Forthcoming from Oxford University Press:

Through The Looking Glass: John Cage and Avant-Garde Cinema

This manuscript examines John Cage’s interactions and collaborations with avant-garde and experimental filmmakers, and in turn seeks out the implications of the audiovisual experience for the overall aesthetic surrounding Cage’s career. As the commercially dominant media form in the twentieth century, cinema transformed the way listeners were introduced to and consumed music. In film, music became stratified, exposed in fragments, and devoid of any sort of unity that a traditional concert setting provided. In addition, the effacement of music within the larger context of narrative further diminished individualistic musical expression. Cage’s quest to redefine music, intentionality, and expression reflect the similar transformation of music within the larger audiovisual experience of sound film. I examine key moments in Cage’s career where cinema either informed or transformed his position on the nature of sound, music, expression, and the ontology of the musical artwork. This is not an exhaustive history of Cage’s influence on filmmakers’ approaches to filmmaking, nor is it a complete history of Cage’s work with filmmakers throughout his career. The examples I have chosen to highlight point to moments of rupture within Cage’s own consideration of the musical artwork, and I argue that these instances have a significant and heretofore unacknowledged role in Cage’s notions of the audiovisual experience and the medium-specific ontology of a work of art.

Breaking the Sound Barrier: Transparency and Cinematic Space in Works of Calder (1950) and Jackson Pollock 51'

Contemporary Music Review LINK

In the early 1950s John Cage and Morton Feldman were commissioned to score documentary films on two significant American artists: Cage for the Herbert Matter documentary on sculptor Alexander Calder, and Feldman for the Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg documentary on Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock. Both artists saw these commissions as opportunities to formalize connections between their compositional approaches to sound and the visual approach to space, kinetic movement, and ground revealed in the time-based poetics of the moving image. Examination of archival documents from these film commissions, including original scores and correspondence, reveals numerous parallels between the New York schools of music and visual arts. Both films predate the radical shift in Cagean esthetics by only a year, and the commissions provided a self-conscious examination of the artistic ‘intermedia’ connections between auditory and visual approaches to a work of art.

Keywords: John Cage; Morton Feldman; Jackson Pollock; Herbert Matter; Alexander Calder; Kinetic Sculpture; Film Music

"Zen for TV? Nam June Paik’s “Global Groove” and “A Tribute to John Cage” (1973)"

Leonardo Electronic Almanac LINK

This essay examines Nam June Paik’s 1973 documentary, A Tribute to John Cage, in the context of identity politics and technological discourse surrounding video technology. In Paik’s tribute, Cage is seen less as a commanding figure of the American neo-avant-garde than as the solitary sage witnessing the transformation of his aesthetic by a new generation of artists and composers. Paik had witnessed Cage’s rise from ‘gadfly to guru’ in the New York Downtown music scene during the 1960s, and his documentary perspective exemplifies the multifarious interpretations of Cage’s aesthetic of chance, indeterminacy, and Zen Buddhism. In conjunction with his single-channel video work, Global Groove, Paik’s approach to video subverted the traditional codes of commercial documentary television through fast-paced segments, commenting on the concept of televisual ‘flow’ and highlighting the mechanical apparatus of television technology.

"Reading Cage," American Music Review, Vol. XLII, No. 1 (Fall 2012) LINK

The Spirit inside Each Object: John Cage, Oskar Fischinger, and “The Future of Music”

Journal of the Society for American Music LINK

Late in his career, John Cage often recalled his brief interaction with German abstract animator Oskar Fischinger in 1937 as the primary impetus for his early percussion works. Further examination of this connection reveals an important technological foundation to Cage’s call for the expansion of musical resources. Fischinger’s experiments with film phonography (the ma- nipulation of the optical portion of sound film to synthesize sounds) mirrored contemporaneous refinements in recording and synthesis technology of electron beam tubes for film and television. New documentation on Cage’s early career in Los Angeles, including research Cage conducted for his father John Cage, Sr.’s patents, explain his interest in these technologies. Finally, an examination of the sources of Cage’s 1940 essay “The Future of Music: Credo” reveals the extent of Cage’s knowledge of early sound synthesis and recording technologies and presents a more nuanced understanding of the historical relevance and origins of this document.

Talks:

Violence by Proxy: Avant-Garde Alchemy and the Materiality of Sound in Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

“Music and the Moving Image X,” New York University, 29-31 May 2015

Peter Strickland’s 2012 homage to sound design in 1970s Italian giallo films, Cathy Berberian Sound Studio, ostensibly a workplace drama surrounding tensions between a shy English engineer struggling to mix sound for a finicky Italian director’s B movie splatter film, falls in a narrow genre accompanied by the 1981 crime drama, Blow Out, in which the conceptual issues surrounding sound design function as a narrative device. Aside from the opening credits, Strickland maintains a purely diegetic space of sounds both uncanny and familiar, where noise becomes a concrete particularity that is channeled through violence not seen on screen, but laid bare via the recording process in the Foley studio. Strickland’s evocation of Cathy Berberian, in addition to a host of avant-garde composers and performers (many who have cameos in the film as ADR loopers), opens up questions regarding the inscription of auditory violence on the female body and the transmutation of avant-garde aesthetics in contemporary film sound theory.

This paper examines Strickland’s theorization of the alchemical nature of both sound design and the ontology of avant-garde music within the filmic soundscape, outlined in his extensive director’s commentary for the film, and places it in the context of contemporary theories of audiovisuality. Following Andy Birtwistle’s notion of the materiality of sound within the cinesonic, I argue that Berberian Sound Studio functions as a conceptual critique of the alterity of noise in film by building a narrative that focuses on the inscription of difference. Rather than relying on the defamiliarizing aspects of noise and avant-garde music, Strickland presents a sensationalization of sonic violence that destabilizes the surface narrative, opening up new audiovisual paths where sound and its materiality are the primary agents.

"The Cinema Delimina: Expanded Cinema Aesthetics in John Cage and Merce Cunningham’s Variations V," The Society for American Music National Meeting, Sacramento, CA March 2015

Many scholars have examined John Cage and Merce Cunningham’s elaborate multimedia production, Variations V, from the compositional standpoint of Cage’s model of indeterminacy, questioned authorship and intentionality, and lastly, viewed the role collaboration in Cage’s works from the 1960s, and this paper builds on past research by exploring the role and impact of live film and video projected and manipulated in performance.

Prior to Variations V, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company relied on visual artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns for set designs. In addition to the elaborate multichannel audio setup and famed capacitance antennas constructed by Robert Moog, Cage commission expanded filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek and video artist Nam June Paik to provide film and video projections for the performance. Avant-garde and experimental film scholars have noted that this production coincided with a significant ideological break within the Underground film community in New York, and VanDerBeek’s contribution in particular marked an overlooked but noteworthy transition from the static visual artist strategy of assemblage (via Rauschenberg) toward multimedia immersion in the nascent Expanded Cinema movement.

This paper examines archival documents and participant interviews conducted by the author in an effort to reassess the role of Paik and VanDerBeek’s films in the overall audiovisual experience of Variations V, and in particular to relate it to the sound system model of the “Variations” series as a whole. What is revealed is an additional level of interactivity previously unnoticed but significant in the overall landscape, in which the gradient light from projected film cues an additional level of interactivity within the sound system by cuing photoelectric cells attached to the performer’s bodies. In addition, I clarify several distinctions between the premiere, which contained an even more elaborate system of triggering the sound system, and the smaller traveling version of the production, which featured less interactivity between the film projections and the sound system, and which is commonly referred to today, due to the fact that a live taping by Norddeutscher Rundfunk has long been in circulation.

Last, I consider the role of multimedia in the larger realm of Cage’s aesthetic and influence in the 1960s, particularly among the first “post-Cage” generation, such as VanDerBeek, that built upon his model of information saturation as a model of epistemological clarity, along with its opposite, a consolidated iteration of a single determined gesture as a model of aesthetic purity, and in doing so, help bridge the gap between Cage Studies and the histories of experimental, underground and expanded cinema.

Introductory address: John Cage and the Avant-Garde Film Score

Museum of Modern Art Film Study Center, 14 November, 2014 LINK

This program explores the use of avant-garde music in experimental cinema, with a particular focus on John Cage, who used chance, unconventional instrumentation, electroacoustics, ambient sound, and silence in his film scores. Cage’s collaborations with Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson, and Herbert Matter are included, along with a film by Ian Hugo featuring an original score by the electronic music pioneers Bebe and Louis Barron. The program culminates in four recent restorations by Center for Visual Music in Los Angeles: John Cage and Richard Lippold’s The Sun Film (1956); Cage and Lippold’s unfinished collaboration The Sun, Variations with a Sphere No. 10 (1956); Oskar Fischinger’s Studie nr. 5 (1930); and Jordan Belson’s LSD (c.1962).

Contributing panelist and co-chair for the evening panel, “Cage Studies.”

American Musicological Society National Meeting, New Orleans, LA, November 2012

Laura Kuhn (John Cage Trust, Bard College), Rebecca Kim (Northeastern University), Gordon Mumma (University of California, Santa Cruz), David W. Bernstein (Mills College), Paul Cox (Oberlin College/Case Western Reserve University), Richard Brown (University of Southern California)

2012 marks the centennial anniversary of John Cage’s birth. This anniversary offers scholars an opportunity to reflect on Cage’s output as a composer, writer, philosopher, and visual artist. It is also a time to survey the present landscape of Cage scholarship in order to assess the range of methodologies that have emerged surrounding the burgeoning field of “Cage Studies.” Recent paper panels devoted to Cage at meetings of the AMS reflect the diversity of approaches used in examining Cage’s work, ranging from analytic and theoretical strategies used in music theory and musicology to interdisciplinary methodologies drawn from art history, dance, and film studies.

This panel brings together six Cage scholars to address the diverse and eclectic body of scholarly inquiry and criticism that each have encountered in their research. The session consists of brief statements from each panelist, followed by open discussion. Laura Kuhn reviews the current state of archival resources available to scholars as well as the impact of recent museum exhibitions devoted to Cage’s visual art; David Bernstein considers the new wave of Cage research that gained momentum following the composer’s death in 1992 , as scholars increasingly began to appraise his work and its reception; Gordon Mumma draws on his own personal experiences working with Cage to address the cross-influences and shared ideas that arose between Cage and his collaborators and also describes his archive of Cage-related recordings and films; Paul Cox discusses the choreomusical strategies used in his study of Cage and Merce Cunningham’s dance and multimedia collaborations; Richard Brown reassesses the use of the concept of “Intermedia” that has emerged in film and media studies and its concomitant role in “Post-Cage” discourse; Rebecca Kim traces the impact of art-historical sources on her approach to analyzing Cage’s ideas on indeterminacy, and how this interdisciplinary approach has informed her overall methodology for examining Cage in a broader cultural, social, and racial context.

Questions the panel address include what strategies scholars might adopt when engaging with Cage’s indeterminate, collaborative, conceptual, and multimedia works; the status of archival resources pertinent to Cage’s life and work; and the challenges of studying a composer whose openness to all sounds (and silence) revolutionized conventional notions of what constitutes a musical work. Our goal is to cultivate a discussion about the diverse avenues of inquiry surrounding Cage’s work and the place of Cage studies within the discipline of musicology.

Narrative Twist, Cinematographic Reality, and Avant-Garde Underscoring in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island,

“Music and the Moving Image VII” New York University, New York, NY, 1-3 June 2012

From the opening scene of Martin Scorsese’s 2010 neo-noir potboiler, “Shutter island,” it is clear that “things are not what they seem.” Whether it is through the retro styling of CGI mimicry of primitive back projection, or the highly stylized and flat mannerisms of the loosely adapted psychological twist genre, it is clear that Scorsese is playing with the conscious reference of the cinematic apparatus in conjunction with the duality of fictive plots that surround the falsity of the protagonist’s psychological elaborately constructed mise-en-scene. At the same time, music supervisor Robbie Robertson supplanted the neo-horror with an soundtrack of borrowed music that spans the 20th century avant-garde. From Adams to Cage, tape splicing to neoromanticism, the filmic underscoring—itself subtle and precise and, at times inaudible—threatens the very thin artifice of cinematic reality by supplanting moments of perceived aural reality and moments of nondiegetic musical sound through music that, to the average listener, is not “music” at all, but sound design. By relying on the very viability of avant-garde music to be perceived as “unmusical” and evocative of stock cinematic underscoring in classic horror films, “Shutter Island” consistently undermines the artifice of reality on the actual and implied fictional narratives contained within the film. The double narrative is littered with ruptures, outright mannerisms and clichés to cue the viewer of its alternate reality, and it is the disunity between sonic and harmonic/melodic underscoring marks the divide between alternate cinematic realities.

Focusing less on conventional discussions of borrowed music and narrative agency and more on the sonic ruptures in the diegetic soundscape of the cinematographic apparatus between moments of “music” and “non-music” in the construction of cinematic reality, this paper examines the role of Scorsese and Robertson’s soundtrack, and the dual role of diegetic sound and music in the construction of alternate cinematic realities, asking the questions: Is this sound sound design or film music? And, following Gregory Currie, at what point do these moments of disparity between actual and perceived cue narrative unreliability on the part of both the protagonist, filmmaker, and the cinematographic experience, or, better, the critical perception of the structures of control that the familiar entails? To the falsity of the genre, or of the inherent reflexivity of a genre homage? The ontology of an actual musical artwork and the ability to reify and assimilate avant-garde practice into Hollywood filmmaking? Finally, what does this adaptation of avant-garde strategies of defamiliarization in a classical narrative homage say of the original ability of shock and negation in avant-garde music? To the assimilation of defamiliarization strategies into mainstream film score supervision practice?

‘Old Man Look at My Life’: Neil Young and the Western Sonic Archive in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995),

“Music and the Moving Image VI,” New York University, New York, NY, 21-23 May, 2011

Cult indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 sardonic take on the Western, Dead Man, starring Johnny Depp as the tragic hero William Blake, challenged the conventional narrative of the Western with a haunting picture of unfettered violence and racial tension. The myth of the frontier is rewritten as a contested space between a Hollywood genre preoccupied with narrating American progress and the brutal reality of early industrial penetration into the Pacific Northwest. Scholars and critics have read this film according to Derrida’s notion of the archive, whereby Jarmusch injects a staunch revisionism into the generic memory of the West in an effort to de-territorialize the visual representation of the Western.

Neil Young’s commission for the soundtrack engendered the film with a parallel sonic archive that grafted Young’s well-known advocacy for Native American rights and environmental activism into a sonic icon for the film. Composed in silent movie fashion as a live improvisation alongside the film in post-production, Young rewrote the sonic narrative of the Western according to the terse unresolved distortions of his early career. Through his signature mix of disheveled electric guitar figures and haunting rotary organ, Young injected a tension into the sharp black-and-white cuts of the film that further revised the relationship between ubiquitous long shots of landscape and “open” orchestrations familiar to the Western genre.

Hearing Through, Seeing Through: John Cage, Richard Lippold, and Open Sculpture,

American Musicological Society National Meeting, San Francisco, CA, November 2011

Among John Cage’s many colleagues in the visual arts, one name stands apart both for his intimate connection to Cage’s inner circle, and for his relative obscurity in the history of American art: the Wisconsin-born sculptor Richard Lippold (1915-2002). Best known for commissions such as Orpheus and Apollo (1961) at Avery Fischer Hall in Lincoln Center, and Flight (1963) at the Pan Am Building in New York, Lippold’s work represents the postwar revitalization of large-scale installation sculpture, a period that favored abstract metallurgical reflections on public interaction with architectural spaces. Followingthe principles of Russian Constructivist theories of kinetic light and rhythm, Lippold’s approach to “open sculpture” focused on themes of transparency and space rather than mass and dimension by seamlessly integrating his intricate constructions of bundled polished wire and tubing into the surrounding architecture.

This paper explores recently recovered archival documentation on the relationship between the two artists, including a film conceived by Cage and Lippold utilizing chance procedures. Their mutual concern for geometric abstraction, elaborate mathematical structures, and an open-ended spiritual discourse on the nature of the work of art sparked an important dialogue leading to the period of Cage’s most dramatic artistic gestures in the early 1950s. Cage dedicated several movements of his Sonatas and Interludes (1948) to Lippold, and in turn Lippold dedicated the first five sculptures from an extended series of variations on a sphere, then tenth of which, The Sun (1953-1956), was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Lippold’s freestanding sculptures delicately articulated three-dimensional space, and the kinetic energy of their complex lattice arrangements mirrored Cage’s compositions for the prepared piano. Cage’s dislocation of the harmonic-nodal structure of the piano in turn projected acoustic simulacra with the same metallic shimmer of Lippold’s wire formations. Cage repeatedly referred to the effect of “seeing through” the visual space of Lippold’s works, much to the same effect as Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923). Through graphic notation, transparencies, and chance procedures, Cage’s sonic efforts at “hearing through” the phenomenal present were founded on similar constructivist principles espoused by this largely forgotten American sculptor.

’Nature in Her Manner of Operation’: Merleau-Ponty, John Cage, and the American Neo-Avant-Garde,

Society for Music Theory National Meeting, Indianapolis, IN, November 2010

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late writings sought to define a new ontology of painting and the plastic arts that could articulate the laterality of the self, a distance conveyed by the concept écart. The final chapters of The Visible and the Invisible, chronologically intertwined with lectures on “The Concept of Nature” at the Collège de France and the climactic study of painting, “Eye and Mind,” reevaluated the perceptual monism of “Phenomenology of Perception” in the context of the artwork. While this new ontology overlooked music as “too far on the hither side of the world,” a musical continuation of this unfinished thesis can be found in the aesthetic of John Cage and the American Neo-Avant-Garde.

Like Merleau-Ponty’s method of “hyperreflection,” Cage demanded an indirect ontology by distancing the self through chance and indeterminacy, thus bringing about a reciprocal anonymity between composer and listener. Merleau-Ponty’s “Flesh,” then, becomes the anonymity of the self that Cage advocated, while reversibility of subject and object, the “chiasm,” reflects Cage’s transcendental goal of bringing about an artistic situation that could “imitate nature in her manner of operation.” Finally, “vertical time” is manifest in the Cage work through process, evoking Merleau-Ponty’s “transversal ecstasis” by arresting temporal movement through perpetual estrangement.

Zen for TV? Nam June Paik’s “Global Groove” and “A Tribute to John Cage” (1973),

“Sights and Sounds: Interrogating the Music Documentary,” University of Salford, UK., 4-5 June, 2010

In 1974 Nam June Paik presented “A Tribute to John Cage” on WGBH Channel 2 in Boston, Massachusetts. Paik’s video homage was a part of the expanding “Guerilla Television” network of alternative new media spaces that emerged from the influx of public support for independent cable television programming in the early 1970s. Featuring an amalgam of footage of Cage performances, interviews and lectures, Paik’s video assemblage was the precursor to his most famous work of single-channel video art, “Global Groove,” from the same year.

In this paper I examine Paik’s documentary in the context of identity politics and technological discourse surrounding video technology. In Paik’s tribute, Cage is seen less as a commanding figure of the American neo-avant-garde than as the solitary sage witnessing the post-1968 transformation of his aesthetic in a new generation of artists and composers. Paik had witnessed Cage’s rise from “gadfly to guru” in the New York Downtown music scene during the 1960s, and his documentary perspective personifies the confusion with Cage’s late-modernist utopian aesthetics. Featuring performances by cellist Charlotte Moorman, interviews with fellow composers, and two stagings of Cage’s “silent” piece (4’33”) in the streets of Boston and New York, Paik celebrates the spectacle of performance art while posing difficult questions regarding the cultural consumption of neo-avant-garde aesthetics and eastern philosophy.

In conjunction with “Global Groove,” Paik’s approach to video subverted the traditional codes of commercial documentary television. Sharp cuts between interview segments and live “in-studio” performances by Paik and Moorman are loosely connected through the narrative voice-over of the “host” and commercial “breaks” of Japanese and Korean advertisements. The dizzying confusion of the narrative flow functions as a critique of culture industry appropriation and as an ominous prediction of its destructive power. By foregrounding the video apparatus in the documentary, Paik intervenes within the technology itself, tearing apart the veiled suture of documentary realism and, in the process, destroying the mediation boundary of video itself.

Paik’s critique of “television” was part of a larger expansion of the role of communications technology in the 1970s, and was the subject of a series of debates on “Art and Technology” with Cage. Subverting the mechanical apparatus of the cathode-ray tube through synthesis elements such as degaussing and the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer, Paik projected a utopian vision of television technology in his series of video-installations that rejected role of passive viewer in the television experience, and his vast library of documentary footage of artists and performances became a fluid part of a series of evolving remixes for these installations. Ironically, by the 1980s many of Paik’s innovative ideas found a commercial outlet in the nascent music video industry, and as public support for independent film and video production faded, the meteoric rise of consumer electronics from Japan and Korea elevated Paik’s status as the new “guru” of electronic communications technology in the consumer art industry.

Losing the Ground: Transparency and Space in John Cage and Morton Feldman’s Commissions for ‘Works of Calder’ (1950) and ‘Jackson Pollock’ (1951),

“Music and the Moving Image V,” New York University, New York, NY, 21-23 May, 2010

In the early 1950s John Cage and Morton Feldman were commissioned to score documentary films on two significant artists of the American postwar avant-garde: Cage for the Herbert Matter documentary on sculptor Alexander Calder, and Feldman for the Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg documentary on Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock. Both artists saw these commissions as opportunities to formalize connections between their compositional approaches to sound and the visual approach to space, kinetic movement, and ground revealed in the time-based poetics of the moving image. Examination of archival documents from these film commissions, including original score sheets and correspondence, reveals numerous parallels between the New York schools of music and visual arts.

Cage’s prepared piano and magnetic tape composition sought to bridge the connection between micro-macrocosmic form and the architectural structure and kinetic movement of Calder’s mobiles, while Feldman hoped to capture the temporal essence of “action painting” through the violent texture of a pointillistic cello duet. In both films, transparency and kinetic movement in space are foregrounded. In Matter’s film, Calder’s mobiles are shot in motion against a backdrop of movements in nature, and in Namuth’s film the painterly act of Pollock’s pour technique is seen through the dramatic repositioning of the camera beneath Pollock as he paints on a sheet of glass. Both films predate the radical shift in Cagean aesthetics by only a year, and the commissions provided a self-conscious examination of the artistic “intermedia” connections between auditory and visual approaches to a work of art.