AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts sunday morning 163
MURDER BY CELLO: JOHN CAGE MEETS CHARLOTTE MOORMAN
Benjamin Piekut
University of Southampton
The cellist and performance artist Charlotte Moorman (1933–91) was one of the most important
organizing forces of experimental music in New York City, and her catalytic role in
galvanizing the avant-garde in the 1960s and ’70s has never been adequately assessed. Her
signature work was John Cage’s 26' 1.1499'' for a String Player, a challenging score from the
mid-1950s that is representative of the general modernist impulse to disarticulate musical
sound into its component parts (pitch, duration, timbre, and amplitude). Although each of
these properties might imply specific relationships to others in traditional musical composition
(for example, a rise in pitch is often accompanied by a brighter tone and louder volume),
Cage isolates and treats each separately. The result is a complicated graphic notation that significantly
denaturalizes the performer’s relationship with her instrument.
The composer further variegates his sonic texture by notating a layer of (nonspecified)
noises and sound effects to be added by the instrumentalist. This direction allowed Moorman
and her collaborator, Korean-born composer Nam June Paik, to transform 26' 1.1499''
into a sonic and theatrical register of the most important themes of its time: flower power,
the women’s movement, black nationalism, the Vietnam war, consumer culture, the sexual
revolution, rock ’n’ roll, free speech, and Watergate. Moorman expressed these themes in the
form of text recitations, tape and phonograph playback, and a number of theatrical gestures.
Although Cage himself embraced a certain theatricality in his performances of this period, he
was not an admirer of Moorman’s interpretation—in a 1967 letter, he referred to this composition
as “the one Charlotte Moorman has been murdering all along.” What did he find so
“wrong” about this performance? Using Moorman’s heavily annotated copy of the score, her
correspondence, and other non-textual documents from the 1960s and ’70s, this presentation
reconstructs Moorman’s interpretation of 26' 1.1499'' to uncover the basis of her disagreements
with the composer of the work. The conflict seems to have turned on the question of what
is properly included in the category of “everyday life.” Could it include politics? Sexuality?
Bodies of every type?
Furthermore, I use insights from Foucauldian ethics and feminist theory to answer the
common claim that such disruptive performances automatically constitute feminist resistance
or transgression. I argue that Cage’s score is an example of what Foucault termed problematization:
“the motion by which one detaches oneself from [thought], establishes it as an
object, and reflects on it as a problem.” If 26' 1.1499'' was a tool for disassembling the customary
method of playing the cello, framing “proper” technique as an object of reflection, then
Moorman used the score correctly, albeit toward unforeseen ends. The limited vocabulary of
resistance fails to register the ways in which, in the words of anthropologist Saba Mahmood,
“norms are not only consolidated and/or subverted, . . . but performed, inhabited, and experienced
in a variety of ways.”