continued to make them. Chapter 3, John Cage, Record-ing Artist, considers the impact that Cages commercially released albumshad on a generation that began producing work in the 1960s. What roledid records play in making John Cage the gure he was to become in the1960s? How were his works disseminated in this period? What innova-

tions resulted rom his attempts to overcome the xed medium o therecord? What did Cages listeners get that his readers did not? Tis chap-ter describes the signicance o three o his albums:Te 25-Year Retro- spective Concert o John Cage, Indeterminacy, and John Cage / ChristianWolff . While stylistically and strategically all over the map, these albumshave proved particularly inuentialeven as Cage expressed ambivalencetoward the medium o recorded sound.

In John Cage, Recording Artist, Cages attitudes toward recording are

analyzed in the context o chance as it has been postulated with photog-raphy, sound recording, and cinema. Te experience o chance in moder-


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nity has requently been invoked with re erence to these media, and in-dexical modes o representation such as these have been seen as ideal to thetask o representing chance. Sound recording captures the error and the

otherwise-unrepeatable, and recordings make accidents happen. Beyond a period o ascination with magnetic tape, why didnt Cage, with his inter-est in chance, nonintentionality, technological innovation, and sound assuch, gravitate toward these phenomena in recordings o musical works?

In chapter 4, Te Antiques rade: Free Improvisation and RecordCulture, John Cage nds a match or his wit in the person o guitaristDerek Bailey. Cage and Bailey are an unlikely pair to contemplatethecomposer and the improviser; comings-o -age in the south o Cali ornia

and the north o England; the student o Schoenberg and the dance-band jazz guitarist who took to Webern; the score-maker and the score-ignorer;the contemplative advocate o silenceand conversely o all soundandthe contemplative advocate o a li etime o mastering a single instrument.Cage and Bailey, polarizers both, are inuential gures who could alwaysbe counted on to provide withering words about encountering their workin recorded orm. And yet they are both among the most widely recordedartists in their eldselds largely o their creations.

In Te Antiques rade, Derek Baileys efforts are considered along -side those o , the pioneering, still-extant ree-improvisation groupthat was ounded in 1965 and that has included Eddie Prvost, KeithRowe, Cornelius Cardew, and John ilbury among its members. isa group that once described its music as apparently unsuited to mechani-cal reproduction. Like Henry Flynt, plays an intriguing role withregard to the ringes o popular music o the 1960s. In this chapter, I tracethe history o s album AMMMusic (1966), taking into account the

group members subsequent writings about ree improvisation and soundrecording, especially in the context o the release decades later o an ex- panded version o AMMMusic on compact disc.

Chapter 5, Remove the Records rom exas: Online Resources and Im- permanent Archives, considers the dramatic change in access to archival

recordings that has taken place through the online dissemination o digitalles. In this chapter, I argue that online resources have begun to affect the very category o the archive, and I provide analyses o two particularly inu-

ential and structurally distinct online resources. Te rst o these is (originally the Database o Recorded American Music), a subscription-


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based project that is rigorous in securing permissions or its holdings. Itsorty thousand tracks are available as streaming audio; it charges a sub-

scription ee, but the site is unded primarily through grants rom insti-

tutions. can be seen as an extension into the digital domain o anambitious series o s produced in the mid-1970s by the Recorded An-thology o American Music. Te second analysis ocuses on UbuWeb, anonline collection that does not seek permissions, does not raise money,and does not charge a ee to its users, but instead operates through tac-tical alliances with an ensemble o institutions that provide bandwidthand server space. UbuWeb ounder Kenneth Goldsmith recently titled anonline posting I We Had to Ask or Permission, We Wouldnt Exist,

and this summation provides a starting point to discussing this controver-sial entity. As with many other online resources, UbuWeb and canbe understood as contributing to the ongoing trans ormation o listenersmeans o historicizing experimental music rom the 1960s.


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Notes

PREFACE

1. Quoted in Watson, Derek Bailey and the Story o Free Improvisation, 424.

2. See Sun Ra, Nothing Is ( -Disk 1045 ) and Sun Ra and His IntergalacticResearch Arkestra, Its A er the End o the World ( 2120748 ).

3. Not only did Morton Feldmans work benet rom the introduction o thecompact disc, but it was also some o the rst music that made use o theextended duration afforded by the . In 2002, Mode Records released a

containing a recording, without interruptions, o the Quartetssix-hour and seven-minute per ormance o FeldmansString Quartet No. 2.Te piece was written in 1983, but it wasnt given a ull per ormance until1999, when the youth ulathletic Quartet became the rst to cross

the nish line o this musical marathon. Te Kronos Quartet had rehearsedit, but eventually came to regard its physical barriers to live per ormance asinsurmountable and never per ormed the work in its entirety. See MortonFeldman / Quartet,String Quartet No. 2 (Mode 112 ). When audio technology appeared, it brought to music what the gargantuan art ex-hibition spaces that appeared in the same decadethe ate Moderns ur-bine Hall, the Bilbao Gu enheimbrought to visual art. Both represent im-mense containers that dwar older efforts and encourage younger musiciansand artists to create works on a larger, altogether different scale.

4. Te note regarding the appropriate playback volume appears on MortonFeldman, Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello (hat 6158 ).

5. In a seminar on John Cages music and aesthetics, I once invited a number ostudents to per orm several iterations o 433 . With each subsequent per or-mance, owing to the quietness o the sounds, I ound my aural attention less o-cused on happenstance occurrences and more focused on the distance that thesesmall sounds had to travel to reach my ears. Relying on my ears alone, a smallclassroom briey assumed un amiliarsurprisingly expandeddimensions.

6. See John Cage,Works for Piano and Prepared Piano, Volume I (19431952)

(Wergo 60151-50 ).


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7. An example o the power o an album to evoke the historical valence o asingle day can be ound in Douglas Wolks book-length study o JamesBrowns Live at the Apollo. Wolk explains to contemporary readers that onOctober 24, 1962, the members o the ecstatic audience that plays such a cru-cial role on this live album (James Brown: I wanna hear you scream! Audi-ence: !!) were also confronting their own mortality while theCuban missile crisis played out. See Wolk, Live at the Apollo.

8. Quoted in Bailey, Improvisation, 115. 9. See Howlin Wol ,Te Howlin Wol Album (Cadet Concept -319 ).

Tis notoriously divisive albumwith Howlin Wol himsel evidentlyamong its detractors ound the blues legend in the company o a numbero younger Chicago musicians, including the wild, Hendrix-inspired guitaristPete Cosey, an early member who would go on to play in Miles Davissmid-1970s electric groups. Tis counts as one o the more extreme exampleso an artists dissatis action with a recordingand a record labels stunningcondescensionbeing played out in public.

INTRODUCTION

1. Regarding the term avant-garde, I value Peter Brgers distinctions betweenthe historical avant-garde and modernism in terms o the ormers assaults onthe institutions o art, but in using the term avant-garde music to describe

work rom the 1960s, I do so in recognition o the amiliar usage o the termin this period. See Brger,Teory o the Avant-Garde. Amy C. Beal identi-es a tradition o American experimental music that is characterized by twomajor phases. Te rst o these includes stylistically diverse composers suchas Charles Ives, Carl Ru les, Henry Cowell, Edgard Varse, Ruth Craw ord,and John Cage, who orged a tradition in large part through the creation osel -organized networks o patronage, per ormance, and publishing (Beal, New Music, New Allies, 2). On this rst phase o American experimentalism,see Nicholls, American Experimental Music, 18901940. Te second phase oexperimental composition dates rom the latter hal o the twentieth centuryand is notable within new music or the pursuit o compositional techniquesthat derive neither rom Stravinskys neoclassicism nor rom the serialism othe Second Viennese School; or works that resist accepted orms o musicalanalysis; and or a tradition o composers per orming their own music. SeeBeal, Introduction: West Germany and the American Experimental radi-tion, New Music, New Allies, 17. Like Beal, Benjamin Piekut describes ex-

perimentalism as a network, one that is arranged and abricated throughthe hard work o composers, critics, scholars, performers, audiences, students,and a host o other elements including texts, scores, articles, curricula, pa-


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tronage systems, and discourses o race, gender, class, and nation (Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 19). Piekuts per ormative ontology o the termexperimental traces its uses in the 1960s and extends beyond the bound-aries o new music. See Piekut, Introduction: What Was Experimentalism?, Experimentalism Otherwise, 119. For analyses o race and identity ormation

with regard to the terms experimental and ree improvisation, see Lewis, A Power Stronger Tan Itsel and Gittin to Know Yall .

2. Cage, Experimental Music: Doctrine,Silence, 13. 3. Cage, Experimental Music,Silence, 7. A quarter o a century afer the pub-

lication o Silence, composer Robert Ashley observed that, in music, the termexperimental had reverted to signi ying the untried, untested, and perhapsuntrustworthy: Te term experimental, which has become so common-

place that we are willing to overlook what it does to our morale, came romSilence, but Cage coined the word there with a meaning, the purpose o which

was entirely different rom the one used now (Ashley, Music with Roots in the Aether , 16).

4. See Extended Voices: New Pieces or Chorus and Voices Altered Electronically bySound Synthesizers and Vocoder (Odyssey 32 16 0156 ) and New Sounds in Electronic Music (Odyssey 32 16 0160 ).

5. See Pauline Oliveros, Reverberations: ape & Electronic Music, 19611970 (Im- portant Records , 12 s).

6. See Max Neuhaus, Electronics and Percussion: Five Realizations (Columbia 7139 ).

7. Tese releases are Max Neuhaus, Fontana MixFeed (Alga Marghen 044 ), Zyklus (Alga Marghen 054 ), andTe New York School (Alga Marghen 052 ).Te New York School contains multiple real-izations o Earle Browns Four SystemsFor Four Amplied Cymbals, MortonFeldmansTe King o Denmark, and Cages 2710.554.

8. See Max Neuhaus and John Cage, Fontana MixFeed (Mass Art Inc. -133).

9. Neuhaus, liner notes to Fontana MixFeed . 10. In the 1960s, Behrman himsel had only one piece appear on record:Wave

rain was included on aSource compilation in 1966. His Runthrough (1968)appears on the Sonic Arts Unions album Electric Sound (1972; Mainstream

-5010 ). Te rst ull album dedicated to Behrmans music wasOn theOther Ocean (Lovely Music 1041), released in 1977. Since then, there havebeen three ull-length releases o new work, plus an anthology o archivalrecordings,Wave rain (Alga Marghen 020 ). When asked about

John Cages dismissive attitude toward records, Behrman remarked, Like alot o Cage, hes absolutely right, but it doesnt mean that the opposite isntalso absolutely right. Tats what Ive taken away rom Cage with that realiza-


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tion. Cage didnt like dualistic thinking. Behrman cites David Tudor as some-one who most likely shared Cages attitudes about recording, and yet who ap-

proached the task o recording with the utmost thoroughness and attentionto detail (David Behrman, interview with the author, March 10, 2004).

11. Cited in Kenneth Goldsmith, David Behrman: Composer as Record Execu-tive, New Music Box , 2000, http://www.w mu.org/~kennyg/popular/articles/behrman.html, accessed July 30, 2012.

12. Behrman, interview with the author. 13. Teresa Stern, Interview with David Behrman, Per ect Sound Forever , Au-

gust 1997, http://www. urious.com/per ect/behrman.html, accessed July 30,2012.

14. See Hoek, Documenting the International Avant Garde, 351. 15. See Corbett, Contemporary Sound Series, 18. 16. Te Contemporary Sound Series ultimately represented orty-eight com-

posers and sixteen countries. See Hoek, Documenting the InternationalAvant Garde, 353.

17. See / , Live Electronic Music Improvised (Mainstream -5002 ). 18. ony Conrad, interview with the author, March 13, 2009. An edited version o

this interview appeared as Grubbs, Always at the End. In the same interview,Conrad noted, In 1965, I cant even tell you who would have been making a rec-ord. I dont know. At that time I wouldnt have even had the money to buy them.

19. SeeSource, ed. Austin and Kahn.Te Wolfman has been reissued onSource Records 16: Music o the Avant Garde, 19681971 (Pogus Productions 210502,3 s) and Robert Ashley,Te Wol man (Alga Marghen 048 ).

20. Conrad, interview with the author. 21. Keith Rowe, interview with the author, February 8, 2003. 22. Quoted rom Peter Greenaways lm 4 American Composers: John Cage

(1985), in Swed, Te Cage Record, 8 . I rst encountered these quotationsin one, John Cage and Recording, 11.

23. Nattiez,Te Boulez-Cage Correspondence, 5051. 24. Cage, 45 for a Speaker,Silence, 185. Cages rst piece to use records is Imagi-

nary Landscape No. 1 (1939), or two variable-speed turntables, requencyrecordings, muted piano, and cymbal. His rst work or magnetic tape isWil-liams Mix (1952), or eight single-track or our double-track tapes.

25. For a reading o Cages 433 as overdetermined by its relation to then-newtechnologies o sound recording and sound production, see Kotz,Words to Be Looked At , 14.

26. Quoted in Watson, Derek Bailey and the Story o Free Improvisation, 413. 27. Cage, A Year fom Monday. 28. Grimailas letter o March 1, 1967, to Cage and Cages March 3 response are

located in the archival collection John Cage Correspondence, Northwestern


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University Library Music Library, Evanston, Illinois, Box 7, Folder 1, Sleeves 2and 5. Permission to quote rom Cages letter granted by the John Cage rust.

29. Cardew, owards an Ethic o Improvisation,reatise Handbook. 30. Cardew, owards an Ethic o Improvisation. 31. Goldsmith, Henry Flynt Interviewed by Kenneth Goldsmith on ,

February 26, 2004. 32. For more on Henry Flynts dissident relations to the avant-garde music scenes

o New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1960s, see Joseph,Concept Art, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 153212; Piekut, aking HenryFlynt Seriously and Demolish Serious Culture! Henry Flynt Meets theNew York Avant-Garde, Experimentalism Otherwise, 65101; and Flynt, LaMonte Young in New York, 196062.

33. Quoted in a brochure included in the boxed set ,Te Crypt12th June1968 (Matchless 5, 2 s).

ONE. HENRY FLYNT ON THE AIR

1. In February 2008, Flynt returned to live music per or