Musical Migration and Imperial New York

Early Cold War Scenes

Brigid Cohen

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780226818016
• eBook ISBN: 9780226818023
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: North American History

Through archival work and storytelling, Musical Migration and Imperial New York revises many inherited narratives about experimental music and art in postwar New York.

From the urban street level of music clubs and arts institutions to the world-making routes of global migration and exchange, this book redraws the map of experimental art to reveal the imperial dynamics and citizenship struggles that continue to shape music in the United States.

Beginning with the material conditions of power that structured the cityscape of New York in the early Cold War years, Brigid Cohen looks at a wide range of artistic practices (concert music, electronic music, jazz, performance art) and actors (Edgard Varèse, Charles Mingus, Yoko Ono, and Fluxus founder George Maciunas) as they experimented with new modes of creativity. Cohen links them with other migrant creators vital to the city's postwar culture boom, creators whose stories have seldom been told (Halim El-Dabh, Michiko Toyama, Vladimir Ussachevsky). She also gives sustained and serious treatment to the work of Yoko Ono, something long overdue in music scholarship. Musical Migration and Imperial New York is indispensable reading, offering a new understanding of global avant-gardes and American experimental music as well as the contrasting feelings of belonging and exclusion on which they were built.

• 1 •

Third Space, Scene of Subjection

Mingus and Varèse at Greenwich House

“Only time you drop the blues is when you drop saying ‘nigger’ or saying ‘black.’ If you call us Americans, the blues might be gone. . . . When they start calling us first-class citizens—which will never be, I gotta figure—then there maybe won’t be no reason for the blues.”

Charles Mingus, interviewed by John F. Goodman, 19721

“And look, look, uhh . . . this is not natural for me!”

Charles Mingus, the Greenwich House sessions, 19572

A rudimentary outline of the story is clear.3 In the spring and summer of 1957, Edgard Varèse led a series of improvisation sessions in downtown New York with jazz musicians including Eddie Bert, Don Butterfield, Bill Crow, Art Farmer, Teo Macero, Hal McKusick, Charles Mingus, Hall Overton, Frank Rehak, and Ed Shaughnessy. (The full roster cannot be known with certainty.) The sessions took place at the Music School of Greenwich House—one of the city’s oldest settlement houses—which by mid-century had become a venerable classical music venue where Varèse held an informal teaching affiliation. Most of the jazz musicians present, as recalled in oral accounts,4 had been participants in the Jazz Composers Workshop (JCW), a loose, racially integrated group of musicians invested in crossover between classical concert and jazz traditions (table 1.1), and whose name became the title of a Mingus album featuring Macero. The musicians’ interactions with Varèse at the Greenwich House sessions created something of a sensation, attracting John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and others who observed the music making from the sidelines on at least one occasion.5 Like Varèse, these informal audience members were associated with the newly crystallizing canons of the New York School and American experimentalism. Composer, producer, and saxophonist Macero and composer Earle Brown organized the sessions, using their contacts as tape editors and commercial recording engineers at Columbia and Capitol Records respectively to assemble the sessions’ personnel.

Table 1.1. Musicians participating in the 1957 Greenwich House sessions, as recalled in oral accounts

Remembered by Earle Brown	Remembered by Teo Macero	Remembered by Bill Crow
Art Farmer (tpt) Teo Macero (ts) Ed Shaughnessy (d) Hal McKusick (cl and as) Hall Overton (p) Frank Rehak (tb)	Art Farmer Teo Macero Ed Shaughnessy Don Butterfield (tu) Eddie Bert (tb) Charles Mingus (b)	Art Farmer Teo Macero Don Butterfield Eddie Bert Teddy Charles (vib)

Their existence long a subject of rumor, recordings from the Greenwich House sessions finally made their way onto Internet sites in the last several years.6 Yet few scholars have addressed the sessions as a historical episode, a fact that is remarkable given the iconic status of the musicians involved. In 1958, Cage brought some slender remembrance to the events by writing of Varèse’s jazz experiment in passing, expressing a dissatisfaction characteristic of his well known dismissal of jazz.7 The music critic Peter Yates referred equally briefly, though approvingly, to Varèse’s jazz interests in an important 1959 essay that first coined the term “American experimental tradition.”8 More recently, Olivia Mattis has written a valuable article documenting the sessions in relation to Varèse’s creative projects, specifically his composition of the Poème électronique (1958).9 Virtually no scholarship, however, has questioned in any detail what the sessions may have meant to the jazz musicians who participated. This lacuna speaks to a wider, racialized rift in the historiography of postwar American music as described by George Lewis—a historiography that tends to narrate jazz history on a separate track from stories of the downtown New York concert avant-garde, despite evidence of mutual awareness and interaction between creators working in the two scenes.10 Though more recent scholarship has taken important steps toward counteracting this pattern, the scarcity of literature on the Greenwich House sessions nonetheless perpetuates the long-standing gap identified by Lewis.11

This chapter addresses dilemmas of race, citizenship, and the arts in downtown New York during the postwar period of national-imperialist canon formation and self-proclaimed American cultural ascendency. It locates these dilemmas at the Greenwich House sessions—a scene of extreme power imbalances, ambivalent emotions, and ambiguous creative outcomes, documented within a scattering of archival artifacts and oral history. At the center of my study is a series of recordings preserved in the Edgard Varèse Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel: the master tapes from which the Internet copies derive.12 These recordings speak to a kind of after-hours experimentation and sociability not usually archived or remembered within official history.13 They open up novel perspectives on a liminal encounter between downtown concert vanguardists and jazz experimenters, testifying to a long and largely unspoken history of mutual fascination, crossed signals, and fraught negotiations of authority. The traces of such an unstable encounter often lie at the periphery of archives, in the silent margins. They do not lend themselves to the formation of an easy or stable historical narrative. This story therefore maintains “enigma” at its heart in a triple sense: as a set of problems unsolved, as a narrative partially obscured, and as a parable with a moral and political charge for sustained interpretation. It foregrounds dilemmas central to the study of racialized hierarchies of citizenship that play out in scenes of intercultural encounter that define New York as an imperial metropolis.

Although the Greenwich House session tapes provide evidence of a tacit history of connection between jazz musicians and concert vanguardists, the sessions were strikingly short in duration and their creative legacy remains elusive. We will see that Varèse appears to have approached the encounter as a source of sound samples for electronic composition to be showcased internationally at the Brussels World’s Fair, yet he ultimately refrained from using any of the material toward that end. The jazz musicians did not incorporate innovations from the sessions into their subsequent work in any obvious or specific way, with the arguable exceptions of Teo Macero, who used graphic notation in one of his subsequent jazz compositions, and Frank Rehak and Don Butterfield, who collaborated in later years with Cage.14 Remarkably, none of the participants claimed ownership of the sessions’ innovations publicly. As Earle Brown put it, the sessions did not have “much to do with history or anything because it was just to do . . . sort of a fun thing and Varèse never did any serious scores [related to the sessions].”15 The jazz bassist Bill Crow, who participated in one of the unrecorded rehearsals, remembered it as a highly unusual gig with experimental yet aesthetically questionable musical results. After receiving word of the event by phone on short notice, he joined it because “jazz musicians respond when someone says something’s happening.”16 (We will return to Brown’s and Crow’s words later.) If the Greenwich House sessions may be considered “experimental” in the sense that they were a “try” at something without an anticipated outcome, then this experiment would seem to have been defined by a spirit of boundary crossing by virtue of its personnel. Yet a term like “boundary crossing” hardly captures the strange and muted history of what happened in the sessions’ wake.

Indeed, it is difficult to seize upon a single term or concept to evoke the acute asymmetries of power and knowledge that shaped the musicians’ interactions and the persistent silences that followed. Contrary to the mythology of his marginalization, Varèse embarked on these sessions at the height of his newly revitalized career. In popular media and avant-garde communities alike, he was received as a genius and icon of a modernist high art tradition that commanded profound cultural capital.17 (Brown’s linking of “history” with Varèse’s “serious scores” intimates this capital.) Varèse held a remarkably secure socioeconomic position in comparison with the sessions’ gigging musicians—a differential all the more acute for Black musicians such as Art Farmer and Charles Mingus, who struggled to make a living within the racist structures of the music industry. Seen through the lens of such inequality, the sessions figure as yet another episode in a history of exploitative appropriations of jazz and other African diasporic traditions—especially given that we have no evidence that the musicians received any remuneration.18 Indeed, Brown and Macero organized the sessions explicitly for Varèse’s benefit, on his home turf, at the educational institution where he taught. Yet the dynamics of appropriation at Greenwich House are disarmingly murky. Varèse’s cultural capital, already strong, appears to have benefited more from the sessions’ low-key legend (furthered in print by Cage and Yates) than from any direct incorporation of the sound recordings in his own composition. Moreover, the agency of the jazz musicians themselves should not be understated: they made the sessions possible. We will see that some of them, including Macero and Mingus, had decidedly more knowledge of Varèse’s music than he did of theirs. Simple notions of “exchange” and “appropriation” hardly do justice to the multilayered complexities of the encounter.

In the face of this inadequacy, I attempt to carve out a space between two concepts—“third space” and the “scene of subjection”—in order to theorize entanglements of encounter such as those at Greenwich House. Let us consider each concept before conceptualizing the interval between them. Far from a mere label, third space is an concept that has sparked disparate interpretations across the arts, humanities, and social sciences.19 As noted in the introduction to this book, Homi Bhabha defines “third space” as an “intercultural site of enunciation, at the intersection of different languages jousting for authority, a translational space of negotiation [that] opens up through the process of dialogue” across power differentials.20 For our purposes, the concept is valuable because it foregrounds acts of cultural translation in which actors’ initial terms of interaction become renegotiated in real time. Third-space encounters play out within an uneven field of power, dramatizing and potentially destabilizing those imbalances. Third space exceeds the mastery of its participants: in the transitional flux of translation, actors become caught in ambivalence and uncertainty, their intentions internally divided and disjunct from their contingent aftereffects. Third space poses a challenge for historiography not only because of its transitory, transitional qualities—which often evade standard documentary and archival practices—but also because its disparate “languages” and translational dynamics remain partially opaque to the historical actors themselves.

Like “third space,” Saidiya Hartman’s “scene of subjection” describes situations of extreme power imbalance and opacity that trouble notions of individuality and free will. The scene of subjection is an intimate encounter, guided by notions of enjoyment, humanity, and consent, that brings forth dehumanizing cruelties rooted in systemic anti-Blackness. In her discussion of slavery and its aftermath, Hartman focuses on the “forms of subjectivity and circumscribed humanity imputed to the enslaved” that everyday institutions such as minstrelsy and the expressive arts propagate and police.21 These insidiously create “scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned.”22 The “expressive and affective capacities of the subject, sentiment, enjoyment, affinity, will, and desire facilitated subjugation, domination, and terror precisely by preying on the flesh, the heart, and the soul.”23 Under these terms, ostensible notions of formal equality—rooted in notions of consent and humanity—become unified with racial subjugation, and the experience of such subjugation finds expression in forms that elude the historical record.24

It is my conviction that the Greenwich House sessions are a scene of subjection that is also a third space, opening up new possibilities to theorize the “in-between” of these concepts. Brown’s blithe reference to the sessions as not “much to do with history,” but rather “sort of a fun thing,” intimates precisely Hartman’s scene of enjoyment and choice which would both license and mask racial subjugation. The sessions’ apparent lack of remuneration reinforced the pretexts of casual fun and free consent while reinforcing racialized pay inequality. The presence of a small, white audience, on at least one occasion, confirmed the spectatorial element of the proceedings: it showcased Varèse managing a mixed assemblage of Black and white bodies while dabbling in the consumption of “Black sounds” for his own pleasure and professional benefit. At the same time, however, the Greenwich House recordings show how the initial terms of the encounter became remade in real time, revealing its qualities as a third space. We will see that the musicians—and Charles Mingus in particular—talked back to Varèse, altering the musical and social character of the proceedings. In the cramped quarters of the townhouse space, a contest of authority unfolded in words, language, and gesture as Varèse and the musicians questioned one another, spoke over one another, changed the physical setup of music making, and labored in a palpable effort to “translate” between different musical idioms and conventions associated with post-bebop improvisation and composition on the one hand, and Varèse’s brand of concert experimentalism on the other. Varèse projection of mastery hardly remained intact, even though he still held the ultimate upper hand of complete citizenship by virtue of his white privilege.

For all of these reasons, this chapter understands both Bhabha’s and Hartman’s concepts as the most promising signs under which to construe the Greenwich House sessions, while cautioning against placing too positive a valence on the sessions as a site for any long-term dismantling of power. This approach navigates between the Scylla and Charybdis of “exchange” and “appropriation,” avoiding both the naive egalitarian promise of the former and the implicati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• introduction: A Recent History of Music, Citizenship, and American Empire
• 1. third space, scene of subjection: Mingus and Varèse at Greenwich House
• 2. cold war acropolis i: Ussachevsky, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the CPEMC
• 3. cold war acropolis ii: Toyama and El-Dabh at the CPEMC
• 4. a counter-discourse of orientalism: Ono in Opera
• 5. the haunting of empires: Maciunas, Fluxus, and the Bloodlands
• 6. concluding thoughts
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Archival Sources
• Bibliography
• Index