Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies

2. John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego

39 John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego Ryan Dohoney 1. John Cage composed his mammoth musical anthology Song Books in 1970 for the vocalist-composer Cathy Berberian and vocalist Simone Rist. Premiered in Paris at the Theâtre de la Ville that year, Song Books was subsequently taken up by the Buffalo-based S.E.M. Ensemble, led by composer-flutist Petr Kotik. The group performed versions of the piece regularly from 1971 to 1975 and again in its complete form in 1982. After a number of well-received performances, Morton Feldman invited the group to perform Song Books at his first June in Buffalo festival on June 4, 1975. Kyle Gann recalled the performance in a 1988 Village Voice review of writings on Cage. Julius Eastman (a fine composer/performer and a gay activist) used the direction “Give a lecture” as a pretext to undress a male student onstage and gesture sexually. Cage’s reaction was inscrutable, but the next day, the man whom no one could imagine even swatting a fly fumed, in impressively subdued tones, about the difference between liberty and license. Unbelievably, he banged his fist on the piano and shouted (or perhaps only paraphrased) the too-little-famous words that appear in caps in his book A Year from Monday: “PERMISSION GRANTED. BUT NOT TO DO WHATEVER YOU WANT.”1 With some variation, this is how the story circulates. Eastman defied the composer’s instructions, sexualized the Song Books, and provoked the ire of Cage, who uncharacteristically erupted in a fit of rage. The S.E.M. Ensemble ’s performance raises important problems for critically approaching the 40 • tomorrow is the question US experimental tradition. I will explore two of them in this essay. First, an immediate question might be, “Who is Julius Eastman?” or, more to the point, “What would it mean to take a minor figure like Eastman seriously as part of the history of U.S. experimentalism?” Eastman is perhaps best known as a vocalist and particularly for his star turn on the first recording of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King.2 Since his death in 1990, he has experienced a small revival and become known as an eclectic and affecting composer, thanks due in large part to composer Mary Jane Leach.3 In order to take Eastman seriously, I’ll reconstruct the events of the S.E.M. Ensemble’s Song Books performance of 1975 and his role in it. In doing so I’ll argue that Eastman gives us a view on a tradition of queer experimental music that affords us an opportunity to reconfigure “experimentalism ” as a production of subjectivity that joins the sonic and the erotic. Both Eastman and Cage were part of a network of gay and lesbian experimental musicians going back to the 1930s. Each experimented with sound and sexuality in conflicting ways—Cage with a so-called homosexual aesthetic and Eastman with a queer experimentalism. Each composer strategically managed sexuality as part of his practice, and both exemplify historically contingent modes of gay subjectivity performed through music. 2. Feldman inaugurated his June in Buffalo festival in 1975 and envisioned it in part as a US counterpart to the Darmstadt summer composition courses. At the first June in Buffalo festival, Feldman celebrated his own experimental tradition with a series of concerts devoted to the “New York School,” including the music of Cage, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, and himself. The festival was based at the State University of New York at Buffalo and featured the musicians of the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, known colloquially as the Creative Associates. Throughout its history, lasting from 1964 to 1980, the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts was the first major academic home for experimental music in the United States. Given startup funds by the Rockefeller Foundation, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, and given support and performance space by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery , the Center became renowned its performances and was a space of cultural exchange among Europe, the United States, and Japan. The international character of the Center was maintained through a frequently changing group of US, European, and Asian musicians, and the Center participated in the sort of cultural diplomacy and exercise of soft power John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego • 41 that characterized much state-supported cultural...