<snip>
The one thing I can agree with unreservedly is that people in the 1960s
began interpreting art as free expression, and training could be viewed
as a detriment because you weren't playing-what-ya-feel-maaaaaan. All
that technique crap would suppress or block your true gift, ahem, oh
Childe of Gawd. The idea that Coltrane or Miles Davis or Joan Baez
could actually READ music and didn't just blare into or strum their
instruments...never mentioned. [KW]
<snip>
Perhaps I'm being unfair, but this seems wrong in most of the ways available
to it to be wrong, beating the 60s with an inappropriate shtick. For a
start, a fair amount of jazz and folk music was produced not by literate
musicians but by those whose practice was intuitive. So it was the
recognition that what had been informal (Blind Joe Whatsit, rediscovered
from the 20s or a *commercial* medium such as film) might be admissible as
*art* nonetheless that characterised the 60s, not that Blind Joe Whatsit
came striding out of the cottonfields onto the Ann Arbor folk circuit with
his degree scroll under his arm.
And for those who were so qualified, training and technique hardly
constituted an embarrassment. Difficult to imagine who _didn't_ know that
Lou Reed was a graduate or John Cale ex conservatoire. Or take Cecil Taylor
(NY College; New England Conservatory): 'The thing that makes jazz so
interesting is that _each man is his own academy_.' (_emphases_ mine). Now
there is every suggestion here that technique is important, and the implicit
self centredness is a bridge, I think, between (on the one hand) the
personal-is-political aspects of 60s feminism, the further shift in focus
during the 60s from the art object per se to creator and observer _in
relation_ to the object, plus the opening out of the object in relation to
its environment, and (on the other) the Gordon Gecko self centredness of
what came later.
Was technique really seen as an impediment to self expression? I don't think
so. Or at least not in those terms. Yes, to the extent that the 60s were
inclusivist, prone to projects of liberation, technique was seen as one way
in which the Academy had bolted its doors and windows. But that is not at
all the same point: 'Permission granted, but not to do what you want,' as
Cage put it. Thus the simplicity of (say) *In C* is about open access not
about some 'playing what you feel' burlesque.
As to the function of impediment itself, what links Toshi Ichiyanagi
(Julliard) and his 60s piece (name escapes me; Martin will probably know) in
which the players are physically prevented from playing their instruments;
Tom Johnson (Yale) and his 1970s piece *Failing* in which a single musician
is distracted from playing, and (say) Brian Fernhough's work is the idea
that obstruction ('It can't be done, Mr Edison') is, in fact, the door. Or
some sort of door, at least.
CW
______________________________________________________
I am always doing what I cannot do yet in order to learn how to do it
(van Gogh)
|