Greetings, everyone, and thank you to Molly for the invitation to drive this thing while she’s away.
I’ll shift into third gear immediately by raising an issue that has caused much internal conflict for me, as a composer/performer and especially as a writer of songs — my desire to balance personal expression with multiplicity of meaning. This conflict of mine was recently reinvigorated by a performance of Sean Griffin‘s piece, Buffalo ’70, at the final concert of the 2008 MATA Festival in Brooklyn, NY.
Buffalo ’70
is a fine piece of music. It is intricate, funny, smart, theatrical,
and thoroughly engaging. The performers at the MATA concert — a
combination of musicians from the New York-based ensembles Newspeak and Either/Or — executed the piece with precision and conviction, and the audience responded very positively.
Nevertheless, Griffin said some things about the piece that drastically restricted my experience of it. In the program notes, he writes:
[Buffalo ’70] is a musical question about an encounter between John Cage and Julius Eastman… I hope to dramatize a shift in aesthetics and political strategies employed by composers at the time. My intention is to have this work speak to the broader cultural shifts in expression and identity in the political landscape of the late 1970s and the return to a more brutally conservative America in the 1980s.
In 1970, composer/performer Julius Eastman was performing sections of John Cage’s Song Books and included gay references in his realization of the work. Although allowed by the score itself, Cage became angry and famously objected with a violent outburst…
Before the performance, Griffin spoke briefly to the concert audience. He clarified his intent by announcing that Julius Eastman was his favorite composer and that Buffalo ’70 is comprised of a number of John Cage’s pieces all realized with deliberate inappropriateness. He also put forward a dubious theory that Cage’s outburst somehow led to Eastman’s tragic personal unravelling.
Knowing that Buffalo ’70 was, at least in part, a disparaging parody of John Cage’s music all but erased its potential for multiple interpretations. This constriction of meaning is, I think, one of the things that upset Cage about Eastman’s performance of Song Books. And Cage was not the only one who was upset. The conductor of that performance, Petr Kotik, described Eastman’s behavior as “sabotage.”
All of this got me thinking: It may be that Cage represents the epitome of one kind of high-modernism — the desire to create works of art in which the personal identities and emotions of the artists are completely absent. The opposite of that, I suppose, would be art as purely a vehicle for self-expression, or what I like to call “art as therapy.”
Is the incorporation into “fine art” of identity politics and self-expression the kind of “cultural shift in expression and identity” that Griffin is referring to in his program notes? Is the “more brutally conservative America” a reference to the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s during which Senator Helms et al attacked artists who received government funding to create so-called blasphemous works of art? That is what I assume Griffin is talking about.
But there’s another side to that argument. The mentality of art-as-self-expression, combined with the politically correct, uncritical acceptance of identity politics in art, has led to plenty of overly sentimental vanity projects. This is another kind of “brutally conservative” approach to making art which is just as lamentable as the reactionary philistinism of Helms and company.
Hi Corey – interesting subject, interesting post, sounds like an interesting piece. But I’m confused as to why the piece is titled Buffalo ’70 when the Cage/Eastman incident happened in 1975. (I was there.)
Corey replies: Song Books was composed in 1970, wasn’t it? Maybe that’s the reason for the confusion. I did double-check the title, and Buffalo ’70 is what’s listed in the program and program notes, as well as on MATA’s website. Curious. Have you written about your experience of that 1975 performance?
I can’t speak to Eastman or Griffin’s own motiviations, but I would think that if your intention is to narrowly put forth an argument for or against a particular side in the culture wars that you would be better off writing an essay than a piece of music (or painting a painting). Such a focus closes off so many possibilities. Even if you want to say that John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 is too constricted with its focus on AIDS, it’s still a big enough vision to encompass more than a knee-jerk response of, “More treatment funding now!”
Corey replies: I agree that an essay (or something less abstract than music) might be a better medium in which to argue for or against a particular position. On the other hand, the benefit of raising questions with a work of art is that the audience doesn’t necessarily expect you to answer them.
But Buffalo had nothing to do with the composition of the Songbooks in 1970, so I still don’t quite get the title.
I don’t think I’ve ever written about it, because I think these incidents get a little overblown. Worse is the 1982 Chicago incident in which Cage called Glenn Branca’s music “fascist.” I was as alarmed as Cage was about some of the robotic audience responses to Branca’s symphony, people jumping up and pumping their fists in the air every 16 beats. I saw Cage’s point, that there seemed to be some kind of mind control over the audience, but he quickly retracted the description, and it’s been blown way out of proportion by music writers. In 1975, Julius was being the self-sabotaging asshole he sometimes was, and Cage showed a rare display of temper. But Cage was human, not a saint, and his occasional momentary reactions (from which he quickly recovered) shouldn’t be read as revelatory of some damning inner contradiction.
I’m out of my depth here, but is it possible that Cage’s outburst and anger had something to do with his own conflicted attitudes toward his own homosexuality as well as with race?
Corey replies: There’s no way to know for sure. It’s certainly possible, but I would imagine that Cage’s reaction had to do with his philosophy of performance rather than any internalized homophobia or racism.
This a case where the ‘back story’ almost supersedes the actual event. Passion for one’s own work- now there is a topic. If only I had more opportunities to be outraged by the performance of my work by others. In some way this is another example of history folding back onto itself and then unfolding with new smudge marks on the page. Thanks for providing the review and references.
Corey replies: Interesting take on it, James. I like the “smudge marks” analogy.
Several issues inevitably emerge every time I bring up the Eastman/Cage issue. First there is an unquestioned adherence to Cage as an absolute genius whose works are not to be questioned or scrutinized in any way. Second, any issues of race seem to be trumped by this admiration. Third, the fact that Cage was a closeted gay man is rarely considered. The fact that he, as the blogger put it, created “works of art in which the personal identities and emotions of the artists are completely absent” does not mean that these subjectivities did not exist. If you go beyond a google search, you’ll find that there are a lot of divergent takes on the event. And, if you look at the score in question, it is hard to argue that Eastman’s interpretation was wrong.
I am particularly alarmed by the idea that Buffalo ’70 is a “PC” work. How is creating a fiction based on a historical event engaging in “politically correct, uncritical acceptance of identity politics?” I assume that the blogger states this because Eastman was black and gay. How is making a work about Eastman “brutally conservative?” This itself seems reactionary. It is lamentable that dealing with orientations of any kind other than the mainstream still garners alarmist denunciation. As shrill and pervasive as it is, the flimsy “anti-PC†movement, a tired relic of the 90s, apparently still marches on.
I’m not sure what constitutes “politically correct” at this time in culture, but Julius Eastman was a real person and a real composer who wrote some very interesting works that challenged the forms and intentions of composition as an art. I am interested in his encounter with Cage because it is a theatrical moment that speaks to many problems not only in the music of the time, but in American culture. Eastman’s story, music, and persona captured my imagination and, frankly, this is a very compelling subject for a musical drama: Two larger-than-life gay composers dealing with very different economies of support and power, one out and black, one closeted and white come into conflict, one is enshrined, one dies homeless on the street of HIV/AIDS. It is a complex operatic tragedy and I hope to turn it into a chamber opera.
To state that the issues implied by Buffalo ’70 should be painted (?) or manifested only as an essay and that music is incapable of dealing with complex social realities is really what is at the heart of the issue for me. To proclaim that music can’t deal with these issues impoverishes us all. Perhaps in some current “contemporary” music cultures this is true, but politics and social issues have always been evidenced in the works of composers and improvisers and in music as an art form, especially in the twentieth century. How can one talk about Cage’s development as a composer without considering the restrictive post-war American culture he lived in?
To make my intentions clear, I state in the program notes:
“His [Eastman’s] encounter with Cage represents to me a moment in time where indeterminacy was becoming less free. “Appropriate indeterminacy†is a strange condition and speaks to the shifts in culture on a broader level. As culture changed, the openness of Cage’s scores became more and more problematic. This moment has inspired an approach to composing this work for me. It presents a problem, a struggle between historical compositional strategies and political intentions, between two similar but drastically different cultures pushed into tension with each other.â€
If obliquely raising issues of race and AIDS via the persona of Eastman collapses Buffalo ’70 into an “art as therapy” vanity project, I would have to say that the self-absorbed, pop-lite music that seems so in fashion with many composers is even more guilty.
Corey replies: Sean, thanks so much for all of these thoughts. When I talked about high modernism’s removal of the self vs. “art as therapy” vanity projects, I was only stating two extremes of cultural/aesthetic sensibilities. I apologize if it seemed as though I was calling Buffalo ’70 an example of latter. That is not at all what I think! Like I said, I thought the piece was smart, intricate, etc… Not only that, but it really inspired me to think about big questions. It was genuinely provocative, which is a wonderful (and rare) quality for a piece of music to have. At any rate, I look forward to the chamber opera.