Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits by Benjamin Piekut (review)

One of the recurring ironies of music history in the later twentieth century is that certain trends that arose outside of traditional repertoires, styles, and institutions struggled so mightily to establish a sense of legitimacy that their ultimate acceptance as “serious” art sometimes served to reinforce the same meta-narratives of canon that had previously excluded them. As our perspective on these trends widens with time, careful historiographic thinking becomes increasingly important.

Benjamin Piekut’s illuminating study, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, doesn’t exactly propose a history, or a corrective to history, of “experimentalism.” Rather, Piekut presents the notion of experimentalism itself as a historiographic undertaking as well as a compositional one. “How have these composers been collected together in the first place, that they can now be the subject of a description? … Experimentalism is a grouping, not a group” (6). Experimentalism, Piekut insists, is not something that is simply identified or described, but—for musician and historian alike—something that is performed.

Piekut’s approach draws on Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, or ANT. Some readers may be unengaged by the granularity with which Piekut applies ANT, but even those who grow impatient with the theoretical and the methodological will still be left with a rigorous and deftly interdisciplinary examination. This type of study “rejects the separation of text from context ab initio,” and “abandon(s) the limit of limit.” In other words, Piekut explains, it “disregard[s] any artificial and normative separations among fields and actors and embrac[es] the messy assemblages that result” (8–9). According to this approach, “we can understand experimentalism itself as a kind of composition, a putting together of people, institutions, sounds, and discourses” (14).

This might initially seem like an elaborate apparatus on Piekut’s part for connecting accounts that otherwise may not all appear musically related enough to share the same bookbinding. The one obvious commonality is that four of these take place in 1964: the New York Philharmonic’s infamously antagonistic encounter with John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis, Henry Flynt’s public demonstrations against the “cultural imperialism” and “snob art” of Karlheinz Stockhausen, composer and trumpeter Bill Dixon’s launch of the October Revolution in Jazz festival and the short-lived Jazz Composers Guild, and Charlotte Moorman’s premiere of Cage’s 26’ 1.1499” for a String Player and subsequent transgressive realizations of the piece. (A fifth story, presented as an epilogue, spills over into later years: Robert Ashley’s 1964 premiere of his piece The Wolfman, which, when performed later in Ann Arbor, became an apparent inspiration for Iggy Pop.)

Piekut’s application of ANT is indeed meticulous, and sometimes a little viscous, but only on occasion does his theoretical scaffolding seem excessive. His approach ultimately yields an illuminating, wide-ranging, and surprisingly cohesive study. Although a number of timely topics—race, politics, gender, the sexual revolution—figure into his narratives, two recurring themes draw his studies together: contention and failure. Each chapter examines the controversies, disagreements, and ultimately the various kinds of failures that characterize the event in question. Piekut’s reasoning for this approach offers a clever historiographic perspective: “As markers of limits, failures indicated the areas that lie beyond the New York avant-garde, as well as the varied means through which the resulting experimentalist formation gained strength and stability” (176).

The examination of Cage’s encounter with Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic artfully draws together observations about details in the score, documentation of performance practices, accounts of technical and managerial matters, insights from extensive oral histories, and analyses of Cage’s politics. Piekut’s approach leads him to challenge typical political narratives about Cagean indeterminacy by examining the actual dynamics of power within the performance context of Atlas Eclipticalis. Similarly, in his chapter on cellist Charlotte Moormon’s realizations of Cage’s 26’ 1.1499...