Benjamin Piekut

Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane

Posthumous duetsperformances involving a dead singer and a living onehave become ubiquitous in popular music. As the case of Natalie and Nat King Coles Unforgettable makes clear, all sound recording harnesses the productive capacities of both living and dead, patterned through specific forms of co-laboring, or deadness.

Actor-Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques

This article offers clarifications and critiques of actor-network theory and its usefulness for music historiography. Reviewing the work of ANT theorists Bruno Latour, Annemarie Mol, and other social theorists (such as Georgina Born and Anna Tsing), the author explains that ANT is a methodology, not a theory. As a general introduction, the author outlines ANTs methodological presuppositions about human and non-human agency, action, ontology, and performance. He then examines how these methodological principles affect three concerns of music-historical interest: influence, genre, and context. In conclusion, he addresses problems related to temporality, critique, and reflexivity. He draws on music-historical examples after 1960: John Cage, the Jazz Composers Guild, Henry Cow, Iggy Pop, and the Velvet Underground.

Sound's Modest Witness: Notes on Cage and Modernism

John Cages work has been interpreted by various critics as representative of both modernism and postmodernism. Although scholars have focused on the aesthetic and historical dimensions of modernism, the subject can also be approached from the perspective of ontology. Specifically, Cages work was premised on an absolute ontological distinction between an objective natural world and a subjective social world. This modernist worldview led Cage to think that he could eliminate the contingencies of the social in order to become a modest witness of the nature that was revealed through experiment. The Cagean discourse of modest self-abnegation—which we are accustomed to associating with his borrowings from Asian philosophy—reproduces a familiar dynamic of power in the West, in which the cultivation of self-invisibility is the key to epistemological and social power.

Race, community, and conflict in the jazz composers guild

Abstract Following the success of his avant‐garde festival, “The October Revolution in Jazz,” trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon founded the Jazz Composers Guild in the fall of 1964. The organization included Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Paul and Carla Bley, Archie Shepp, Roswell Rudd, Burton Greene, and John Tchicai, among others. One of the first significant attempts at self‐determination by jazz musicians, the Guild sought to reorient the exploitative working conditions of the major clubs and record companies by producing its own concerts in venues across New York City. The Guild competed for leadership of the jazz underground with Amiri Baraka, the writer and critic associated with the Black Arts Movement, and with Bernard Stollman, a lawyer and owner of the free jazz record label ESP‐Disk. The conflicts that arose between these three poles of organization, as well as within the Guild itself, were often the results of incompatible discourses of race. Critical race theorist Ruth Frankenberg’s useful concepts of “power‐evasiveness,” “color‐evasiveness,” and “race‐cognizance” are employed here as a means to help make sense of the different ideologies at work in the 1960s jazz avant garde.

New Thing? Gender and Sexuality in the Jazz Composers Guild

Trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon founded the Jazz Composers Guild in the fall of 1964. The organization included Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Paul and Carla Bley, Archie Shepp, Roswell Rudd, Burton Greene, and John Tchicai, among others. The Guilds short history was marked by conflict both within the organization and with other figures in the jazz underground, such as Amiri Baraka. Scholarship has explained these conflicts in terms of race and class, overlooking a hidden history of gender and sexuality that inflected relationships and conflicts in New Yorks avant-garde jazz scene. The article pays particular attention to Carla Bleys experiences in the group, and to the nonnormative sexual presentation of Taylor, whose presence seemed to disrupt the heteromasculine rhetoric of the Black Arts Movement. Drawing on interviews with members of the Guild, this article traces how gender and sexuality framed the discourse of free jazz in the 1960s.