Reflections on Performing Ben Patterson’s “Paper Piece”

Late in the summer of 2011, George Lewis sent an essay to the members of the “Music as Translation” panel entitled “In Search of Ben Patterson.” A meditation on his long-standing interest in this composer, classical double bassist, arts organizer, and one of the few black members of the Fluxus movement, George’s piece arrived, as most things do these days, electronically, as a Microsoft Word attachment. I had recently succumbed to the latest consumer craze, and I first read the essay on my iPad, highlighting important passages by simply gliding my index finger across the glass screen, leaving a trace of cloudy grease and salt as the silent yet oddly material supplement to the on-screen yellow “pen” marks. I had studied the Fluxus movement in a course on American Minimalist Music years ago, but had never once heard of Ben Patterson, and George’s account of meeting him after years of searching became my own discovery. As an undergraduate piano performance major, I had struggled mightily with an inarticulable sense that somehow the hours spent practicing Bach, Schumann, Prokofiev, or even George Walker were drawing me further away from the project of understanding my own history and political place in the world, a project that seemed more obviously served by reading Ama Ata Aidoo or Maria Stewart, or teaching Toni Morrison in a state correctional facility. Over the years I’d learned to draw fewer boundaries between interests, and reading of Patterson’s own capacious journeys and creations was an inspiring reminder of the serious intellectual work that performers and composers do, and of how close that work is to poetry and the other textual forms we literary types spend so much time with.

It has become second nature to “google” any new discovery, and so I quickly found that there was a rich web archive of Ben Patterson’s 2011 residency at the Studio Museum of Harlem and Valerie Cassel Oliver’s retrospective of Patterson at the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston in 2010 available online, as well as footage of interviews with him, copies of scores for some of his early procedure pieces, and even streaming video and audio of performances. One piece important to both Lewis’s essay and to Patterson’s oeuvre was “Paper Piece.” As he reflects in a recent artist statement:

This work cut the umbilical cord to all of my previous classical and contemporary musical training and experience. The process had begun during my first encounter with John Cage at Mary Bauermeister’s “Contre Festival” (May 1960 in Cologne). Three months later, my reaction to the first performance of Stockhausen’s “Kontakte” made the completion of this process an urgent necessary. “Paper Piece” was completed in September 1960 and received its first performance at Galerie Lauhus, Cologne on May 14, 1961. However, despite my reasonably precise instructions (see score reproduced here: http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/bpatterson-paperpiece.html), beginning with the first Fluxus festival concerts in 1962, “Paper Piece” grew a life of its own. It literally began enveloping and involving entire audiences in a wonderfully messy happening.”

(Patterson)

So why perform “Paper Piece” (written in 1960 in Köln, Germany) when there were at least three very different performances of the work available online? What can one learn by doing that one cannot learn by watching, listening, or pushing play?

1. There may be no such thing as free lunch, but brown paper bags still don’t cost anything

The score for Patterson’s piece instructs performers to do four different sets of procedures on a total of fifteen sheets of paper and three paper bags. During the two days of the conference before the music panel, my colleague and good friend Alain Lawo-Sukam of the Texas A&M Department of Hispanic Studies showed me around campus and helped me gather all sorts of paper products—cookie bags in the cafeteria, newspapers, glossy advertisement inserts, plain white copy-machine paper. Even in these times of economic crisis, one sign of the US university’s comparative wealth is the sheer plenitude of paper products...