Experimentalism Otherwise: the New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits challenges readers to rethink historical notions of experimentalism through an exploration of the complex social negotiations in four specific case studies. The author, Benjamin Piekut, bases his story on concerts and musical protests that took place in New York City during the year 1964. Each of the four chapters is devoted to a different musical event: the New York Philharmonic's presentation of John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis; two concert protests organized by Henry Flynt under the banner of Action Against Cultural Imperialism (AACI); Charlotte Moorman's Second Annual Avant Garde Festival, and in particular her performance with Nam June Paik of works by John Cage; and the Jazz Composers Guild October Revolution festival organized by Bill Dixon. Piekut ends his work with an epilogue, which takes the reader to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where similar experimental networks are explored in the work of Robert Ashley and other musicians of the ONCE group as they influenced the popular music and style of Iggy Pop. As Piekut illustrates, each of these musical moments – and the complex, interwoven artistic networks that produced them – reveals the impact of race, gender, politics, and sexual orientation on the creation of musical radicalism.

According to Piekut, experimentalism is not a musical style or a genre, but rather a construct developed out of ordinary and extraordinary moments experienced and created by connected individuals and musics (1). For him, analysing the effectiveness of particular musical moments reveals the broader success of experimentalism as a product of the labour of scholars, musicians, composers, journalists, patrons, and venues, produced through historical, social, linguistic, and technological methods in particular locations at specific times. Piekut's aim is ultimately a political one: to challenge those normative historical assumptions that create hierarchies along social, class, race, and gender lines. His four main case studies and an epilogue question the historic separation of conceptual art, fluxus, jazz, shock art, and pop music. Piekut emphasizes the everyday overlaps, successes, conflicts, failures, and resonances among individuals whose performances have hitherto been told as separate avant-garde or experimental stories.

Piekut's Experimentalism Otherwise artfully brings into dialogue elements of the existing yet disparate scholarship on experimentalism, avant-gardism, and musical exceptionalism from the last thirty years, while using newly gathered oral histories to challenge assumptions about experimentalism. Piekut studies a variety of definitions of experimentalism, drawing on texts ranging from Michael Nyman's Experimental Music of 1974 to Amy C. Beal's New Music, New Allies of 2006.Footnote ¹ These definitions focus primarily on the characteristics of the music generally assigned to experimentalism as a category: the privileging of process over product; antiteleology over goal-directedness; the use of notation as a prescription for actions rather than sounds; and so on. But Piekut notes the circularity inherent in such descriptions, in that while these characteristics provide ‘a useful description of the thing we take to be experimentalism, it is not an explanation or definition of the category’. Instead, he suggests, we need to ask: ‘How have these composers been collected together in the first place, that they can now be the subject of a description?’ (6). In other words, Piekut's definition of experimentalism has more to do with the formation of experimentalism as a category: experimentalism as the outcome of social rather than just musical processes, and as something concerned with networks of ideas around the creation of a work rather than just the sonic product itself. Experimentalism is defined by those with whom composers, musicians, and artists interact and by the ways in which they create and shape their own artistic discourses, rather than necessarily by any particular sounds, genres, or styles represented in the music, a distinct view which departs radically from previous scholarship on the subject.Footnote ² By drawing on the scholarship of cultural and network theory, Piekut's work sets itself apart from that of musicologists and cultural historians who focus more specifically on the internal or aesthetic logic of particular experimental movements or works. His theoretical framework draws on Michel Foucault concerning such issues as problematization and technologies of the self, and on Bruno Latour concerning the significance of an individual's social network (6).Footnote ³ Unlike recent work that engages cultural theory through place, Piekut's book moves away from the Romantic notion that location can be connected to specific musical signifiers and symbols and instead towards a dynamic reading of how social and economic networks come to organize sound in particular locations. Whereas a book such as Denise Von Glahn's The Sounds of Place focuses on specific musical works that seek to represent place in literal and figurative musical gestures and structures,Footnote ⁴ Piekut instead articulates music's role in the fabric of everyday life, one full of contested negotiations between identity, experience, belonging, and musical significance.

While not putting it explicitly in these terms, Piekut's book calls for a spatial reorientation of how we think about experimentalism. Experimentalism Otherwise is built on his own extensive interviews, which combine to create an oral history that charts the contested aesthetics and everyday experiences of the individuals that shaped specific experimental music communities and spaces in New York in 1964.Footnote ⁵ Piekut is in many ways rejecting the way in which musicology and cultural history are presented as inert fact by instead ‘showing how experimentalism is made’ by means of ‘a performative ontology [that] renders its object far more real than any stylistic or formalist description could’ (19). Piekut's performative ontology redefines experimentalism as a series of connected moments that are tied to identity politics and the economic and social survival of the artists who participate in its networks. A rich area for further exploration would be to use Pierre Bourdieu's habitus to describe the social interactions and economic forces that influence the principal actors building experimental networks. Just as Piekut draws on Michel de Certeau concerning the ways in which everyday experiences are used to uncover new perspectives on historical moments, so too the insights brought by spatial and urban geography to musicology would enable an explanation of the ways in which experimental ideas are exchanged within the broader creative economy.Footnote ⁶

Rather than forging entirely new intellectual territory, Piekut's work extends recent contributions to the field of experimental music studies by Bernard Gendron, Amy C. Beal, and Georgina Born.Footnote ⁷ Piekut draws explicitly on the work of Gendron, whose book Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club mapped out the subtle ways in which the music and discourses surrounding popular music, art music, and jazz of the 1950s and 60s incorporated avant-garde techniques and aesthetics, challenging the genre and style boundaries that had previously characterized the scholarly literature.Footnote ⁸ Piekut recognizes the significant contributions of earlier scholars of experimentalism and experimental composers, such as Catherine M. Cameron, Michael Nyman, and Michael Broyles, while making it clear that his own scholarship takes a radical turn away from defining experimentalism in terms of styles or sounds.Footnote ⁹

Piekut also draws upon jazz studies by engaging with what the literary scholar Fred Moten, in his study of the Black radical tradition, considered ‘the very intense relationship between the experimental and the everyday’.Footnote ¹⁰ Piekut's chapter on the Jazz Composers Guild can be seen as extending a broader musicological project that has sought to understand the central importance of racial dynamics to the discourse and practice of jazz in the United States, particularly George Lewis's 2008 study of the ACM (Advancement of Creative Musicians) group in Chicago.Footnote ¹¹ In drawing on Lewis's methodologies in Chapter 3, Piekut connects the struggles of the Jazz Composers Guild to the complex dynamic between the entertainment economy of jazz and the racially policed borders of high culture that came to mediate relationships within experimental jazz. He documents the process through which Dixon and the Jazz Composers Guild worked to create a new space for their music outside the normative economy of jazz as entertainment music (104). Efforts to address systemic racial and gender discrimination drove the work of some of the members, though Piekut emphasizes that the Guild never achieved a consensus on the role of race and gender in its self-definition. Piekut analyzes the black nationalist movement and in particular the view of Amiri Baraka (then known as Leroi Jones), articulated in such essays as ‘American Sexual Reference: Black Male’ (1965),Footnote ¹² that the discursive formulation of jazz as a heterosexual black man's music was opposed to forms of experimentalism that represented weak, effeminate sexually deviant white men (122–5). Elusive sexuality and Jewish identity among the members of the Guild became mediators between the circulating discursive nodes that opposed strong black jazz with weak white avant-gardism. While not a category of difference to which Piekut pays much attention, age must have contributed to the conflict within the group, as Sun Ra remained hostile and negative towards the young Carla Bley, one of the only female members of the group (126). The impact of racial, ethnic, and gender modes of identity on musical opportunity and creation remained contested within the Jazz Composers Guild meetings and activities. Indeed, the Guild was formed to combat the hurdles experienced by experimental jazz performers, despite the cultural capital that many musicians gained from their relationships to Cage and his experimental circles. Most significantly, Piekut demonstrates that race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality were unavoidable issues for the jazz avant garde in a way that was not the case for their European-American avant-garde counterparts. At the same time, many of the same concerns for musical validation and social-musical acceptance were at play in the creation of shared discourses and sounds between jazz and European-American experimental music.

To retell the story of the 1964 New York Philharmonic presentation of John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis, Piekut uses new archival research and his own interviews. The latter especially prove that the reality of the rehearsal and concerts was much more complex than the received history of the event would suggest. Piekut links the disagreements and friction between the Philharmonic and Cage with the identity politics of the orchestra. To the musicians – largely white heterosexual men, many of them Jewish, who had worked hard to achieve their positions – both Cage's music and his ‘effeminate, possibly gay self-presentation’ may have been threatening (52). The performance itself was a failure on many levels because of the dynamics between Cage and the musicians. The members of the orchestra evidently felt that their virtuosity was made completely redundant by Cage's score. In their turn, the musicians failed to recognize the precision and arduous preparation that went both into developing the new notation and into producing the elaborate individual parts of Atlas Eclipticalis. From an ideological standpoint, Cage's music rendered the Philharmonic members' skills meaningless because the new musical notation system rewarded only musicians who had an intimate knowledge of the composer's aesthetic (48). Likewise, Cage had developed a highly philosophical, inward-driven musical language, so his pride was wounded when the musicians of the orchestra did not take his music seriously in rehearsals.

Drawing us further into this divide, Piekut suggests that the conflict was part of a broader clash between Cagean liberalism, which made room for a diversity of musical styles (with the exception of tonal virtuosity), and a traditionalism which privileged mastering virtuosic, understandable complexity (63). Within this conflict, however, Piekut is critical of Cage's tolerant liberalism, which projected a utopia of participatory disorganization when in fact what Cage himself had provided was a framework allowing for only limited musical autonomy on the part of the performers. Under Cage's control the musicians had a kind of freedom that was achieved only through the discipline of chance and by means of eliminating their own ego, creating sounds as sound alone. Piekut claims that, although Cage was never explicitly political (and indeed even criticized social justice movements), Atlas Eclipticalis makes it clear that he was working against power structures through his music. For Cage, the practice of breaking down musical hierarchies existed despite the contradiction that this position alienated some musicians, thus mirroring the broader ideological struggles of the late twentieth century (63–4).

Another figure who risked alienating his collaborators and patrons was the often misunderstood Henry Flynt. In Chapter 2, Piekut presents what he claims are fundamental misinterpretations of Flynt's work and aesthetics, retelling the story of two protests organized by Flynt under the banner of Action Against Cultural Imperialism (AACI). Complicating Flynt's role in these experimental circles was his close association with George Maciunas, a proponent of a separate art movement known as Happenings (a split-off from Fluxus). Piekut works to reinstate Flynt as the true author of pamphlets handed out at the AACI events, pamphlets that have long been misattributed to Maciunas (68). Piekut raises these inconsistencies both to suggest that the 1960s avant garde was decidedly unreflective of its own position and to expose the narrow scope of subsequent disciplinary investigations of experimental music, which have tended to consider events from the perspective of Fluxus. Piekut discusses the influences of John Cage and La Monte Young on Flynt, while pointing out that Flynt's challenging musical actions went beyond their aesthetic concerns by pushing the definition of music into the political. He also points to the biographical connection between Flynt's exposure to jazz, blues, R&B, early rock ‘n’ roll, and various folk traditions and his growing interest in Marxist-Leninist political movements (79). Bringing his interest in politics and vernacular music together, Flynt eventually, in his political rock recordings of 1966, created music that sought ‘to demonstrate how a communist cultural policy ought to sound’ (70). In particular, Piekut argues that Flynt was attempting to redefine an experimentalism whose focus promoted a collective struggle against imperialism, supported black liberation, and encouraged self-determination. Throughout this chapter, Piekut reveals the contradictions between Flynt's embrace of particular ideologies and the opposite motivations that drove others to those same ideologies. Flynt also found connections within the black liberation movement and the argument of Amiri Baraka in Blues People that the purpose of a riff in R&B is to make instruments sound as non-Western as possible (85). According to Piekut, Flynt subsequently turned to R&B, hillbilly, folk, blues, and jazz since they were ‘non-European’ genres that could be linked with progressivism as an antidote to the insular concerns of Western avant-garde composers (86). Strikingly, Piekut makes clear that the very ideas that made Flynt's work significant were also those that he subsequently critiqued. Despite Flynt's own failure to articulate the significance of his critique of imperialism, racism, and serious culture, Piekut expertly argues that an exploration of his involvement in the NYC music and activist networks serves to deepen our historical understanding of the complexity of experimentalism.

Turning his focus more specifically on gender and sexuality in experimental music, Piekut's fourth chapter brings together an investigation of the performativity of Charlotte Moorman with an analysis of her collaborations with Nam June Paik and Cage. Piekut claims that by embracing Paik's shock tactics in her interpretation of Cage's scores, Charlotte Moorman's performances gave his musical works an overtly sexualized significance. Drawing on Foucault and de Certeau, Piekut analyzes Moorman's performances as ones that tested the global aims of experimentalism by interpreting and ‘poaching’ (a process defined by de Certeau as creating one's own text) the elements of the music that sought to challenge listeners and composers to think differently. Piekut also suggests that Moorman's use of shock was not particularly political, but rather pushed the limits of social and cultural norms around female sexuality in a way that shared Cage's disdain for the audience. But Moorman also interrogated the gender norms underlying the performance practice of both traditional and avant-garde Western music, whose styles and genres were typically inhabited and created by white men.

Overall, Piekut chooses to engage Moorman's musical performances in psychoanalytic terms that position her more as a body in motion without the fully formed subjectivity given to Cage, Flynt, and members of the Jazz Composers Guild like Dixon. Rather than being the agent of her own musical and personal actions who navigates already established networks, Moorman is analyzed as an individual whose subjectivity emerges out of the injustices and contradictions of the social structure in which she lives (148). Piekut analyzes Charlotte Moorman's performances as a way of exploring the creation of an everyday, singular version of a work authored by someone else (Cage in this case) which both allows her to assume a subject position but at the same time risks rendering her as an object (142). By shifting his focus onto her subjectivity, Piekut reifies the mind and body divide that scholars such as Daniel Chua have attributed to music and scholarship going back to the very beginning of modernism.Footnote ¹³ By positioning Moorman's musical significance in terms of her lack of a subject position, Piekut renders her more of an object or body, and less of a fully formed subject or mind.

Experimentalism Otherwise relegates popular music to the epilogue and discusses musical connections between popular musicians and more traditionally trained musicians in less dynamic ways than in the rest of his book. Piekut describes the intimate relationships between Iggy Pop and the composers and musicians of the experimental ONCE group, free jazz, and the counterculture in Ann Arbor, Michigan (185). The intricately traced relationships between the Michigan artists of ONCE, such as Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma (who had strong socio-musical connections to New York artists Cage, Feldman, and Young), and the young Iggy Pop is told as a one-way exchange, in which Iggy Pop was influenced but did not participate in an exchange of ideas. For example, when describing a performance of John Cage's music by Charlotte Moorman, Piekut uses de Certeau's term ‘poaching’ in a way that seems to legitimate Moorman's use of the influence by presenting it as both critical and creative, whereas Iggy Pop simply ‘translates’ Ashley's work from the ONCE festival into a popular idiom (172, 185). Uncharacteristically, Piekut further reinforces the stereotypical surface descriptions of influences on popular music by pointing out ‘tribal grooves’, without calling attention to the essentialist rhetoric of such comments (186–7). It is in these small but significant linguistic turns of phrase that Piekut fails to embrace Bernard Gendron's fundamental challenge to rethink the artificially constructed yet discursively real boundaries between popular music and various avant-garde movements. Despite an overarching definition of experimentalism as a practice bound to an artistic network, Piekut's argument intentionally relegates popular music to a place outside the network of experimental musical interaction.

The complex dynamic of overlapping networks, the constant negotiation and refinement of subject/object positions, and the aesthetic aim to use art to break through modes of oppression (concerning race, gender, sexual orientation, or the creative evolution and direction of modern music) unifies all four of Piekut's main chapters. Experimentalism Otherwise is enriched by his investigation of a collection of experiences that expose the contested nature of subject and music-formation, the battle of gender equality, and underlying racial discrimination. The significance of his contribution lies in the way he investigates the complexities surrounding the failure of each musical moment, giving voice to the underlying inequalities and the dynamics of experimental networks that at the same time reveal the potential of his experimentalism otherwise.