Egocentric Predicaments: Charles Olson and the New York School of Music

This essay examines a conjunction between literary and music aesthetics in the early postwar American avant-garde. In 1950, Charles Olson and the New York School of music both began to address what Olson called the “egocentric predicament” — the monadic singularity of the creating artist and his unwanted presence in the work of art. In attempting to overcome this egocentric predicament, Olson and the New York School imagined a similar kind of aurality, one that posited sounds as impersonal objects disposed across unmediated “fields.” Attending to this conjunction brings the early postwar avant-garde into new focus: against the lyric expressivism of New York School painting, the auditory half of the avant-garde can be defined by its very resistance to subjective egocentrism.