Hoover, Elizabeth
(2012)
"I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY AND I AM SAYING IT": COLLABORATION, COLLAGE, AND THE MEETING OF INDETERMINACIES IN AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE PERFORMANCES OF THE 1960S.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
When approaching the 1960s, histories of the United States commonly emphasize the dynamic movements of the decade such as fighting for equality, traveling through space and moving upwards in “the Great Society.” These movements captivated both the eyes and ears of Americans through a collage of television, radio, records, newspapers, magazines and journals—a multi-mediated culture that fashioned new political platforms for change. Whereas the roles of popular musicians during the 1960s have been well researched, investigations of American avant-garde music have been limited to studies of individual composers and their compositional methods, largely ignoring these musicians’ role in the germination of a collective consciousness that questioned established aesthetic paradigms and cultivated unique exchanges between multiple forms of artistic media. This study focuses on the so-called “New York School”—a diverse group comprised of, among others, John Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and David Tudor. I reassess the cultural, social and aesthetic importance of these figures by examining their work in multimedia collaborations.
I offer three case studies each organized around an avant-garde event whose premiere performance and/or subsequent renditions marked the 1960s. Chapter 2 elucidates the interplay of indeterminate and determined relations between collaborators in John Cage’s and Merce Cunningham’s Variations V by conceptualizing a “collage of authorities” that thematizes a Derridean play of différance. In Chapters 3 and 4, I detail the textual and perceptual collage that reinforces a Bergsonian notion of order in the “feedback conditions” of Earle Brown’s Calder Piece. In Chapter 5, I unravel and analyze the surfaces of Merce Cunningham’s choreography, Robert Rauschenberg’s décor and Morton Feldman’s music, which together creates a performative collage in the ballet Summerspace. I argue that, as multitudinous collages, these collaborations continued the modernist legacy of questioning conventional musical (and visual) languages while simultaneously projecting traits we now associate with postmodernism, such as theatricality and potentiality through variously constituted indeterminacies. Questioning the very grounds of mainstream communication, these dynamic events offered their own terms for linking politics and aesthetics during the 1960s.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
|
| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
| Creators | Email | Pitt Username | ORCID  |
|---|
| Hoover, Elizabeth | A | | |
|
| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
20 June 2012 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
2 March 2012 |
| Approval Date: |
20 June 2012 |
| Submission Date: |
17 April 2012 |
| Access Restriction: |
5 year -- Restrict access to University of Pittsburgh for a period of 5 years. |
| Number of Pages: |
292 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Music |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
Earle Brown, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, indeterminacy, collage, multimedia performance |
| Date Deposited: |
20 Jun 2012 15:56 |
| Last Modified: |
20 Jun 2017 05:15 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/11836 |
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