Musical Models of Democracy 0197658814, 9780197658819

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Musical Models of Democracy

Musical Models of Democracy R O B E RT A D L I N G T O N

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2024 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Adlington, Robert, author. Title: Musical models of democracy / Robert Adlington. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023017605 (print) | LCCN 2023017606 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197658819 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197658833 (epub) | ISBN 9780197658840 Subjects: LCSH: Music—Political aspects. | Democracy. | Modernism (Music)— Political aspects. | Aleatory music—Political aspects. | Improvisation (Music)—Political aspects. Classification: LCC ML3916 .A365 2023 (print) | LCC ML3916 (ebook) | DDC 780/.0321—dc23/eng/20230614 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017605 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017606 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197658819.001.0001 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America Cover image: extract from Jason Freeman, Piano Etude no. 1 (2008); reproduced by kind permission of the composer. In this work the sequence of musical fragments, dynamics, use of pedal and overall duration are left entirely to performer preference. A web-based version of the score allows non-pianists to create their own realisation. The full score and performance instructions are available at the composer’s website https://distributedmusic.gatech.edu/jason/.

Contents List of Figures and Examples  Acknowledgements 

1. Deciding how to decide: The choices for democratic music-​making 

vii ix

1

2. Curating difference: Elliott Carter and modernist pluralism 

30

3. Admitting interests: On the openness of musical indeterminacy 

66

4. Empowering others: Audience participation as ‘democracy in action’ 

102

5. Practising egalitarianism: Free improvisation and the limits to inclusive music-​making 

143

6. Ungrounded: Musical models of democracy in the age of epistemic chaos 

178

Bibliography  Index 

197 219

List of Figures and Examples Ex. 2.1 Elliott Carter, String Quartet no. 4 (1986), bb. 107–110

41

Ex. 3.1 Christian Wolff, For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964), p. 4 

76

Ex. 3.2 John Cage, Variations II (1961), one possible realisation 

88

Ex. 4.1 Dieter Schnebel, Concert sans orchestre for pianist and audience (1964), p. 3 

110

Ex. 4.2 Huang Ruo, The Sonic Great Wall (2016), audience parts 

112

Ex. 4.3 Udo Kasemets, Contactics (1966), full score 

128

Ex. 4.4 Jorge Antunes, Microformobiles II (1971), tables indicating options for audience decision-making 

133

Fig. 4.1 James Saunders, sometimes we do what you say, but occasionally we don’t (2017), performance layout

135

Ex. 4.5 Luc Ferrari, Société V: participation or not participation (1967–69), parts for percussionists I and V showing options for responding to audience prompts 

138

Ex. 4.6 Luc Ferrari, Société V: participation or not participation (1967–69), ‘Latin’ percussion ensemble to signal election of opposition ‘Leader’ 

139

Ex. 6.1 WIKI-PIANO.NET (2018–), screenshot of start of score, 28 July 2022 

186

Fig. 6.1 Darius Jones, We Can Change the Country (2020), performance layout

190

Fig. 6.2 Shelly Knotts, Flock (2015), sample visuals showing voter preference in relation to the three performers 

194

Acknowledgements As befits a project about democracy, this book has benefitted from the thoughts, provocations, and assistance of many people. Colleagues and postgraduate students at the University of Huddersfield informed the development of this book in many ways: in particular, I wish to thank Aaron Cassidy, Maria Donohue, Sophie Fetokaki, Moss Freed, Bryn Harrison, Mia Pistorius, Ben Spatz, Philip Thomas, PA Tremblay, and Igor Contreras Zubillaga. Exchanges with Esteban Buch, Scott McLaughlin, James Saunders, and Ben Scott were important to particular aspects of the book’s argument. Early iterations of the case-​study material were tested at a number of conferences and guest seminars; I am grateful to all my interlocutors at these events. The anonymous reviewers of a draft manuscript of the book offered supportive but robust advice which has helped me to clarify arguments and focus the discussion; I am hugely grateful to them. I owe thanks to former OUP music editor Suzanne Ryan and her successor Norm Hirschy for offering enthusiastic support for this project from the outset. Thanks are also due to OUP project editor Rachel Ruisard, production manager Lavanyanithya K, and copy editor Joseph Matson for seeing the project through review and production with care and friendly encouragement. Balancing book-​writing with family life is never an easy task. I offer my gratitude and love to Jayne, Astrid, and Hugo, for their understanding and support throughout. Chapter 2 is a substantially expanded version of my chapter ‘Curating difference: Elliott Carter and democracy’, which appeared in Finding Democracy in Music, ed. Robert Adlington and Esteban Buch (Routledge, 2020); it is reproduced with permission of Informa UK Limited through PLSclear.

1 Deciding how to decide The choices for democratic music-​making

Music’s claims on democracy Music has no necessary relation to democracy. It has been used to glorify gods, monarchs, and despots; to entrench the power of authoritarian states; to sustain the mythologies of genius-​creators; to lubricate the machinations of global corporations. In performance, music has arisen from exploitative labour arrangements and been celebrated as an expression of autocratic control. As compositional practice, it has been characterised by aggressive gatekeeping, excluding discourses, and the protection of established interests. Historically and in the present day, music has served as a highly effective vehicle for delineating kinds of social distinction, prestige, and value, and for reinforcing hierarchical and colonialist social orders. Music is turned as readily to anti-​democratic purposes as to the emancipatory and egalitarian goals typically associated with democratic politics. The expansive literature examining the entanglements of music and oppressive regimes, to name but one body of recent scholarly research, serves as a reminder that music and democracy have by no means always been regarded as natural bedfellows.1 Yet today it is more common to find music identified with democracy and democratic values than with their opposites. There is good reason for this. Music possesses a number of distinctive properties and affordances that align it to democratic action and attitudes. Music is celebrated for its capacity to bring people together, united in collective voice and motion. It is a powerful means for the expression of identities and passions, including those of marginalised and minoritised groups. It not only stimulates 1 See for instance Esteban Buch, Igor Contreras Zubillaga, and Manuel Deniz Silva, eds, Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth-​Century Dictatorships (Routledge, 2016); Marina Frolova-​Walker and Jonathan Walker, Music and Soviet Power, 1917–​1932 (Cambridge University Press, 2013); James Garratt, Music and Politics: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2018), ­chapters 3 and 4.

Musical Models of Democracy. Robert Adlington, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197658819.003.0001

2  Musical Models of Democracy active participation—​through singing and dancing—​but also incites action, changing behaviours through its capacity to energise and inflame. As sound, it bears inescapably upon the public realm, connecting across distances and reconfiguring the meaning of social space. These are of course some of the qualities that suit music to use in protest and social activism.2 Music is also regarded as having a special role to play in promoting citizenship and addressing social exclusion. Because it doesn’t rely upon words, and thanks to its capacity to involve large groups, music enjoys unique advantages in overcoming social barriers and cultivating ideals of collaboration and personal agency.3 These qualities are especially cherished by practitioners in the field of community music, whose goal of extending musical opportunities to ‘a wide range of people from many cultural groups’ has been understood precisely as ‘an expression of cultural democracy’.4 Music’s potential for advancing social inclusion has been abundantly demonstrated in projects involving migrants and refugees, people living with disabilities and those in care, the homeless, and subjects of the criminal justice system. In the classroom, music has proved an effective educational tool for developing key citizenship skills, such as expressing and justifying opinions, respect for diversity, and responsibility to others.5 Music has also been claimed to be democratic on account of its proximity to popular culture and taste. The various folk revivals of the twentieth century, for instance, were fuelled by claims of the essentially democratic origins of national folksong repertoires. In the 1950s, American folk singers like Pete Seeger promoted folk music as a repertoire rooted in ordinary lives, and an important driver of civic cooperation. At his concerts Seeger would insist upon audience participation, on the basis that ‘if you’re not singing, you’re probably not going down to the election booth!’6 Despite the dominance of global corporations over the music industry in the past fifty years, it continues to be widely felt that popular music is intrinsically democratic

2 For an overview, see Eric Drott, ‘Resistance and social movements’, in The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music, ed. John Shepherd and Kyle Devine (Routledge, 2015), 171–​80. 3 An overview of relevant research is offered in Graham F. Welch et al., ‘Singing and social inclusion’, Frontiers in Psychology (July 2014), doi: 10.3389/​fpsyg.2014.00803. 4 Lee Higgins, Community Music: In Theory and in Practice (Oxford University Press, 2012), 7, 173. 5 See Lisa C. DeLorenzo, ed., Giving Voice to Democracy in Music Education: Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge, 2016); and for a more critical view, Elizabeth Gould, ‘Social justice in music education: the problematic of democracy’, Music Education Research 9, no. 2 (2007), 229–​40. 6 David Blake, ‘ “Everybody makes up folksongs”: Pete Seeger’s 1950s College Concerts and the Democratic Potential of Folk Music’, Journal of the Society for American Music 12, no. 4 (2018), 383–​ 424: p. 397.

Deciding how to decide  3 due to its accessibility, its responsiveness to changes in public taste, and its capacity to cater for what have been termed ‘multiple mainstreams’.7 Music’s roles of advancing democratic debate, cultivating democratic behaviours, and expressing democratic freedoms are thus well recognised and have been widely discussed. Yet when musicians have positioned their own practice in relation to democracy, they have often highlighted a different kind of association, one in which music was not so much placed at the service of democracy, but rather was used to explore the nature of democracy itself. For the past one hundred years and more, musicians working in diverse genres have explored the potential of musical processes to ‘model democracy’, creating analogies between the structure of their practice and the ideals they ascribe to democracy at large. In many cases this focus emerged as a natural extension of musicians’ political convictions: a commitment to equality, freedom, and inclusivity in the wider world entailed that kinds of equality, freedom, and inclusivity should also be sought in their creative work. Thus in the 1960s, for instance, musicians inspired by the civil rights and student movements felt compelled to explore how their own music-​making could be guided by democratic principles, whether through rethinking the relationships between individual musicians, the involvement of the audience, or the structural principles of their performances and compositions.8 Such explorations implied rejection of various constraining or hierarchical elements of established musical practice—​such as the concentration of creative decision-​making in the hands of a single person, the glorification of charismatic individuals, the denial of meaningful recognition or fulfilment to other participants, and the perpetuation of confining notions of stylistic and expressive legitimacy. In her pioneering study Musical Democracy, Nancy Love argues that the music of feminist singer-​songwriters and the ‘freedom songs’ of African American vocal groups not only advanced the causes of marginalised and oppressed citizens, but they also prefigured through their musical processes more inclusive forms of social relationship.9 By deploying sound and voice to ‘disrupt established notions of subjectivity’, and by practising kinds of communal singing in which lines between leaders and followers are redrawn, these repertoires exceeded the category of ‘movement 7 See variously Ian MacDonald, The People’s Music (Pimlico, 2003); Ian Watson, Song and Democratic Culture in Britain: An Approach to Popular Culture (Routledge, 1983); Eric Weisbard, Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music (University of Chicago Press, 2014). 8 For a case study, see Robert Adlington, Composing Dissent: Avant-​ garde Music in 1960s Amsterdam (Oxford University Press, 2013). 9 Nancy S. Love, Musical Democracy (SUNY Press, 2006), c­ hapters 4 and 5.

4  Musical Models of Democracy music’, narrowly understood, because they were not simply preoccupied with the expression of particular identities or the mobilisation of specific interests.10 Love’s argument, rather, is that the very structure of such musical practices suggested new ways to do democracy, to be democratic. They presented, in other words, what I call musical models of democracy. This interest in modelling democracy is often pronounced in the practice of musicians who are overtly committed to particular causes. But strong political conviction is not a necessary precondition. For other musicians, an interest in the form and functioning of democracy has acted as a substitute for more active forms of political engagement, an opportunity to transcend the fray of political debate. Indeed, as we will see in this book, it is precisely democracy’s promise to encompass all views and all positions that has appealed to some musicians, even as they were also content to associate themselves with the implicitly progressive virtue of a democratic mindset. The potential of music to embody democratic principles has found expression in many different forms and styles, and it has reflected widely diverging ideas of both the nature of democracy and (as we will see) how music might best reflect it.11 By perceiving in the structures and processes of their creative practice a profound way of connecting with the dominant social model of the age, musicians were not just giving voice to the politics of the moment, but building upon a longer-​established understanding that the forms of music-​ making exist in intimate interrelation with wider patterns of social structure and human interaction.12 The capacity of music to ‘model democracy’ hinges upon music’s potential for forging kinds of relationship that may be treated as analogous to the relationships characteristic of democracy. If democracy is understood as a set of principles governing associational life, then music lends itself to modelling democracy in a variety of ways, through the manifold of relationships it constructs. For instance, a musical work, genre, or performance tradition may embody democratic principles through the relationships it forges between individual performers. This is the aspect of African American vocal groups to which Nancy Love draws attention, and it was characteristic of 10 Ibid., 75, 104–​5. 11 For some case studies, see Robert Adlington and Esteban Buch, eds, Finding Democracy in Music (Routledge, 2020). 12 On this interrelation see Steven Feld, ‘Sound structure as social structure’, Ethnomusicology 28, no. 3 (1984), 383–​409; Tia DeNora, ‘Musical practice and social structure: a toolkit’, in Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects, ed. Eric Clarke and Nicholas Cook (Oxford University Press, 2004), 35–​56.

Deciding how to decide  5 many of the musical ‘collectives’ founded during the 1960s and 1970s. But restructuring the relationships between performers is by no means the only available approach. ‘Democratic’ arrangements may also be sought between performers and composers, or between musicians and audiences, or potentially between any other contributing element of a musical performance: any of these may be reassessed in order to overturn conventional hierarchies and explore more collective and egalitarian formats. Even the arrangement of constituent elements within a compositional structure, as notated in a composer’s musical score for instance, carries the potential for the textural delineation of distinct identities, and so the possibility of metaphorically imagining new, ideal kinds of social relation. Musicians drawn to this potential for modelling democracy within their practice thus face a range of choices. A primary decision is how the demos—​ that is to say, the entities participating in the ‘democratic’ process—​is to be defined. We have seen that options include elements of musical structure, performers, composers, audiences, other agencies integral to musical practice, and any particular combination of these. In modelling democracy, musicians make choices (consciously or otherwise) regarding who or what ‘participates’. One choice as to how music may model democracy by no means necessarily maps onto another: different aspects of a given composition or musical performance can suggest different things about the music’s stance in relation to democracy. For instance, as we will see in Chapter 2, a vision of democracy inscribed into a composer’s musical score by no means implies the realisation of a set of democratic relationships between the performers realising that score; nor does a democratic relationship between performers, or between composer and performer, augur emancipation for an audience. Such decisions over the shape and boundaries of the mandate are of course foundational to any democracy, and as political theorists have frequently observed, they entail judgements about exclusion as well as inclusion, reflecting in turn the dominion of a particular worldview (for instance, regarding the primacy of the nation state as determinant of a self-​governing citizenry) over the subsequent democratic negotiation of different views.13 Here we encounter for the first time a central theme of this book: namely, that the modelling of democracy involves taking decisions that inevitably reflect 13 For a theoretical consideration of ‘the boundary problem’ in democratic theory, including an assessment of twenty-​first-​century calls for a universal demos to tackle global challenges such as the climate emergency, see Sarah Song, ‘The boundary problem in democratic theory: why the demos should be bounded by the state’, International Theory 4, no. 1 (2012), 39–​68.

6  Musical Models of Democracy particular standpoints, notwithstanding democracy’s promise to transcend particular interests and preferences. As we will see, this has been a preoccupation of many theorists of democracy, not least because it implies limits on the freedoms and equality promised within any democracy. Musicians seeking to install democratic principles within their practice are no different in this regard: their imagining of democracy inevitably reflects kinds of preference that precede and condition the democratic exchange. In this way, as I will elaborate throughout this introductory chapter, music’s democratic leanings are also always a point of entry for its undemocratic leanings too.

Varieties of democracy—​in politics and music A further fundamental choice facing musicians wishing to model democracy through their practice concerns the nature of democracy itself. It is not uncommon for musicians to invoke the category in informal or casual terms, presenting it as a largely self-​evident set of principles that can be enacted through widely recognised mechanisms of decision-​making, such as equality of participation, freedom of speech, and consensual negotiation. Political theorists, on the other hand, have long been preoccupied by the heterogeneity of the concept, and the understanding that democracy has been realised and theorised in numerous contrasting ways. David Held’s book Models of Democracy, for instance, enumerates ten different visions of democracy (some with further sub-​variants), ranging across republicanism, liberalism, direct democracy, pluralism, deliberative democracy, and radical democracy; each of these embodies different ideas of the relation of equality, freedom, and cooperation, and each depends upon different assumptions about such things as the nature of the demos, the scope of popular decision-​ making, and the respective primacy of individual and group interests. As a field, democratic theory has been characterised by what Rikki Dean and colleagues call the ‘model wars’, by which they mean ‘a kind of ideological struggle to define a best form of democracy situated around a particular form of practice’, a struggle ‘evident in battles over representative democracy vs. direct democracy, participatory democracy vs. elite democracy, and agonist democracy vs. deliberative democracy’.14 These debates animate the field 14 Rikki Dean, Jean-​Paul Gagnon, and Hans Asenbaum, ‘What is democratic theory?’, Democratic Theory 6, no. 2 (2019), v–​xx: p. xii.

Deciding how to decide  7 of contemporary democracy studies. Yet for Held, ‘the meaning of democracy has remained, and probably always will remain, unsettled’.15 A recent attempt to establish an index for measuring democracy in different states around the world—​the V-​Dem or ‘Varieties of Democracy’ project—​takes the ‘multiple meanings’ of democracy as its ‘fundamental point of departure’. Noting that ‘within the sphere of social science, democracy is perhaps the archetypal “contested concept” ’, the project’s authors propose seven key ‘varieties of democracy’ that ‘offer a fairly comprehensive accounting of the concept of democracy as used in the world today’: these are summarised as electoral, liberal, majoritarian, consensual, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian.16 The index offered by V-​Dem attempts to combine analyses of national governments according to each of these different understandings to produce a single numerical measure. However, the project acknowledges that conflicts and contradictions exist between the varieties—​most strikingly between majoritarian and consensual, but to a lesser degree between other pairings. The project’s authors observe that ‘such contradictions are implicit in democracy’s multidimensional character. . . . The protean nature of democracy resists closure.’17 The contested nature of democracy has been increasingly visible in recent political life. In the United Kingdom, the 2016 vote on departure from the European Union fomented lively debate on the pros and cons of the referendum as a means of gauging the will of the people. For many, there existed no truer mechanism for ensuring that government policy followed public preference: dispensing with the complications of elected representatives, constituency boundaries, and party allegiance, the referendum ensured that every British, Irish, or Commonwealth citizen over the age of eighteen who lived in the United Kingdom (or who had lived there during the previous fifteen years) could have their say, on the basis of ‘one person, one vote’. The victory margin may have been slight—​4% of votes cast—​but the result delivered a majority preference for leaving the EU, and the government honoured the long-​established principle that the majority view of those who chose to vote should be taken as the verdict of the people as a whole. But was the exercise unanswerable as an enaction of popular rule? The 15 David Held, Models of Democracy, 3rd ed. (Polity, 2008), 2. 16 Michael Coppedge et al., Varieties of Democracy: Measuring Two Centuries of Political Change (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 27–​28. See also V-​Dem: Varieties of Democracy website, https://​ www.v-​dem.net. 17 Coppedge, Varieties of Democracy, 41–​42.

8  Musical Models of Democracy opposing case was vigorously argued: that the turnout of 72% meant that the leave vote represented only 37% of eligible citizens; that some of those who would be most profoundly affected by the outcome, including EU citizens resident in the United Kingdom, British expats resident in the EU, and young people aged under eighteen, were excluded from the vote; that the binary choice posed by the referendum question misrepresented the complexity of altering the United Kingdom’s relationship to the EU; that the decision-​ making process of individuals was vulnerable to misinformation and lies. The aftermath of the referendum brought into sharp relief the tensions between contrasting models of democracy, as the decision delivered by the referendum met resistance from the majority of elected members of the House of Commons: here, direct democracy came into conflict with representative democracy, contributing to a prolonged parliamentary stalemate, two general elections, and two changes of prime minister.18 Donald Trump’s presidency brought attention to democratic uncertainties of a different kind. The widespread view that Trump was a threat to democracy was underpinned by a catalogue of specific complaints about the way in which he defied or repudiated democratic norms. Writing in 2019 (and so before the tumultuous events surrounding the 2020 US Presidential election), political scientist Michael Klarman listed the norms that Trump chose to disregard: (1) respect for an independent judiciary; (2) support for a free and independent press; (3) more generally, the importance of independent actors within government, as opposed to actors who simply owe loyalty to the president; (4) a commitment to the peaceful resolution of political disputes rather than encouraging violence; (5) respect for the legitimacy of elections; (6) not using the legal system to attack political opponents; (7) not expressing admiration for foreign autocrats; (8) preserving transparency within government; (9) the maintenance of a sharp separation between the private interests of public servants and the public good; (10) at least a minimal commitment to truth telling.19

18 See Andrew Blick and Brian Salter, ‘Divided culture and constitutional tensions: Brexit and the collision of direct and representative democracy’, Parliamentary Affairs, gsz049 (2020), https://​acade​ mic.oup.com/​pa/​adva​nce-​arti​cle-​abstr​act/​doi/​10.1093/​pa/​gsz​049/​5695​547. 19 Michael Klarman, ‘Trump and the threat to democracy’ (2019), Harvard Law School Democrats blog, https://​orgs.law.harv​ard.edu/​democr​ats/​2019/​12/​10/​trump-​and-​the-​thr​eat-​to-​democr​acy/​.

Deciding how to decide  9 And yet whilst Trump’s disregard for such norms was the cause of widespread global outrage throughout his term in office, he could claim that he acted on the basis of a popular mandate under the United States’ electoral rules, and moreover that his track record as president continued to enjoy vast popular support from American citizens at the 2020 election. The challenge to democracy here—​and in other nations where strong-​man leaders have been elected precisely on the basis that they will overthrow the conventions of government—​is more complex than simply that democracy is thereby threatened: rather, such administrations effectively propose a different idea of what democracy should look like. Opponents of the new wave of populist politics may feel strongly that such tactics are not in the long-​term interests of the citizens they claim to serve, and so are fundamentally undemocratic; but as long as those citizens continue to offer their support for such politics, it remains difficult to argue that such concerns should stand as the ultimate arbiter of the form that ‘rule by the people’ should take. Musicians have tended to ignore this contestability in the meaning of democracy. But democracy’s undecidability emerges starkly if we turn to some of the more familiar claims that have been made about the democratic or undemocratic nature of different kinds of music-​making. The symphony orchestra, for instance, is often viewed as embodying an intrinsically authoritarian approach to music-​making. Two-​hundred years ago it was possible to speak approvingly of the dictatorial aspects of the orchestral conductor’s role. In 1807, the German music critic Gottfried Weber wrote: During the performance of a music piece, the conductor is the representative of the general will, as a sovereign is in his state; since, in an emergency during a performance, it is impossible for the musical sovereign to gather his private council or the Great of the Kingdom, only a monarchic or a despotic constitution is viable for the Kingdom—​at least as long as the performance goes on. The conductor must decide alone, given the impossibility to debate and discuss who is right and who is wrong on a particular issue.20

In more recent times, the seemingly undemocratic nature of this arrangement has more often been the cause of critical consternation. For Nicholas Cook, the figure of the ‘martinet conductor’ has become ‘the most stereotyped 20 Gottfried Weber, ‘Praktische Bemerkungen’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 9, no. 51 (16 September 1807), 51–​52.

10  Musical Models of Democracy symbol of the authoritarian construction of classical music’, a visible emblem of a culture that continues to place considerable weight on notions of authority, duty, subservience, and faithfulness.21 In 1977, Jacques Attali offered a Marxist analysis of the orchestra in terms of alienated factory labour, in which ‘anonymous and hierarchically ranked’ musicians were assigned the execution of strictly demarcated tasks that have no value in themselves, making the musician ‘a stranger to what he produces’.22 A number of the musicians surveyed in the chapters of this book have shared this view of the orchestra as an outmoded relic of an authoritarian past. But it is an incomplete view. In the first place, such a picture misrepresents the decision-​making processes that inform both orchestral performance and the management of most orchestras in the present day. It is today widely recognised that successful orchestral performance emerges as a collaborative process in which negotiation and consensus play an important role.23 Empirical studies of the rehearsal and performance practices of modern orchestras highlight the important leadership function played by a sub-​group of orchestral principals—​Murray Dineen calls them the ‘shadow ensemble’—​ who use physical gestures and eye contact to supplement and mediate the cues of the conductor.24 The shadow ensemble provides a kind of qualified sanctioning of the conductor’s actions, and in some cases substitutes for a conductor’s shortcomings, or if necessary offers resistance.25 As regards orchestral management, it is increasingly common today for orchestral players to be present on boards or indeed to be entirely self-​governed.26 Every member of the Berlin Philharmonic, to take one well-​known example, is involved in auditioning and voting for musicians to fill vacancies: It’s a democratic process. Everyone has one vote. After everyone is heard, the section speaks a little and then the vote happens. To get past the first 21 Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (Oxford University Press, 2013), 269. 22 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester University Press, 1985), 66. 23 See Michele Biasutti, ‘Orchestra rehearsal strategies: conductor and performer views’, Musicae Scientiae 17, no. 1 (2013), 57–​71; Pauline Adenot, ‘The orchestra conductor: from the authority figure to negotiated order in a vocational profession’, Transposition 5 (2015), https://​journ​als.open​edit​ion. org/​transp​osit​ion/​1296 (accessed 26 March 2021). 24 Murray Dineen, ‘Gestural economies in conducting’, in New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, ed. Anthony Gritten and Elaine King (Ashgate, 2011), 131–​58; Cayenna Ponchione-​Bailey, ‘Tracking authorship and creativity in orchestral performance’ (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2016). 25 Dineen, ‘Gestural economies in conducting’, 141. 26 See Erin V. Lehman, ‘Models of self-​governance and workplace democracy: a comparison of select orchestras in Germany, the U.S., and U.K.’ (PhD thesis, City University, London, 2002).

Deciding how to decide  11 round you must have fifty percent of the vote and to get to the finals you must have sixty-​six percent of the vote.27

A similar process takes place for new music directors: It’s a democracy, of course. They choose their own director and take it very seriously. It’s not just a question of likes and dislikes. No, they think very hard about what the future will bring or could bring.28

But while this reminds us that the stereotypical view of the orchestra as a kind of dictatorship is today frequently inaccurate, orchestral musicians may also regard an element of authoritarianism on the part of conductors as desirable, if it enables their own overriding goal of excellent performance. A research project on working relations within the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra revealed some interesting views in this regard: ‘Our job is simply to do what we are told!’ one orchestra member related. ‘There is no room for democracy! Not at all! So it’s very authoritarian in a way, professionally authoritarian, that is.’ Another observed: It should not be too relaxed, definitely not . . . One man [sic] stands up in front of 100 really professional musicians, who each have an opinion on how things should be done . . . and then he is supposed to have a really well-​thought approach to the music. Otherwise you simply cannot conduct . . . So it’s also important to have conductors of a certain standard here . . . You cannot expect us to play with a mediocre conductor . . . not an orchestra with our standard.29

27 Gábor Tarkövi (Berlin Philharmonic trumpeter), cited in Marta Medico Piqué, ‘The Berlin Philharmonic: culture and leadership’ (Master’s thesis, Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, 2015), 50. 28 Roger Norrington, cited in ibid., 51. 29 Cited in Mille Buch-​Andersen, ‘Internal conflicts in the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra’ (PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2007). The thesis was the subject of controversy in Denmark after the orchestra requested that parts of it be redacted—​an indication of the sensitivities involved in interrogating the nature of working relations within musical ensembles. The musicians’ quotes cited here are reproduced in a blog posting about the controversy: ‘Controversial sociology report: conflicts in a professional symphony orchestra’ (2007), Mostly Opera blog, https://​most​lyop​era. blogs​pot.com/​2007/​11/​contro​vers​ial-​sociol​ogy-​rep​ort.html; see also Lea Wind-​Friis, ‘Studerende følte sig presset til at trække speciale tilbage’, Politiken (14 December 2007), https://​politi​ken.dk/​indl​ and/​art​4722​938/​Stu​dere​nde-​f%C3%B8lte-​sig-​pres​set-​til-​at-​tr%C3%A6kke-​speci​ale-​tilb​age. The ambiguous standing of the symphony orchestra in respect to democracy is further explored in Tina Ramnarine, ‘ “Unsociable sociability”: orchestras, conflict and democratic politics in Finland after 1917’, in Finding Democracy in Music, ed. Adlington and Buch, 19–​36.

12  Musical Models of Democracy Here is the closer parallel with the United Kingdom’s post-​referendum wrangles over the meaning of democracy. An arrangement that some might regard as ‘undemocratic’ is viewed by others as consistent with the realisation of a collective preference. Which side of this fence—​democratic, or undemocratic—​ you come down on depends upon your attitude towards the nature of democratic process. For instance: How are the interests of participants identified? How is consent signalled? What balance is to be struck between individual and collective rights? Which decisions are rightly in the hands of everyone, and which are better made by specialists and technocrats? Which aspects of collective life may be taken as shared ground and so placed beyond democratic challenge? How are mandates granted and withdrawn? What does it mean to be accountable? An individual’s judgement about whether a particular power arrangement is democratic is contingent upon their particular views on questions such as these. The contested nature of democracy emerges clearly from the discourse surrounding a musical genre that, perhaps more than any other, has been persistently associated with democracy: jazz. Claims of the parallel have a long history; as David Adler has observed, writings extolling the close association of jazz and democracy by authors such as Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Cornel West, are ‘so rich as to constitute a subgenre of American letters’.30 The association has arisen partly from Black Americans’ struggle for equality in twentieth-​century America, and the role of jazz in advancing this struggle. But equally important is the argument that jazz performance reflects the structure of democracy itself. Central to this reading is the role of improvisation, which has often been held to embody the freedom of the individual within democratic society. The succession of improvised solos characteristic of much jazz performance allows each individual to have their say whilst others listen, and successive solos may engage in flexible dialogue with what has gone before. Importantly, though, in ‘straight-​ahead’ jazz, the freedom granted to individuals is constrained by ground rules accepted by all, in the form of a piece’s key, metric structure, chord changes, swung rhythm, and other given elements of musical structure. Thus it is that jazz presents a model of ‘strong individuals combined in a common project

30 David R. Adler, review of Kabir Seghal, Jazzocracy: Jazz, Democracy, and the Creation of a New American Mythology, in Democatiya 14 (Autumn 2008), 157–​65: p. 157.

Deciding how to decide  13 they must sustain to serve their separate interests and their common purpose both at once’.31 This reading of jazz as ‘the music of democracy’32 has been popularised in recent years by the composer and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who in 2014 spearheaded an educational programme called ‘Let Freedom Swing’, which was designed to encourage classroom exploration of ‘big ideas in jazz and democracy’. At the beginning of the teacher’s pack for this programme, Marsalis writes: Jazz calls us to engage with our national identity. It gives expression to the beauty of democracy and of personal freedom and of choosing to embrace the humanity of all types of people. It really is what American democracy is supposed to be.33

Later in the pack, key phrases from the founding documents of the United States—​‘We the People’; ‘E Pluribus Unum’; ‘A More Perfect Union’—​are described as ideas [that] are relevant to the world of jazz as well: a group of diverse musicians negotiating in time to create a collective expression that reflects the unique personalities and values of each individual for the good of everyone. The traditions of experimentation and improvisation in jazz resemble the innovative approach of American’s democracy in placing so much faith in its people and in striving to invent something new, different, and perhaps, even better.34

As others have noted, Marsalis’s reading indulges a romanticisation of jazz performance practice that overlooks aspects that less easily fit the democratic 31 Gregory Clark, Civic Jazz: American Music and Kenneth Burke on the Art of Getting Along (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 3. 32 Gerald Early and Ingrid Monson, ‘Why jazz still matters’, Daedalus 148, no. 2 (2019), 5–​12: p. 8. 33 ‘Let Freedom Swing: Resource Guide’, Jazz at Lincoln Center (2014), https://​acad​emy.jazz.org/​ wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2014/​09/​14-​15-​Let-​Free​dom-​Swing-​Conc​ert-​Resou​rce-​Guide.pdf (accessed 26 March 2021), 5. Most recently, these ideas led to Marsalis’s 2021 album The Democracy! Suite, which he describes as ‘a non-​polemical, instrumental composition inspired by the facts, feelings, and fictions of our current global situation’, and offers as further evidence that jazz ‘provides solutions to the central issue of our democracy and of our universal humanity: should we work together to create unlimited resources and agency for each other? Or should the strong exploit and control the weak?’; The Democracy! Suite liner notes (2021), https://​wyn​tonm​arsa​lis.org/​pdf/​book​let/​The_​Demo​crac​y_​ Su​ite_​book​let.pdf (accessed 26 March 2021). 34 ‘Let Freedom Swing: Resource Guide’, 7.

14  Musical Models of Democracy ideal. It is well known, for instance, that band leaders have often adopted leadership styles that were anything but democratic, retaining executive control over employment contracts, group management, and sometimes the specifics of other musicians’ performance styles.35 The pragmatics of a high-​pressure performance schedule often determined that instrumentalists’ solos were learnt in advance and reproduced largely identically from night to night; contrary to the myth of spontaneous improvisation reflecting the authentic voice of individual performers, in some early jazz ‘freely improvised solos were the exception, not the rule’.36 Paul Berliner’s well-​known ethnographic investigation of jazz in New York additionally highlighted how, in contemporary jazz performance, considerations of convention and authority are often uppermost as improvisers strive to orient themselves ‘in acceptable ways’ towards ‘a specific set of musical conventions that represents, and constitutes, the performance tradition’.37 In all of these regards, the idea that jazz performance enables ‘freedom of speech’ appears problematically simplistic. A larger debate emerges if we return to the ground rules that, for those drawn to the ‘jazz as democracy’ analogy, comprise an essential framework for ensuring that the contributions of individuals serve a broader common purpose. As Gregory Clark makes clear in his book Civic Jazz—​a book directly inspired by Marsalis’s assertion, during a concert by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, that ‘jazz is the sound of democracy’—​jazz performance frequently relies on the fact that certain fundamentals have been agreed in advance and are placed beyond ‘democratic’ discussion. Specifically, there needs to be preliminary agreement on ‘matters of process’, including ‘tune and chord changes, key and rhythm, order of participation’, and so on.38 Whilst inevitably constraining on individual freedom, Clark does not believe this pre-​agreed framework limits the analogy with democracy. On the 35 Benjamin Givan, ‘How democratic is jazz?’, in Finding Democracy in Music, ed. Adlington and Buch, 58–​79; Corey Mwamba and Guro Gravem Johansen, ‘Everyone’s music? Explorations of the democratic ideal in jazz and improvised music’, in Verden inn i musikkutdanningene: Utfordringer, ansvar og muligheter, ed. Sidel Karlsen and Siw Graabræk Nielsen (Norges Musikkhøgskole, 2021), 29–​54: p. 37. 36 See Wolfram Knauer, ‘ “Simulated improvisation” in Duke Ellington’s “Black, Brown and Beige” ’, The Black Perspective in Music 18, nos. 1–​2 (1990), 20–​38; Katherine Williams, ‘Improvisation as composition: fixity of form and collaborative composition in Duke Ellington’s Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue’, Jazz Perspectives 6, nos. 1–​2 (2012), 223–​46. 37 This is the gloss of Berliner’s findings offered in Peter J. Martin, ‘Spontaneity and organisation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, ed. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 133–​52: p. 142. 38 Clark, Civic Jazz, 3.

Deciding how to decide  15 contrary, he likens it to the function of the US Constitution: the Constitution makes ‘demands’ of citizens, determining a sense of collective identity and loyalty amongst individuals as a necessary precondition for democratic interaction.39 In this reading, democratic citizens are not empowered to act as they please; rather, they are called to embody an idea of society already substantially determined in advance, a disposition that qualifies them as citizens rather than just individuals inhabiting a common territory. Indeed, Clark offers the value judgement that jazz only ‘works’ if this common desire—​the domination of ‘piety’ over ego, as he puts it—​is shared by the musicians.40 Clark’s warning reflects the concerns voiced by other advocates of jazz democracy about the consequences of individuals acting without due heed to wider social constraint. Whilst improvisation affords a uniquely powerful means of allowing individuals to express themselves, Stanley Crouch has argued that a distinction needs to be drawn between the ‘heroic individuality’ exemplified by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, and the ‘anarchic individuality’ of the outlaw, whose antics offer nothing more than an ‘antisocial posturing’.41 Implied in this remark is a criticism of free jazz, which appeared to its critics to do away entirely with pre-​agreed structure in order to allow the musicians complete freedom and spontaneity, but in so doing abandoned the social responsibility and ‘discipline’ deemed essential to an ordered society. The results have notoriously been written off by Crouch and Marsalis as ‘self-​absorbed’ and ‘pretentious’.42 Yet the debate between jazz traditionalists and the avant-​garde highlights a broader question: how certain can we be that those aspects of jazz performance determined in advance really do serve the interests of all? The inception of free jazz in the 1960s was motivated by a politicised desire to shed the fetters of European song forms and chord changes. For many Black improvising musicians, the conventions of jazz performance had to be rejected precisely on the basis that they symbolised the oppression of ‘personal freedom’ and ‘the humanity of all types of people’. It was in this spirit that Amiri Baraka, writing from the perspective of the Black Arts Movement of the mid-​1960s, extolled the virtues of John Coltrane for ‘showing us how 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 19–​20. 41 Stanley Crouch, ‘Blues to be constitutional’, in Democracy and the Arts, ed. Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman (Cornell University Press, 1999), 103–​16: pp. 104, 106. 42 Marsalis, cited in Todd S. Jenkins, Free Jazz and Free Improvisation: An Encyclopedia, volume 1 (Greenwood Press, 2004), lxvi; Stanley Crouch, Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (Basic Books, 2007), 31.

16  Musical Models of Democracy to murder the popular song. To do away with weak Western forms’.43 Appeals to ‘piety’ have little purchase in contexts where the process of adopting norms of conduct and exchange is perceived to entail self-​abasement or self-​erasure. In reading jazz as democracy, in other words, we become acutely aware of the presuppositions that attend any claim to be ‘truly democratic’, and the ease with which any one model of democracy may serve to marginalise and exclude. Just as the existence of different ideas of democracy is a significant aspect of political debate, so it is a feature of the attempt to model democracy musically.

Democracy’s undemocratic grounds As we can see from these examples, although musicians have deployed the words ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic’ as if their meaning were self-​evident, what individuals regarded as democratic could be quite idiosyncratic. Historians of democracy have regularly observed that the conception of democracy advanced by individuals or groups invariably reflects the interests and worldview of those individuals and groups. This can give rise to problematic and indeed oppressive situations: democracy pretends to rise above positionality to encompass or enable all the opinions and differences within a society, yet its terms of operation are inevitably shaped by partisan agendas. The tendency of the rhetoric of democracy to clothe the pursuit of particular ends in the language of universality has been traced across many historical and political contexts. Leela Ghandi has analysed the emergence of contrasting ‘ethics for democracy’ in early twentieth-​century British debates about the legacy of Empire. She recounts the attempts of a generation of young, educated men inspired by socialism and affiliated to various ethical societies to advocate for an ideal of democracy that rejected the assumptions of superiority and dominion over others—​assumptions that were characteristic of the era’s colonialists. Ghandi elaborates upon how the ostensible openness and inclusivity of this attitude in fact obscured a desire on the part of these ‘New Liberals’ to universalise their own ethics—​what she describes as ‘a heroic ethical style’—​as a condition for democratic participation:

43 Amiri Baraka, cited in Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Harvard University Press, 2005), 229.

Deciding how to decide  17 [New Liberalism’s] ethical project consists in raising the general masses to the already exalted level of the political—​that is in the cultivation of an improved citizenry. Herein, democratic coexistence implies shared responsibility for evicting demotic elements—​in the sense of all that is unexceptional, ordinary, un-​remarkable, unworthy of note—​from civic life, so as to secure a culture of maximal communal achievement. This modality, whereby individual citizens commit to work upon themselves in order to catch up with and live up to progressive political structures, forms the nucleus of New Liberal moral perfectionism.44

Whilst the proposal to aspire to a high ethical standard might seem simply to reflect the requirement upon any democratic citizen to recognise the needs of others, Ghandi notes how it created an ‘asymmetry between expectations of haves and have-​nots, because of their difference in circumstances’.45 For the New Liberals themselves, altruism entailed making a choice to ‘transcend pleasure’; but such ethical perfection was a ‘more strenuous affair’ for those subject to the travails and pain of working life, entailing as it did the expectation that ‘the common labourer [should] rise above his abjection and develop capacities beyond the “conditions of the animal soul” ’.46 In this way, Ghandi writes, ‘moral perfectionism turns against democracy through the very gestures with which it turns toward it’, by laying down unequal terms for participation.47 As a consequence, New Liberalism, while acting as ‘an important adversary to New Imperialism on home ground’, nonetheless ‘retained key investments in totalitarian premises’.48 Their ethical democracy was in important regards undemocratic. A related perspective has been offered in analyses of the new democracies that arose from authoritarian regimes in the course of the second half of the twentieth century. In the view of Michael Albertus and Victor Menaldo, such democracies, while in many cases undoubtedly bringing welcome new freedoms to citizens, were typically ‘gamed by elites’—​which is to say, they were engineered so as to continue to serve incumbent political or economic interests, even as they posed as breaking with past inequalities in the distribution of power. In such ‘elite-​biased’ democracies—​and Albertus 44 Leela Ghandi, The Common Cause: Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy, 1900–​1955 (Chicago University Press, 2014), 11. 45 Ibid., 12. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 13. 48 Ibid., 3.

18  Musical Models of Democracy and Menaldo’s belief is that all democracies follow this pattern—​the introduction of popular elections is frequently paired with ‘institutional devices . . . designed by elites under the previous authoritarian regime, or in the intervening transition period, to protect those who were powerful under that regime’.49 These may take the form of unelected or indirectly elected upper chambers, restrictions to the franchise, permanent appointments to political bodies, the creation of judicial structures that exempt former elites from prosecution, or other tools to protect established interests. As a result, it is possible for authoritarian political elites and their economic allies to negotiate a democratic transition that can not only insulate them from punishment but allow them to thrive economically. Democracy is therefore often a continuation of the same political dynamic that characterizes the previous authoritarian period.50

The prospects for real popular power are limited, Albertus and Menaldo contend, because even in the aftermath of a revolution the masses typically rely upon economic elites for the resources to create new state structures.51 The best chance for a complete break with the past is for a mass movement to gain support from the ‘outsider economic elites’ that were held back under the authoritarian regime, but the new arrangements will then be built around the interests of those insurgent economic elites. Democracy, Albertus and Menaldo argue, always inherits an authoritarian legacy; the only open question within a transition to democracy is which elite will emerge with the upper hand. As Albertus and Menaldo suggest, this authoritarian legacy is often encoded into the foundational documents and structures of a democracy. Such a concern has increasingly been voiced about even the most long-​ established of democracies. In an article on ‘Black Lives Matter and the Paradoxes of U.S. Black Politic’, Juliet Hooker asks what we are to make of the fact that ‘blacks are condemned to be perpetual losers in U.S. democracy’.52 Her discussion picks up on the themes of sacrifice and virtue addressed by Leela Ghandi. She notes how it has long been accepted that, in democratic 49 Michael Albertus and Victor Menaldo, Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 27. 50 Ibid., 28. 51 Ibid., 35. 52 Juliet Hooker, ‘Black Lives Matter and the paradoxes of U.S. Black politics: from democratic sacrifice to democratic repair’, Political Theory 44, no. 4 (2016), 448–​69: p. 464.

Deciding how to decide  19 politics, there will be losers as well as winners, because citizens have conflicting preferences; accordingly, in the words of Danielle Allen, ‘citizens have to learn to reconcile themselves to the experience of losing’.53 Democratic theory has postulated that this is generally accepted by citizens on the understanding that the burdens of democratic citizenship are supposed to fall equally, meaning that ‘there are no systematic winners and losers’. Yet history attests to a ‘disproportionate distribution of loss’ between different groups, making problematic the expectation that ‘losers’ should unceasingly tolerate their losses as a reasonable outcome of democratic governance. Hooker proposes that in the United States this situation has come about thanks to a model of citizenship and democratic virtue that is intrinsically bound to the experiences of the socially privileged—​namely whites. Citing from Joel Olsen, she notes how race and dominant models of responsible citizenship have become entwined, producing ‘a narrow political imagination that constrains the way white citizens understand citizenship (as status rather than participation), freedom (as negative liberty), and equality (as opportunity rather than social equality)’.54 Olsen’s book The Abolition of White Democracy goes further in sketching the historical background to this conjuncture. His blunt contention is that ‘American democracy is a white democracy, a polity ruled in the interests of a white citizenry and characterized by simultaneous relations of equality and privilege: equality among whites, who are privileged in relation to those who are not white.’55 This undemocratic aspect to American democracy has its roots in the fact that the development of modern ideas about the rights of the American citizen occurred at the same time as the systematisation of chattel slavery in the United States.56 In this process, the advantages conferred on whites and withheld from Black slaves were projected as natural, normal, and deserved. They were posited as rights for wealthy and poor whites alike, thus lending the impression of a novel social egalitarianism. But they were also founded upon a new conception of racial hierarchy, written into the primary legislation of states where slavery flourished and subsequently repeatedly enforced in state laws, in which Africans were regarded as subordinate and unworthy of inclusion in a society of equals. In this way, ideals of citizenship became effectively coterminous with the social privilege that

53 Danielle Allen, cited in ibid., 451. 54 Joel Olsen, cited in ibid., 455.

55 Joel Olsen, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minnesota University Press, 2004), xiv. 56 Ibid., ch. 2 passim.

20  Musical Models of Democracy Black noncitizens enabled and (through their exclusion) constituted. As Olsen expresses it, ‘white chauvinism did not contradict citizenship but was constitutive of it’, giving rise to a concept of democratic equality dependent upon ‘a system of formal and informal controls that maintained racial hierarchy’ and which persisted until the civil rights movement.57 Within American liberal democracy, Olsen contends, it continues to be the case that ‘the political values and vision of the white citizen bundle racial privilege with democratic ideals’, meaning that efforts to expand democratic inclusion remain compromised. Olsen proposes that attention must correspondingly shift ‘from the goal of fulfilling liberal democracy to the possibility of transcending it’.58 These varied accounts of the partial and interested nature of democracy as it has been imagined and enacted in different times and places reflect the perception of many democratic theorists that democracy may never attain the universal inclusion to which it aspires. A manifestation of this is the paradox that we noted in discussing jazz: namely, that a democracy, in order to be defined or implemented, requires a founding act that precedes the democratic discussion and so is in some sense ‘undemocratic’. The ground rules that typically act as the basis for democratic exchange—​as laid out in a constitution or bill of rights, for instance—​need to be established in advance, and inevitably (and purposely) inform and constrain how the demos may act. Such ground rules, typically determined by social elites who, at least in the cases discussed by Albertus and Menaldo, wish to maintain their power within the new ‘democratic’ dispensation, are likely to be at best an imperfect reflection of the popular opinion of the time; and they additionally claim authority over future generations, often allowing only limited powers for popular amendment in light of changed circumstance or shifts in public sentiment.59 It has generally been felt that such foundations are nonetheless essential as a framework for orderly decision-​making, and as protection against irrational shifts in majority view that may be the result of short-​term circumstances or the passing pressures of a particular moment. Yet for all their utility, such constraints on popular rule betray the principle that democracy confers higher ground to none.

57 Ibid., 33, 42. 58 Ibid., xxiii. 59 For a consideration of this issue in constitutional theory, see Andrei Marmor, ‘Are constitutions legitimate?’, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 20, no. 1 (January 2007), 69–​94.

Deciding how to decide  21 How to reconcile democracy’s apparent need for grounds and foundations with the perception that such grounds and foundations are essentially undemocratic? For the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, this impasse points to ‘the impossibility of the complete realization of democracy’.60 Her stance finds epistemological footing in the belief that all identities, including collective identities, are constituted through the exclusion of other identities; accordingly, any conception of ‘the people’, however universalising in intention, bears ‘the traces of the acts of exclusion which govern its constitution’.61 Mouffe’s conviction of ‘the impossibility of constituting a form of social objectivity which would not be grounded on an originary exclusion’62 thus reaches beyond pragmatic questions of decisions over who can vote, or how a democracy’s founding principles vitiate equality and inclusion, to offer an a priori rejection of the idea that a community could ever be convened in a way that reflects the interests of all. Mouffe, accordingly, declares herself ‘suspicious of any attempt to impose a univocal model of democratic discussion’.63 Instead, attention must be turned to how any given democratic arrangement falls short of the aspiration to universality. In the words of Alan Keenan, [D]‌ emocratic politics requires ‘recognizing’ this incompletion, and renouncing any claims to be able to achieve a ‘completed’, fully reconciled society. . . . In other words, given that, as a democrat, one accepts the goal of universality—​of equality and inclusion—​. . . one must guarantee that one’s own beliefs and political institutions are questionable, [and] one must refuse the practice of defending one’s exclusions on grounds that they are ‘natural’, or ‘necessary’, and thus beyond argumentation.64

Mouffe recognises that ‘a moment of closure’ will be necessary to the establishment of any democratic system, as a particular idea of popular governance gains widespread acceptance. She insists, however, that any such consensus exists only ‘as a temporary result of a provisional hegemony, as a stabilization of power, and that it always entails some form of exclusion’.65 60 Chantal Mouffe, ‘Democratic citizenship and the political community’, in Miama Theory Collective, Community at Loose Ends (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 70–​82: p. 81. 61 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (Verso, 2000), 21. 62 Ibid., 11. 63 Ibid., 34. 64 David Keenan, Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (California University Press, 2003), 127, 129. 65 Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 104.

22  Musical Models of Democracy The responsibility for any democrat, therefore, is to remain vigilant as to how exclusion persists under democracy, and how any democratic system remains open to contestation: Instead of trying to erase the traces of power and exclusion, democratic politics requires us to bring them to the fore, to make them visible so that they can enter the terrain of contestation. And the fact that this must be envisaged as an unending process should not be cause for despair because the desire to reach a final destination can only lead to the elimination of the political and to the destruction of democracy. In a democratic polity, conflicts and confrontations, far from being a sign of imperfection, indicate that democracy is alive and inhabited by pluralism.66

The ‘post-​ foundational’ perspective motivating Mouffe’s analysis is common also to readings of democracy by theorists such as Ernesto Laclau, Jacques Rancière, Claude Lefort, and others whose ideas we will return to in this book.67 It receives historical substantiation from the studies of historians like Ghandi, Albertus, Menaldo, Allen, and Olsen, who highlight the determining role played by particular circumstances and particular actors in the creation of ideas of democracy; and it resonates with the empirical findings of the V-​Dem project, which highlight democracy’s heterogeneity and resistance to definitive conceptualisation. In highlighting the existence of many models (in the plural) of democracy, one intention of this book is to emphasise democracy’s undecidability. This brings the benefit of recognition of the richly different ways in which democracy has been imagined in music. But it entails, too, acknowledgment of the futility of hoping for a perfect reconciliation of the totality of interests and aspirations within a community, and an acceptance that democratic practice is substantially a matter of the recognition of shortfalls, continuing injustices, and the essential contestability of any one arrangement.

66 Ibid., 33–​34. Mouffe’s analysis provides a means of inflecting present-​day critiques of democracy as a bulwark for neoliberalism. Writers including Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and Jodi Dean have asked whether we should persist in regarding democracy as some kind of ideal endpoint in the evolution of social relations. Viewed through Mouffe’s account, however, these critiques relate to hegemonic forms of democracy, rather than the wider aspiration for ‘rule by the people’, which can take numerous different forms. 67 On post-​foundationalism, see Oliver Marchart, Post-​Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

Deciding how to decide  23

Scope, limits, and overview Such a perspective—​that fully achieved democracy is by definition impossible, and that all existing democracies are necessarily touched by the undemocratic—​contrasts with the utopianism characteristic of musicians’ use of the concept. It is part of the purpose of this book to temper the idealisations of democracy found in discourse about music, idealisations that, as we will see in the course of the following pages, often bring disappointment and disillusionment.68 But there is also an interpretative dividend to bringing some of the complexity, nuance, and ambivalence of theoretical writings on democracy to a consideration of music. Attempts to model democracy in music, far from reproducing each other in identikit fashion, produce different kinds of contingency and interestedness, mirroring the diverse ways in which power comes asymmetrically to bear on political democracies. Relinquishing the utopian claim for music as a route to universal egalitarian participation allows us instead to trace the different kinds of trade-​off that any democracy entails, and the different ways in which music contributes to what Mouffe and other theorists regard as the ‘unending’ contestation over democracy’s meaning and emancipatory potential. To structure my exploration of these diverse narratives, each of the following chapters focuses upon a different approach to the musical modelling of democracy. As previously discussed, musicians have tended to be selective regarding the relationships within their practice that they seek to democratise. Chapters 2 to 5 highlight four contrasting approaches to this question, focusing in turn upon the relationships between kinds of musical material, between composer and performers, between musicians and an audience, and between performers within an ensemble. As case studies to illustrate each approach, I turn to musical practices largely overlooked in the existing literature on music and democracy, examining not folk music, popular song, or jazz, but instead selecting different repertoires drawn from late-​twentieth-​century modernist, avant-​garde, and experimental musical practice. Specifically, I focus respectively upon late twentieth-​century modernist composition, musical indeterminacy, audience participation works,

68 A comparable approach is taken in Mwamba and Johansen, ‘Everyone’s music? Explorations of the democratic ideal in jazz and improvised music’. The authors note the existence across four case studies of ‘tension, inconsistencies, and discrepancies’ within improvising musicians’ claimed adherence to democratic principles (p. 38).

24  Musical Models of Democracy and collective free improvisation. Within each of these bodies of work, democracy and democratic sentiment have figured prominently. This choice of repertoires requires some justification. In the first place, it may seem eccentric to concentrate on music that, by and large, has been and remains resolutely unpopular. As we have seen, it has been more common to treat music with a wide public appeal as somehow intrinsically related to democracy.69 But my focus upon the relatively obscure and arcane is not an accident. In the first place, musicians aware that their practice held an uncertain place in the affections of a wider public frequently felt an additional impulse to articulate the relevance of their work within democratic society. Unable to demonstrate the need for their music in terms of popularity, other means had to be found to explain its currency and legitimacy. There was also the motivation that an allusion to democracy could serve as a token of their progressiveness as artists, insofar as it implied a rejection of aspects of historical musical culture that seemed rigidly hierarchical, such as the symphony orchestra and the formalities of the concert hall. The prominence of modernists and experimentalists within this study also reflects the way in which the very idea of ‘musically modelling democracy’ privileges a conception of music that they themselves favoured. Late-​twentieth-​century art music culture placed an emphasis upon music’s processes and relationships as the basis for meaning. Rather than serve a purpose through offering commentary on worldly events, or furnishing the requirements of a public occasion, or lightening the burdens of everyday life, this repertoire principally claimed significance through its investigation of its own materiality—​a materiality that eventually extended to encompass performers and the audience too. Whilst certainly not unique to these more rarefied musical cultures, the idea that music could serve democratic ends by reconfiguring its own terms of operation reflected priorities that were especially marked amongst musicians of an adventurous or experimental bent. A further concern regarding this book’s choice of repertoire is that its focus upon approaches taken by musicians in a small part of the global North risks implying that there is little to be said about the connection of music and democracy within other cultural traditions and geographic contexts. That this is not the case has been amply demonstrated by other researchers. For instance, Nathan Hesselink has interpreted the traditional South Korean 69 On modern composers’ view that their unpopular work is, nonetheless, ‘the people’s music’, see Robert Adlington, ‘Modernism: the people’s music?’, in The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music, ed. Björn Heile and Charles Wilson (Routledge, 2019), 216–​38.

Deciding how to decide  25 musical practice of p’ungmal as exemplifying key democratic principles, namely ‘equality in terms of access and treatment, freedom of (personal) expression, concern for the common good, tolerance or respect of difference, and activity taking place in public space’.70 He believes that this makes it an effective tool for strengthening the place of participatory democracy within Korean society more generally. Along similar lines, Jerome Lewis has examined the role of group singing and dancing in modelling what Lewis describes as the ‘cultural grammars of interaction’ in the ‘egalitarian cultural context’ of the BaYaka Pygmies in Central Africa.71 Within this ‘musical socialisation’, which is experienced by all members of the community from an early age, polyphony becomes a model for ‘culturally appropriate ways of interacting with others’.72 Yet to attach the word ‘democracy’ to these practices is not unproblematic. As Hesselink notes, although democracy ‘is extremely important as a concept and practice to late twentieth-​and early twenty-​first-​century South Korean society’, the word would ‘have had little or no sense’ for older generations of p’ungmul performers.73 While democracy is often treated as a category of universal significance for its realisation of fundamental human rights, there is growing recognition of the hazards of unreflective attempts to export European and North American models of liberal democracy to other parts of the world, and growing interest in what democracy as it is commonly conceived in ‘the West’ may have to learn from approaches to social organisation within other cultural traditions.74 In various ways, this book draws to the fore the co-​implication of democracy and modernity within European and North American culture. Although enjoying an ancient history, democracy’s modern conceptualisation is tightly bound up with key suppositions of post-​Enlightenment thinking, notably the idea of the autonomous subject, whose inalienable rights and freedoms democracy has typically taken as a primary orientation.75 The processes of 70 Nathan Hesselink, ‘Taking culture seriously: democratic music and its transformative potential in South Korea’, The World of Music 52, nos. 1–​3 (2010), 670–​701: p. 678. 71 Jerome Lewis, ‘A cross-​cultural perspective on the significance of music and dance to culture and society: insight from BaYaka Pygmies’, in Language, Music, and the Brain: A Mysterious Relationship, ed. Michael A. Arbib (MIT Press, 2013), 45–​65: pp. 61–​62. 72 Ibid., p. 62. Lewis cites John Blacking on the capacity of music and dance to act as ‘primary modelling systems for the organization of social life’ (p. 49). 73 Hesselink, ‘Taking culture seriously’, 670. See also Michelle Kisliuk, Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnology of Performance (Oxford University Press, 2001), which enquires into the complexity of applying European ideas of ‘egalitarianism’ to different cultures. 74 For an overview of key arguments and literature in this area see Richard Youngs, ‘Exploring “non-​western democracy”  ’, Journal of Democracy 26, no. 4 (October 2015), 140–​55. 75 Ingolfur Blühdorn, ‘The dialectic of democracy: modernization, emancipation and the great regression’, Democratization 27, no. 3 (2020), 389–​407.

26  Musical Models of Democracy industrialisation cemented the view that these rights and freedoms needed protection, and handed a leading role in the definition of democratic emancipation to a well-​educated cosmopolitan class who wished to preserve above all the autonomy of thought and action by which they defined themselves. The musical modelling of democracy described in this book can be comfortably situated within this broader ‘progressive’ programme of articulating for others the freedoms that they should wish to claim and cherish. As we will repeatedly discover, such programmatic emancipatory visions often struggled to recognise the contingent and partial bases upon which they were inevitably built. In expanding upon the democratic impulses of my case-​study repertoires, my analyses go considerably beyond those offered by most of the musicians I discuss. In general, musicians have likened their practice to democracy only in general terms, or by alluding more generically to kinds of freedom, emancipation, equality, and loosening of control. Few if any of the musicians I consider made an extensive study of ideas of democracy or democratic theory, leaving us largely without fixed reference points for an understanding of these aspects of their work. This does not mean, however, that they did not entertain particular conceptions of democracy, with their specific implications for the relationship of individual and collective—​but these typically only become clear through careful examination of the processes characterising the musical relationships they wished to democratise. In digging more deeply into these implicit articulations of different models of democracy, as well as the statements that musicians have made about their engagement with democratic principle, I reach for varied tools drawn from democratic theory and practice that illuminate musicians’ approaches. These may connect to the particular cultural and political milieu inhabited by the musicians concerned—​ as is the case with the discussion of Elliott Carter in Chapter 2, and of collective free improvisation in Chapter 5—​or they may have no such connection but instead offer promising avenues for hermeneutic investigation, revealing democratic affordances and constraints that can be quite removed from musicians’ cultural affinities and stated intentions—​as in the case of the discussion of indeterminacy in Chapter 3, conducted from the perspective of French philosopher Claude Lefort. Linking the analytical approaches is the post-​foundationalist perspective outlined in the previous section, which stresses the absence of a secure basis for democratic social arrangements that transcends the preferences or interests of a particular individual or group. As Chantal Mouffe summarises this perspective, ‘the democratic character

Deciding how to decide  27 of a society can only be given by the fact that no limited social actor can attribute to herself or himself the representation of the totality and claim to have the “mastery” of the foundation’76—​and yet this is of course precisely what proselytisers for democracy have routinely done throughout history. In taking up the challenge of musicians’ typically unelaborated claims around the emancipatory aspects of their practice, the goal is to deepen our understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of those claims. My study begins with an investigation of a figure who epitomises the seeming paradox of hostility towards the popular alongside keen interest in democracy as a principle for composition: Elliott Carter. Carter was unusually explicit about the parallels between his complex, multi-​layered structures and the ideals of democratic pluralism; but I treat his approach as to a certain extent emblematic of a wider concern amongst modernist composers for textural multiplicity as a symbol of the encompassing of difference—​a concern that endowed their work with a certain kind of democratic legitimacy, despite public indifference (or worse). Drawing upon the contradictory themes of Alexis de Toqueville’s Democracy in America—​a foundational text for the evolution of American liberal democracy—​I propose that any attempt to ‘curate difference’ in this way involves assumptions about the nature of the individual and the collective, which in turn reflect interests that limit ‘the infinite play of differences’ that pluralism ostensibly wishes to protect. In Carter’s case, the idea of the democratic individual conveyed by his compositions coincides with the compositional persona he frequently projected in interviews and writings: namely, that of the stubbornly asocial frontiersman. Chapter 3 turns from relations inscribed in a composer’s score to the relations forged between composer and performers. The pioneers of musical indeterminacy—​John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff—​laid particular emphasis upon the ways in which their innovations offered kinds of emancipation to performers, an emancipation achieved by leaving many aspects of the realisation of their compositions unfixed or ambiguous. At the same time, these composers’ interest in non-​intentionality led to the elaboration of an ethic of performance that implied significant constraint upon performers’ pursuit of their own inclinations. I explore Claude Lefort’s philosophical writings on the indeterminacy of democracy as a means to evaluate these conflicting tendencies within musical

76 Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 100.

28  Musical Models of Democracy indeterminacy. Lefort’s proposition that democracy consists of both the essential ‘disincorporation’ of society, and individuals’ attempts to reincorporate it, leads to an account of the practice of musical indeterminacy that stresses not ascetic disinterest but precisely the assembly of multiple competing interests, and a consequent ‘institutionalisation of conflict’. In Chapter 4 the boundary line demarcating interested parties is extended further to include the audience. Audience participation has been a significant field of experiment within art music of the past sixty years, often—​ though certainly not always—​undertaken with the aim to empower and involve. A survey of the various approaches composers have taken indicates the difficulty of distinguishing cleanly between liberation and control—​a point that has been extensively rehearsed by critics of participatory theatre, including Jacques Rancière in his widely-​read essay ‘The emancipated spectator’. My discussion argues that the inevitable involvement of the interests of the organiser in such participatory initiatives is not in itself reason to discount their empowering potential: agency, it has been persuasively argued, is always also the outcome of ‘patiency’, or being acted upon. Using ideas from the field of community organising, I elaborate upon ways in which musical attempts to involve an audience may afford productive new distributions of power, before closing with an example that demonstrates the intimate entanglement of composers’ instincts to liberate and to dominate. Chapter 5 focuses upon the relationships that music forges between performers in an ensemble—​perhaps the most widely recognised way in which music-​making can model democracy. The strengths and weaknesses of the democratic analogy for ensemble music-​making are carefully assessed, in an attempt to distinguish between what Nicholas Cook has termed ‘the mythologization of musical community’ and the empirical reality. Then attention is turned towards the implications of recent approaches to democratic deliberation, which highlight the unavoidability of circumstances that compromise inclusion and equality. These findings are placed against the utopian claims that have been made about collective free improvisation as a practice especially open to differences between performers. Recent theories of deliberation prove useful in indicating how free improvisers’ stated desire to encompass difference may exist alongside a desire for kinds of sameness, driving the articulation of norms of practice that inevitably establish boundaries to inclusion. The book’s concluding chapter turns to the profound challenges confronting democracy in the 2020s. Here a question needs to be asked

Deciding how to decide  29 about the analytical orientation of my study as a whole. If democracy is ‘undecidable’, what grounds any longer exist to rebut those who reject all democratic norms in the name of the people? Does a refusal to rule on the shape of democracy not amount precisely to the attitude of ‘radical indifference’ that has blurred to the point of invisibility the distinction between lies and truth; allowed citizens’ decision-​making to be guided by hearsay, prejudice, and misinformation; and meant that no measure of democratic preference any longer enjoys general acceptance—​with the result that democracy itself seems imperilled? In this chapter I offer a brief consideration of the implications of theoretical debates around democratic norms and the shape of democracy in an age of ‘epistemic chaos’ (to borrow Shoshana Zuboff ’s formulation), before considering what new musical models of democracy might be apt for the post-​Trump era.

2 Curating difference Elliott Carter and modernist pluralism

In many of the obituaries and tributes that followed Elliott Carter’s death in November 2012, the theme of democracy loomed large. Lloyd Schwartz proposed that ‘Elliott was the most democratic of composers’, on account of the fact that in his music ‘there were no “secondary” instruments’.1 In similar vein, Anthony Cheung observed that Carter’s music resembles a ‘town-​ hall democracy [which] is pristine and utopian, its citizens speaking and clashing eloquently, often simultaneously, and never randomly’.2 The cellist Fred Sherry quoted Carter as saying that ‘my music is like the ideal form of American democracy—​dissenting independent voices creating harmony’.3 Sherry noted that Carter had voted in the presidential election a few weeks before he died at the age of 103. An indication as to which candidate enjoyed Carter’s support is given by a photo of the composer’s workdesk taken by Jeff von der Schmidt shortly before he died, proudly displaying two greetings cards from the Obamas.4 David Schiff highlighted the defining influence upon Carter of Ives, who ‘had envisioned a distinctly American music expressive of the redemptive order of democracy’.5 Paul Griffiths’s tribute in turn recorded Carter’s view that the kind of keen attention his music expected of a listener ‘has to be a very real and important thing in a democratic

1 Lloyd Schwartz, ‘Remembering Elliott Carter’ (2012), Elliott Carter website, https://​www.elliot​ tcar​ter.com/​tribu​tes/​ (accessed 29 March 2021). This page gathers tributes written by Carter’s friends and admirers, which were previously mounted on separate pages of the Elliott Carter website. 2 Anthony Cheung, ‘Controversies and conversations: an appreciation of Elliott Carter’, American Academy in Rome website, http://​aar​ome.org/​news/​featu​res/​elli​ott-​car​ter-​1908-​2012-​two-​apprec​ iati​ons (accessed 29 March 2021). 3 Fred Sherry, untitled tribute (2012), Elliott Carter website, https://​www.elliot​tcar​ter.com/​tribu​ tes/​(accessed 29 March 2021). 4 Jeff von der Schmidt, ‘From 100 to 2013: the wisdom of Elliott Carter’ (2015), Jeff von der Schmidt blog, https://​jeffvo​nder​schm​idt.com/​2015/​06/​18/​from-​100-​to-​103-​the-​wis​dom-​of-​elli​ott-​ car​ter/​ (accessed 29 March 2021). John Link suggests that these were likely sent in appreciation of a gift from Carter to Obama’s re-​election campaign; email communication, 21 November 2017. 5 David Schiff, ‘Magna Carter’ (2012), Elliott Carter website, https://​www.elliot​tcar​ter.com/​tribu​ tes/​(accessed 29 March 2021).

Musical Models of Democracy. Robert Adlington, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197658819.003.0002

Curating difference  31 society’.6 The obituarist of the Boston Globe was even moved to compare Carter’s ‘vision of America’ to ‘that of the Founding Fathers’.7 This emphasis upon Carter as ‘the most democratic of composers’ may seem surprising, given Carter’s notorious claim that his mature compositional style sprang from his decision, made in 1951 at the time of the First String Quartet, to say ‘to hell with the public and with the performers too’.8 Daniel Guberman has recently persuasively argued that this famous statement, made to Allen Edwards at the end of the 1960s, should be treated circumspectly; at the time of the First Quartet, Carter seemed keen to find both performers and public acclaim.9 However, proponents of the democratic Carter also have to contend with the composer’s oft-​repeated dismissals of mass culture, a culture variously characterised by Carter in terms of the ‘passive consumption of commercially profitable objects’10 and ‘over-​publicized consumerist hedonism’;11 his likening of minimal music to ‘junk mail’ and Hitler’s speeches;12 and his comparison of the European wish for American music to be ‘jazzy’ to an American expectation that Europeans should still be wearing ‘peasant costumes’.13 No wonder that Carter’s friends and advocates felt the need to argue a different side of the story. Who today would want to be anti-​democratic? One obvious way to interpret what is going on in these posthumous tributes is that, at the time of his passing, Carter’s friends and advocates felt the need to leap to the composer’s defence against the spread of the opposite critical view: that his music was elitist because of the equation it appeared to draw between difficulty and excellence; it was asocial because of

6 Paul Griffiths, untitled tribute (2012), Elliott Carter website, https://​www.elliot​tcar​ter.com/​ tribu​tes/​. 7 Matthew Guerrieri, ‘The American music of Elliott Carter’, Boston Globe (11 November 2012), https://​www.bost​ongl​obe.com/​ideas/​2012/​11/​11/​the-​ameri​can-​music-​elli​ott-​car​ter/​aiq​naDB​oidI​ 3Qdk​hWAQ​HDK/​story.html (accessed 29 March 2021). 8 Elliott Carter and Allen Edwards, Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation with Elliott Carter (Norton, 1971), 35. 9 Daniel Guberman, ‘Composing Freedom: Elliott Carter’s “Self-​Reinvention” and the Early Cold War’ (PhD thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012). 10 Carter and Edwards, Flawed Words, 14. 11 Elliott Carter, ‘Acceptance Speech for the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize’ (1981), in Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents, ed. Felix Meyer and Anne C. Shreffler (Paul Sacher Foundation, 2008), 243. 12 Carter, cited in Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (University of California Press, 2005), 62–​63. 13 Elliott Carter, ‘The European Roots of American Musical Culture’ (1961/​94), in Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937–​1995 [CEL], ed. Jonathan W. Bernard (University of Rochester Press, 1997), 62–​ 72: p. 69. Carter’s attitude to jazz was complex, not precluding an admiration for jazz’s rhythmic resources and improvisatory aspects; see ‘The Rhythmic Basis of American Music’ (1955), in CEL, 57–​62.

32  Musical Models of Democracy its apparent prioritisation of process and form over purpose and content; and it was coldly detached because of its implicit rejection of the popular.14 Unsurprisingly, the fuller picture of Carter’s relationship with the idea of democracy is more nuanced, and more complex, than that given by either his obituarists or his critics. In interviews and writings, Carter regularly appealed to the values of democracy as a basis for his approach to composition, in which differentiated individuals engage in collective situations without compromising their identity. The disputatious textures of his compositions were to be understood, he argued, in terms of his commitment to democratic pluralism. This is the trope picked up by a number of Carter’s obituarists. At the same time, Carter also passed comment on the challenges faced by his music in the context of modern American democracy, which he presented as favouring untutored choices and threatening a homogenisation of culture. This led to his espousal of the exceptionalism of artists, whose challenging visions needed to be protected from an uncomprehending public. Carter’s position on democracy seems contradictory, but in fact he shared it with other mid-​twentieth-​century liberals, for whom the championing of difference was an essential element in the defence of American society from the threats of totalitarianism and the culture industry, but who understood ‘difference’ in the particular terms of a distinctive individualism, of which the modernist artist was the living paradigm. My account places this attitude, firstly, in the context of Carter’s direct contact over the course of his long life with leading thinkers on democracy and influential institutions dedicated to the defence of democracy. I then highlight the role played by Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America—​a point of reference for all American democrats, including Carter, but one whose length and complexity enabled the spread of contradictory ideas regarding the relationship of art and democracy. This leads me to argue for the need to position modern composers’ attempts to ‘democratically’ embrace ideas of pluralism in their works in relation to recent political theory that argues that any ‘curation of difference’ entails kinds of exclusion—​an exclusion that is most certainly evident in Carter’s compositions.

14 Such critical sentiments are advanced in Richard Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 5 (Oxford University Press, 2005), 261–​307, and John Rockwell, All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century (Da Capo Press, 1997), 37–​46; see also Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Fourth Estate, 2008), 404–​5.

Curating difference  33

Carter and discourses on democracy Daniel Guberman has observed that ‘It was rare for Carter to use a political statement to explain his compositions or practices’, and that Carter ‘rarely spoke publicly, or in his letters, about political matters’.15 This being the case, it is nevertheless striking that his writings and interviews reveal a marked if infrequent engagement with democracy—​to be contrasted with close contemporaries such as Milton Babbitt, who used the word democracy only in the most disparaging contexts,16 and John Cage, who rejected the idea of government in general and later in life espoused a Thoreauvian disdain for democracy in particular—​as will be discussed in Chapter 3. That Carter should have been drawn to democracy as a topic for reflection is unsurprising in view of an intellectual and artistic development that brought him into direct personal contact with a range of discourses and debates around democracy across his long career—​a facet of his development that has remained largely unexplored in the Carter literature. What is striking about reconstructing this aspect of his career is the difficulty of pigeon-​holing Carter’s attitude towards democracy. This reflects the very varied ideologies of democracy with which he came into contact, but it is nonetheless striking in the light of the vehement debates of the time. This ambivalence can be traced through into his remarks on the significance of democracy in relation to his own compositions, as we will see in the following section. Carter’s teenage encounters with Charles Ives brought early contact with a composer unusual for his public commitment to democracy. This commitment was expressed most notably through Ives’s 1920 essay ‘Majority’, which proselytised for the replacement of elections of representatives by direct democracy through regular referenda. ‘The day of leaders, as such, is gradually closing’, Ives prophesied; ‘the people are beginning to lead themselves’.17 Ives even drew up proposals for a twentieth constitutional amendment, formulating a process that would allow the entire electorate to vote upon all the leading issues of the

15 Daniel Guberman, ‘Elliott Carter’s Cold War abandonment of the chorus’, Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 25 (April 2012), 36–​40: p. 39. 16 Milton Babbitt includes withering references to ‘this people’s cultural democracy’—​in which musical worth is equated to ‘the counting of ears’—​in essays from the 1970s and 1980s; see The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, ed. Stephen Peles et al. (Princeton University Press, 2003), 378 and 386. On Babbitt’s scepticism towards left-​wing politics, see Martin Brody, ‘ “Music for the masses”: Milton Babbitt’s Cold War music theory’, Musical Quarterly 77, no. 2 (1993), 161–​92. 17 Ives, cited in Judith Tick, ‘Charles Ives and the politics of direct democracy’, in Ives Studies, ed. Philip Lambert (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 133–​62: p. 146.

34  Musical Models of Democracy day.18 Carter’s accounts of his meetings with Ives focus on their discussions of music and art, but Carter also recalled Ives’s ‘disillusionment with America as it emerged from the First World War’, and that ‘in talk about contemporary politics, [Ives] seemed profoundly disturbed by the bungling and compromising that had gone on with the peace settlement and the postwar negotiations’.19 These views reflected Ives’s concern that the American people had been failed by their leaders and their electoral system. Ives’s conviction in the merits of popular self-​determination may have contributed to what Carter later recalled as the ‘Trotskyite’ inclination of his college days, although as we will see, this was a short-​term flirtation.20 A letter of reference from Ives facilitated Carter’s entry to Harvard in 1926, where he eventually settled on a programme of studies in literature, classics, and philosophy. Here he encountered thinkers far less positively disposed towards democracy. Carter took classes with the critic and professor of French literature Irving Babbitt, whose criticisms of modern art Carter was later to acknowledge as having a lasting impact.21 But Babbitt was also an influential theorist of democracy, notably in his book Democracy and Leadership, which was published in 1924, two years before Carter arrived in Boston. This volume presents unchecked egalitarianism as a guarantor of cultural decline, and argues for the ordering of human life according to a transcendent ethical principle.22 ‘One is inclined to ask’, Babbitt wrote, ‘whether in this country in particular we are not in danger of producing in the name of democracy one of the most trifling brands of the human species that the world has yet seen’.23 Also at Harvard, Carter came into contact with the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, whose distinctive ideas about temporality and sequence were to have a lasting impact on the composer.24 Whitehead’s 1929 book Process and Reality set forth a ‘process philosophy’, which posited that living organisms were not things but processes, comprising what he termed ‘societies of occasions’. As such, ‘process philosophy’ was not just a theory of temporal 18 See ibid., 161. For more on Ives and democracy see Michael Broyles, ‘Charles Ives and the American democratic tradition’, in Charles Ives and His World, ed. J. Peter Burkholder (Princeton University Press, 1996), 118–​60. 19 Elliott Carter, ‘Charles Ives remembered’ (1974), in CEL, 98–​107: p. 102. 20 Elliott Carter and Enzo Restagno, Elliott Carter: In Conversation with Enzo Restagno for Settembre Musica 1989 (Institute for Studies in American Music, 1991), 35. 21 Carter and Edwards, Flawed Words, 47. 22 On Babbitt’s New Humanist antipathy to Ives’s transcendentalism, see David Paul, Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer (University of Illinois Press, 2013), 18–​20. 23 Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 243. 24 Carter and Edwards, Flawed Words, 47: pp. 96–​97; Jonathan W. Bernard, ‘Elliott Carter and the modern meaning of time’, Musical Quarterly 79, no. 4 (1995), 644–​82: pp. 649–​56.

Curating difference  35 process, but also concerned the convergence of multiplicities: for Whitehead, an organism was not a thing but rather ‘a temporally bounded process which organizes a variety of given elements into a new fact’.25 In characterising these multiplicities, Whitehead invoked democracy as an analogy, but not with positive connotations. Instead, the word ‘democracy’ is reserved for describing the ontology of the most basic of organisms—​worms and jellyfish are mentioned—​because they are incapable of the kinds of discriminations between moments characteristic of ‘living bodies of a high type’, such as humans.26 The contrasting philosophies of democracy that Carter encountered in his student years laid the ground for an enduring political ambivalence. Between 1932 and 1935 he studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris; he later recalled how the gathering flow of German refugees during these years acted as a constant reminder of Europe’s turn towards authoritarianism.27 But of the 1930s as a whole David Schiff writes that ‘Carter’s political profile at this time seems as elusive as his musical voice’, involving continued engagement ‘with both the establishment and subversive sides of Harvard culture’, and close friendships with leftist composers Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein alongside composition of a succession of ‘apolitical choral works written for Ivy League choruses, many of them based on obscure Latin or English poetry’.28 Schiff notes how this period established a pattern of an ‘alternation of conservative and rebellious stances’ that ‘remains puzzling even today’.29 During the Second World War one finds Carter engaging more directly with American democracy, in a manner consistent with the military and ideological struggle against fascism. In 1942, as he was waiting to be called up for military service, he summarised his view of democracy’s fundamental values in a letter to the League of Composers, in which he praised its commitment to ‘the free exchange of ideas, and the mutual respect, interest and assistance of living musicians’ as ‘a practical demonstration of what must remain a fundamental law for every member of a democratic state’ and thus ‘one more very tangible thing to fight for’.30 In the event, Carter was unable to 25 Whitehead, cited in Bernard, ‘Elliott Carter and the modern meaning of time’, 649. 26 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (Free Press, 1929/​1978), 50, p. 108. 27 Carter and Restagno, Elliott Carter, 12. 28 David Schiff, Carter (Oxford University Press, 2018), 61–​62. 29 Ibid., 61. 30 Elliott Carter, letter to Claire Reis (co-​founder of the League of Composers), 1 November 1942, reproduced in Elliott Carter Studies Online 2 (2017), http://​stud​ies.elliot​tcar​ter.org/​volum​e02/​ 01aCar​terR​eis/​01aCar​terR​eis.html (accessed 29 March 2021).

36  Musical Models of Democracy serve in the armed forces for medical reasons, but instead in 1943 he took up a post as musical consultant to the United States Office of War Information (OWI), where he had responsibility for programming and producing propagandistic radio broadcasts of American composers and performers. This coincided with the composition of songs setting the words of two poets renowned for their investments in democracy, and whose work had interested him since his student days: Walt Whitman and Hart Crane.31 ‘Warble for Lilac Time’ (1943) draws from Whitman’s collection Leaves of Grass, about whose 1855 preface Charles Oliver writes that ‘it would be difficult to find anywhere in our written history a clearer, more detailed explanation of America’s democratic principles and the sort of poetry that can develop under those principles’.32 This made the collection a favoured source of song texts for American composers during World War II, attracting composers such as Roger Sessions, William Schuman, and George Kleinsinger, as well as Carter.33 Crane’s ‘Voyages’, part of which Carter set in ‘Voyage’ (1942/​43), was written in 1924 under the conscious influence of Whitman, just like his next and most famous work, ‘The Bridge’, whose central image of the river acts as a metaphor for the common purpose of America’s diverse humanity, and which contains numerous direct allusions to Whitman.34 Carter’s compositional engagement with Crane dated back to 1936, when he provided music for the ballet Pocahontas, which was based on ‘The Bridge’; and this epic poem again served as a point of reference in Carter’s programme note for A Symphony of Three Orchestras (1976).35 It is striking, though, that for these wartime songs on texts by pre-​eminent ‘democratic’ poets, Carter avoided the topic of ‘the people’ and chose instead a rapturous paean to nature (‘Warble for Lilac Time’) and a vivid evocation of erotic embrace (‘Voyages’, part III). At the end of the war, the Office of War Information commissioned an essay from Carter for a planned (but later cancelled) festival of American music in a newly liberated Paris; in his draft notes, Carter celebrated the diversity and decentred nature of American cultural life, in which ‘no elite or

31 James Wierzbicki, Elliott Carter (University of Illinois Press, 2011), 10, p. 30. 32 Charles M. Oliver, Critical Companion to Walt Whitman: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (Facts on File, 2006), 155. 33 Annegret Fauser, Sounds of War: Music in the United States During World War II (Oxford University Press, 2013), 135: pp. 236–​37. 34 Daniel Gabriel, Hart Crane and the Modernist Epic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 96–​102. 35 David Schiff argues that the Crane connection to the Symphony of Three Orchestras has been overstated; see Schiff, Carter, 123–​26.

Curating difference  37 clique has been able to dominate the country and dictate the trends. No single musical center from which everything emanates.’36 Involved in the plans for the festival was Carter’s friend and OWI colleague Nicolas Nabokov, an exile from revolutionary Russia, whose career as what Martin Brody terms ‘a Cold War cultural impresario’37 subsequently took shape through work for the US authorities in post-​war Berlin. Nabokov was soon to gain prominence as Secretary General of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF, founded in 1950), a loose gathering of prominent American and West European intellectuals committed to the defence of intellectual freedom in the face of Soviet communism, and ‘the winning over of the western intelligentsia to the American proposition’.38 Carter’s friendship with Nabokov, which dated back to 1936, inevitably drew him close to the activities of the CCF, an association that has done much to motivate the perception that, within Cold War cultural politics, challenging modernist music was especially prized as bespeaking the values of democracy. The extent of Carter’s involvement with the CIA-​funded CCF remains the subject of debate.39 He never formally joined the organisation, and later expressed his distaste for the anticommunist propaganda of the Cold War years,40 but he was certainly content to be aligned with the CCF’s ‘cocktail of high culture and moderate social democracy’.41 Nabokov helped to engineer Carter’s breakthrough career success with a high-​profile performance of the First String Quartet at the CCF’s lavish 1954 Rome festival of ‘Music in Our Time’, which came at the end of a year’s residency for Carter at the American Academy in Rome.42 Carter also participated in the festival’s debate on ‘Style, Aesthetics and Technique’ (though not those on ‘Music and Politics’ or ‘Composer and

36 Elliott Carter, ‘Music in America at War’ (1945), in Elliott Carter, ed. Meyer and Shreffler, 67–​ 70: p. 68. 37 Martin Brody, ‘Cold War genius: music and cultural diplomacy at the American Academy in Rome’, in Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–​2000, ed. Felix Meyer, Carol J. Oja, Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne C. Shreffler (Paul Sacher Foundation, 2014), 375–​87: p. 385. 38 Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (Granta Books, 199), 9. 39 See Guberman, ‘Composing Freedom’, 13–​17. 40 Carter and Restagno, Elliott Carter, 34–​35. Carter also gained a positive impression of Polish musical life from his 1962 visit to the Warsaw Autumn festival; see Lisa Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–​1968 (University of California Press, 2017), 83. 41 Giles Scott-​Smith and Charlotte A. Lerg, ‘Introduction: journals of freedom?’, in Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War: The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ed. Scott-​Smith and Lerg (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 1–​24: p. 12. 42 Martin Brody, ‘Class of ’54: friendship and ideology at the American Academy in Rome’, in Music and Musical Composition at the American Academy in Rome, ed. Martin Brody (University of Rochester Press, 2014), 222–​55.

38  Musical Models of Democracy Audience’).43 As a resident artist at the American Academy in Rome, Carter struck up a friendship with the director of the CCF’s Italian wing, the writer Ignazio Silone, who wrote regularly on democracy for the CCF-​supported journal Tempo presente.44 Silone’s politics presented interesting points of difference with Nabokov’s, for while he was mistrustful of Marxism and convinced that it was the ‘duty of democrats . . . to concern themselves with liberty in their own country’, he also believed that ‘only socialism can create a true democracy’.45 Further stays at Rome’s American Academy in the 1960s enabled work on large-​scale compositions in which the musical fabric was itself suggestive of the struggle of individual freedom against impersonal collective forces. The Piano Concerto, begun in Rome, was substantially written during a 1964 residency (also facilitated by Nabokov) in divided Berlin, whose post-​ wall tensions the work has often been seen as reflecting.46 The Concerto, Carter related, presented ‘the alienation of the individual from the misguided mass’,47 the orchestra ‘treated more or less monolithically’, offering ‘massed effects against the Protean figures and expressions of the piano and its accompanying concertino’.48 The Concerto for Orchestra (1969) offers a more optimistic picture of the orchestra ‘as a crowd of individuals, each having his own personal expression and coordinated in a less stereotyped way than is usually done in orchestral writing’; in this piece Carter emphasised the importance of ‘everyone having his chance to present himself ’.49 Carter was even moved to associate this liberated musical texture with the democratising activism of 1968, although the overriding theme is one of

43 Sharron E. Pahl, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom, La Musica Nel XX Secolo, and Aesthetic “Othering”: An Archival Investigation’ (MMus thesis, University of Wisconsin-​Milwaukee, 2012), 113–​14. 44 Elliott Carter, ‘For the Academy’, in Music and Musical Composition, ed. Brody, 276–​78: p. 277. 45 Ignazio Silone, ‘My political faith’ (1956), reproduced on Marxists’ Internet Archive, https://​ www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​dra​per/​1956/​sil​one/​silo​ne1.html (accessed 29 March 2021). Vincent Giroud notes that Nabokov had concerns regarding Silone’s ideological waywardness; see Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music (Oxford University Press, 2015), 286. 46 See Marguerite Boland, ‘Form and dialectical opposition in Elliott Carter’s compositional aesthetic’ (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2017), 94; ‘Piano Concerto (1961–​65)’, in Elliott Carter, ed. Meyer and Shreffler, 188–​91; David Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, new edition (Faber and Faber, 1998), 254. 47 Carter, cited in Guberman, ‘Composing Freedom’, 206. 48 Elliott Carter, composer’s note to Piano Concerto, Elliott Carter website, https://​www.elliot​tcar​ ter.com/​compo​siti​ons/​ (accessed 29 March 2021). Guberman describes how these aspects of the piece gained the favourable attention of IS cultural diplomats; see ‘Composing Freedom’, 207–​8. 49 Elliott Carter, ‘On Saint-​John Perse and the Concerto for Orchestra’ (1974), in CEL, 250–​ 56: p. 251, p. 256.

Curating difference  39 impermanence, presumably applying also to the youthful idealism of the student protestors he alludes to in his essay on the work.50 If there is a touch of exaggeration in Carter’s claim, in a 1961 letter to Paul Freeman, that ‘the daily newspaper (particularly these days) influences me more than anything else’,51 the extent of Carter’s interest and involvement in political and social debate should not be underestimated either, especially in view of his reluctance to make overt statements about it. This appears to have endured to the end of his life, as indicated by his interest in the 2012 presidential election.52 A more general commitment to public life was also a lasting feature of Carter’s career. He felt that his belief in the importance of communication and the primacy of aural intelligibility distinguished him sharply both from many post-​war European serialists, whose music he believed disregarded the realities of human psychology, and from American university-​based composers, whose separation from society encouraged a kind of scientific hermeticism.53 And for several decades, Carter worked energetically to create conditions that would support wider performance opportunities for contemporary music in the United States, as a service not just to composers like himself, but also to broaden public knowledge.54

Carter on democracy Whilst Carter mostly refrained from public statements on politics, he was not averse to making comparisons between his works and the wider sphere of human relations. The descriptions just cited of the Piano Concerto and the Concerto for Orchestra are an expression of Carter’s interest in what David Schiff terms ‘the plural voice’—​or, to adopt Carter’s description, the idea of ‘simultaneous streams of different things going on together’—​ a characteristic that Schiff sees as forming ‘the premise of all of Carter’s music’ after 1948.55 Anne Shreffler describes this technique as a ‘new kind of polyphony’, within which the different voices ‘achieve an unprecedented 50 Ibid., 252. 51 Carter, cited in Guberman, ‘Composing Freedom’, 1. 52 See Charles Neidich, untitled tribute, Elliott Carter website, https://​www.elliot​tcar​ter.com/​tribu​ tes/​(accessed 29 March 2021). 53 Carter and Edwards, Flawed Words, 89; Felix Meyer and Anne C. Shreffler, ‘Introduction’, in Elliott Carter, ed. Meyer and Shreffler, 1–​19: p. 12. 54 Meyer and Shreffler, ‘Introduction’, 8. 55 Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, 5; Carter and Edwards, Flawed Words, 101.

40  Musical Models of Democracy independence; each voice often possesses its own distinct intervallic collection, rhythmic profile, tempo, registral space, and articulation. This kind of counterpoint is much more concerned with preserving the character of each voice than with subjugating them to a common sonority.’56 As early as 1960 Carter encouraged listeners to hear his highly differentiated musical textures as ‘auditory scenarios’ in which the different voices were treated as participants in a drama.57 Commentators on Carter’s music have accordingly read its ‘polyvocalism’ as symbolising diverse kinds of social interaction, encompassing cooperation, argument, mediation, conversation, and isolation.58 Carter tended to avoid detailed narrative descriptions of his work, speaking instead in more general terms about how his music offered ‘reflection on how people live together’,59 or how music can ‘help us to envision qualities of life and social cooperation that seem to many worth striving for’.60 On a number of occasions, however, the composer specifically invoked democracy to explain how his music worked. In his note to the Fourth Quartet (1986), Carter alluded to the resonances between his compositional textures and the processes of democracy, in a way that suggests such a conception was by no means limited to this work: A preoccupation with giving each member of the performing group its own musical identity characterizes my String Quartet no. 4, thus mirroring the democratic attitude in which each member of a society maintains his or her own identity while cooperating in a common effort—​a concept that dominates all my recent work.61

In the score, this conception is most visibly projected by the different rhythmic subdivisions of each part: for the entirety of the work, the duple

56 Anne C. Shreffler, ‘Elliott Carter and his America’, Sonus 14, no. 2 (1994), 38–​66: p. 41. 57 Elliott Carter, ‘Shop Talk by an American Composer’ (1960), in CEL, 214–​24: p. 221. 58 See John Roeder, ‘ “The matter of human cooperation” in Carter’s mature style’, in Elliott Carter Studies, ed. Marguerite Boland and John Link (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 110–​37; Roeder, ‘Autonomy and Dialog in Elliott Carter’s Enchanted Preludes’, in Analytical Studies in World Music, ed. Michael Tenzer (Oxford University Press, 2006), 377–​414; Anne C. Shreffler, ‘Instrumental dramaturgy as humane comedy: What Next?’, in Musiktheater heute: Internationales Symposion der Paul Sacher Stiftung, ed. Hermann Danuser and Matthias Kassel (Schott, 2003), 147–​71; Guy Capuzzo, Elliott Carter’s What Next?: Communication, Cooperation, and Separation (University of Rochester Press, 2012). 59 Carter and Restagno, Elliott Carter, 63. 60 Carter and Edwards, Flawed Words, 122. 61 Elliott Carter, composer’s note to String Quartet no. 4, Elliott Carter website, https://​www.elliot​ tcar​ter.com/​compo​siti​ons/​ (accessed 29 March 2021).

Curating difference  41

Ex. 2.1  Elliott Carter, String Quartet No. 4 (1986), bb. 107–​110. © Copyright 1986 by Hendon Music, Inc. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. Solely for the use by Robert Adlington

subdivisions of the first violin part are set against triple subdivisions in the second violin, quintuplet divisions in the viola and septuplet divisions in the cello (Ex. 2.1). This surface differentiation is underpinned by a long-​ term structural polyrhythm that determines the placement of key events in each part according to fixed periodicities, limiting the exact concurrence of events between instruments.62 Each instrumental part is also built predominantly from three of the twelve possible chromatic intervals, lending each 62 John F. Link, ‘Long-​Range Polyrhythms in Elliott Carter’s Recent Music’ (PhD thesis, City University of New York, 1994), 49–​53; see also Jonathan Bernard, ‘The String Quartets of Elliott Carter’, in Intimate Voices: The Twentieth-​Century String Quartet, vol. 2, ed. Evan Jones (Rochester University Press, 2009), 238–​75; Laura Emmery, Compositional Process in Elliott Carter’s String Quartets: A Study in Sketches (Routledge, 2019).

42  Musical Models of Democracy voice a complementary intervallic repertory. As David Schiff remarks, these techniques are strongly reminiscent of those used in the Second Quartet (1959), where each instrument is similarly associated with distinct rhythmic, intervallic, and expressive characteristics, a differentiation underlined by the composer’s request to seat the four instruments as far apart as possible on the stage. Schiff suggests that ‘the Fourth can be heard as a twenty-​fifth year reunion’ of the Second, in which ‘the characters have become more complex with age’.63 Carter periodically brings individual instruments to the fore, but in contrast to the Second, more effort is also made to find common ground, as in the periodic collective alighting of each instrument upon sustained double-​stopped chords—​as if trying to stake out shared territory. Such mutual recognition, however, never erases the instruments’ distinct identities; as Schiff puts it, ‘the players cannot escape their own vocabularies of intervals and rhythms’.64 In an interview for Frank Scheffer’s film A Labyrinth of Time, Carter elaborated further on the vision of democracy he believed to be embodied in his music. He offered a comparison with the societal transition, through history, from authoritarian rule to the autonomy of the individual: In previous times there was a dominant group of society that explained just how everybody ought to act, and now this has become much freer. As a result, every individual has to make a choice about how we will cooperate, and how we will fit into any particular situation produced by a group of people. This is very important in my work, in my quartets for instance—​ the idea that each player is an individual, that he has his [sic] own way of thinking, his own way of expression, but he also has a way of behaving in relation to the other people that are playing with him.65

For Carter, this new primacy of the individual under democracy had the further consequence that collective situations tended towards the disputatious. Speaking to Lloyd Schwarz in 1983, he described his approach to ensemble writing as ‘a special thing—​no goose-​stepping: more like a free-​ for-​all; a democracy—​a group of people contributing without losing their 63 Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, 88. 64 David Schiff, ‘Carter’s New Classicism’, College Music Symposium 29 (1989), 115–​22: p. 122. 65 Carter, speaking in Frank Scheffer (dir.), Elliott Carter: A Labyrinth of Time, film (Juxtapositions DVD9Ds17, 2006). The interviews with the composer recorded for this film were made over many years, making this statement difficult to date.

Curating difference  43 individuality. It’s not always smooth going.’66 This comment reveals Carter’s conviction that the collective participation of individuals should not come at the cost of their autonomous identities, which instead persist unflinchingly through their social involvements. ‘I think that people in a free society don’t keep step together’, he told Enzo Restagno; ‘each one must find and hold his own rhythm, and in this sense instruments to me are like individuals, each with its own character and its own rhythmic personality’.67 In this context, unanimity acquired a negative connotation: ‘my idea of awful’, he half-​jokingly declared, ‘is when everybody plays together’.68 In 1986 Carter offered this perspective as a reason for not accepting a new choral commission. ‘Choral music’, he wrote, represents a social cohesiveness and agreement about worthy goals—​which I no longer see in the world we live in, except on very superficial matters—​ public relations and consumer goods and as I have no desire to write an advertising cantata . . ., there is little for me in the project. Being one of a crowd and expressing this in choral music is, now, I think, alien to me.69

A contrast can be made here with Ives’s conception of democracy. Carter’s emphasis on multiple conflicting voices has frequently been likened to the sometimes-​anarchic textures of Charles Ives’s music, especially the Second String Quartet, with its depiction of the ‘discussions’ and then ‘arguments’ of the four protagonists, which appear to anticipate the strategies in Carter’s own Second and Fourth Quartets.70 But in fact there was a key difference in the two composers’ rhetoric on democracy. Ives’s essay ‘The Majority’, in arguing for the merits of direct democracy, also posited a faith ‘in the people acting as an organic entity’, in articulation of what Ives (echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson) regarded as ‘the common over-​soul’ of the people.71 Emerson’s transcendentalism claimed the essential oneness of all humanity, and this communal connection underlying individual difference manifested itself in the Second Quartet’s concluding vision of the four protagonists setting 66 Carter, cited in Lloyd Schwartz, ‘Elliott Carter and the conflict of chaos and order’, Harvard Magazine (November–​December 1983), 57–​62: p. 60. 67 Carter and Restagno, Elliott Carter, 42 (my emphasis). 68 Elliott Carter, ‘An interview at the Banff Centre’ (1984), in Elliott Carter, ed. Meyer and Shreffler, 252–​58: p. 258. 69 Carter, letter to Anne Santen (1986), cited in Guberman, ‘Elliott Carter’s Cold War abandonment of the chorus’, 38. 70 See Meyer and Shreffler, ‘Introduction’, 6; Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, 73; Schiff, Carter, 48. 71 Broyles, ‘Charles Ives’, 123; Ives, cited in Tick, ‘Charles Ives’, 146.

44  Musical Models of Democracy aside their squabbles to view the glories of nature from a mountain top. It also governed Ives’s confidence that ‘the majority’ would arrive easily at consensus, reflecting their development of ‘a collective-​personal social consciousness’.72 Such an overarching homogeneity of interests appears notably absent from Carter’s account of democracy, which places emphasis instead upon the persistence of difference through communal affairs, a refusal to ‘keep step together’, and an association of ‘social cohesiveness’ with the brainwashing of propaganda and advertising. In these comments, Carter extols democracy as a virtue to be celebrated in musical form. But not all of Carter’s remarks on democracy are equally positive. In 1960, the topic of ‘democratic society’ was placed centre stage in a lecture Carter gave at Princeton on the subject of ‘The practical problems of the composer’. The surviving notes for this lecture are fragmentary, but prominent amongst them is the proposal to consider ‘problems of composition in a democratic society: a) where developed culture is predominantly scientific; b) where the rest is governed “mass-​culture”; c) In a laissez-​faire economy; d) The USA’s special position in this.’73 Here, democracy is presented as an all-​ important context for the modern composer, especially the American composer. That Carter regarded this context, with the commercial and cultural freedoms it entailed, as deleterious for the serious composer is made clear in a later note from the same source: ‘The experience of being a composer in America is a very intense one because of the appalling dilemmas it involves. We are, of course, involved in a terrific process of democratization.’74 Why did democratisation lead to ‘appalling dilemmas’? Carter regarded the compositional tradition he had inherited as having its origins in pre-​ democratic Europe. The trade of the art music composer, he argued, was rooted in ‘standards of skill and imagination established at another time in another place’ and which historically would only ever have been recognised by an ‘influential elite’; this meant that a composer such as he stood divided from ‘the present standards of behavior respected, sanctioned and rewarded by the society that surrounds us’, which are based on the preferences of all.75 For Carter, the ‘marginalisation’ of the contemporary composer was a ‘consequence of democracy’: as cultural life became answerable to more people, 72 Cited in Tick, ‘Charles Ives’, 146. 73 Carter, cited in Dörte Schmidt, ‘ “The practical problems of the composer”: der schwierige Weg vom Auftrag zur Uraufführung von Elliott Carters zweitem Streichquartett’, Die Musikforschung 48 (1995), 400–​403: p. 403. 74 Carter, cited in ibid. 75 Carter, ‘Shop talk’, 223.

Curating difference  45 so the demand for a certain kind of highly cultivated and specialised music inevitably dropped. ‘Because in fact’, Carter noted with seemingly unchallengeable logic, ‘if no-​one wishes to listen to contemporary music, should he pay tax to listen to it? The system, in short, is based on the protection of the primary sovereignty of individual choice’.76 From this arose a paradox: whilst the idea of democracy was offered by Carter as a positive model for his compositional structures, it was also viewed pessimistically, as threatening the survival of advanced composition. Carter’s reference to ‘the primary sovereignty’ of the individual highlights the contradiction with which he was engaging: such sovereignty was championed in Carter’s account of his ‘democratic’ musical textures, but depicted also as a threat to serious culture. Carter’s remarks on the consequences of democracy for composition were offered relatively dispassionately, as an objective reading of a conundrum thrown up by historical and political change. But there is little doubt that he harboured an intense suspicion of some of the more widespread cultural behaviours that democracy had validated. For instance, he was unapologetic in defence of the kind of careful, focused attention that his music appeared to demand. This he linked to the rigorous compositional training he received under Nadia Boulanger, and more generally to a European attitude to culture: The idea of this intense concentration [which Boulanger encouraged], and of valuing this intense concentration on a thing like music, was something that is not really a part of our American point of view, our American society. You see it for instance in a composer like Boulez, and in many French composers—​this very, very focused point of view, which is not very characteristic of most Americans.77

Carter viewed this deficit within American culture as damaging not only from the standpoint of cultural literacy, but also as a threat to democracy. ‘It is hard not to feel’, he reflected in 1984, that this is one of many types of breakdown of communication we are faced with at a time when focused attention [is] needed more than ever in our



76 Elliott Carter, ‘Elliott Carter talking to Raffaele Pozzi’, Tempo 167 (1988), 14–​17: p. 16. 77 Carter, speaking in Scheffer (dir.), Elliott Carter.

46  Musical Models of Democracy democratic and highly complex society, where choices of citizens are so important for their own welfare.78

In this remark, democratic decision-​making is seen as consistent with, and indeed requiring, the ‘active searching, discrimination, and thought’ which Carter imagines for listeners to his music,79 and it is clear that he regards contemporary society as falling well short of this high democratic standard. From this lack of confidence in citizens’ untutored choices arose a hankering on Carter’s part for what he termed the ‘benevolent authoritarianism’ that continued to sustain high-​cultural institutions in Europe, something made possible by the cultural continuity of European traditions from the era before mass suffrage.80 Accordingly, Carter frequently argued for the ‘extra-​democratic’ protection of advanced music by universities or private foundations ‘until the time when our society can find the kind of cultural consensus which allows a large enough community of citizens to encourage musical composition’.81 In Carter’s comments on democracy, then, we encounter an array of verdicts which, contrary to the impression given by his obituarists, are not easily reconciled. Democracy is extolled as a virtue, seen as an insidious threat, or viewed as making demands that ordinary citizens are reluctant or unable to accept. Carter seems to have felt simultaneously drawn to and suspicious of democracy. The idea of democracy that prevails in Carter’s ruggedly egalitarian musical textures, in which (as Carter says) ‘each member of a society maintains his or her own identity’, is not extended to his analysis of American society, in which citizens fall short of the requirements of democracy by failing to adopt certain behaviours of attentiveness and critical thought. Democracy is presented by the Fourth Quartet as a communal discourse of equals; Carter’s comments on the composer’s place in democratic society, on the other hand, imply that special protection should be accorded to a solitary discourse at odds with popular preference. Carter expresses concern to avoid compositionally marching ‘in lockstep’; yet the ‘lack of unanimity’ and ‘splintering of interest’ amongst the ‘mass musical public’ is decried as ‘incoherent’ and leading to the ‘negation’ of all creative efforts.82 78 Carter, ‘An interview at the Banff Centre’, 253. 79 Carter and Edwards, Flawed Words, 19. 80 Carter, ‘The European roots’, 64. 81 Elliott Carter, ‘The composer is a university commodity’ (1970), in CEL, 83–​85: p. 85. 82 Ibid., 224; Elliott Carter, ‘France–​America Ltd.’ (1976), in Elliott Carter, ed. Meyer and Shreffler, 228–​32: p. 232.

Curating difference  47 Henning Eisenlohr, one of the few Carter scholars to pay serious attention to the composer’s interest in democracy, seeks to explain these tensions by offering the view that Carter’s comparison of his instrumental textures to democracy ‘is not a glorification of the existing democracy, but rather a utopian alternative of a possible democratic society, that can nevertheless only be conceived as the result of an attitude of resistance towards consumer society’.83 Eisenlohr cites in support a 1958 letter written by Carter to Paul Henry Lang, proposing that his music sought ‘a glimpse of another America not occupied with conspicuous waste, with “killing time”, but occupied with the values of adventure, liveliness, beauty, tradition and the rest that are presupposed but forgotten in the world we face’.84 But while Eisenlohr is clearly right to say that Carter’s commitment is to an ideal rather than actually existing democracy, his explanation does not fully account for the striking contradictions in his remarks, which on the one hand celebrate obduracy and on the other excoriate it, on the one hand cherish the co-​existence of difference and on the other lament the lack of consensus. As I will suggest in what follows, such tensions were (and are) by no means just Carter’s problem. Nor can they be explained solely in terms of a Cold War imperative to resist the imposition of sameness threatened by Soviet communism and ‘democratic’ popular culture alike, for all that this was a real concern for Carter and many around him. Rather, they need to be traced back to the longer history of American traditions of imagining democracy over the course of the twentieth century.

Approaching Carter through Tocqueville A key figure through whom to grapple with the tensions over democracy revealed in Carter’s remarks is Alexis de Tocqueville, whose pioneering study Democracy in America has been regarded by many Americans as foundational to American attitudes on politics and culture. Carter himself held Tocqueville in high regard, as his writings reveal.85 As a lifelong Francophile, 83 Henning Eisenlohr, Komponieren als Entscheidungsprozess: Studien zur Problematik von Form und Gestalt, dargestellt am Beispiel von Elliott Carters Trilogy for Oboe and Harp (Gustav Bosse, 1999), 239. I make use of Marguerite Boland’s English translation: Boland, ‘Form and dialectical opposition’, 97. 84 Carter, letter to Paul Henry Lang (1958), cited in Eisenlohr, Komponieren als Entscheidungsprozess, 236; English translation from Boland, ‘Form and dialectical opposition’, 100. 85 See Carter and Edwards, Flawed Words, 14, which mentions Democracy in America specifically; also ‘France–​America Ltd.’ (1976), 229. Carter’s personal library has been dispersed, excepting a few

48  Musical Models of Democracy one might expect Carter to have a particular interest in the French aristocrat’s travels around and social commentary upon the United States of the early 1830s. But the 1940s saw a general Tocqueville revival amongst American intellectuals, with publication of a new edition of Democracy in America in 1945 leading to what Isaac Kramnick calls an ‘explosion of interest . . . during the 1950s and 1960s’, cementing Democracy in America’s reputation as a kind of ‘secular scripture’.86 Tocqueville’s prediction that the processes of democratisation he witnessed in Jackson’s America would lead to a new world order dominated by a democratic United States standing for freedom, and a despotic Russia standing for ‘slavish obedience’,87 lent new lustre to his reputation in the context of the Cold War; and his warnings of the dangers posed by the advancing tide of social equality spoke especially powerfully to American intellectuals disillusioned with Marxism. As we will see, amongst those finding in Tocqueville a model for a reinvigorated liberalism were figures close to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. But a further aspect of Tocqueville’s twentieth-​century afterlife also needs highlighting if Carter’s complex relationship to democracy is to be fully understood. This is encapsulated in Kramnick’s remark that Democracy in America ‘is a protean text, capable of being stretched and adapted to serve just about everyone’.88 As Kramnick notes, ‘every president since Eisenhower has quoted Democracy in America’. Its insights have proved capable of being selectively embraced by the left and the right alike, not least because Tocqueville’s discussion was long (thus seldom read in its entirety), nuanced, and somewhat ambivalent. ‘Most Tocqueville readers’, Raf Geenens remarks, ‘have been selective and some even deliberately misleading in their presentation of Tocqueville’s ideas’.89 In the 1980s, the magazine New Republic even banned its contributors from citing Tocqueville, on the ground that to do so was ‘the ultimate cliché in contemporary journalism’.90 In this way, an appeal to Tocquevilian democracy by no means necessarily represented an appeal

books to remain with his archive at the Paul Sacher Stiftung; it has not been possible to trace his own copy of Democracy in America. 86 Isaac Kramnick, ‘Introduction’, in Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America (1835/​40) (Penguin, 2003), xlii; Donald E. Pease, ‘Tocqueville’s Democratic Thing; or, Aristocracy in America’, in Materializing Democracy: Towards a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Duke University Press, 2002), 22–​52: p. 34. 87 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 486. 88 Kramnick, ‘Introduction’, xliii. 89 Raf Geenens and Annelien de Dijn, ‘Tocqueville Today? Contexts, Interpretations and Usages’, in Reading Tocqueville: From Oracle to Actor, ed. Geenens and De Dijn (Palgrave, 2007), 1–​11: p. 4. 90 Ibid.; see also Pease, ‘Tocqueville’s Democratic Thing’, 36–​37.

Curating difference  49 to a stable concept, or an internally coherent one. Carter’s contradictory attitudes to democracy reflect two distinct motifs in Tocqueville reception in mid-​century America, motifs that chafe with each other but whose tensions could perhaps be overlooked because of their ostensible origin in the one writer. These motifs could be summarised as the espousal of pluralistic difference, and the need for seers or visionaries to guide the development of democracy. I will trace each in turn. In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Isaac Kramnick writes that the work’s first English translation contained ‘one of the earliest usages of the word individualism in English’.91 Tocqueville was fascinated by the ‘isolation of men from one another and the egoism that follows’ that he perceived to be a primary consequence of democratic revolution: ‘Such men entertain an arrogant confidence in their own strength and do not suppose that they may ever again need to seek help from their fellows. They have no scruples about showing that they think only about themselves.’92 As Kramnick elaborates, Tocqueville’s account places considerable emphasis upon the way in which Americans see themselves as individuals in a Lockean state of nature, as self-​making, self-​realizing, free and equal agents. . . . Americans never consider themselves aristocrats, peasants, or artisans for life, but rather self-​creating individuals, relying on their own industry and talent to define and make themselves. Devoting so much energy to being author of self, they have little left for public life. They are active and busy, Tocqueville concludes, but as private, self-​centered individuals not as participatory citizens. . . . The American spirit is energetic and enterprising. Like atomistic Hobbesean individuals, Americans are never at rest or settled, but always in a hurry, in permanent agitation and constant motion, incessantly jostling one another. Nothing is fixed. [They are] perpetually on the move.93

Whilst marvelling at this energetic pursuit of individual interest, Tocqueville also famously warned of the dangers of such social atomisation: namely, that the abandonment by individuals of a sense of responsibility for the development of society would permit the rise of a new kind of despotism in the



91 Kramnick, ‘Introduction’, xxxi.

92 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 590. 93 Kramnick, ‘Introduction’, xxxii.

50  Musical Models of Democracy form of elected powers whose oppressive effect is all the more powerful for seeming benign and answerable to the electorate: I see an innumerable crowd of men, all alike and equal, turned in upon themselves in a restless search for those petty, vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. . . . Above these men stands an immense and protective power which alone is responsible for looking after their enjoyments and watching over their destiny . . . [I]‌t covers the surface of social life with a network of petty, complicated, detailed, and uniform rules through which even the most original minds and the most energetic of spirits cannot reach the light in order to rise above the crowd. . . . [I]t inhibits, represses, drains, snuffs out, dulls so much effort that finally it reduces each nation to nothing more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as shepherd.94

In comments such as these, Tocqueville became a crucial point of reference for mid-​century American intellectuals shaken by the experience of fascism and fearful of the threat posed to Americans both by Soviet communism and the mass-​marketed products of the culture industry. What Greg Barnhisel has termed ‘the worry that Americans were becoming a nation of sheep’ characterised a sense amongst American and European intellectuals of the late 1940s and 1950s that American society ‘was becoming more homogenized, that it increasingly feared individualism and freedom, and that large, powerful institutions and individuals dominated American political, economic, and cultural life’.95 Leading figures in the arts and social sciences, including figures prominent in the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its affiliated groups, undertook readings of Tocqueville that sought to cement the defence of diverse individual interests against society’s oppressive forces. The French writer Raymond Aron, for instance, who played an important role in rehabilitating Tocqueville in France, and who served on the CCF’s executive committee from its founding in 1950 through to its dissolution in 1966, sounded a warning that, ‘as Tocqueville and Burckhardt saw clearly a century ago, what lies in wait for societies lacking an aristocracy, and driven by the commercial spirit and a boundless appetite for wealth, is the conformist tyranny of majorities and concentration of power 94 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 805–​6. 95 Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (Columbia University Press, 2015), 41.

Curating difference  51 in a monstrously overgrown state’.96 The response had to be a cultivation of what in 1949 the prominent literary critic and anti-​communist Lionel Trilling termed ‘the primal imagination of liberalism’. Trilling, a keen student of Tocqueville, frequent contributor to CCF-​sponsored journals, and husband of the future chair of the CCF’s American committee, influentially defined liberalism in terms of its cultivation of ‘variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty’.97 In so doing, he articulated the priorities of a wider post-​war ‘American liberal intelligentsia’, a group of writers and thinkers who ‘set the intellectual status quo’ of the 1950s through their university positions and public writings, and many of whom were associated with the CCF.98 The link to Tocqueville of such liberal ‘variousness’ was made more explicit still in the influential 1950 book The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman, another member of the American wing of the CCF. Christopher Shannon has termed the book ‘the most ambitious and enduring of all the postwar commentaries on the problem of conformity in American life’.99 As well as adopting Tocqueville’s motif of the crowd, Riesman prefaced a number of the chapters of his ‘Study of the Changing American Character’ with quotations from Democracy in America to create what Kamnick describes as ‘an extended conversation with Tocqueville’.100 Riesman influentially proposed two character types as defining American society—​the ‘outer-​directed’ and the ‘inner-​directed’—​and argued that the second was in precipitous decline. This echoed Tocqueville’s concerns about individualism, but with a significant inflection. Riesman, like Tocqueville, feared the flattening effects of democracy’s egalitarianism, but he saw the threat to America’s cherished individualism, not in a ‘turning inwards’ on the part of citizens, but on the contrary, in the all-​consuming concern with what others are doing. He advocated instead for ‘a more autonomous type of social character’, one that will better realise ‘the enormous potentialities for diversity in nature’s bounty and men’s

96 Raymond Aron, ‘Fanaticism, Prudence and Faith’ (1955), in The Opium of the Intellectuals (Transaction Publishers, 2001), 325–​52: p. 343. 97 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (Secker and Warburg, 1951), xv. Diana Trilling became chair of the ACCF in 1956; see Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-​Communism (Harvard University Press, 2009), 281. 98 Paul, Ives in the Mirror, 92. 99 Christopher Shannon, A World Made Safe for Differences: Cold War Intellectuals and the Politics of Identity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 29. 100 Kramnick, ‘Introduction’, xliii.

52  Musical Models of Democracy capacity to differentiate their experience’.101 ‘The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading’, Riesman wrote in the book’s closing sentence; ‘men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other’.102 Here, then, Riesman offers a vision of democratic equality that emphasises diversity rather than sameness, the precedence of individuals over society, and the maintenance of individual identity through passing liaisons and allegiances. Each of these motifs is reproduced in Carter’s characterisations of his music’s democratic processes, and in the compositional strategies deployed in the Fourth Quartet: the distinct rhythmic and intervallic characteristics of the individual instruments persist throughout; the long-​term structural polyrhythm dictates that moments of convergence are short-​lived and often seem accidental rather than intended; counterpoint trumps homophony. Democracy emerges as a matter of the coexistence of well-​defined variousness. Tocqueville’s concerns about American democracy could in this way be used to support a mid-​twentieth-​century preoccupation with a kind of plural individualism, in which differentiation was the necessary corollary of equality of contribution. But they also motivated a separate conception of democratic practice, one channelled down through a different genealogy of American thinking about democracy. It is through Tocqueville’s quite extensive comments on the qualities of literature in democratic society that this alternative seam of Tocqueville reception becomes most easily visible. Tocqueville saw two sides to literature under democracy. On the one hand, the busyness of Americans, and their desire for easy pleasures to relieve the demands of their daily existence, will create demand for a literature that is superficial, escapist, and crude in style. ‘The taste for ideal beauty and the pleasure of seeing it depicted’, Tocqueville contends, ‘are never as intense or widespread among a democratic as among an aristocratic people’.103 But Tocqueville was also interested in how the structure of democratic society carried the potential for creative renewal because of the way it threw up new subject matter for writers and poets. The dismantling of the established beliefs characteristic of aristocratic society ‘dries up most of the traditional springs of poetry’; instead, Tocqueville argued, democratic poetry will move 101 David Riesman, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Yale University Press, 1950/​1989), 304, 307. 102 Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, 307. 103 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 559.

Curating difference  53 from gods, heroes, and nature to consider ‘man himself ’, ‘the nation as a whole’, and indeed ‘the whole human race’.104 But, as Tocqueville recognises, ‘The language, dress, and daily actions of men in democracies . . . are not intrinsically poetic and anyway would cease to be so because they are too familiar to all who might be addressed by the poet’. As a result, the democratic poet will be driven to dive beneath the outer surface perceived by the senses in order to glimpse the soul itself. Now nothing fosters more readily the portrayal of ideal beauty than the hidden depths of man’s spiritual nature. . . . [Democratic poets] did not seek to relate the actions of a single man but wished to illustrate and enlarge certain dark recesses of the human heart. Such are the poems of democracy.105

These remarks provided a basis for two claims in American twentiethc​ entury cultural criticism. First, there was the idea that Tocqueville successfully predicted key qualities of the great American poets, especially the avowedly ‘democratic’ work of Walt Whitman. Whitman’s concern with democracy was explicit and wholehearted: as noted earlier, the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass offered a lengthy paean to ‘the common people’ and proclaimed the poet ‘the voice and exposition of liberty’;106 and his second collection carried the title Democratic Vistas. From the 1920s onwards, American critics linked this concern to Tocqueville. In 1926 the literary theorist Katherine Harrison wrote that ‘Whitman fulfills miraculously the Frenchman’s prophecy; he is the representative democratic poet.’107 In his 1941 study The American Renaissance, F. O. Matthiessen—​who had studied at Harvard at the same time as Carter—​explained how Whitman’s work bore out Tocqueville’s prediction that the democratic poet would be preoccupied with lofty generalities, arising from a poetic outlook concerned, not with the specifics of gods or monarchs, but rather with ‘the immense form of society at large, or the still more imposing aspect of mankind’.108 104 Ibid., 561. 105 Ibid., 565. 106 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass ([no publisher], 1855), online at http://​whi​tman​arch​ive.org/​ publis​hed/​LG/​1855/​whole.html (accessed 29 March 2021), iii; viii. 107 Katherine Harrison, cited in Matthew Mancini, Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals: From His Times to Ours (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 163. 108 Tocqueville, cited in F. O. Matthieesen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (Oxford University Press, 1941), 534.

54  Musical Models of Democracy But accompanying this twentieth-​century view of Whitman as the exemplification of Tocqueville’s democratic poet was an interest in how Tocqueville’s remarks suggest that the democratic artist occupies a separate and privileged vantage point, capable of offering leadership because of the unusual penetration of the poetic vision. The appeal of this reading was especially strong for conservative thinkers who were deeply suspicious of the cultural consequences of democracy. Prominent amongst these was Carter’s Harvard teacher Irving Babbitt, who as early as 1908 yoked Tocqueville to his insistence on the maintenance of elite standards in the face of the deadening mediocrity of the masses: ‘The final test of democracy, as Tocqueville has said, will be its power to produce and encourage the superior individual.’109 Babbitt had little time for Whitman, critiquing him in his Democracy and Leadership for ‘romantic egotism’110—​ a manifestation of the anti​romanticism that made such an impact on Carter (whilst not putting him off setting Whitman).111 But in fact Whitman too felt that democracy’s reality fell well short of its promise. His prose work Democratic Vistas offers an unsparing analysis of the failings of actually-​existing democracy in 1850s and 1860s America, and argues for art as a tool for shaping the people into a society worthy of democracy’s ideals. To achieve this he issued a ‘demand [for] races of orbic bards’, whose elevating poetic leadership, would make them, in Whitman’s piquant term, ‘sweet democratic despots of the west’.112 For Whitman, Joli Jensen has argued, ‘literature is the way to guarantee that the people become The People, worthy of the powers that democracy offers them’. His and later critics’ ‘faith in the redemptive power of the arts gives them . . . a way both to call for an ideal democracy and to believe they have a special responsibility to bring it into being’.113 Whitman’s critical relationship to actually existing democracy encouraged other twentieth-​ century commentators to read Tocqueville’s prediction of the democratic poet’s concern for the ‘dark recesses of the human heart’ as advocating a retreat to a private realm, from which democracy is not celebrated but rather critiqued. Cushing Strout has written upon how

109 Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American College: Essay in Defense of the Humanities (Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 105. 110 Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, 249. 111 Carter and Edwards, Flawed Words, 47. 112 Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas ([no publisher], 1871); online at https://​arch​ive.org/​deta​ils/​ democr​atic​vist​a00w​hitr​ich/​page/​n7/​mode/​2up (accessed 29 March 2021), 52. 113 Joli Jensen, Is Art Good for Us? Beliefs about High Culture in American Life (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 56.

Curating difference  55 mid-​century literary critics read Tocqueville as sanctioning for American poets an ‘asocial paradigm’, or what Auden described as ‘a literature of lonely people’. Far from celebrating democracy, such literature would express (in the words of Lionel Trilling, who contributed significantly to the dissemination of the idea) ‘a disenchantment or disgust with the very idea of society’.114 This ‘asocial paradigm’ persisted in critical reception of American literature through to the 1960s and beyond, albeit reinterpreted to suit evolving literary styles and aesthetic stances. As Strout notes, in its emphasis upon abstraction and social detachment, it was a trope of Tocquevillian reception that tended to celebrate classic American writers as ‘precursors of the modernists’.115 Compare this construction of an asocial paradigm to remarks made by Elliott Carter in 1969, regarding how the lack of ‘a consensus about what culture is’ means that ‘the composer is left to his private world more than ever before’, and how playing and hearing ‘serious music’ amount to ‘acts of non-​ cooperation with our society’.116 Carter’s swipes at modern society’s ‘consumerist hedonism’ and the ‘regression of listening ability’,117 and his nostalgia for the ‘intellectual elite’ that historically had guided (or manipulated, or dictated) public taste,118 were entirely consonant with Trilling’s diagnosis, in The Liberal Imagination, of a ‘fear of the intellect which Tocqueville observed in us more than a century ago’, a fear that Trilling felt became ‘more intense when intellect works in art as it ideally should, when its processes are vivacious and interesting and brilliant’.119 Carter’s cultural elitism could thus find a justification in Tocqueville, just as his commitment to pluralism and difference could. In ways such as these, Tocqueville, as read through his twentieth-​century commentators, appears to legitimise multiple contradictory positions on the questions of freedom, equality, and participation within democracy. The problem for Carter was that he wished to defend both the conflictual textures of an encounter of equal differences, and to anoint cultural leaders to provide shape and direction to modern liberty. This position of both being democratic and being in charge—​to, in Jensen’s words, ‘call for an ideal democracy and believe one has a special responsibility to bring it into being’—​was 114 Auden and Trilling, cited in Cushing Strout, ‘Tocqueville and the idea of an American literature (1941–​1971)’, New Literary History 18, no. 1 (1986), 115–​27: p. 116. 115 Ibid., 125. 116 Carter and Edwards, Flawed Words, 121. 117 Carter, ‘Acceptance speech’, 243; Carter ‘An interview at the Banff Centre’, 253. 118 Carter and Edwards, Flawed Words, 14. 119 Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 12.

56  Musical Models of Democracy also inhabited by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The CCF existed to defend intellectual freedom, but also to oppose communism, thus establishing clear boundaries to the kinds of intellectual freedom to be entertained. Such contradictions were reflected also in programming of the CCF’s cultural events. The repertoire presented at the CCF’s 1954 Rome Festival—​at which Carter achieved his European breakthrough with his First Quartet—​offered diverse aesthetic visions in what Martin Brody has argued was a ‘display of democratic dissensus’, intended to make the anti-​communist case for ‘diversity of expression as a manifestation of free speech tout court’.120 This was partly in contrast to the festival’s precursor, two years earlier in Paris, which had been widely criticised for prioritising pre-​war neoclassicism over the work of the post-​war avant-​garde. At the same time, the ideological ends of the Rome festival, which involved recalibrating European perceptions of American culture as crass and populist, implied a continued commitment to the humanistic traditions of European art, and thereby expressed overall ‘the mandates of Old World cultural refinement’.121 In sum, for Brody, ‘the Cold War turn in American musical modernism can be understood as an episode in a longer trajectory, poignant in the ways it reconciled democratic pluralism as a cultural value with patrician (and nostalgic) ideas about cultivation and prestige’.122 These tensions played out also in Carter’s own attitudes to democracy.

Pluralism’s limits Brody’s characterisation of the balancing act performed by the programming and rhetoric of the Congress for Cultural Freedom implies a positive pole—​ the recognition of pluralism and dissensus—​to be weighed against the negative, ingrained instinct to protect established markers of cultural prestige and value. As we have seen, the advocacy of difference could not be neglected in the struggle against totalitarianism, even as powerful cultural actors felt impelled also to defend their own preferences. Pluralism and dissensus stood as abiding values within mid-​century American liberal thought more generally. The championing of variousness by cultural critics such as Trilling 120 Brody, ‘Class of ’54’, 245. 121 Ibid., 244–​45. The works performed at the Rome festival are listed in Pahl, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’, Appendix C. 122 Brody, ‘Class of ’54’, 245.

Curating difference  57 and Riesman was but one manifestation. Simultaneously, post-​war political scientists were formulating ‘rational choice theory’ as a new conceptual basis for democracy that resisted collectivism, foregrounding the interactions of ‘strategically self-​interested agents’.123 In parallel, ‘pluralism’ became a watchword for political theory, denoting the centrality within American democracy of a ‘never-​ending struggle between interest groups’, each of which ‘strives to defend its interests as effectively as possible in an environment that is by definition potentially adversarial’.124 Ostensibly, it is precisely this picture of the co-​existence and negotiation of different interests that is reflected in Carter’s ‘democratic’ compositions. The textures of his musical scores seem to embrace pluralism, even as his comments on the impact of democratic choice upon musical culture suggest a more ambivalent view. Carter was unusual in reaching so explicitly for the analogy of democracy to characterise this aspect of his compositional technique. But it is a characterisation that builds upon a long history of thinking about musical counterpoint in social terms. Indeed, surveying the history of reception of Bach’s counterpoint, David Yearsley has observed that, despite its reputation as ‘the purest of abstractions’, counterpoint ‘reveals itself to be as much social practice as compositional technique’.125 Yearsley’s account dwells upon the susceptibility of contrapuntal traditions to be heard and understood in contradictory ways, as signalling both emancipation and control. Thus as early as 1753 the music theorist Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg highlighted the autonomy of individual voices within fugue, within which ‘all voices compete with each other and none has preference over another as is the case with other genres’.126 Against this lay the conviction of eighteenth-​ century progressives that strict counterpoint ‘was a symbol of reaction’ on account of the severe constraints to melodic writing presented by the rules of voice leading and the imitative style.127 This negative assessment was turned into a positive during the Third Reich, when German contrapuntal traditions were read as symbolic of individual voices made subservient to a general will.128 123 S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 9. 124 Hans Blokland, Pluralism, Democracy and Political Knowledge: Robert A. Dahl and his Critics on Modern Politics (Routledge, 2011), 33. 125 David Yearsley, Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 237. 126 Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg, Abhandlung von der Fuge, volume 1 (G. Olms, 1970 [1753]), 129. 127 Yearsley, Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint, 235. 128 Ibid.

58  Musical Models of Democracy For many twentieth-​century composers, such ideological appropriations strengthened the appeal of devices that promised to loosen the structural bonds constraining the individual elements within counterpoint, especially the ‘hegemonic’ control of tonal harmony. Yet such adventures typically did not proceed without interest in retaining some element of overall executive control. In his 1931 essay ‘Democracy in music’ Percy Grainger asserted boldly that ‘the value of all existing art music depends on the extent to which it is intrinsically many-​voiced or democratic—​that is to say, the extent to which the harmonic texture is created out of freely-​moving voices, each of them full of character, or vigor, or melodic loveliness’.129 This was in contrast to music in which a primary melody was accompanied by ‘subservient unmelodic chords and basses’, which came ‘closer to musical feudalism, aristocracy or high-​priest-​craft than to democracy’.130 Nonetheless, Grainger’s vision, not dissimilarly to Ives’s, supposed ‘the oneness and harmonious togetherness of all human souls’, which meant that democratic music too had to observe the overriding importance of ‘the splendour and beauty of the composite whole’.131 In Grainger’s case this was assured by his continuing adherence to an essentially tonal musical language. More directly relevant to Carter’s polyvocalism was the ‘dissonant counterpoint’ of American ‘ultramodern’ composers such as Henry Cowell, Charles Seeger, and Ruth Crawford. Seeger and Crawford’s 1930 article ‘On Dissonant Counterpoint’ advocated the cultivation of ‘sounding apart’ over ‘sounding together’, so that the ‘difference [of parts] rather than their likeness is emphasized’.132 Some of the implications of this were pursued in works like Crawford’s String Quartet, in which ‘the parts are sharply differentiated from one another in character, register, articulation, and speed’.133 Yet the method of dissonant counterpoint sought not the abandonment of principles governing the interaction of independent voices, but, on the contrary, ‘a new order’ in which relations between them were strictly regulated through strictures on voice-​ leading and use of intervals.134 A similar dialectic 129 Percy Grainger, ‘Democracy in Music’ (1931), in Grainger on Music, ed. Malcolm Gillies and Bruce Clunnies Ross (Oxford University Press, 1999), 217–​22: p. 218. 130 Ibid. 131 Ibid., p. 217; p. 218. For an appraisal of how this ideal squared with Grainger’s racial politics, see Ryan Weber, ‘Dismantling borders, assembling hierarchies: Percy Grainger and the idea of democracy’, in Finding Democracy in Music, ed. Robert Adlington and Esteban Buch (Routledge, 2020), 37–​57. 132 Shreffler, ‘Elliott Carter and his America’, 45–​50. Only Seeger was credited as author when the article was first published. 133 Ibid., 48. 134 Henry Cowell, New Musical Resources (Cambridge University Press, 1996 [1930]), 39.

Curating difference  59 pertained to the approach to counterpoint of the Second Viennese School, another critical influence upon Carter.135 For these composers, the advent of atonality promised to free contrapuntal voices from the shackles of tonal voice-​leading, a development dramatised by the politically resonant slogan of ‘the emancipation of the dissonance’.136 But the siren call of order was not resisted for long, manifested in the concern for the ‘law of the unity of musical space’ and the ‘utmost relatedness between all component parts’, as guaranteed by the twelve-​note row.137 In the light of these twentieth-​century predecessors, the autonomy granted to individual parts in Carter’s music seems remarkable indeed. Can we conclude then, that if Carter’s remarks on cultural politics are set aside, his music can be taken as exemplary of an openness to difference and pluralism, as his obituarists wished us to believe? In assessing this question, it is instructive to return to Trilling’s and Riesman’s call for Americans to assert their ‘variousness’ and individuality. Both were mounted from a fear of the spread of conformity. But in issuing these calls, there was a risk of substituting one kind of conformity for another. As Christopher Shannon has observed, whilst Riesman resisted readings of his text that imputed a moralistic component to his juxtaposition of inner-​and outer-​directed personalities, his ‘consistent strategy of ironic juxtaposition’ itself stands as ‘a sociological expression of the stoic, existential progressivism characteristic of the most sophisticated midcentury modernist intellectuals’.138 It is no accident that in The Lonely Crowd, Charles Ives should be named (alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Carlos Williams) as a figure exemplifying the virtues of ‘autonomy’, providing the first instance of Ives’s ideologically freighted deployment ‘as a symbol for American individualism’ during the Cold War.139 This lent the impression that Riesman’s advocacy of difference was a conditional one: it

135 On Carter’s earliest influences see Wierzbicki, Elliott Carter, 8–​10. 136 Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Opinion or Insight’ (1926), in Style and Idea: Selected Writings, ed. Leonard Stein (Faber, 1975), 258–​63: p. 260. In his article ‘Emancipation of the dissonance’ (Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 6, no. 1 (1982), 106–​11) Robert Falck reveals that the term had a significant prehistory before Schoenberg used it. 137 Schoenberg, ‘Composition with twelve tones (I)’ (1941), in Style and Idea, 214–​45: p. 223; Anton Webern, ‘Path to Twelve-​Note Composition’ (1932), in The Path to the New Music (Theodore Presser, 1963), 42–​56: p. 42. 138 Shannon, A World Made Safe for Differences, p. 33; p. 30. 139 Paul, Charles Ives in the Mirror, 78–​79; see Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, 274. This is but a passing mention; Riesman was more interested in how conformist and autonomous character types manifested themselves in different sectors of the popular music market; see his article ‘Listening to popular music’ (1950), reprinted in Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, eds, On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word (Routledge 1990), 5–​13.

60  Musical Models of Democracy was the self-​consciously distinctive individual—​paradigmatically, the modernist artist—​that was the best emblem of democratic difference. In Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination this was more explicitly spelt out: the values of ‘variousness and possibility’ were explicitly linked with those of ‘complexity and difficulty’, attributes readily associated with the lonely visions of the artistic pioneer. In this way, by defining variousness in terms of a particular kind of individual, both Riesman and Trilling effectively cast it also as a kind of conformism. Something similar has been observed by commentators on Carter’s Fourth String Quartet. How different are the four individuals pitted against each other in this work? Andrew Porter’s remark that the work’s musical conversation resembles ‘a philosophical colloquy at All Souls’ unintentionally points to the similarity of the four participants, notwithstanding their reluctance to speak ‘as one’.140 A Chicago critic hearing the Fourth Quartet in performance similarly queried the differentiation of the four players highlighted in the composer’s programme note: ‘Ultimately’, the critic wrote, ‘it is hard to not hear this piece as an expression of a type of democracy where sameness and difference become confused’.141 This sameness is in part a product of the similar way in which each instrumental part has been conceived. Each orients around a single, unchanging rhythmic subdivision, and each is equally constrained in its intervallic content. Each pursues its own course in a rather unrelentingly fidgety manner. In this regard, it arguably matters little that the subdivisions and the intervals are different for each instrument. Each is also similarly pig-​headed with regard to its counterparts, making a virtue of not worrying too much about what the other is saying. As David Schiff observed, ‘the four protagonists find it much easier to talk than to listen’.142 Viewed as such, the similarities between the work’s democratic participants are more obvious than the differences. A connection can be drawn here with the model of direct democracy championed by Ives. Ives’s democratic ideal was a situation in which all members of a community were directly involved in decision making, 140 This remark is paraphrased in Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, 90. Compare Lloyd Schwarz on the ‘four colourfully incompatible club members of the Second String Quartet’; Schwarz, ‘Elliott Carter and American Poetry’, Chicago Review 58, no. 3–​4 (2014), 46–​60: p. 47. 141 Nicholas Betson, ‘Pacifica String Quartet gives a democratic performance’, Chicago Maroon, 25 February 2003. Carter himself acknowledged that his focus had been to ‘build on the similarities between the different instruments rather than on the contrasts in their characters, even though each of them has its own rhythmic and intervallic features’; Carter, cited in Bernard, ‘The string quartets of Elliott Carter’, 259. 142 Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, 92.

Curating difference  61 without the mediation of representatives—​ the same model implicitly invoked by Carter’s comparisons of his compositional textures to democracy. Ives’s paradigm for this model was the small-​town governance chronicled by Tocqueville, in which the cherished principle of ‘every man for himself ’—​ a stereotypical Yankee individualism—​prevailed. But as Michael Broyles has noted, such town-​hall democracy only enjoyed a chance of success because of the small size of the community, and its underlying ‘homogeneity of interests’, a homogeneity largely guaranteed by the limitation of the demos to male landowners within an immediate locality, plus a shared obedience to the ministrations of the church.143 The kinds of difference that remained to be negotiated in such circumstances were inevitably relatively modest: town-​ hall democracy involved the negotiations of individuals who were broadly the same as each other. Broyles additionally notes that the twentieth-​century mythologising of such local, direct democracy conveniently set aside some of the realities of nineteenth-​century town life, which was often characterised by preferential terms for the wealthy and ministers of the church.144 To establish the democratic credentials of any convocation of difference, one is obliged to ask: what gets left out? What exclusions are hidden by the claim to celebrate ‘variousness’? In Carter’s case one may point first of all to the boundaries of a compositional style that shuns such things as conjunct melody, diatonic harmony, a regular beat, the option of improvisation, unpitched noise, and so on. Such are the perhaps unavoidable consequences of an approach to the modelling of democracy within the constraints of a coherent authorial voice. The same consideration would apply to the broader interest of twentieth-​century composers in textural multiplicity as a means to register the era’s social upheavals and to resist canonical utterances—​an interest that has been seen as fundamental to modernist music.145 Without disputing the symbolism of such compositional strategies as an expression of ‘multiple perspectives, . . . a cacophony of competing narrative voices’,146 and ‘a world that is more complex, dense, multivalent, and multilingual than ever before’,147 it is inevitably the case that such experiments in pluralism will be 143 Broyles, ‘Charles Ives’, 149–​50. 144 Ibid., 150–​51. 145 Overviews are offered in Jonathan Cross, The Stravinsky Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 1998), c­ hapter 3; Katherine Russell Covington, ‘A study of textural stratification in twentieth-​century compositions’ (PhD thesis, Indiana University, 1982). 146 Joseph N. Straus, Broken Beauty: Musical Modernism and the Representation of Disability (Oxford University Press, 2018), 27: p. 30. 147 Tim Rutherford-​Johnson, Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (University of California Press, 2017), 165.

62  Musical Models of Democracy circumscribed by individual composers’ personal predilections. This reflects the fact that no democracy ever involves a fully representative cross-​section of the universe of identities: all democracies are determined by boundaries that exclude as well as include, whether defined by the borders of a nation state, membership of an organisation, or some other criterion marking out affected parties. Indeed, it has been argued that such exclusions are necessary for the proper functioning of democracy because they establish the solidarity—​the shared interests—​that motivate the desire to find common solutions that transcend difference.148 But a thorough response to the problem of democratic exclusion cannot rest content with the issue of identities left out; it must also address the idea of identity itself. Carter is clear that in his musical models of democracy, ‘each member of a society maintains his or her own identity’; as he puts it, ‘each . . . must find and hold his own rhythm’. Accordingly, in the Fourth Quartet the differentiated identities of the four individuals are not significantly altered by the collective situation in which they participate, even as they show degrees of mutual awareness from time to time. This corresponds to what has become known as the ‘economic’ concept of liberal democracy, in which interests are regarded as equivalent to private capital, and ‘ “participation” is . . . understood to mean defending as effectively as possible one’s (supposedly) known preferences, which are deemed to be beyond criticism’.149 In supposing that individuals can be regarded as ‘isolated from the social context in which they are found, as if they were unencumbered by any attachments or obligations to their families or their communities’,150 such a conception connects back to the earliest formulations of liberalism in the seventeenth century. In 1642 Thomas Hobbes proposed that one should ‘consider men as if even now [they] spring up out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity, without all kind of engagement to each other’.151 But this perspective has been criticised for neglecting the mutual formation of individual and community, and the potential of an individual’s interests to be affected and changed by the social experience. Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd propose that ‘there are collective dimensions to individual selfhood. . . . To be an individual self is to be inserted into economies 148 Sarah Song, ‘The boundary problem in democratic theory: why the demos should be bounded by the state’, International Theory 4, no. 1 (2012), 39–​68. 149 Blokland, Pluralism, Democracy and Political Knowledge, 228. 150 Avigail I. Eisenberg, Reconstructing Political Pluralism (SUNY Press, 1995), 121. 151 Hobbes, quoted in ibid.

Curating difference  63 of affect and imagination which bind us to others in relations of joy and sadness, love and hate, co-​operation and antagonism’.152 Feminist critics of liberalism have striven to champion ‘a moral sensibility that reflected not “detachment, objectivity, universality, and abstraction but instead empathy, engagement, subjectivity (or intersubjectivity), and contextuality.” ’153 The implication of such criticism is clear: to propose that democracy presupposes maintaining one’s identity throughout the intersubjective encounter is to make constraining suppositions about the kinds of individuals who are entitled to participate in the first place. Ironically, in his account of the value of the kind of focused attentiveness his music demands Carter points to the desirability for democracy of just such an openness to change—​an insistence, indeed, that individuals’ existing preferences are challenged and developed. In these remarks, the idea of an autonomous individuality unresponsive to the preferences of others is set to one side. Recognising such tensions within Carter’s various characterisations of democracy, one may feel emboldened to ask whether his short descriptions of his ‘democratic’ textures in fact adequately map onto the specifics of the musical processes. In describing his polyvocalism, Carter lays emphasis upon the combination of elements that ‘hold to their own rhythm’, whose sense of identity is not compromised amidst all the passing communal entanglements. Analytical accounts of the intricate compositional structure of a piece like the Fourth Quartet have likewise pointed to a conception in which the rhythmic and intervallic properties of each part are upheld unflaggingly until the very end; to a large degree each instrument pursues a predetermined course, moments of interaction being accommodated within but not affecting the fundamentals of each part’s solipsistic purpose. Indeed, in this work Carter seems to have taken steps to avoid coincidence of parts, where the polyrhythmic structure risked accidentally throwing them up.154 But the quite persistently maintained character-​ patterns of the Fourth Quartet are not replicated in all of Carter’s ‘polyvocal’ 152 Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (Routledge, 2002), 73. For an influential account of the constitution of individuality by community, see Charles Taylor, ‘Atomism’, in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 187–​210. 153 Linda McClain, cited in Linda M.G. Zerilli, ‘Feminist critiques of liberalism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism, ed. Steven Wall (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 355–​80: p. 364. Another influential feminist critique of the detachment assumed by the liberal view of the individual is offered in Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Harvard University Press, 1982). 154 Link, ‘Long-​Range Polyrhythms’, 54.

64  Musical Models of Democracy works, where the compositional interrelationship of instrument, intervallic repertoires, tempo scheme, and group behaviours may cut across and complicate the articulation of clear identities. In Penthode (1985), for instance, five groups of four instruments are each given their ‘own repertory of expressive characters embodied in [their] own special field of speeds and musical intervals’; these are the principal differentiated ‘identities’ of the work. But these identities are sporadically disturbed by pairing up instruments from different groups that belong to the same instrumental family, or other doublings and reinforcements that cut across the five-​way grouping;155 here, Carter’s strategies evoke the ‘collective dimensions of selfhood’ discussed by Gatens and Lloyd. At a larger scale, in the Concerto for Orchestra (1969), instrumental groupings, structural rhythms, tempi, and intervals crosscut and metamorphose in a manner that is difficult fully to equate to the composer’s characteristic description of ‘individuals . . . each having his [sic] own personal expression . . . his own personality and his own kind of music to play’.156 Instead, the motifs of impermanence and mutability, thematised by Saint-​ John Perse’s poem Vents (which inspired the Concerto), and concretised in the transitory student protests that accompanied the work’s composition in Rome, appear more apt to the work’s structural symbolism. If Carter’s works sometimes suggest a more flexible and nuanced modelling of democracy than his own descriptions imply, he, like David Riesman, would nonetheless surely have resisted a vision of democracy implying the desirability of people ‘seeking to become more like each other’—​the path to empathy and collective responsiveness espoused by some of liberalism’s critics. But the larger lesson here is one that affects liberals and critics of liberalism alike. It is the acknowledgment that any vision of plurality, any attempt to encompass variousness, will inevitably be interested, the product of a certain positionality. As Ernesto Laclau observed, there is no objective vantage point on society that is not ‘constructed through acts of power’ and which does not, therefore, ‘entail acts of exclusion’.157 From this perspective, the tension traced here within Carter’s remarks on democracy, of seeming to want to be both democratic and in charge, emerges as a specific instance of a more general phenomenon. The very act of ‘modelling’ democracy serves to 155 Ibid., 64–​65. 156 Carter, ‘On Saint-​John Perse’, 251–​52. For a concise account of the work’s compositional structure see Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, 290–​99. 157 Carla Yumatle, ‘Pluralism’, in The Encyclopaedia of Political Thought, vol. 6, ed. Michael T. Gibbons (John Wiley, 2015), online at https://​scho​lar.harv​ard.edu/​files/​cyuma​tle/​files/​c.yuma​tle-​ plural​ism.pdf (accessed 30 March 2021).

Curating difference  65 limit ‘the infinite play of differences’ that comprises the social; it represents, in Laclau’s words, ‘an attempt—​by definition unstable and precarious—​to act over the “social”, to hegemonize it’.158 For this reason, the benefits of any attempt to curate difference will always fall unevenly, offering emancipation for some, exclusion or marginalisation for others.

158 Ernesto Laclau, ‘The impossibility of society’ (1983), in New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (Verso, 1990), 89–​92: p. 90.

3 Admitting interests On the openness of musical indeterminacy

In advancing the claims of indeterminacy as a legitimate principle for composition, its leading practitioners were not slow to reach for political analogies. By leaving key aspects of a musical work open to the decisions of performers, indeterminacy signalled a departure from the established idea that the content of a musical work was determined in all its essential details by the composer’s notated score, with performers functioning principally as obedient servants. As such, it appeared reflective of broader social trends away from authoritarianism, resonating with post-​war narratives about the freedoms permitted by Western democracy.1 The merits of indeterminacy were advanced in part by casting traditional compositional practices as undemocratic. John Cage argued that ‘the masterpieces of Western music exemplify monarchies and dictatorships’, because of how they exert complete control over their human performers.2 From this perspective, the traditional model of the composer was an anachronistic hangover from pre-​democratic times; a figure such as Pierre Boulez, Morton Feldman proposed, sought ‘only to realize the perennial Frenchman’s dream . . . to crown himself Emperor’, deploying his formidable compositional technique as ‘an instrument of power’.3 Indeterminacy, by contrast, signalled what Earle Brown termed ‘the composer’s abdication from total sovereign finite power’.4 Cage elaborated to an interviewer in 1968: ‘You see, the old idea was that the composer was the genius, the conductor ordered everyone around, and the performers were 1 See Anne C. Shreffler, ‘Ideologies of serialism: Stravinsky’s Threni and the Congress for Cultural Freedom’, in Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, ed. Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb (Harvard University Press, 2005), 217–​46. 2 John Cage, ‘The future of music’ (1974), in Empty Words: Writings ’73–​’78 (Marion Boyars, 1980), 177–​87: p. 183; see also Cage, ‘Indeterminacy’ (1958), in Silence: Lectures and Writings (MIT Press, 1961), 35–​40: p. 36. 3 Morton Feldman, ‘Conversations without Stravinsky’ (1967), in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings (Exact Change, 2000), 50–​62: pp. 60–​61. 4 Earle Brown, ‘The notation and performance of new music’ (1964), Musical Quarterly 72, no. 2 (1986), 180–​201: p. 198.

Musical Models of Democracy. Robert Adlington, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197658819.003.0003

Admitting interests  67 slaves. In our music, no one is boss. We all work together.’5 For Christian Wolff, indeterminacy was ‘concerned with freedom, and a great hesitation before the use of power’.6 In reducing composerly control, it even acquired an ethical dimension, assuming in Feldman’s eyes ‘a moral, . . . an honest, . . . a “true” position in art’.7 The idea that musical indeterminacy embodied principles of emancipation and equality undoubtedly contributed substantially to its social cachet from the 1960s onwards. What better way to symbolise a new politics than by granting powers to performers that were previously denied to them. Yet as recent scholarship has demonstrated, the reality was more complicated. Relationships between the composers and performers of indeterminate music were by no means always harmonious. Performers sometimes felt that composers were experimenting upon them rather than with them; composers, for their part, frequently judged performers to be taking unsanctioned liberties in their realisations of indeterminate scores. As the first part of this chapter describes, behind such clashes lay a spread of opinions amongst the composers of the New York School on the merits of democracy, and a shared scepticism about the relevance of democratic principles for the business of music-​making. In particular, and notwithstanding the eye-​ catching rhetoric about overthrowing monarchs and despots, the new dispensation offered to performers stopped substantially short of enabling the self-​realisation that is typically seen as a primary goal of democracy. Rather than allow these complexities to deter us from a democratic interpretation, however, I suggest that the ambiguities of the composers’ approach encourage us to pursue it. In his writings on democracy, the French philosopher Claude Lefort accords a primary place to the idea of indeterminacy, suggesting that democracy is marked both by ‘a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power’, and a desire on the part of its citizens to resolve that indeterminacy.8 For Lefort, democracy is characterised not just by an openness in relation to decision-​making, but also by the attempts of individuals to substitute for this openness a concrete representation of the social order that will serve to install certainty in place of uncertainty. A primary theme, then, is the emergence of conflict from the attempt of interested parties to 5 John Cage, cited in Conversing With Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Omnibus Press, 1989), 106. 6 Christian Wolff, ‘Electricity and music’ (1968), in Occasional Pieces: Writings and Interviews, 1952–​2013 (Oxford University Press, 2017), 31–​35: p. 35. 7 Morton Feldman, ‘The anxiety of art’ (1965), in Give My Regards to Eighth Street, 21–​32: p. 27. 8 Claude Lefort, ‘The question of democracy’ (1983), in Democracy and Political Theory (Polity Press, 1988), 9–​20: p. 16.

68  Musical Models of Democracy determine the place of others within their vision of an emancipated demos. My discussion pursues the consequences of Lefort’s analysis of democratic indeterminacy for an understanding of the practices of musical indeterminacy, as manifested in performances deemed both successful and unsuccessful by composers. In the process, it becomes necessary to push back on the language of non-​intentionality and disinterestedness that has surrounded discussions of musical indeterminacy—​thanks in large part to the personal creative ethic promulgated by Cage—​and to insist instead that indeterminate music is more completely understood when seen as permeated by the conflicting interests of its various participants.

Musical indeterminacy: Emancipation and control The composers of the New York School frequently presented the diminishment of their own authority within indeterminacy as bringing emancipatory benefit to performers.9 Cage’s groundbreaking Darmstadt lecture on indeterminacy dwelt upon the way in which ‘composition which is indeterminate with respect to its performance’ relieved performers from ‘subservience to intolerable directives’.10 Distinguishing between music that deployed chance methods in its composition but which offered the performer no choice in the manner of its realisation, and music that left many decisions to the performer, he found fault with the former (citing his own Music of Changes as an example) for relegating the performer to the status of a building contractor obediently following an architect’s blueprint. In such pieces, Cage proposed, sounds may be freed from composerly authority, but these sounds in turn become authoritarian in function, ‘coming together to control . . . the performer, [thus giving] the work the alarming aspect of a Frankenstein monster’.11 Cage contrasted this situation with that engendered by a work like Feldman’s Intersection 3 (1953), a graph composition in which many decisions are left to the pianist-​performer. Here, rather than acting as 9 David Nicholls has observed that the four figures of the so-​called New York School only enjoyed close contact for a short period at the start of the 1950s, and harboured antipathies and differing creative priorities throughout their professional association; see Nicholls, ‘Getting rid of the glue: the music of the New York School’, in The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts, ed. Steven Johnson (Routledge, 2002), 17–​56. Some of these differences are recognised in the account given in this chapter, although emphasis is laid upon the commonalities that emerge from their practice and commentaries. 10 Cage, ‘Indeterminacy’, 37. 11 Ibid., 36.

Admitting interests  69 a contractor obediently fulfilling a brief, the performer has ‘the function of a photographer who on obtaining a camera uses it to take a picture’, of which the composition ‘permits an infinite number’.12 For Cage, this arrangement enabled the pianist to be an equal contributor alongside the composer. By the early 1960s, Cage’s metaphors for describing the performer’s role within indeterminacy had become more overtly political: indeterminate composition meant that ‘the performers are no longer [the composer’s] servants but are freemen’.13 Cage’s colleagues expressed comparable commitment to the levelling of the relationship between composer and performer. Echoing Cage, Christian Wolff was disparaging of the inherited notion of performers as ‘more or less adequate machines of reproduction’, and sought instead to create pieces in which performers are ‘free to exercise their identities; to produce rather than reproduce music; to make in confidence decisions, engaged in a conversation with the composer’s score’.14 A score, Wolff proposed in 1970, ‘must make possible the freedom and dignity of the performers’.15 Earle Brown spoke in turn of how indeterminacy enabled a ‘collaborative poetics of music making’, in which composer and performers were equally active.16 By ceding a measure of decision-​making to performers, the realisation of indeterminate works acquired an immediacy and spontaneity that Brown likened to jazz—​a form of music-​making which, as we saw in Chapter 1, enjoyed a particularly close association with ideas of democracy.17 The benefits of indeterminacy for performers were but one element of a wider emancipation afforded by these composers’ work to different constituent elements of musical performance. Feldman emphasised how indeterminacy liberated sound itself. For Feldman, sounds ‘were very much like human beings’;18 given ‘a taste of freedom’ by the early twentieth-​century revolutions

12 Ibid. 13 John Cage, ‘Happy new ears!’ (c. 1963), in A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (Marion Boyars, 1968), 30–​34: p. 32. 14 Christian Wolff, ‘Music—​Work—​Experiment—​Politics’ (1995), in Occasional Pieces, 201–​ 9: p. 209. 15 Christian Wolff, ‘Fragments to make up an interview’ (1970–​71), in Occasional Pieces, 43–​ 47: p. 47. 16 Earle Brown, composer’s note to From Here (1963), Earle Brown website, http://​www.earle-​ brown.org/​works/​view/​30 (accessed 31 March 2021). 17 Brown, ‘The notation and performance of new music’, 190. Brown had trained as a trumpeter and played jazz with Air Force bands during his wartime conscription. 18 Morton Feldman, cited in David Charlton and Jolyon Laycock, ‘An interview with Morton Feldman’ (1966), in Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964–​1987, ed. Chris Villars (Hyphen Press, 2006), 25–​28: p. 28.

70  Musical Models of Democracy in composition, they ‘now wanted to be really free . . . They wanted to live’.19 The indeterminate methods through which composers sought to limit their executive control were accordingly valued as means for sounds to ‘be as free as a human being might be free . . . not to be used for the vested interest of an idea’.20 Indeterminacy was also identified with new freedom for listeners. No longer was there an assumption that the singular message of the author would be imprinted unaltered on the mind of a passive recipient. Wolff prized the fact that, in his work, ‘sounds are not used deliberately to compel feelings in others. Let the listeners be just as free as the players.’21 In similar terms, Brown noted how, by shifting attention away from a composer’s ‘self-​limiting subjective condition’ and towards objective possibilities, indeterminacy allowed audiences ‘to be most free in relation to experience’.22 In the late 1960s and early 1970s Cage took this idea to its logical conclusion by attempting to create ‘a situation in which there is no difference between the audience and the performers’, sometimes through offering audience members more active roles in a work’s performance.23 Such sentiments served to encourage the view that Cage and his followers approached music as ‘a model of democratic political possibilities’, building upon a broader cultural movement in post-​war America that advocated new cultural forms and mass creativity as means to shore up the values of liberal democracy.24 Yet their relinquishment of authorial intentionality had a flip side when viewed in relation to democratic principles. On the one hand it could be rhetorically deployed to indicate a reluctance to perpetuate asymmetrical power relationships within musical life, and specifically a distaste for the canonising practices that served to separate ‘great composers’ off from a broader public, with all the hierarchical implications that this entailed. On the other hand, it hardly seemed to unconditionally affirm core democratic values such as the advancement of strong opinions, clear expression of

19 Morton Feldman, ‘A compositional problem’ (1972), in Give My Regards to Eighth Street, 109–​ 11: pp. 110–​11. 20 Feldman, cited in ‘Conversation between Morton Feldman and Walter Zimmermann’ (1975), in Morton Feldman Says, 51–​56: p. 56. 21 Wolff, ‘Fragments to make up an interview’, 47. 22 Brown, ‘The notation and performance of new music’, 197. 23 John Cage (1972), cited in Kostelanetz, ed., Conversing with Cage, 111. See Clemens Gresser, ‘(Re-​)Defining the relationships between composer, performer and listener: Earle Brown, John Cage, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff ’ (PhD thesis, University of Southampton, 2004), 150–​51. 24 Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (University of Chicago Press, 2013), 116; see also pp. 2–​3.

Admitting interests  71 preferences, and a spirit of lively debate—​values that, as we saw in Chapter 2, were championed in 1950s and 1960s America as a necessary defence against the homogenisation threatened by Soviet communism and mass culture. Indeed, it has been argued that the New York School embodied an ‘aesthetic of indifference’ that expressed a desire to withdraw from the public sphere, in reaction against the increasing stridency of Cold War political discourse and in particular the oppressive atmosphere created by the McCarthy trials.25 For Cage the interest in themes of silence and absence may also have reflected growing awareness of the lack of public representation for alternative sexual identities, and the ‘dangers of self-​disclosure’ within the highly homophobic culture of the time.26 In Cage’s case, these factors mingled with other seams of philosophical and spiritual influence to produce a credo of self-​abnegation that was notably removed from the democratic aspirations of the era. Already predisposed to avant-​garde traditions that stressed expressive restraint and the permeability of art and life, from the late 1940s Cage immersed himself in Asian philosophical writing and the practices of Zen Buddhism, which further strengthened his attachment to ‘purposeful purposelessness’ and denial of the ego.27 The urge to ‘get one’s mind and one’s desires out of the way’ motivated Cage’s exploration of chance compositional methods, leading directly to the creation of works in which much of the decision-​making was left to performers.28 Yet it also created a profound disjunction with the democratic emphasis upon the pursuit of distinct interests. Cage’s commitment, rather, was ‘to accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences’, in accordance with Zen’s insistence on the suppression of preferences, likes, and dislikes.29 Indeterminacy’s promise to ‘bring about an unforeseen situation’ appealed precisely because of how it circumnavigated the passing desires of the self.30 Critically, for Cage this outlook demanded that disinterestedness should be a goal not only for composers, but also for performers. Precisely a consequence of his removal of the ‘conventional difference between composer 25 Moira Roth, ‘The aesthetic of indifference’, Artforum (November 1977), 46–​53; https://​www. artfo​rum.com/​print/​197​709/​the-​aesthe​tic-​of-​indif​f ere​nce-​37263. 26 Jonathan D. Katz, ‘Identification’, in Moira Roth and Jonathan D. Katz, Difference/​ Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (G&B Arts, 1998), 49–​ 70: p. 53. 27 John Cage, ‘Experimental music’, in Silence, 7–​12: p. 12. 28 Ibid. 29 John Cage, ‘Julliard Lecture’ (1952), in A Year from Monday, 95–​111: p. 105. 30 John Cage, ‘Indeterminacy’, 36.

72  Musical Models of Democracy and performer’ was that the performer, like Cage himself, was expected to ‘let go of his feelings, his taste, . . . not attaching himself to this or that, leaving by his performance no traces, providing by his actions no interruption to the fluency of nature’.31 New performer freedoms consequently by no means equated to enhanced self-​expression or the pursuit of personal ends.32 Rather, performers were expected to affirm ‘no matter what eventuality’, instead of seeking to advance ideas or realise preferences.33 As we will see, Cage reacted angrily whenever he felt this expectation had been disregarded by performers. This critical distance from democratic principles persisted in the 1960s as Cage grew increasingly interested in anarchism. In 1967 he discovered Henry David Thoreau’s 1849 essay ‘Civil Disobedience’, in which Thoreau expressed scepticism that democracy was ‘the last improvement possible in government’ and argued for an alternative that better recognised ‘the individual as a higher and independent power’.34 Cage subsequently quoted this essay in a number of his writings and compositions, and eventually used it as the basis for the installation work Essay (1987), in which Thoreau’s words are broadcast through loudspeakers.35 Whilst anarchist thought inhabits a broad spectrum that is by no means closed to elements of democratic principle, Cage was drawn above all to the Thoreauvian conviction that ‘that government is best which governs not at all’.36 This, combined with his Zen-​inspired suspicion towards the pursuit of personal interests, led him to comment

31 John Holzaepfel, ‘Cage and Tudor’, in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 169–​85: p. 183; Cage, ‘Indeterminacy’, 39. 32 Thus it was that the dancer Carolyn Brown highlighted the paradox between Cage’s wish to ‘let the sounds be themselves’ whilst not ‘letting the performers be themselves’, in the sense of admitting anything that might ordinarily be equated with the performer’s identity. Carolyn Brown, cited in Martin Iddon, John Cage and David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 82. 33 Cage, ‘Indeterminacy’, 37. 34 Henry David Thoreau, ‘Civil disobedience’ (1849), available online at https://​xro​ads.virgi​nia. edu/​~Hyp​er2/​thor​eau/​civil.html (accessed 30 March 2021). 35 David Revill, The Roaring Silence—​John Cage: A Life (Arcade Publishing, 1992), 220. Thoreau’s text appears in different forms in the Afterword to A Year from Monday (1968), 166; Solo for Voice no. 35 of the Song Books (1970); the installation Essay (1987); and the lecture Anarchy (1988). For a comprehensive analysis, see Jannika Bock, Concord in Massachusetts, Discord in the World: The Writings of Henry Thoreau and John Cage (Peter Lang, 2008). See also Rob Haskins, ‘John Cage and anarchism: notes on sources and musical evocations’, Terz 5 (2012), online at http://​www.terz.cc/​ print.php?where=​maga​zin&id=​264 (accessed 30 March 2021). 36 Thoreau, ‘Civil disobedience’. On the relationship of anarchism and democracy, see Marcus Lundström, Anarchist Critique of Radical Democracy: The Impossible Argument (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Admitting interests  73 disparagingly on key facets of American democracy, including political debate, protest, activism, and elections.37 In 1982 he observed that People often object to my work as not being political . . . But I’m not interested in the difference between communism and capitalism or between Democrats and Republicans. I think they are all impossible. . . . I wouldn’t vote for anyone for president. I don’t think we need a president. What we need is a solution of our present problems, which are global, not national.38

Cage’s interpretation of anarchism further constrained the freedoms enjoyed by his performers. For Cage, anarchism meant above all a commitment to non-​obstruction; each citizen should be ‘as careful as possible not to form any ideas about what each person should or should not do’.39 This resonated with the Zen principle of ‘unimpededness’, which sought to reflect how, in Cage’s formulation, ‘in all of space each thing and each human being is at the center and furthermore that each one being at the center is the most honored of all’.40 But in imposing limitations on consorting and on attempting to influence other people’s actions and opinions, these priorities clearly ran counter to familiar conceptions of collective action and group deliberation within democratic society. For Cage’s performers, the seemingly beneficent invitation to perform ‘from their own centers’ merged into a requirement that ‘independent action’ be favoured over responsiveness to others.41 From Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958) onwards, Cage’s approach to ensemble writing stressed the complete independence of each part from every other, with individual musicians encouraged to proceed at their own speed, without regard to what others are doing. Cage encouraged musicians to practice ‘in solitude, not together’, with choices made ‘in a way not constrained by his [sic] likes and dislikes’.42 The ideal arrangement was for each musician to be ‘paying so much attention to what he is doing that

37 Ian Pace, ‘ “The Best Form of Government . . .”: Cage’s Laissez-​Faire Anarchism and Capitalism’, The Open Space Magazine 8, no. 9 (2007), 91–​115. 38 John Cage (1982), cited in Kostelanetz, ed., Conversing with Cage, 279. 39 John Cage, For the Birds: In Conversation with Daniel Charles (Marion Boyars, 1981), 99–​100. 40 ‘Communication’ (1958), in Silence, 41–​56: p. 46. Cage is here paraphrasing the words of Zen scholar Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, whose classes Cage attended at Columbia University. 41 Cage, ‘Indeterminacy’, 39. 42 Cage, letter to Charles Boone, 12 March 1968, cited in Philip Thomas et al., ‘Performing the Concert for Piano and Orchestra’, cageconcert website, https://​cage​conc​ert.org/​per​form​ing-​the-​conc​ ert/​. Working with the Joseph Jarman Quartet in 1965, Cage similarly advised the musicians ‘not to listen to each other’; For the Birds, 171.

74  Musical Models of Democracy he can’t mix with the neighbour, and, say, “adulterate” the neighbour’.43 In this conception, group performance took the form of the ‘interpenetration’ of multiple independent actions, rather than an interaction between collectively minded individuals. In varying ways, Cage’s colleagues showed themselves equally reluctant to provide opportunities within their indeterminate works for performers to freely pursue their interests. Brown and Feldman were wary about Cage’s blanket prohibitions on personal preference, but in neither case did this signal an expansion of expressive liberties for performers. While Brown was happy to accept that the ‘variable factors’ within his works gave scope for realisations ‘interesting to the performer’, his ultimate measure for the success of a work remained ‘what I [i.e. Brown] wanted to hear’.44 Regardless of the elements of notational flexibility, Brown insisted that his works should exhibit a clear ‘identity’ or ‘character’, just as ‘we recognize people regardless of what they or saying or how they are dressed’.45 By the 1960s this determined that performance freedoms within Brown’s ‘open forms’ were limited to matters of coloristic detail or (in the case of large-​scale works) the quasi-​spontaneous directives of the conductor. Feldman’s relinquishing of elements of compositional control, meanwhile, was driven not by an ethic of equality but, on the contrary, by an attitude of subservience towards sound. Likening sound to a ‘deity’,46 Feldman believed that service to this higher cause was not just the composer’s duty, but also the performers’. His experiments in indeterminate notation accordingly reflected a concern to bracket out rather than liberate performer identity. The graph notations of his early works allowed durations, pitches, and dynamics to be ‘freely chosen’, but were at the same time intended to prevent performers from resorting to ‘memory (relationships)’ and from imposing their own ‘compositional rhetoric’.47 Later, Feldman came to resent the openness of even these indeterminate methods, because of how they elicited what he termed ‘historical clichés in performance’—​an aversion that from the 1960s increasingly drove him to

43 John Cage, cited in Charles Junkerman, ‘Modeling anarchy: the example of John Cage’s Musicircus’, Chicago Review 38, no. 4 (1993), 153–​68: p. 165. See also Gresser, ‘(Re-​)Defining the relationships’, 207. 44 Note to 25 Pages; Notation and performance, 191. 45 String Quartet note; and comment cited in Hoover c­ hapter 164. 46 Feldman, cited in Robert Ashley, ‘Part of an interview with Morton Feldman’ (1964), in Morton Feldman Says, ed. Villars, 14–​17: p. 15; Feldman, cited in ‘Conversation between Morton Feldman and Walter Zimmermann’, 55. 47 Morton Feldman, ‘Liner notes’ (1962), in Give My Regards to Eighth Street, 3–​7: p. 6.

Admitting interests  75 prefer fixed notation.48 As he explained in an interview, ‘I was interested in freeing the sound and not the performer’.49 Of the four leading figures, only Christian Wolff has openly embraced the idea of democracy, claiming in 2009 to aspire ‘to stay always aware of good democratic principles’ when making music. Unlike Cage, Wolff has cherished the ways in which indeterminacy might enable processes of collective decision-​making, producing what he has described as ‘a kind of democratic libertarianism’.50 Commentators have correspondingly described Wolff ’s music as ‘strongly anti-​authoritarian, “democratic” ’, and enacting a ‘democratic indeterminacy’.51 But the freedoms accorded by Wolff to performers have by no means always given unfettered scope for the pursuit of personal preference. For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964) is typical of his early indeterminate work in leaving pitches, dynamics, and durations largely unspecified, the score indicating instead how musicians should react to the sounds produced by others (see Ex. 3.1). Here, listening and responsiveness to others is undeniably front and centre. But the intricate interdependencies that such a score creates, plus the requirement to respond almost instantaneously to other musicians’ cues, means that performer agency can be exercised only in drastically constrained form. Frederic Rzewski once observed how, in Wolff ’s Music for Six or Seven Players (1959), the choices offered to performers allowed ‘no time to think, but only time to perform mechanical operations’.52 Wolff ’s scores of this period reflected a concept of sociality in which responsibility to others trumped, even effaced, individual liberty. As he later wrote, his intention was to enable ‘not so much an expression of the player (or composer) as a way of connecting, making a community’—​a formulation that cast community as distinct from, rather than the outcome of, musicians’ personal preferences.53 48 Feldman, cited in Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras, ‘Soundpieces Interview’ (1980), in Morton Feldman Says, ed. Villars, 87–​94: p. 91. 49 Feldman, cited in ‘H.C.E. (Here comes everybody): Morton Feldman in conversation with Peter Gena’ (1982), in Morton Feldman Says, ed. Villars, 115–​32: p. 122. 50 Christian Wolff, ‘Interview with James Saunders’ (2009), in Occasional Pieces, 275–​83: p. 277; Christian Wolff, ‘What is our work?’ (1990), in Occasional Pieces, 107–​17: p. 114. 51 John Tilbury, cited in Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund, Christian Wolff (University of Illinois Press, 2012), 58; Beal, ‘Christian Wolff in Darmstadt’, 26. 52 Rzewski, cited in Hicks and Asplund, Christian Wolff, 29. 53 Wolff, ‘On notation’ (1984), in Occasional Pieces, 85. Wolff ’s position on this question has vacillated over time. Emily Payne and Philip Thomas have recently examined later pieces by Wolff that better reflect his 1995 assertion that performers ‘are the critical centers of musical production’; they do this partly through performance instructions that are either wilfully ambiguous or explicitly offered as optional, and which thus generate ‘democratic’ discussion. See Emily Payne and Philip Thomas, ‘Getting exercised: ensemble relations in Christian Wolff ’s Exercises’, in Finding Democracy in Music, ed. Robert Adlington and Esteban Buch (Routledge, 2020), 101–​24.

76  Musical Models of Democracy

Ex. 3.1  Christian Wolff, For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964), p. 4. © 1964 by C.F. Peters Corporation, New York. Reproduced by permission of Peters Edition Limited, London

Claude Lefort and the indeterminacy of democracy Attitudes such as these hardly seem to provide promising ground for an investigation of indeterminacy in terms of democracy. Composers of indeterminate music declared their abdication from sovereign power, but continued to insist on adherence to their written instructions, aesthetic predilections, and life philosophies. Performers were promised freedom from subservience, but expected to set aside all prior commitments and investments before realising a composer’s work. Guarantees were offered on the levelling of composer and performer, but on terms decided entirely by the composers. Yet a way of understanding these apparent contradictions can be found if we enquire further into the use of the term indeterminacy within democratic theory. In a banal sense, all democracies are indeterminate, in so far as they leave open a question as to who will govern, and to what ends. The decisions of the people ought never to be predetermined. But the idea of indeterminacy

Admitting interests  77 has also been used to encapsulate a key theme of this book, namely the resistance to definition of the very concept of democracy. In his late study Voyous [‘Rogues’], Jacques Derrida deploys the word ‘indétermination’ to remark upon ‘a freedom of play, an opening of indetermination and undecidability in the very concept of democracy, in the interpretation of the democratic’.54 Democracy fascinated Derrida as a concept because of the way in which it asserted its own intrinsic contestability; as he expressed it, democracy ‘remains free, like a disengaged clutch, freewheeling, in the free play of its indetermination; it is inscribed right onto this thing or this cause that, precisely under the name of democracy, is never properly what it is, never itself’.55 From this conceptual indetermination arose what Derrida termed democracy’s ‘autoimmunity’.56 By this, he meant to indicate how democracy, in striving to be encompassing of all views, is susceptible to self-​destruction through its openness to what is against it. It is in the writings of the philosopher Claude Lefort, however, that we find the richest tools for thinking through democratic indeterminacy in relation to musical practice. In his seminal essay ‘The question of democracy’, Lefort writes that democracy proves to be . . . a society which, in its very form, welcomes and preserves indeterminacy . . . The important point is that democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge, and as to the basis of relations between self and other, at every level of social life.57

In these observations, Lefort treads similar territory to Derrida: democracy resists certainty, and thus ‘is never properly what it is’. But Lefort’s account reaches beyond such general reflections to elaborate how this indeterminacy plays out for citizens’ conception of their relations to one another. It is here that we can find some insights that throw light upon musical indeterminacy in particular, and composers’ relations with performers in general.

54 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford University Press, 2005 [2002]), 25. 55 Ibid., 36–​37. 56 On this autoimmunity, see Samir Haddad, Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy (Indiana University Press, 2013), 58–​60. 57 Lefort, ‘The question of democracy’, 16.

78  Musical Models of Democracy Lefort proposes that the advent of democracy brought about ‘a mutation of the symbolic order’.58 In pre-​democratic times, society conceived of itself in terms of the body of the monarch—​in other words, as a ‘substantial unity’ which ‘gave [to] society a body’,59 with every individual member of society occupying a defined place and function in relation to all the others. As Carlo Accetti explains, ‘the society of the Ancien Régime actually functioned as if it were a “body”, with the orders coming from the “head” of the state and the lower “members” executing them’.60 This integrated articulation of social power held sway, Lefort argues, ‘as a result of a belief in the nature of things or in a supernatural principle’.61 It follows that the overthrow of such preordained designations of power stood to deprive society of the symbolic means by which to conceive of itself as a unity; instead, democracy manifests as ‘a society without a body’.62 Democracy inaugurates society’s ‘disincorporation’, with the spheres of power, law, and knowledge obtaining relative autonomy, and the structure of social relations no longer pre-​assigned but instead left open to contest. The result is ‘a society whose identity can no longer be defined in terms of the identity of a social body’.63 Far from affording a reassuring and harmonious co-​existence, democracy is thus presented as a social arrangement that is fundamentally unresolved and marked by a certain vacancy; as Lefort expresses it, under democracy ‘the locus of power becomes an empty place’.64 Indeed, for Lefort, democracy’s indeterminacy is marked by a ‘principle of division’, resisting representation as ‘an organic totality’.65 This doesn’t prevent the advancement within democracy of representations of the newly empowered people, in an attempt to substitute for the body that has been disincorporated. Lefort observes that ‘as soon as there is no ultimate reference on the basis of which the social order might be conceived and determined, the social order is constantly on a quest for foundations, in search of its own legitimacy’, a search that he regards as ‘constituting democracy’s essence’.66 To put it another way, a democratic 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 17. 60 Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, ‘Claude Lefort: democracy as the empty place of power’, in Rethinking Radical Democracy: The Return to Politics in Post-​War France, ed. Martin Breaugh et al. (University of Toronto Press, 2015), 121–​40: p. 128. 61 Lefort, ‘The question of democracy’, 19. 62 Ibid., 18. 63 John B. Thompson, ‘Editor’s introduction’, in Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Polity, 1986), 25. 64 Lefort, ‘The question of democracy’, 17. 65 Lefort, ‘The question of democracy’, 18. 66 Cited in Abensour, 707.

Admitting interests  79 society ‘must always be attempting to “fill” the “place of power” with a concrete representation of what it is’.67 Such bids to overcome democracy’s disincorporation are intrinsic to the dynamics of democracy. Yet, crucially, any such attempt to configure ‘the people’ is contestable, for ‘no one holds the formula for democracy’.68 Here, Lefort’s position is close to that of Chantal Mouffe, who, as we saw in Chapter 1, argues that within democracy ‘no limited social actor can attribute to herself or himself the representation of the totality and claim to have the “mastery” of the foundation’.69 Understood as the form of society that arises from the abandonment of the metaphor of a coherent social body, democracy resists any attempt at a definitive resolution of its essential indeterminacy. Behind any such move to posit a new social unity in the name of the multitude Lefort perceives ‘the work of ideology’, reflecting the specific interests of a particular individual or group. From here it is a short step, he contends, to the denial of division and ‘fantasy of the People-​as-​One’ characteristic of totalitarianism.70

Musical indeterminacy viewed from the perspective of Lefort Lefort’s account of democratic indeterminacy invites projection onto musical terrain in a number of ways. In the first place it is clear that the New York School composers’ conception of music was in significant ways ‘disincorporated’. Cage’s famously polemical assertion that ‘composing is one thing, performing another, and listening a third; . . . there is no reason for the three operations to be linked’71 encapsulated a radical questioning of the assumed unity of apperception between the different parties involved in a musical performance. This was a natural consequence of the decision to loosen the bonds between compositional instruction and performer 67 Accetti, ‘Claude Lefort’, 128. 68 Claude Lefort and Paul Thibaud, cited in Miguel Abensour, ‘ “Savage Democracy” and the “Principle of Anarchy” ’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 28, no. 6 (2002), 703–​26: p. 707. 69 Mouffe has acknowledged Lefort as an important influence, albeit one not received uncritically; see Martin Oppelt, ‘ “Thinking the world politically”: an interview with Chantal Mouffe’, Zeitschrift für Politische Theorie 5, no. 2 (2014), 263–​77: pp. 265–​66. Lefort’s position is explored in the closing pages of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd edn (Verso, 2001 [1985]), 186–​89. 70 Lefort, ‘The question of democracy’, 20. 71 Cage, For the Birds, 129. Compare Cage’s remark, made in 1961, that ‘composition, performance, and audition or observation are really different things. They have next to nothing to do with one another.’ Cage, Silence, 6.

80  Musical Models of Democracy response, and it was further accentuated by composers’ reticence towards authorial expression, and their emphases upon ‘independent action’ and non-​obstruction. In the view of Cornelius Cardew, Cage and his colleagues were here simply taking to its logical conclusion the everyday truth that any notated music leaves matters of detail undetermined for its performers, and that specific compositional intentions frequently fail to convey themselves to listeners.72 Yet the resulting stance represented a drastic departure from the established ideal in which the conceptions of composer, performer, and listener are aligned to form a ‘substantial unity’ (to use Lefort’s term). Instead, musical performance is understood as comprising a kind of convocation of distinct understandings, none of which map precisely onto the others. It presents, in other words, a disincorporated social order, obeying no higher logic or coordinating oversight. Here, indeterminacy, as for Lefort, appears to be characterised precisely by the ‘dissolution of the markers of certainty’. Yet this interest in disincorporation existed in tension with a contrary instinct towards unity. Cage and his colleagues by no means comprehensively set themselves off from the ‘fantasy of an organic society’ that Lefort critiqued, nor did they consistently share with Lefort the desire to articulate a kind of collectivity that ‘undermines the representation of an organic totality’.73 This expressed itself in different ways. For instance, composers often asserted that some kind of shared purpose was in fact a necessary prerequisite for adequate performance—​a condition that rather contradicted the idea that composing, performing, and listening had nothing to do with each other. Thus, performers were expected to enter into ‘the spirit of the thing’, and to come to the music ‘seriously, with good will, [so that] they will just do the right thing’.74 Ryan Dohoney has suggested that Feldman’s turn towards more fully prescriptive notation during the 1960s was driven in part by the realisation that the kinds of unpredictability he prized only arose when he knew the performers well. Dohoney goes so far as to suggest that ‘friendship in fact produced New York School modernism’, providing the ‘underlying 72 This is the argument made by Cornelius Cardew in his ‘Notation—​Interpretation, etc.’ (1961), in Cornelius Cardew: A Reader, ed. Edwin Prévost (Copula, 2006), 5–​22: p. 7. See also Wolff, ‘Fragments to make up an interview’, 46. 73 Simonetta Falasza-​Zamponi, Rethinking the Political: The Sacred, Aesthetic Politics, and the Collège de Sociologie (McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2011), 245; Lefort, ‘The question of democracy’, 18. 74 Cage, cited in Philip Thomas, ‘Determining the indeterminate’, Contemporary Music Review 26, no. 2 (2007), 129–​40: p. 134; Wolff, ‘Conversation with Walter Zimmermann’, 58. On the importance of performers’ ‘good will’, see also Wolff, ‘Questions’, 27; ‘Interview with Cole Gagne’ (1992), in Occasional Pieces, 143–​67: pp. 152–​53.

Admitting interests  81 network of awareness’ that enabled experiments with new kinds of relationship between collaborators.75 In the absence of such prior understandings, performers could follow paths that composers deemed illegitimate. Composers also associated indeterminacy with kinds of communion that, while ostensibly exceeding their personal preferences, at the same time represented powerfully integrative visions. For Earle Brown, ‘the composer’s abdication from total sovereign finite power’ enabled the ‘total involvement’ of performers and audience, which in turn lent to the work ‘an infinite power and universality . . . an absolute state of entity’. Yet it was Brown’s view that the responsibility ‘to bring all of these elements into an intense relationship of oneness’ was the composer’s alone.76 In his Darmstadt lecture Cage took issue with Brown precisely for creating works that, although indeterminate in certain respects, presented a ‘situation of the subservience of several to the directives of one’.77 Notwithstanding such criticism, Cage’s own collaborative ethic reflected comparably personal foundational premises. Ben Piekut has written of how Cage adhered to ‘an understanding of “nature” that is authoritative when set against “society” ’, and which in Cage’s mind provided ‘a universal ground for action’.78 By urging deference to ‘the fluency of nature’—​on the part of both composer and performers—​Cage supposed the existence of an objective realm lying beyond personal difference, to which all were ultimately bound.79 Piekut regards this conception as reflecting a ‘modernist ontology’ that presented as objective a ‘reality’ that was substantially Cage’s own creation, and which was ‘disputable at every stage’.80 As such, it reproduced the dynamic that Lefort saw as integral to feudal societies, within which ‘a belief in the nature of things or in a supernatural principle’ supported a fixed and asymmetrical distribution of power.81 The inclination of composers to act as a ‘unifying subject’ clearly exists in tension with Lefort’s insistence that ‘no one holds the formula for

75 Ryan Dohoney, ‘Spontaneity, intimacy, and friendship in Morton Feldman’s music of the 1950s’, Modernism/​Modernity 2, no. 3 (2017), online at https://​mod​erni​smmo​dern​ity.org/​artic​les/​mor​ton-​ feld​man (accessed 31 March 2021). 76 Brown, ‘The notation and performance of new music’, 198–​99. Clemens Gresser has remarked upon Brown’s ‘rather Romantic idea of the work as quasi-​organic material’; ‘(Re-​)Defining the relationships’, 391. 77 Cage, ‘Indeterminacy’, 37. 78 Benjamin Piekut, ‘Chance and certainty: John Cage’s politics of nature’, Cultural Critique 84 (2013), 134–​63: pp. 139, 144. 79 Cage, ‘Indeterminacy’, 39. 80 Piekut, ‘Chance and certainty’, 153–​54. 81 Lefort, ‘The question of democracy’, 19.

82  Musical Models of Democracy democracy’.82 But there remains a larger parallel with Lefort’s analysis. For these composers’ self-​presentations bore out the dynamic that Lefort describes: while democracy augurs a ‘principle of division’ and ‘the disappearance of natural determination’, it is also perpetually subject to attempts to address and remedy the ‘lack’ in the place of power. For Lefort, as we have seen, this drive to act as a unifying subject in the face of social multiplicity—​ to coordinate multiple interests into a harmonious whole—​is both undemocratic and a fundamental characteristic of democracy. By ‘undemocratically’ seeking to reassert control over the uncertainty of indeterminacy, composers acted in a way that is fully characteristic of democratic citizens. Approaching musical indeterminacy in this light thus requires us to recognise composers as interested rather than disinterested parties, for it is precisely in acting as a unifying subject that interests come to the fore. This is not a neglected perspective when it comes to the composers of the New York School. For all that indeterminacy was rhetorically presented in terms of an effacement of controlling authorial desires—​to be sure, in differing degrees according to who was speaking, and when—​there has been increasing recognition of the key role played by composers’ preferences.83 These preferences made themselves felt at the level of broad principle as well as more local ‘likes and dislikes’. Regarding the latter, writers on Cage have observed how his approach to chance methods and his strong views about different performers reflected preferences for certain sounding results over others.84 We have already seen how Feldman’s idea of the ‘unknown’ was better serviced by performers with whom he was familiar, and noted Brown’s unapologetic centring of what he ‘wanted to hear’. But a larger contradiction was presented by composers’ compulsion to deliver manifestoes and position statements that clearly embodied interests even as they sought to downplay habitual inclinations and passing preoccupations. To willingly surrender elements of authorial control was clearly not to forsake all personal investments. In declaring that ‘my purpose is to remove purpose’, Cage declared a purpose nonetheless, just as his claim to be ‘interested in anything but myself ’ 82 Claude Lefort and Paul Thibaud, cited in Abensour, ‘ “Savage Democracy” and the “Principle of Anarchy” ’, 710, 707. 83 Branden W. Joseph sees a concern for ‘investigations into the conflicts and exclusions surrounding Cage’s oeuvre’ as characteristic of the ‘second wave’ of Cage studies, referring to the work of Benjamin Piekut, Ryan Dohoney, Rebecca Kim, and Sara Heimbecker amongst others; see Joseph, Experimentations: John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2016), 8–​9. 84 For an overview, see Drake Andersen, ‘ “What can they have to do with one another?”: approaches to analysis and performance in John Cage’s Four2’, Music Theory Online 23, no. 4 (2017), https://​mto​ smt.org/​iss​ues/​mto.17.23.4/​mto.17.23.4.ander​sen.html.

Admitting interests  83 betrayed precisely his interests.85 And these purposes and interests could by no means be assumed to be inconsequential for the purposes and interests of others. On the contrary: indeterminacy’s ‘aesthetic of indifference’ came accompanied with a host of injunctions, proscriptions, and desiderata for performers, unapologetically asserted in the many interviews and writings of all four of these composers. For Lefort, such is to be expected in any democracy. His conception of indeterminacy envisages not the eradication of interests, but rather the uncertain coexistence of multiple conflicting interests. Democracy obeys a ‘principle of division’; it brings what Lefort terms the ‘institutionalization of conflict’.86 And it follows from this that, in the performance of musical indeterminacy, composers have not been the only interested parties intent on pursuing particular ends. Lefort’s emphasis on disincorporation suggests the merits of dwelling upon the distinct interests of performers when they elect to engage with indeterminate music, just as we have recognised the role played by the interests of composers. The history of performance of indeterminate music furnishes abundant evidence that the openness of indeterminacy has frequently been construed as an invitation to performers to pursue interests separate from those of the composer, even when composers actively sought to shut down or limit that openness. Approached in these terms, indeterminacy is reconceived as a space for different interested parties that assumes no unity—​rather than, as in the composers’ controlling conception, a space for disinterested parties whose integration is assumed in advance. Such an approach brings into question fixed ideas of legitimate and illegitimate performances, for any such judgements invariably reflect the totalising aspirations of particular parties. As we will consider in the next section, a wide range of different performance situations may be recognised as embodying the disincorporation of indeterminacy, encompassing both those found acceptable and those found unacceptable by composers. To explore these possibilities further, we begin with one of the performers most closely identified with the New York School: David Tudor. His intimate and sustained association with Brown, Cage, Feldman, and Wolff appeared to reflect the perfect example of a performer being ‘in the spirit of the thing’, ready to show ‘good will’ in adhering to the composer’s expectations. But as 85 Cage (1961), cited in Kostelanetz, ed., Conversing with Cage, 216; Cage, cited in Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, ‘An interview with John Cage’, Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (1965), 50–​ 72: p. 70. 86 Lefort, ‘The question of democracy’, 17.

84  Musical Models of Democracy we will see, Tudor’s practice evolved in a way that is more fully understood as reflecting a quite independent conception of the relation of composer and performer, one that resisted compliance with the totalising schemes of others. As such, he draws attention to the capacity of performers to contribute to indeterminacy’s disincorporation, precisely by rejecting the preferences of composers.

Indeterminacy as disincorporation: David Tudor, Variations II, and the interests of performers David Tudor’s dedication to the music of Cage and his colleagues during the 1950s and 1960s gained him the unflinching loyalty of these composers. ‘David Tudor was present in everything I was doing’, Cage later wrote.87 His fellow indeterminicists spoke of ‘how much we trusted David to always be doing things properly’, and how ‘when a piece was turned over to David, there was simply no anxiety’.88 One reason for the confidence he inspired was that his meticulous approach to preparing their music appeared to signify a setting aside of personal taste comparable to that which the composers claimed to be undertaking. Tudor’s performance methods involved ‘a series of rigorous preparatory steps, including measurements, computations, conversion tables’,89 as a means of converting the ambiguities and openness of composers’ scores into a realisation that could be rendered in performance. In the case of Cage’s Music of Changes (1951), for instance, Tudor employed the services of the mathematician Hans Rademacher to find a consistent means of calculating the duration of the work’s spatially notated units, with their internal accelerandi or ritardandi indications.90 Earle Brown recalled how Tudor’s approach to performing the graphically notated Four Systems (1954)—​which was written for and dedicated to Tudor—​involved ‘using a ruler and calipers and various things in order to find exactly, vertically, what pitches were involved and their durations’.91 The seriousness and seeming

87 Cage, cited in Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-​Garde and Its Limits (University of California Press, 2011), 55. 88 Earle Brown and Christian Wolff, cited in ibid., 57. 89 Holzaepfel, ‘Cage and Tudor’, 176. 90 Ibid., 173. 91 Earle Brown, ‘On December 1952’ (1970), American Music 26, no. 1 (2008), 1–​12: p. 8. In this reminiscence Brown says he ‘didn’t at all object to David approaching Four Systems in this way’, but also recorded his preference for a more ‘improvisational’ approach (pp. 8–​9).

Admitting interests  85 objectivity of these preparatory processes ‘inspired many composers’, Cage wrote, ‘to introduce freedoms for the performer into their compositional means’, producing ‘indeterminate music which removes the conventional difference between composer and performer’.92 Recent research into Tudor’s methods has sought to complicate the idea that his performance practice was laid entirely at the service of composers’ declared goals. In the first place, Tudor elected to avoid the uncertainties that indeterminacy might imply for the moment of performance by preparing and practising a single realisation in advance, which would then also be used in subsequent performances.93 Such an approach was at odds with Cage’s claim, in his Darmstadt lecture, that ‘a performance of a composition which is indeterminate of its performance is necessarily unique. It cannot be repeated. When performed for a second time, the outcome is other than it was.’94 The repetition of Tudor’s realisations from performance to performance inevitably meant that a work acquired the object-​like status that Cage, at least, had claimed to wish to avoid.95 That this contradiction could be readily overlooked by Cage and his colleagues was significantly due to the foundational role played by Tudor in the creation of indeterminacy’s ‘experimental sound ideal’.96 Tudor’s role in the experimental scene, in other words, ‘was generative, rather than just interpretive’, and the way in which it fed back into these composers’ ongoing compositional work guaranteed that his performance style was also ‘reliably amenable to his composers’ tastes’.97 But if Tudor’s practice highlights how composers of indeterminate music, despite the emphasis they placed upon non-​intentionality, had very distinct preferences for certain kinds of performance of their scores, it also points to the way in which Tudor’s own tastes and preferences manifested themselves. On this question, a chronological picture emerges that sees Tudor becoming more assertive in making unilateral decisions that go beyond, reinterpret, or ignore aspects of composers’ work.98 In Cage’s Winter Music 92 Cage, cited in Holzaepfel, ‘Cage and Tudor’, 183. 93 Iddon, John Cage and David Tudor, 85. 94 Cage, ‘Indeterminacy’, 39. Piekut remarks upon the inconsistency with Tudor’s preferred practice; Experimentalism Otherwise, 56–​57. 95 Cage, ‘Indeterminacy’, 37–​38. 96 Judy Lochhead, ‘Controlling liberation: David Tudor and the “experimental” sound ideal’ (2001), Getty Research Institute website, https://​www.getty.edu/​resea​rch/​exh​ibit​ions​_​eve​nts/​eve​nts/​ david_​tudo​r_​sy​mpos​ium/​pdf/​lochh​ead.pdf (accessed 1 April 2021). 97 Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 56; see also Iddon, John Cage and David Tudor, 93. 98 Iddon has suggested that this may partly be accounted for by the growing pressures of Tudor’s touring schedule from the late 1950s, which meant performing versions had to be produced more quickly; John Cage and David Tudor, 138–​40.

86  Musical Models of Democracy (1956/​7), for instance, Tudor again applied the rigorous method he had used in Music of Changes for extracting timings from the isolated notations of the score; and he conducted similarly careful evaluation of the full range of possible realisations of the indeterminately notated pitch events.99 However, he also took an idiosyncratic approach to Cage’s instruction that ‘overlappings, interpenetrations, are also free’, responding to this not by allowing the work’s individually notated sonorities to blend with each other, but by overlaying several pages of the score into a composite realisation, so as to produce denser textures.100 The solo part for the Concert for Piano and Orchestra (also performed separately as Solo for Piano; 1957/​8) poses a quite different kind of challenge for the performer: its eight-​four distinct notations each carry instructions on how they are to be performed, but ‘pianists are given no instructions concerning how to navigate their way through and around the score, nor of how to construct a performance of any given duration’.101 Tudor made two realisations of the piece. In the first, while the overall progress through the notations was straightforwardly sequential, the realisation of some of the individual notations ‘seems wilfully to go against the spirit’ of Cage’s detailed instructions—​ignoring, for instance, the request accompanying notation K to make use of grace notes and to ‘disregard time’ (Tudor persists with a left-​to-​right reading of pitches).102 In his second realisation, Tudor’s authorial interventions became more marked still. First, he selected ‘only those notations that can be interpreted as single attacks . . . as distinct from those that suggest a connected succession of notes’, and then, rather than stringing them together sequentially, he superimposed them on top of each other (as he had done with the pages of Winter Music), each hugely augmented in playing time, so as to fill the performance’s ninety-​ minute frame.103 Philip Thomas notes how the latter decision ‘perverts the idea that the score is a collection of pieces’, contributing to a realisation that in general is ‘entirely surprising and disruptive’ and, in Thomas’s view, ‘a subversion of the piece’.104

99 Holzapefel, ‘Cage and Tudor’, 178–​83. 100 John Holzapefel, ‘David Tudor, John Cage, and comparative indeterminacy’ (2001), Getty Research Institute website, http://​www.getty.edu/​resea​rch/​exh​ibit​ions​_​eve​nts/​eve​nts/​david_​tudo​r_​ sy​mpos​ium/​pdf/​hol​zaep​fel.pdf (accessed 1 April 2021). 101 Philip Thomas, ‘Understanding indeterminate music through performance: Cage’s Solo for Piano’, Twentieth-​Century Music 10, no. 1 (2013), 91–​113: p. 93. 102 Iddon, John Cage and David Tudor, 71. 103 Thomas, ‘Understanding indeterminate music’, 94. 104 Ibid.

Admitting interests  87 Tudor’s performances of Feldman’s indeterminate works similarly ‘wilfully deviated from what he knew Feldman expected’.105 As David Cline has shown, Tudor variously neglected Feldman’s notations, chose counterintuitive readings of his written instructions, and prepared realisations in advance, in direct contradiction to the composer’s express wishes.106 Feldman appears to have been unperturbed: in 1960 he described hearing Tudor’s performance of his indeterminate works as ‘a miracle. . . . In some ways he’s entirely responsible for it. Meeting David enabled me to hear and see possibilities I never dreamed of.’107 Cage similarly valued how Tudor arrived at ‘solutions’ to the notational conundrums of his scores ‘that would never have occurred to me’.108 This positive evaluation was guided by Cage’s conviction that Tudor ‘decided to begin with what was unknown—​to start with the unknown rather than to force the unknown to become the known’.109 But left unasked in this justification was the question of how Tudor’s unexpected choices might be distinguished from the kind of subjective personal preference that these composers generally abhorred. As we have already noted, a desire to explore the unknown is still a desire; and one person’s serendipitous surprise by no means necessarily maps onto another’s. The extent to which Tudor’s preferences risked effacing those of the composers he performed is revealed if we examine his early performances of Cage’s Variations II (1961). The ‘score’ for Variations II comprises eleven pieces of transparent plastic: five have a single dot printed on them; six have a single line. To play the piece in accordance with the instructions provided by the composer, the performer (or performers) arranges these sheets in any way, then obtains readings by measuring the distance of dots to lines, with each line treated as a different parameter of sound (amplitude, duration, overtone structure, frequency, onset within the timeframe, and ‘structure of event’; see Ex. 3.2). Decisions left to the performer include how to correlate individual lines to parameters, how to interpret the meaning of individual parameters, how to relate measurements between dot and line to each parameter, and so on. Tudor, however, appears to have regarded such considerations as only an optional starting point for a realisation which, in James Pritchett’s view, was

105 David Cline, The Graph Music of Morton Feldman (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 288. 106 Ibid., ­chapter 9. 107 Feldman, cited in David Cline, The Graph Music of Morton Feldman (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 287. 108 Cage, For the Birds, 128. 109 Ibid.

88  Musical Models of Democracy

Ex. 3.2  John Cage, Variations II (1961), one possible realisation. © 1961 by C.F. Peters Corporation, New York. Reproduced by permission of Peters Edition Limited, London

‘really David Tudor’s music, not just a realization of Cage’s.’110 Tudor set aside the score’s potential to generate a scale of different measurements for amplitude, duration, frequency, and so on, in favour of readings that produced a binary output—​‘simple’ or ‘complex’—​which was subsequently applied to each parameter. This not only substituted a reduced either/​or optionality for the sliding scale of values implied by Cage’s instructions, but also complicated the relations between measured distances and those parameters (amplitude (volume), duration, frequency) where a simple correlation could have been established. Additionally, Tudor’s sketches suggest a desire to apply his readings not to the sounds themselves, but to the process of sound production, which in the case of the first performances of Variations II involved a complex electronic set-​up that transformed the sound of the piano.111 110 James Pritchett, ‘David Tudor’s realization of John Cage’s Variations II’ (2000), James Pritchett website, http://​www.ros​ewhi​temu​sic.com/​cage/​texts/​Var2.html (accessed 1 April 2021). A version of this article was later published as ‘David Tudor as Composer/​Performer in Cage’s Variations II’, Leonardo Music Journal 14 (2004), 11–​16. See also Iddon, John Cage and David Tudor, 165–​87. 111 Iddon, John Cage and David Tudor, 180–​81.

Admitting interests  89 Pritchett remarks that, as a result of these decisions, Tudor’s realisation of Variations II ‘is wholly outside Cage’s conception of the work’.112 In place of Cage’s stated ideal of a performer ‘leaving by his performance no traces’, Pritchett depicts Tudor’s ‘idiosyncratic interpretation’ as driven by a desire to ‘further his own personal interests’.113 Pritchett’s reading implicitly challenges the idea that the practice of indeterminacy was governed above all by a shared ethos of asceticism and self-​denial—​an impression that tended to be cultivated by the New York School composers throughout the 1950s and beyond. But to draw attention to how, within indeterminacy, performers pursued ends that were distinct from those of the composer, is not to assert that these parties were necessarily harshly at odds. That much is already clear from the case of Tudor’s performances: composers relished the unexpected strategies that Tudor adopted and generally found them broadly consistent with their compositional goals. In indeterminacy, as in democracy, one party’s interests will align with another’s in a variety of ways. Many later performers of Cage’s music have been content to accept the composer’s preferences—​for instance, for laying aside their training, their day-​to-​day tastes, their instincts to interact with others—​as an unquestioned starting point for their own involvement in his music. This does not mean that such performers are not interested parties in their own right. They simply find their own interests lying broadly in sympathy with those of the composers they perform. Others, however, will understand indeterminacy as by definition an invitation to ‘take liberties’, which may mean accepting or rejecting different elements of composers’ declared intentions. This again does not imply a stance of outright antagonism, more a conviction that by ceding elements of control, composers were accepting that others will participate on terms different from their own. Tudor adopted this last approach in his performances of Variations II, and others have done the same when performing this piece, with quite different results. A 1998 performance at Boston’s Mobius arts centre made use not of musical instruments but of everyday household objects, including chairs, a broom, a hair dryer, and some chopsticks. This choice was consistent with Cage’s sanctioning of the use of ‘any sound-​producing means’, but as David Miller (who coordinated the performance) has described, it also reflected an ‘exercise of taste’, because of the way the sounds of these objects

112 113

Pritchett, ‘David Tudor’s realization of John Cage’s Variations II’. Pritchett goes further: ‘Tudor sinned against the work’; ibid.

90  Musical Models of Democracy ‘interested me [when] considered in isolation’.114 Miller’s preference had further consequences for the interpretation of Cage’s score, for these simple noise-​making devices necessitated the abandonment of the linear scale for timbre that Cage’s instructions imply, in favour of a simple means of selecting objects on the basis of measurements of lines to dots. A quite different approach to the work was explored by Nicholas Knouf at MIT, in the form of a software application. The purpose of the app is to enable performers and listeners to test out empirically the sonic results of particular arrangements of Variation II’s lines and dots, with the implication that some arrangements will be preferred over others. ‘Rather than accepting the results of chance operations, the listener-​composer can modify them to her will’, Knouf writes, ‘placing the dots wherever she wants, rather than standing outside as a detached observer of a random arrangement’.115 A more direct contravention of Cage’s insistence that the performer surrender to ‘no matter what eventuality’ is difficult to imagine. Unsurprisingly, performers who take full advantage of indeterminacy’s openness often find themselves in conflict with composers. Some cases have gained substantial notoriety. A series of performances of Cage’s 26'1.1499" (1955) by the cellist Charlotte Moorman, for instance, raised the composer’s ire for the very personal way in which she interpreted his stipulations. The score comprises largely prescriptive notation for a single string instrument, supplemented by an instruction to produce sounds ‘from entirely other sources’, for which ‘only high and low are indicated’.116 Over the course of many performances of the work between 1964 and 1973, Moorman developed an idiosyncratic approach to these ‘other sources’, assigning an important place to spoken texts relating to the social and political movements of the 1960s, and bringing to the work an ‘oversized theatricality’ that asserted what Ben Piekut describes as ‘a fugitive coauthorship’.117 Moorman continued to stress her devotion to Cage, but Cage felt that Moorman was playing ‘a piece of mine . . . in a way that didn’t have to do with the piece itself. I didn’t like it at all’.118

114 David P. Miller, ‘The shapes of indeterminacy: John Cage’s Variations I and Variations II’, European Journal of Musicology 6 (2003), 18–​45: p. 33. 115 Nicholas Knouf, ‘Variations 10b: a digital realization of Cage’s Variations II’, MM ’06: Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (2006), online at https://​dl.acm.org/​doi/​ 10.1145/​1180​639.1180​797 (accessed 1 April 2021), 736–​39: p. 739. 116 Cage, cited in Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 145. 117 Ibid., 163, 171. 118 Moorman, cited in ibid., 150.

Admitting interests  91 Cage expressed similar dislike for a 1975 performance by Julius Eastman of his ‘Solo for Voice no. 8’ (from the Song Books). Cage’s score reads in its totality: In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action. With any interruptions. Fulfilling in whole or part an obligation to others. No attention to be given the situation (electronic, musical, theatrical).

Eastman realised these instructions in the form of a camp homoerotic lecture that involved undressing two members of the audience. Cage’s angry response, expressed the following day, focused on Eastman’s failure to leave behind his own preoccupations and preferences.119 Cage explained that his scores should be understood as ‘suggestions’ which were left ‘ambiguous so that people will have some freedom to share . . . in the exploration of things beyond their imagination’. Eastman’s performance had failed this expectation. It reflected for Cage an ‘ego . . . closed in on the subject of homosexuality. . . . [H]‌e [i.e. Eastman] has no other idea to express. In a Zen situation where his mind might open up and flow with something beyond his imagination, he doesn’t know the first step to take.’120 Eastman’s realisation followed a pattern, Cage complained, in which performers did ‘the least thing that they can imagine to do’ and then presented it under Cage’s name.121 Cage’s grievance was shaped by long experience of what he perceived as mistreatment by performers, who often interpreted the freedoms afforded by indeterminacy as a byword for ‘anything goes’, and not infrequently regarded Cage and his colleagues as charlatans or jokers. Moorman’s and Eastman’s performances appear to have been committed acts of engagement with Cage’s work, albeit ones that declined to be bound by the full range of the composer’s expectations, especially the imperative to set aside personal feelings and tastes. On other occasions, the dividing line between creative reinterpretation and outright sabotage was less easy to draw. In the case of the uproarious 1958 premiere of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, the high-​ spirited behaviour of orchestral members—​Cage described it as ‘foolish and 119 Ryan Dohoney, ‘John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the homosexual ego’, in Tomorrow is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies, ed. Benjamin Piekut (University of Michigan Press, 2014), 39–​62. 120 Cage, cited in ibid., 48, 51. 121 Ibid., 49.

92  Musical Models of Democracy baffling’—​found some justification in both the composer’s notation, which demands extreme and even comedic physical manoeuvring, and the set-​up of the event, which took place late at night and involved session musicians more at home in jazz and Broadway.122 Elsewhere, the distinct ends pursued by Cage’s performers have taken the form of overt displays of hostility. Most famously, the New York Philharmonic’s 1964 performances of Atlas Eclipticalis saw some of the orchestral musicians openly laughing or refusing to play, leading Cage to describe them as ‘a group of gangsters . . . they do everything wrong on purpose’.123 Such antagonistic displays have been described as representing ‘a reactionary performance ideal, exemplifying the antithesis of the ego-​less and disciplined approach Cage’s music is thought to require’.124 Lefort’s perspective on indeterminacy encourages us to deepen this reading. For Lefort, the ‘democratic’ inheres in the avoidance of incorporation, not in the avoidance of division. Viewed as such, the active resistance of performers to entering into ‘the spirit of the thing’ is as much a gesture of democratic independence as of reactionary refusal. Admittedly, Lefort’s analysis neglects the perception of many political theorists that all democracies hinge upon some kind of boundary-​setting, establishing common values, and proscribing certain kinds of antisocial behaviour. The most democratically minded of composers may feel it is still legitimate to expect performers to accept the basic rules of engagement laid out in their instructions, as a basis for respectful ‘free pursuit’ of separate ends. (The questions raised by both the wilful neglect of, or, conversely, insistence on adherence to, such democratic norms are discussed further in Chapter 6.) As we have noted, many performers have been content to adhere to such compositional ground rules, finding that their own interests may be satisfied within them. Yet for composers to insist on the unchallengeable legitimacy of their perception of proper conduct is, as Lefort writes, to risk precisely ‘the opposition and the demands of those who are excluded’ from such agenda-​ setting—​ oppositions and demands which he regards as democracy’s ‘most effective wellspring’.125 Indeterminacy, by

122 Philip Thomas, Martin Iddon, and Emily Payne, ‘Disruption and discipline: approaches to performing John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra’, Music and Practice 5 (2019), https://​www. music​andp​ract​ice.org/​vol​ume-​5/​dis​rupt​ion-​and-​dis​cipl​ine-​app​roac​hes-​to-​per​form​ing-​john-​cages-​ conc​ert-​for-​piano-​and-​orches​tra/​. 123 Cage, cited in Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 22. Piekut’s account carefully notes the differences of view about exactly what happened; see pp. 38–​40. 124 Thomas, Iddon, and Payne, ‘Disruption and discipline’. 125 Lefort, cited in Abensour, ‘ “Savage Democracy” and the “Principle of Anarchy” ’, 707.

Admitting interests  93 radically questioning traditional expectations for the respective roles of composer and performer, inevitably lays the ground for such discord.

Audiences, instruments, and the multiple ends of musical performance As hinted at earlier, indeterminacy’s unstable convocation of interests does not stop at composers and performers. For instance, there have been occasions where audience members have taken it upon themselves to re-​ shape the nature of a performance of indeterminate music, as if encouraged by the composer’s espousal of openness to wrest definition of their own place in the proceedings from the hands of others. A 1963 visit by Cage and Tudor to the Music Biennale Zagreb featured performances of Atlas Eclipticalis and Variations II in which members of the audience vociferously asserted themselves. Documentation of the event is scarce, but Cage was later to recall ‘the uproar in the Zagreb Midnight Concert. I kept on conducting, but I might as well have stopped. The music could not be heard at all. The audience was making so much noise.’126 Of his performance of Variations II Tudor remembered that I had no sooner started to perform than the audience began to come onstage. . . . They crowded over the piano like flies. I couldn’t even reach the controls of my electronic equipment. [laughs] There was nothing I could do. It wasn’t protest. They were surprised and they wanted to see what was going on.127

Here, it appears that the audience joined composer and performer as a separate constituent within the disincorporated sociality convened by the performance, laying aside any authorised or allocated roles in pursuit of interests that presumably in some way reflected the conditions and constraints of life in socialist Europe at the height of the Cold War. Indeterminacy’s potential to bring new freedoms to listeners was trumpeted by Cage and his colleagues, as we saw earlier in the chapter. But

126 Cage, ‘How many years ago’ (1985), Glissando: New Music Magazine 30 (2017), 81. 127 Tudor, cited in Peter Dickinson, ed., CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage (University of Rochester Press, 2006), 89.

94  Musical Models of Democracy as with performers, this promise of liberation was hedged by various limiting conditions. Notable amongst these, not surprisingly, was the expectation to dispense with previous listening habits. Cage was characteristically forthright on the matter: ‘The two things that [listeners] shouldn’t be doing are the things that they generally think they should be doing: one is responding emotionally, and the other is responding in terms of relationships of sounds. I don’t think either one should be done.’128 Earle Brown similarly warned against audience members ‘dragging the entire history of music’ into the concert hall.129 Audiences for indeterminate music have not infrequently disregarded such preconditions, however, preferring instead a variety of less obliging responses that have ranged from derisive laughter, to high-​spirited ‘involvement’, to noisy protest.130 Composers and performers could be alarmed or delighted by such unexpected responses. Above all, they strengthened the sense of indeterminacy as a social practice resistant to the unifying gaze of a higher power. Tudor’s performances of Variations II further complicated indeterminacy’s complex play of interests by according a certain wayward independence to his instrument. Just as Cage accepted elements of Tudor’s performative realisations that ‘would never have occurred to me’, so Tudor wished to accommodate the inclinations of his amplified piano, which he rigged to ensure that (in Pritchett’s words) ‘its behaviour [could] never be totally predicted’. Tudor recalled how he ‘could only hope to influence’ what was an essentially uncontrollable instrument, due to the feedback loops created between microphones, pick-​ups, and speakers directed into the strings of the instrument.131 The potential that this set-​up offered for throwing up the ‘unforeseen’ was something relished by Tudor, auguring as it did the ‘development of a means of performing that was itself indeterminate’, and so seemingly in accordance with the intentions of the composer.132 At the same time, the piano 128 Cage, cited in Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras, ed., Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers (Scarecrow Press, 1978), 78. 129 Brown, cited in Bruce Duffie, ‘Composer Earle Brown: a conversation with Bruce Duffie’ (1991), http://​www.bruc​eduf​fi e.com/​brown.html (accessed 12 August 2022). 130 For examples see, variously, Cage, ‘Diary: audience 1966’, in A Year from Monday, 50–​51; Gianluigi Degli Esposti, ‘Life is sound’ (1977), John Cage in Italy website, http://​www.johnc​age.it/​en/​ 1977-​empty-​words.html (accessed 1 April 2021); Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 43. 131 Tudor, cited in Pritchett, ‘David Tudor’s realization of John Cage’s Variations II’. For detail on Tudor’s set-​up, see You Nakai, Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor’s Music (Oxford University Press, 2021), ­chapter 2. 132 Iddon, John Cage and David Tudor, 183; Dustin Donahue, ‘Variations: four studies in the aesthetics, history, and performance of indeterminate music’ (DMA thesis, University of California, San Diego, 2016), 105.

Admitting interests  95 defied its conventional role as tool or prosthesis at the service of composer and performer, and was instead enabled by the feedback loops to pursue its own ends, in which capacity it acted as both listener and autonomous creator of sounds. The idea that instruments might comprise independent agents, capable of bringing their own agendas to a musical performance, became a mainstay of Tudor’s emerging compositional practice from the late 1960s. His series of electronic installation pieces entitled Rainforest (1968–​73) arose from the perception that ‘loudspeakers should be individuals . . . each one should have its own individual voice’.133 This idea is pursued through exploring the distinct resonating properties of different kinds of sound-​reproducing objects. As Tudor explained: ‘I don’t like to tell the machines what to do. It’s when they do something that I don’t know about, and I can help it along, then all of a sudden I know the piece is mine.’134 Such thoughts reflected a growing interest amongst experimental composers in the potential of things as animate participants within an indeterminate setting. Works by Alvin Lucier such as Chambers (1968) and I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), for instance, explored how a given spatial environment ‘intrudes its personality on the sounds that you produce’.135 Lucier’s later Music on a Long Thin Wire (1977) amplifies the variable sounds produced by a metal wire set into motion by a sine wave and a magnet, producing a performance that ‘changes by itself without any alterations to the system. It seems to possess a life of its own’.136 Can musical instruments and other inanimate objects plausibly be considered as interested parties, jostling alongside composers, performers, and audiences as constituent elements of indeterminacy’s uncertain social order? Support for such an idea may be found in Bruno Latour’s actor network theory, which has sought to elaborate how all things enjoined in human action must themselves be regarded as actors exhibiting an independent agency. As Latour puts it, an actor is ‘something that acts or to which activity

133 David Tudor and Victor Schonfeld, ‘From piano to electronics’, Music and Musicians 20, no. 12 (1972), 24–​26: p. 26. 134 Tudor, cited in John David Fullemann, ‘An interview with David Tudor’ (1984), David Tudor website, https://​dav​idtu​dor.org/​Artic​les/​fullem​ann.html (accessed 1 April 2021). 135 Alvin Lucier and Douglas Simon, Chambers (Wesleyan University Press, 1980), 9. 136 Unattributed author, ‘Music on a Long Thin Wire (1977)’, No Ideas But in Things: The Composer Alvin Lucier website, http://​www.alvin-​luc​ier-​film.com/​moa​ltw.html (accessed 1 April 2021). The composer says of this piece: ‘[I]‌just let it go by itself, then the piece took on a magical quality. No one was intending to make it sound any way. It was just sounding by itself ’; Lucier, cited in ‘Alvin Lucier on Music on a Long Thin Wire: interview by Jason Gross’ (2000), Perfect Sound Forever website, https://​www.furi​ous.com/​perf​ect/​ohm/​luc​ier.html (accessed 1 April 2021).

96  Musical Models of Democracy is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general’.137 Latour’s approach is particularly suggestive in the context of the present discussion because of how it highlights objects’ resistance to smooth compliance with humans’ intentions. For Latour, agency presents itself first and foremost as kinds of obstruction to the achievement of others’ goals: Actors are defined above all as obstacles, scandals, as what suspends mastery, as what gets in the way of domination, as what interrupts the closure and the composition of the collective. To put it crudely, human and nonhuman actors appear first of all as troublemakers. The notion of recalcitrance offers the most appropriate approach to defining their action.138

Latour’s vocabulary here resonates with Lefort’s emphasis upon disincorporation: actors ‘get in the way of domination’; they ‘interrupt the closure of the collective’. This resonance is no accident: Latour offers these particular formulations in the context of a conceptualisation of democracy that resembles Lefort’s in key respects. Reasoning that environmental crisis demonstrates once and for all the impossibility of separating the social from the natural, Latour advances a conception of the collective that seeks to ‘compose the common world little by little’ from the associations forged between human and non-​human actors.139 Critically, this work is never-​ending, because the complexity of the world refuses any definitive articulation: ‘the collective . . . is not a thing in the world, a being with fixed and definitive borders, but a movement of establishing provisional cohesion that will have to be started all over again every single day’.140 Latour’s contribution, in expanding the compass of democracy to the non-​human domain, is helpful for the present discussion in two ways: it lends weight to composers’ and performers’ interest in the capacity of instruments and sound-​making objects to assume ‘a life of their own’ within musical indeterminacy; and it reminds us of how those instruments and objects may remain recalcitrant in the face of the roles and purposes assigned to them. 137 For Latour, an actor is ‘something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general’; see ‘On actor-​network theory—​a few clarifications’, Soziale Welt 47, no. 4 (1996), 369–​81: p. 373. 138 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2004), 81. 139 Ibid., 200. 140 Ibid., 147.

Admitting interests  97 In sum, Lefort’s account of democratic indeterminacy encourages us to entertain an idea of musical performance in which composer, performer, audience, instruments, and potentially numerous other co-​present actors comingle, each pursuing discrete ends that cannot be reduced to the interests of others. Such performances override the traditional executive role of the composer, constituting instead a plural and unpredictable meeting of parties whose encounter refuses reduction to a single order or unified conception shared by all. They present a sociality that ‘is constitutively fragmented’,141 the unity symbolised by the ruler’s body effaced by ‘the principle of division’. At least, this reading holds to the extent that the different participants refrain from acting as a ‘unifying subject’, concerned to determine the part played by others.142 We have seen that, as in democracy, this unifying urge has nonetheless frequently manifested itself within the practice of indeterminate music.

Other indeterminacies My account has laid emphasis upon contestation and divergence within this multitude of interests: the parties invested in musical performance pursue ends that are distinct and frequently at odds, each acting as ‘troublemaker’ (to use Latour’s term) in relation to the purposes of others. The history of indeterminacy furnishes plenty of grounds for regarding the relation between composer and performers in this way, even when the individuals concerned were on good personal terms. But we have noted too that the principle of disincorporation doesn’t automatically entail contestation or the adversarial. Performers may find their interests lying in close accord with the composers whose music they faithfully perform, for instance. Composers have also increasingly seen close collaboration with performers as an intrinsic part of their creative process, lessening the sense that composer and performer are autonomous actors preoccupied with distinct terrains of activity.143 This represents a shift from the early years of indeterminacy: for all that Tudor was a key influence upon and inspiration for Cage and his colleagues, a clear 141 Juliane Rebentisch, The Art of Freedom: On the Dialectics of Democratic Existence (Polity, 2016), 220. Rebentisch is commenting on Lefort’s philosophy of democracy. 142 Abensour, ‘ “Savage Democracy” and the “Principle of Anarchy” ’, 710. 143 For an overview see Lauren Redhead and Richard Glover, eds, Collaborative and Distributed Processes in Contemporary Music-​Making (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018).

98  Musical Models of Democracy division of labour was typically maintained between the business of arriving at a work’s notated form and the job of realising this notation for performance.144 The recent growth in closer composer–​performer collaboration has brought parallel interest in how contributants within a musical performance may be responsive to one another, not setting aside their independence as actors but ready to accommodate and adapt in recognition of the communal context. Such mutual accommodation is of course frequently also regarded as a key ingredient of healthy democracies, even if this desideratum is rather neglected within Lefort’s writings. By way of example, we may briefly survey the ‘material indeterminacy’ pursued by composer Scott McLaughlin. Here we find an overt concern for music-​making as a convocation of multiple interests, with particular attention paid to the ‘material agency’ of instruments, and the way in which instruments resolutely retain ‘an alien quality of unpredictability, of not-​ quite-​knowableness’.145 McLaughlin writes of ‘the material preferences or “will” ’ of instruments, a facet that manifests most clearly when the performer’s goal of ‘mastery’ over the wayward inclinations of an instrument is laid aside, and technique is instead directed to allowing its unstable and uncontrollable potentialities fuller rein.146 Here, then, we see overt recognition of instruments’ independence from composer or performer intention, following the example of Tudor, Lucier, and Eliane Radigue, each of whom are identified by McLaughlin as important predecessors. This in turn necessitates a close working relationship with sympathetic performers, whose expertise is essential to identifying and eliciting an instrument’s distinctive behaviours. The resulting play of agencies is complex. The autonomous agency of the performer is doubly recognised, both through collaboration in the devising of a work, and in its performative realisation. McLaughlin describes the latter in terms of Tim Ingold’s concept of the ‘wayfarer’: the performer acts in response to the ‘forking paths’ that are ‘always present in the unfolding moment of performance’, encouraged by the notated

144 John Holzaepfel writes that ‘Tudor never considered himself . . . a co-​composer of the music he played’; Holzaepfel, ‘Cage and Tudor’, 183. Cathy Berberian’s active involvement in the composition of Cage’s Aria (1958) appears to be something of an exception; see Francesca Placanica, ‘ “Unwrapping the voice”: Cathy Berberian and John Cage’s Aria’, in Transformations of Musical Modernism, ed. Erling E. Gulbrandsen and Julian Johnson (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 264–​78. 145 Scott McLaughlin, ‘On material indeterminacy’, Contemporary Music Review 41, nos. 2–​3 (2022), 216–​33: p. 225. 146 Scott McLaughlin, ‘The impossibility of material foundations’, in Sound Work: Composition as Critical Technical Practice, ed. Jonathan Impett (Leuven University Press, 2021), 153–​69: p. 153.

Admitting interests  99 score to undertake a quasi-​spontaneous exploration.147 But while the performer thus ‘has clear agency and intentionality’, that agency is oriented strongly towards ‘where the instrument wants to go’, a sensitivity accentuated by the focus upon unorthodox performance techniques that in key respects render the instrument ‘strange’ and ‘defamiliarized’.148 The resulting ‘dance of agency’ places emphasis upon awareness and responsiveness, forming (in the composer’s words) ‘a duet between actants that can never fully know each other, but who nonetheless have a sympathetic and sympoetic relationship’ with each other.149 What, though, of the composer’s agency? It is already clear that McLaughlin’s approach to material indeterminacy wishes to respect and enable (rather than suppress) the inclinations of performer and instrument. Accommodation of the preferences of others forms the starting point for the act of composition. But this is not to imply a compositional ‘wallowing in arbitrary emergence’, of the kind that McLaughlin identifies with Cageian practice.150 On the contrary, the composer’s own interests are asserted clearly and in numerous ways, not least in the basic fascination with the play between human and material agency, a fascination inspired by theorists such as Andrew Pickering, Tim Ingold, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad. While McLaughlin sees his approach to composition as focusing ‘less on the fixed sequencing of events and more on creating open networks of contingencies’,151 it remains his active concern that the ‘lively unforeseen’ should have ‘growth and consequence’.152 Specifically, McLaughlin seeks to create situations that ‘maintain conditions for emergent sonic phenomena to carry on’, a goal that reflects his commitment to Haraway’s conception of ‘ongoingness’.153 This is achieved through scores that instruct a performer to undertake a loosely repetitive process that enables the identification of and homing in upon the sonically unexpected or unstable—​the states when the instrument’s material agency is most pronounced. In Strata for clarinet with punctured barrel (2021), for instance, this is achieved by the performer playing continuous ascending and descending scales on their adapted instrument, listening for 147 McLaughlin, ‘The impossibility of material foundations’, 157. 148 McLaughlin, ‘On material indeterminacy’, 10; McLaughlin, ‘The impossibility of material foundations’, 163; Scott McLaughlin, ‘The material clarinet’, in Rethinking the Musical Instrument, ed. Mine Doǧantan-​Dack (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022), 70–​96: p. 71. 149 McLaughlin, ‘On material indeterminacy’, 226. 150 McLaughlin, ‘On material indeterminacy’, 220. 151 McLaughlin, ‘The impossibility of material foundations’, 161. 152 McLaughlin, ‘The material clarinet’, 92. 153 McLaughlin, ‘The material clarinet’, 73.

100  Musical Models of Democracy the breaks or disturbances in sound and reducing the compass of the scales to focus in on them.154 In Fringing for clarinet (2021), a modified staff notation guides the performer’s navigations around the instrument’s distinct registers in ways likely to reveal ‘indeterminate stable sounds . . . that emerge in the moment of playing’.155 The overriding aim of such works is to create an ‘autopoietic system’ in which the performer is perpetually oriented to the voice of the instrument, with the unpredictable behaviours of the instrument then fed back into emerging structure, ‘influencing the ongoing unfolding of the system’.156 It is here that Lefortian sensitivities might be aroused: even within a compositional scenario so avowedly accommodating of the preferences of others, there remains an instinct to incorporate, to tie others’ interests into a ‘substantial unity’. The desire to establish and ‘maintain’ a system of relations between the actors contributing to a musical performance sits uneasily with Lefort’s understanding of indeterminacy. In this regard, his thought offers an enduring challenge to the most fundamental compositional impulses. Is the picture developed in this chapter—​of musical performance as a matter of multiple, irreducible interests—​relevant only to music that brands itself ‘indeterminate’? We noted earlier Cornelius Cardew’s observation, made in 1961, that the indeterminacy of the New York School merely magnified the loose relationships between compositional intention, performative action, and audience response characteristic of the entire history of notated music. Since Cardew made his remark, the cherished illusion that musical performance forges a transcendent unity between all participants—​ composer, performer, listener, instrument, venue, and so on—​has increasingly been questioned. In proposing ‘the death of the author’, literary critics have cemented the idea that acts of creation and reception enjoy at best an indirect relationship.157 Empirical research on musical performance has established that performers are never simply ‘machines of reproduction’, as Christian Wolff feared, but are always producing new meaning in ways that

154 The score and recorded performances are available at Scott McLaughlin, The Garden of Forking Paths website, University of Leeds, https://​forki​ngpa​ths.leeds.ac.uk/​music/​ (accessed 30 August 2022). 155 The score and a recorded performance are available at Scott McLaughlin, The Garden of Forking Paths website, University of Leeds, https://​forki​ngpa​ths.leeds.ac.uk/​music/​ (accessed 30 August 2022). 156 McLaughlin, ‘The material clarinet’, 92. 157 Roland Barthes, ‘The death of the author’ (1967), in Image-​Music-​Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana, 1977), 142–​48.

Admitting interests  101 exceed the conceptions of composers.158 Within performance studies and organology, growing attention is today being given to the material agency of musical instruments, including recognition of how it shapes all instrumental performance and resists complete subjugation to human control.159 These advances in understanding point to the ways in which all performances of composed music convene multiple interests that elude the confines of a single controlling grasp—​even if the rhetoric of common ends and unity of apperception continues to predominate in the discourse around music-​making. Musical indeterminacy only stands out from this picture because of the overt nature of the invitation to other parties to exercise their own decisions and to enjoy a ‘taste of freedom’ (as Feldman put it)—​an invitation extended both by the notational openness of composers’ scores, and the democratising language of composers’ spoken statements and writings. As we have seen, composers’ welcoming of others was in practice frequently highly conditional, situating invitees within an authorial scheme that determined places and functions in limiting ways. But once extended, the invitation to ‘work together’ as ‘freemen’ could not then legitimately be answerable only to the preferences of the party issuing the invitation—​or could be so only at the cost of the openness that they claimed to proffer. Viewing the work of the New York School from the perspective of Claude Lefort’s analysis of democracy helps us to recognise how interests stood central to the practice of musical indeterminacy, both for composers who proclaimed themselves disinterested, and for performers who often opted to take matters into their own hands, pursuing their interests regardless of, and sometimes in opposition to, imposed designs. More broadly, the approach taken here encourages us to be alert to the play between disincorporation and the unifying impulse within music-​making of all kinds, and ready to consider whose interests might be enabled by particular arrangements, and whose might be compromised or suppressed.

158 Nicholas Cook, Music as Creative Practice (Oxford University Press, 2018). 159 John Tresch and Emily I. Dolan, ‘Toward a new organology: instruments of music and science’, Osiris 28, no. 1 (2013), 278–​98.

4 Empowering others Audience participation as ‘democracy in action’

In late 2015, a series of press releases announced the collaboration of four of Europe’s most prestigious contemporary music ensembles on an initiative entitled ‘CONNECT: The Audience as Artist’. Funded by the Swiss patron Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, the project aimed to overcome the barriers to public appreciation and enjoyment of contemporary music by involving ‘the audience’ as composers and performers. This was to be done by commissioning new works which, in the words of the London Sinfonietta’s Chief Executive Andrew Burke, ‘need the participation of the audience as an inextricable part of their realisation’.1 Between 2016 and 2021, five pieces (by Huang Ruo, Christian Mason, Philip Venables, Oscar Bianchi, and Cathy Milliken) were premiered in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Porto.2 Each piece involved volunteer audience members participating in rehearsals in advance of the performance, and each also assigned a place for participation of the wider attending audience during the performance itself. The aspiration was to ‘build a bank of music with public participation at its very heart’, with the goal of ‘empowering audiences to play their own role in great art’.3 The reference to ‘empowerment’ ties the CONNECT initiative to a larger trend in the arts over recent decades. In the face of the ubiquity of cultural products seemingly designed for ‘passive’ consumption, and responding to anxiety over the pernicious effects of neoliberal individualism, the idea of participation has acquired ever greater allure for practitioners in the contemporary arts world. Writing in 2009, theatre scholar Helen Freshwater noted how ‘the belief in a connection between audience participation and political empowerment’ had become one of the most ‘cherished orthodoxies in theatre 1 ‘Connect: The Audience as Artist’, London Sinfonietta concert programme book, 22 October 2016. 2 ‘Connect’, Arts Mentor Foundation Lucerne website, https://​artmen​tor.ch/​en/​conn​ect-​en/​ (accessed 2 April 2021). 3 ‘Connect: The Audience as Artist’, press release (2016), https://​www.ensem​ble-​mod​ern.com/​ downl​oad.php?ite​mID=​145 (accessed 2 April 2021).

Musical Models of Democracy. Robert Adlington, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197658819.003.0004

Empowering others  103 studies’,4 paralleling the growth of theatre companies specialising in immersive and participatory productions, such as Punchdrunk, Shunt, and Coney.5 Visual artists since the 1990s have in turn pursued a ‘relational aesthetics’ aimed at producing new kinds of sociability amongst viewers; this might take the form of the promotion of conversation between gallery visitors, an intervention upon the communal structures of everyday life, or a direct invitation to physically interact with the artwork. In the words of Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘this generation of artists is . . . inspired by a concern for democracy. . . . [They] bring us face to face with exhibition situations inspired by a concern to “give everyone a chance” thanks to forms that do not give the producer any a priori superiority . . . over the viewer’.6 The CONNECT initiative derived additional momentum from widely felt unease with the rituals of the concert hall. The continued privileging of silent, motionless contemplation as the primary means of engaging with art music, while valued by some concertgoers, is uncomfortable and alienating for many. It appears anomalous not just with the active audiencing favoured in rock and jazz concerts, but also with the historical conventions of opera houses and concert halls—​not to mention the ‘participatory’ practices of traditional music cultures around the world.7 From these differences have arisen concerns about the political implications of a social arrangement in which 4 Helen Freshwater, Theatre and Audience (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 9. 5 Recent literature on these developments includes: Adam Alston, Beyond Immersive Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Participation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Rose Biggin, Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience: Space, Game and Story in the Work of Punchdrunk (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); James Frieze, ed., Reframing Immersive Theatre: The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 6 Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Relational aesthetics’ (1998), in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (Whitechapel Gallery, 2006), 160–​71: pp. 167–​68. 7 On the rock audience see Nicola Spelman, ‘ “Sing it with me now”: audience participation in arena concerts’, in The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment, ed. Robert Edgar et al. (Bloomsbury, 2015), 231–​46. On modern jazz audiences, see Karen Burland and Stephanie E. Pitts, ‘Understanding jazz audiences: listening and learning at the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival’, Journal of New Music Research 39, no. 2 (2010), 125–​34; Elina Hytönen-​Ng, ‘Contemporary British jazz musicians’ relationship with the audience: renditions of we-​relations and intersubjectivity’, in Musicians and their Audiences: Performance, Speech and Mediation, ed. Ioannis Tsioulakis and Elina Hytönen-​Ng (Routledge, 2016), 69–​85. For earlier traditions of audience behaviour in the opera houses and concert halls of Europe, see James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (University of California Press, 1996), 27–​30. On participatory versus presentational musical performance in traditional music cultures, see Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (University of Chicago Press, 2008). Turino sees the absence of ‘artist-​audience distinctions’ as the ‘primary distinguishing feature of participatory performance’, and views participatory performances as ‘the most democratic’ (p. 35). Georgina Born has recently explored what concert performance might be able to learn from other, more overtly participatory cultures of audiencing; see Georgina Born, ‘Reinventing audiences: imagining radical musical democracies’, in Finding Democracy in Music, ed. Robert Adlington and Esteban Buch (Routledge, 2020), 181–​203.

104  Musical Models of Democracy the public is, as it were, denied a voice. As Christopher Small has written, ‘A ritual in which the majority watch and listen in stillness and silence, unable to influence the course of the event, while a minority acts can be a vivid representation of certain types of political relationship’.8 Ethnographic work has confirmed how the formality of concert hall audiences is experienced by many in terms of an ‘unhappy passivity’ and ‘submission without pleasure’.9 This fate can seem doubly inescapable when what is being performed on stage is unfamiliar, confrontational, or otherwise challenging, as is the case in much contemporary concert music. The CONNECT initiative was presented as a ‘ground-​breaking’ development in the world of contemporary music. But in fact, as this chapter will elaborate, many composers since 1960 have experimented with audience participation, often driven by the feelings of dissatisfaction just mentioned. These experiments have, however, rarely secured a stable place in the repertoire, and are often isolated one-​offs in their composers’ outputs. They have correspondingly received little attention in the scholarly literature—​in sharp contrast to the substantial and ever-​growing bodies of work on participatory theatre and visual art.10 The most extended study of audience participation in contemporary concert-​hall music is Lanier Lee Sammons’s unpublished doctoral thesis ‘Audience Interactivity and the Concert Hall Audience’, although his stimulating historical purview is strongly slanted towards North American composers.11 Studies of concert-​hall audiences have generally pursued other directions. A number of writers have sought to problematise the dichotomy of ‘passive’ and ‘active’ modes of musical engagement, arguing that ‘audiences are as intrinsic to music-​making as performers’, and that ‘listening should also be conceptualised as “performing” ’.12 This serves to complicate the assumption that ‘just listening’ does not count as participation, 8 Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 105. 9 Christabel Stirling, ‘Agonistic atmospheres: audiences for (non)classical music in contemporary London’, guest lecture, University of Huddersfield, 14 March 2019. 10 For participatory theatre see note 5. Key literature on participatory art includes Sruti Bala, The Gestures of Participatory Art (Manchester University Press, 2018); Bishop, ed., Participation; Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012); Kathryn Brown, Interactive Contemporary Art: Participation in Practice (Bloomsbury, 2014). 11 Lanier Lee Sammons, ‘Audience Interactivity and the Concert Hall Audience’ (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2012). 12 Ioannis Tsioulakis and Elina Hytönen-​Ng, ‘Introduction to musicians and their audiences’, in Musicians and their Audiences, ed. Tsioulakis and Hytönen-​Ng, 1–​12: pp. 1, 4; Daniel Cavicchi, Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 189. See also Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (University of California Press, 2013), 7–​9.

Empowering others  105 a debate to which I will return later in this chapter. Important research has also been undertaken on audience engagement in a wider sense, especially around audiences’ attachments and contributions to local and civic musical organisations. For instance, the work of Stephanie Pitts and Karen Burland has highlighted the active contribution that audience members make to a performance ecosystem, and the sense of involvement that they often feel from belonging to a community of listeners.13 But this research does not address initiatives that challenge the ‘performer-​audience’ divide within the music-​making itself. Revisiting the diverse approaches that composers have taken to audience participation, as I do in this chapter, highlights one thing in particular: the difficulty of assuming a simple equation between participation and empowerment. Indeed, many examples of audience participation in concert music confirm the doubts expressed by theatre theorists regarding the emancipatory implications of actively involving an audience. In contrast to the optimism felt about participatory experiments during the 1970s and 1980s, theorists today increasingly argue that audience participation is as often repressive and authoritarian as it is democratically inclusive; it as frequently deprives audiences of meaningful agency as it expands that agency; and it sharpens social hierarchies, rather than flattening them. This scepticism is epitomised by Jacques Rancière’s influential writing on the ‘emancipated spectator’—​discussed further in what follows—​which argues that the effort to make spectators into actors expresses rather than overcomes an abiding inequality, and that we should instead seek to erase the conceptual opposition that regards spectatorship as deficient by comparison with acting. Yet the purpose of this chapter is not to refute the aspirations for participation advanced by the CONNECT project. Rancière’s critique of ‘a theatre without spectators’ may cast doubt upon certain approaches to audience participation, but his wider theory of politics, in associating democracy with a dynamic of constant renewal regarding recognised forms of participation and agency, by no means represents a stamp of endorsement for the fixed roles of concert hall convention. Bringing together these different elements in Rancière’s thought, I will suggest, encourages us to recognise how the extension of new forms of participation augurs both empowerment and subjection, the latter as a necessary precipitate of the former. Such a perspective 13 See for example Karen Burland and Stephanie Pitts, eds, Coughing and Clapping: Investigating Audience Experience (Routledge, 2014); Stephanie Pitts, Valuing Musical Participation (Ashgate, 2005).

106  Musical Models of Democracy is informed by the view that ‘doing’ and ‘being done to’ are not easy to disentangle. It reflects also the larger theme of this book, namely the way in which processes of democratisation are always governed by particular interests. The final two sections of the chapter assess different scenarios that may arise within this broad framework. On the one hand, we find approaches to audience emancipation that seek to mitigate the shaping hand of composers; here, methodologies developed in the world of community organising provide a useful analytic tool. On the other hand, the interconnection of the urge to empower with the urge to dominate is conducive to more ambivalent approaches to participation; my case study is Luc Ferrari’s Société V: Participation or not participation (1967–​69), whose ostensible intention to extend democratic freedoms to the audience was coloured by the more familiar avant-​garde attitude of antagonism and critique.

Appraising the complexities of audience participation in music Experimentation with audience participation was already a prominent feature of artistic innovation in the early decades of the twentieth century. At a time of social revolution and widening suffrage, the motivation to extend and deepen the cultural involvement of audiences was keenly felt, and manifested itself in many ways—​of which active participation in performance was just one. As Claire Bishop describes in her landmark history of participatory art, arousing spectators from their complacent slumber was a primary goal for modernists of the 1910s and 1920s, one that could be bent to political agendas of contrasting hues. The Brecht-​Hindemith collaboration Lehrstück (1929), for instance, included a fully composed singing part for the audience, projected onto a screen during performance, as a means of encouraging direct engagement with the didactic elements of the work.14 Mass participation spectacles in the early Soviet Union, such as the ‘Hooter Symphonies’ staged in 1922, incorporated workers performing on factory sirens, car horns, and boat whistles.15 Dada performances at the Cabaret Voltaire took a different approach, drawing audiences into ‘frenzied involvement’ through



14 Joy H. Calico, Brecht at the Opera (University of California Press, 2008), 29.

15 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 65.

Empowering others  107 kinds of gratuitous provocation.16 Here, as with some Futurist performances, pride was taken in confrontation with the audience, rather than a militant solidarity.17 Post-​1960 practice amongst composers shows similar diversity of means and motivation. Chronologically speaking, the impulse to involve audiences traversed a series of overlapping and interlocking phases. Followers and students of John Cage interpreted indeterminacy as implying a participatory role not just for performers but also for audiences; this found expression in many of the happenings, events, and environments of the 1960s.18 The work of Fluxus artists was similarly characterised by a sense that, as Hannah Higgins puts it, ‘the audience has to do something to complete the work’;19 this was reflected in the frequency with which the audience was named in the title or performance text of Fluxus scores.20 The upheavals of 1968 saw a wave of more agitatory work, in which audience participation was explicitly linked to new democratic movements and social activism, encompassing large-​ scale concert hall compositions, experimental ensemble works, and group improvisation.21 The 1970s brought interest in alternative kinds of collectivity and collective consciousness, seen in meditative participatory works by composers such as Pauline Oliveros and Annea Lockwood,22 and the growth of community arts practice, pursued in different ways by composers such as

16 Cornelius Partsch, ‘The mysterious moment: early Dada performance as ritual’, in Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-​Garde, ed. Dafydd Jones (Rodopi, 2006), 37–​65: p. 44. 17 On Futurist performances see Bishop, Artificial Hells, 41–​49. 18 See Allan Kaprow, ‘Participation Performance’, in Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (University of California Press, 1993), 181–​94. For a European manifestation of this participatory movement, see Robert Adlington, Composing Dissent: Avant-​garde Music in 1960s Amsterdam (Oxford University Press, 2013), ­chapter 4. 19 Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002), 25. 20 There are 148 mentions of the word ‘audience’ in The Fluxus Performance Workbook, the standard catalogue of Fluxus text scores. Ken Friedman, Owen Smith, and Lauren Sawchyn, eds, The Fluxus Performance Workbook (Performance Research, 2002), online at https://​www.thing.net/​ ~grist/​ld/​flu​xusw​orkb​ook.pdf (accessed 2 April 2021). 21 Pierre Albert Castanet, ‘1968: a cultural and social survey of its influences on French music’, Contemporary Music Review 8, no. 1 (1993), 19–​43; Amy C. Beal, ‘ “Music is a universal human right”: Musica Elettronica Viva’, in Sound Commitments: Avant-​garde Music and the Sixties, ed. Robert Adlington (Oxford University Press, 2009), 99–​120. German works from the period—​such as Erhard Karkoschka’s Versüch fur Alle for vocal double-​quartet, orchestra, and audience (1969), and Ingomar Grünauer’s Co-​Produktion 1 und 2 for audience and ensemble (1970)—​have yet to receive scholarly attention. 22 Oliveros’s A-​OK (1969) and Meditation on the Points of a Compass (1970) distinguish performers and (participating) audience, unlike her later Sonic Meditations (1974), in which this distinction is erased. See also Lockwood’s Humming for mixed voices and/​or audience participation (1972). On the friendship between the two composers, see Martha Mockus, Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality (Routledge, 2007), 57–​65.

108  Musical Models of Democracy Georges Aperghis in France and Trevor Wishart in England.23 More recently, the advent of the internet and mobile technology has generated new kinds of participatory experiment.24 Across this diverse body of work, we find audience members enjoined to engage in many different ways: they are variously expected to make noises or to affect the noise-​making of others; to mount the stage or to move around the performance space; to integrate with performers or to actively confront them; to submit content in advance or to contribute ‘live’ via a range of media and technological interfaces. Many of these experiments in audience participation were conceived in a spirit of democratising and emancipation—​but not all. Claire Bishop has observed how early twentieth-​century approaches to audience involvement cemented a dual genealogy for later participatory work, comprising on the one hand ‘a de-​authored lineage that aims to embrace collective creativity’, and on the other ‘an authored tradition that seeks to provoke’. Whilst the first of these traditions aimed to be ‘constructive and ameliorative’, the second was ‘disruptive and interventionist’.25 Bishop’s history of participatory art is rich in examples that embody an antagonistic rather than friendly relation to the audience. For instance, she chronicles a number of young Argentine artists working under the military dictatorship of the late 1960s, who took a ‘coercive’ approach in which audiences were ‘obliged, violently, to participate’.26 This was the case for Graciela Carnevale’s piece Encierro (‘Confinement’; 1968), in which members of the public were locked as prisoners in an empty room, only escaping when they eventually took the decision to smash a glass window. Fluxus works frequently took a similarly hostile approach. Shower II (1962), a text piece by Fluxus member Ben Vautier, reads as follows: A performer sits on a chair in the center of the stage holding a fire hose and does nothing. On hearing the audience begin to complain, he shouts ‘Go!’ The water is turned on. The performer soaks the audience.27

23 On Aperghis’s work in the Parisian Banlieue, see Eric Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–​1981 (University of California Press, 2011), 251–​59. On Wishart’s work with community groups in Leeds, see Trevor Wishart, Sounds Fun: A Book of Musical Games (Universal Edition, 1977). 24 For a review of ‘Technology Mediated Audience Participation’ work in music, see Oliver Hödl, ‘The design of technology-​mediated audience participation in live music’ (PhD diss., Technische Universität Wien, 2016). 25 Claire Bishop, ‘Introduction: viewers as producers’, in Participation, ed. Bishop, 10–​17: p. 11. 26 Graciela Carnevale, cited in Bishop, Artificial Hells, 120. 27 The Fluxus Performance Workbook, 102.

Empowering others  109 The Fluxus group regarded a confrontational attitude to the audience as a legitimate component of their critique of the conventions of the art world, continuing the long-​established preoccupation of the avant-​garde with shock effects.28 Vautier’s later Audience Piece no. 1 (1964) anticipates Carnevale’s Encierro: it reads, ‘Audience is locked into the theatre. The piece ends when they find a way out.’ A different means of antagonism is chosen in Alison Knowles’ String Piece (1964), also written for performance at a Fluxus event, which instructs performers simply to ‘Tie up the audience’. A comparably confrontational attitude is evident in musical works that forcibly co-​opt the participation of audiences. One favoured strategy is to incorporate audience protest as compositional material. György Ligeti’s Die Zukunft der Musik, first performed in 1961 before an audience of European scientists and artists, comprises a ‘silent lecture’, in which the performer—​originally Ligeti himself—​says nothing, arousing audience unrest which is then systematically transcribed onto a chalkboard.29 In Dieter Schnebel’s Concert sans orchestre for pianist and audience (1964), audience protest is anticipated in the score itself, notated in the form of predicted waves of complaint (marked ‘Publikum’) caused by the solo performer’s eccentric, highly theatricalised behaviour (Ex. 4.1). The audience unrest is here treated essentially as the soloist’s missing orchestral accompaniment. In such works, whilst no-​one is literally assaulted or taken captive, audience autonomy is compromised because any expression of displeasure is integrated as a part of the performance. Comparable ends are achieved by works that submit audience behaviours to kinds of surveillance. David Helbich’s Keine-​Pause (Audience Observations) (2011), for instance, is mounted as an intervention to a conventional recital: the composer, seated at a desk at the side of the stage informs the audience that their behaviour will be observed throughout the performance, and reported upon in between the other pieces. Everything that the audience does—​involuntary audience movements, facial responses to the performance, interaction between audience members—​is thus liable to be adopted as content for the work.30 28 On the centrality of shock to both Dada and Fluxus, see Dorothée Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus (University of Chicago Press, 2010). 29 The performance is described in Benjamin R. Levy, Metamorphosis in Music: The Compositions of György Ligeti in the 1950s and 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2017), 128–​30; see also Eric Drott, ‘Ligeti in Fluxus’, Journal of Musicology 21, no. 2 (2004), 201–​40: pp. 219–​21. Ligeti’s written trace of the performance is Ligeti, ‘ “The Future of Music”: A collective Composition’, Dé-​coll/​age 3 (December 1962), n.p. 30 See Helbich, ‘Audience observations—​live performance’, David Helbich website, http://​david​ helb​ich.blogs​pot.com/​2011/​10/​keine-​pause-​no-​break-​antw​erp-​bru​gge-​den.html (accessed 2 April 2021). Helbich’s work is described in Charlie Sdraulig and Louis d’Heudières, ‘Attending to attending: performing audience personae in contemporary music’, Tempo 76, no. 300 (2022), 18–​32.

Ex. 4.1  Dieter Schnebel, Concert sans orchestre for pianist and audience (1964), p. 3. © Schott Music, Mainz. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved

Empowering others  111 Since the 1970s it has been more common to find audience participation presented in friendly rather than antagonistic terms, but such approaches nonetheless admit widely varying levels of freedom and agency on the part of audience members. We may consider, for instance, the familiar scenario in which the audience is assigned its own composed musical part, allowing them to join in with the performance. The two pieces premiered at the first CONNECT concert, Huang Ruo’s The Sonic Great Wall and Christian Mason’s In the Midst of the Sonorous Islands, took this form; the audience parts—​involving chanting simple melodies in Ruo’s piece (see Ex. 4.2), and the production of gentle noises from everyday objects in Mason’s—​were intended to realise the project’s aspirations to ‘empower audiences’ by assigning them an integral role within the works’ performance. This direct involvement of the audience in the realisation of the pieces certainly marked a departure from the ‘business as usual’ protocols of the ensembles’ regular performances, and the presentation of the works within the groups’ main stage programming, rather than as an educational adjunct event, was intended to avoid any perception of inferiority that might arise from the participatory goals.31 As Jutta Toelle and John Sloboda have documented in their analysis of the project, the experience was especially valued by those members of the public who participated in the preparatory workshops that acted as a testing ground for the ‘audience’ element of the works, and who were thus given a behind-​the-​scenes view of the composers’ and ensembles’ work.32 For those who simply attended and participated in the final performances, however, Toelle and Sloboda observed a sense of ‘expectations raised but not fulfilled’.33 Audience contributions were largely fixed, limited to particular moments in the works, and carefully rehearsed during the concert in advance of the formal performance, affording little scope for creativity or freedom of expression. In works that adopt this approach to audience participation, the audience is essentially beholden to the same obligations as the professional performers, and the emphasis on ‘mass effects’ additionally limits any sense of individual contribution. Such an experience may be enjoyable for its novelty, but it is clearly constrained as an expression of democratic emancipation. Other approaches to participation allow an audience greater independence of action. An important category here comprises works that ask the audience 31 Andrew Burke, Chief Executive of the London Sinfonietta, email correspondence with the author, 3 August 2022. 32 Jutta Toelle and John A. Sloboda, ‘The audience as artist? The audience’s experience of participatory music’, Musicae Scientiae 25, no. 1 (2019), 67–​91. 33 Ibid., 21.

Ex. 4.2  Huang Ruo, The Sonic Great Wall (2016), audience parts. Reproduced by permission of the composer

Empowering others  113 to vote. The best-​known example is Henri Pousseur and Michel Butor’s music-​ theatre piece Votre Faust (1961–​68), in which the audience is balloted at the end of the first act to decide how the narrative should unfold in Act 2, and is then encouraged to use more demonstrative means—​including standing and shouting—​to determine the course of action during Act 3. To accommodate these audience preferences, the piece has five possible endings.34 In recent years, mobile technology (especially smartphones) has encouraged composers to experiment with new ways of enabling an audience to determine the course of a performance.35 Kate Hayes’s Open Symphony (2015) invites audience members to vote through their smartphones for different categories of musical material, which then structure performers’ improvisations. Jason Freeman’s Sketching (2013) similarly uses a mobile app to allow audience members to shape a live-​generated graphic score intended to influence the improvisation of a jazz ensemble.36 Audience members may also be given some control over what they hear by being allowed to move around the performance space. Michael Pisaro’s space: for audience (2009), for instance, encourages audience members to move in response to the environmental noises of a particular room; precisely where to move, and how to interpret the numbered instructions, is left to audience members to decide.37 Works of this kind resemble the participatory dynamics of immersive theatre and installations, where audience members have to decide for themselves how to navigate around a complex performance site, producing (as Joseph Browning has observed) ‘forms of audiencing that could not help but be inventive’.38 Surveying these different approaches to audience participation lends strength to Claire Bishop’s contention that the practice of participatory art has inherited both emancipatory and dominatory impulses from early twentieth-​century experiments. Some audience theorists have gone further, 34 See André Brégégère, ‘The serial concept in Pousseur’s Votre Faust’, in The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music, ed. Lorna Fitzsimmons and Charles McKnight (Oxford University Press, 2019), 377–​406. 35 For a concise overview of relevant work, see Oliver Hödl et al., ‘Large-​scale audience participation in live music using smartphones’, Journal of New Music Research 49, no. 2 (2020), 192–​207. 36 Yongmeng Wu, Leshao Zhang, Nick Bryan-​Kinns, and Mathieu Barthet, ‘Open Symphony: creative participation for audiences of live music performances’, IEEE Multimedia 1 (2017), online at https://​qmro.qmul.ac.uk/​xmlui/​han​dle/​123456​789/​22542 (accessed 2 April 2021); ‘Sketching (2013), for improvising musicians with audience participation via mobile phones’, Jason Freeman website, http://​distr​ibut​edmu​sic.gat​ech.edu/​jason/​music/​sketch​ing-​2013-​for-​impro​vis/​ (accessed 2 April 2021). 37 Katharina Rost, Stephanie Schwarz, and Rainer Simon, ‘Tuning in/​out: auditory participation in contemporary music and theatre performances’, Performance Research 16, no. 3 (2011), 67–​75. 38 Joseph Browning, ‘Involving experiences: audiencing and co-​reception in Pleasure Garden’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 145, no. 1 (2020), 191–​227: pp. 195, 221.

114  Musical Models of Democracy proposing that participatory performances may be arrayed along a spectrum corresponding to the different levels of agency afforded to participants. In this way one might distinguish between audience roles that are ‘reactive’, ‘interactive’, or ‘proactive’, for instance, or rank graduated levels of influence exerted by audience members over a performance.39 Yet Bishop has urged caution, arguing that artworks aimed at audience interaction rarely conform neatly to a single position on a spectrum of empowerment, tending rather to move flexibly or provocatively around them in ‘a continual play of mutual tension, recognition and dependency’.40 Thus works that appear to adopt a confrontational or hostile attitude to an audience might also serve to enable that audience. Bishop’s account of Carnevale’s Encierro, for instance, stresses the particular context for its performance: created in the midst of a military dictatorship, the performance of Encierro was intended to symbolise the ‘imprisonment’ of Argentine citizens and offer a first-​person training in the dynamics of escape.41 The work’s forced confinement of the audience was thus conceived as a contribution to their liberation. Bishop’s scepticism that participatory works resist easy categorisation as either liberatory or subjugatory implies also an awareness of how ostensibly emancipatory invitations to an audience may simultaneously represent extensions of authorial control. She draws attention, for instance, to how an intention to release the creativity of an audience typically entails ‘second-​ guessing’ participants’ expressive proclivities, and ‘judging in advance’ what situations they will and will not find empowering.42 In this way, an act of containment risks stealing in under the guise of a gesture of generosity. Returning to some of the musical examples just discussed, we find that even in those works that appear to afford audiences a measure of independent agency, this is inevitably mediated by the terms established by the composer. Thus, the opportunity to express a preference through voting is constrained by the limited array of options from which an audience may choose—​a familiar shortcoming within all electoral democratic systems. Interactive works designed to enable audiences to contribute ideas or musical material

39 Astrid Breel, ‘Audience agency in participatory performance: a methodology for examining aesthetic experience’, Participations 12, no. 1 (2015), 368–​87; Alina Striner, Sasha Azad, and Chris Martens, ‘A common framework for audience interactivity’ (2017), arXiv, https://​arxiv.org/​abs/​ 1710.03320 (accessed 5 April 2021); Ben Fletcher-​Watson, ‘Seen and not heard: participation as tyranny in Theatre for Early Years’, Research in Drama Education 20, no. 1 (2015), 24–​38. 40 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 279, 267. 41 Ibid., 119–​21. 42 Ibid., 25–​26.

Empowering others  115 (through smartphones or other technology, for instance) invariably submit that material to kinds of author-​led processing and manipulation that significantly determine the artistic outcome. Even the kinds of installation environment intended to stimulate ‘co-​creative’ audiencing are usually fixed in advance and so shape and limit the scope for participant invention. In all these respects, audience participants appear to be forever on the back foot when it comes to self-​determination and expressive agency.

Audience participation as subjection: Perspectives from theatre Dilemmas such as these have remained largely unexplored in scholarly writing on audience participation in the concert hall. If we turn to the abundant literature on participatory and immersive theatre, on the other hand, we find a keen awareness of the complexities of the relation between participation and empowerment—​and indeed considerable scepticism that rendering the audience ‘active’ can ever be regarded as a democratising prospect. ‘What in participatory performance’, Matthew Reason asks, ‘might genuinely count as proactive, self-​initiated agency’?43 Pursuing similar lines of thought to Claire Bishop, Reason and other theatre scholars have highlighted how audience members lose rather than gain their autonomy in performance situations where they are urged or obliged to be directly involved. This is because immersive theatre demands a ‘special complicity’ from an audience, even when audience members are granted scope to make their own decisions.44 Such complicity may be rewarding, even exhilarating, but it also implies a relationship of obligation, sometimes resulting in a situation where the supposedly ‘active’ audience member comes to inhabit the ‘disempowered position of the obedient functionary’—​a ‘blank scrabble tile’, to borrow Jan Wozniak’s phrase—​‘becoming any character the performer wants them to be’.45 Perceptions of manipulation are not uncommon in participatory theatre performances, and they are felt especially strongly in situations where refraining from involvement—​ or even leaving the performance space 43 Matthew Reason, ‘Participations on participation: researching the “active” theatre audience’, Participations 12, no. 1 (2015), 271–​80: p. 278. 44 Adam Alston, ‘Audience participation and neoliberal value: risk, agency and responsibility in immersive theatre’, Performance Research 18, no. 2 (2013), 128–​38: p. 129. 45 Reason, ‘Participations on participation’, p. 277; Jan Wozniak, ‘The value of being together? Audiences in Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man’, Participations 12, no. 1 (2015), 318–​32: p. 330.

116  Musical Models of Democracy altogether—​is cast by the performance as a kind of irresponsible passivity.46 In circumstances such as these, participation is effectively ‘extorted from immersive theatre audiences’, even if it has been preceded by the choice to attend the performance in the first place.47 Audience participation in the theatre implies a relationship of domination not only through the sense of obligation it foists upon participants, but also through the kinds of behaviour that are encouraged or elicited. Writers on participatory theatre have drawn attention to the ways in which works tend to construct an ‘ideal’ participant, raising questions about producers’ rhetoric of inclusivity and openness. Analysing a Punchdrunk production, Adam Alston observes the privileging of what he terms ‘entrepreneurial participation’—​in other words, the expectation that participants will embrace an ethos of ‘risk-​taking, personal responsibility [and] individualism’.48 While there clearly exists a market for shows that offer audience members first-​ person experiences of risk and boundary-​testing, as a normative conception of participation these priorities are exclusory and limiting.49 Work of this kind, critics observe, envisages participants who are willing to jostle competitively for the most intimate experience or best viewpoint, and who are driven by a ‘hedonistic and narcissistic desire’ to achieve an individualistic ‘maximization of experience’.50 As a consequence, participatory opportunity is ‘unevenly distributed’, because only certain kinds of people are either attracted or able to be fully involved on the terms offered by the performance.51 Such critiques attain a broader philosophical footing in Jacques Rancière’s 2007 essay ‘The emancipated spectator’. For Rancière, the very supposition that audiences need empowering reveals an intention to dominate. He urges the retention of the distinction of spectator and actor precisely on the grounds of democratic equality, offering at the same time a vigorous critique of the trend for audience participation.52 His essay begins by noting 46 A striking example is explored in Anna Wilson, ‘ “Playing the game”: authenticity and invitation in Ontroerend Goed’s audience’, Participations 12, no. 1 (2015), 333–​45. 47 Alston, ‘Audience participation and neoliberal value’, 129. 48 Adam Alston, ‘Productive participants: aesthetics and politics in immersive theatre’ (PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2013), 157–​58. 49 See Alston, ‘Audience participation and neoliberal value’; Jen Harvie, ‘Democracy and neoliberalism in art’s social turn and Roger Hiorn’s Seizure’, Performance Research 16, no. 2 (2011), 113–​23. 50 Wozniak, ‘The value of being together?’; Alston, ‘Audience participation and neoliberal value’, 130. 51 Alston, ‘Audience participation and neoliberal value’, 133. 52 Jacques Rancière, ‘The emancipated spectator’, Artforum (March 2007), 271–​80. Rancière’s book of the same name includes a substantially rewritten version of this essay as c­ hapter 1, and other essays relevant to participatory theatre and relational art; The Emancipated Spectator (Verso, 2009).

Empowering others  117 the desire running through twentieth-​century theatre practice for ‘a theatre where spectators will no longer be spectators’, one in which an audience will ‘become active participants . . . instead of being passive viewers’.53 Brecht’s epic theatre and Artaud’s theatre of cruelty are singled out as representing ‘two paradigmatic attitudes’ within this development. Rancière’s argument is founded on his perception that the calls for ‘a theatre without spectatorship’ presuppose a set of problematic oppositions between looking and acting, appearance and reality, and activity and passivity. He regards these oppositions as ‘allegories of inequality’, because they embody the idea that there are people with capacities and people without.54 Such ‘partitions of the sensible’ establish an ‘order of appearances’ that serves only the interests of established power.55 Rancière proposes an alternative starting point: that ‘emancipation is the process of verification of the equality of intelligence’.56 Equality does not have to be worked towards: it exists already, but to recognise the fact requires the dismantling of the conceptual terminology that structures inequality. From these observations springs Rancière’s call to ‘dismiss the opposition between looking and acting’, for ‘looking is also an action . . . and “interpreting the world” is already a means of transforming it, of reconfiguring it’.57 Spectators, he contends, act as ‘translators’; in observing a performance they ‘invent their own translation in order to appropriate the story for themselves and make their own story out of it’.58 (Here we find a resonance with others who have argued for listening as a kind of ‘active’ participation.) Moreover, performers are best regarded as co-​spectators, in the sense that they are ‘looking to find what [their] competences might produce in a new context, among unknown people’.59 Everyone in a theatrical performance, Rancière implies, is both actor and spectator, constantly linking seeing and doing, with no ‘privileged starting point’: ‘we have to acknowledge that any spectator already is an actor of his own story and that the actor also is the spectator of the same kind of story’.60 Whilst such a perception appears to challenge the 53 Rancière, ‘The emancipated spectator’, 272. 54 Ibid., 277. 55 See Rachel Magnusson, ‘A politics in writing: Jacques Rancière and the equality of intelligences’, in Thinking Radical Democracy: The Return to Politics in Post-​War France, ed. Martin Breaugh, et al. (University of Toronto Press, 2015), 189–​209. 56 Rancière, ‘The emancipated spectator’, 276. 57 Ibid., 277. 58 Ibid., 280. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 279.

118  Musical Models of Democracy demarcation of audience and spectator roles in much the same way that participatory theatre does, what it resists is the idea that emancipation is to be attained only by making everyone into actors. Such a vision of unity is, to Rancière’s mind, profoundly undemocratic in the way it implies ‘a single regime of presentation and interpretation of the given imposing its obviousness on all’.61 No such regime can claim to justly represent the interests of everyone. The ‘separation of the spectacle’, by insisting upon acts of looking that are separate from the doing—​the critique of which motivated so much participatory art—​serves for Rancière the profoundly valuable function of underlining individuals’ autonomy from the containing schemes of others. It is in the recognition of such ‘irreducible distance’, rather than its overcoming, that Rancière believes the cause of equality is best served.

Reclaiming audience participation for democracy These views are not encouraging for the prospects of musical projects that seek to explore audience participation for democratising ends. Far from guaranteeing empowerment, it would appear that an audience’s participation in a performance promises only continuing subjection to the devices of others. We have already seen how this dynamic plays out in musical contexts, both through participatory works that forcibly co-​opt or dictate, and those that afford greater agency within a pre-​planned scheme: in both, authorial designs continue to govern the proceedings. Similar concerns have been expressed in the field of community music, where the guiding tenet has been that ‘everyone involved in the artistic act is an artist’, and that professionals and non-​professionals ‘co-​operate as equals’.62 To achieve this vision of ‘cultural democracy’, community music practitioners have typically disavowed the participatory models favoured in the professional art world; the ‘composer’ who generously opens up elements of their creation to non-​professional participants makes way for the less domineering figure of the ‘project leader’ or ‘animateur’, whose role is conceived largely in terms of facilitation. Yet the presence of a confining authorial agenda remains a cause for concern nonetheless. How to tell, as Lee Higgins and Brydie-​ Leigh Bartlett ask, ‘whether the intervention is acting as another colonizing 61 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 48–​49. 62 François Matarasso, A Restless Art: How Participation Won, and Why It Matters (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2019), 49, 50.

Empowering others  119 endeavour or promoting a more positive sense of self-​determination for participants’?63 Their question holds out the hope that a non-​colonising alternative might be conceived that stands independently of the particular perspectives and specific interests of those making the intervention. Yet their proposed formula for such an alternative—​to promote ‘a more positive sense of self-​determination’ amongst participants—​itself points to the kinds of judgements that inevitably attend and frame the invitation to participate: for what might constitute ‘more positive’, and even the idea of ‘self ’, is hardly a matter on which everyone will readily agree. Sharpening our sensitivity to the ways in which the participatory invitation may imply surrender of participants’ autonomy certainly helps to avoid some of the problematic assumptions that have been made about the relationship of participation and empowerment. We will see at the end of this chapter that recognition of these controlling tendencies also helps to explain how composers could shift seamlessly from rhetoric about the emancipation of the audience to angry refusal of audience preferences, without any embarrassment about the evident inconsistency. Yet is it right to conclude that audience participation is, by definition, incapable of empowering participants, and that, by extension, there is no democratic rationale for abandoning the traditional audience protocols of the concert hall—​protocols that, we should recall, are certainly not a historical or global norm for the public presentation of music? For a fuller response to these questions, it is instructive, first of all, to return to Rancière, with the specific intention of locating his critique of ‘a theatre without spectatorship’ within the wider context of his political philosophy—​a contextualisation that commentators on ‘The emancipated spectator’ have generally avoided.64 This philosophy makes a powerful case for constant reappraisal of the functions and roles presented as ‘natural’ within society, and does so precisely in the name of democracy. Additionally, there is good reason to pause before accepting, as critics of participation have sometimes implicitly done, that subjection and empowerment are necessarily mutually exclusive, and that agency is a state that comes about only in the absence of ‘patiency’. From these perspectives arises a richer sense of the potential of participatory experiment, one that can be aligned with the idea of democracy being elaborated throughout this book.

63 Lee Higgins and Brydie-​Leigh Bartlett, cited in Matarasso, A Restless Art, 118. 64 An exception is Susanne Shawyer, ‘Emancipated spect-​actors: Boal, Rancière, and the twenty-​ first-​century spectator’, Performance Matters 5, no. 2 (2019), 41–​54.

120  Musical Models of Democracy Rancière’s wider philosophy deserves attention within this discussion precisely because of its concern with the organisation of society, and the place of democracy within it. Central is his distinctive definition of ‘politics’. Departing from the standard use of this term to denote the ideological contests of politicians and activists, Rancière proposes that politics emerges ‘whenever the count of parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of those who have no part’.65 Rancière views any given social arrangement as embodying an ‘order of appearances’ that entails what Rachel Magnusson terms a ‘logic of places and capabilities[,]‌. . . identities and categorizations’—​in short, a way of doing things and of seeing the world. This naturalised order, which encompasses institutionalised political allegiances and processes, is termed by Rancière the ‘police’. But in governing ‘who can be seen, what can be heard, [and] what seems possible’, the police determines that ‘there will always be something missing, something masked’—​a ‘part with no part’.66 In Rancière’s philosophy, politics represents an assertion of the part that is rendered invisible by the order of appearances; it is the manifestation of a shunned or neglected equality. As Tyson Lewis puts it, [politics] makes visible the nothing as something to be contended with, thus disorganizing and reorganizing the field of visibility and sayability that defines the contours of a community. Stated differently, the mute speech of the world is put back into circulation.67

This process lies at the heart of Rancière’s concept of democracy. Democracy, he writes, is not a regime or a social way of life. It is the institution of politics itself, the system of forms of subjectification through which any order of distribution of bodies into functions corresponding to their ‘nature’ and places corresponding to their functions is undermined, thrown back on its contingency.68 65 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 123. 66 Magnusson, ‘A politics in writing’, 191–​94. 67 Tyson Lewis, ‘Image as ignorant schoolmaster: a lesson in democratic equality’, in Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis, ed. David J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Wayne D. Bowman (Oxford University Press, 2016), 549–​62: p. 554. 68 Rancière, Disagreement, 101.

Empowering others  121 Here, we find a distinct resonance with other accounts of democracy already explored in this book, which emphasise contestability and impermanence. No social order can be imagined that does not create a ‘part with no part’. Democracy takes the form, not of the realisation of an inclusive whole, but rather of ‘an unending process’ oriented towards bringing society’s exclusions to the fore.69 Rancière, like Mouffe, Lefort, and other ‘post-​foundationalists’, emphasises the perpetually provisional nature of democratic politics, as new social settlements give rise to new perceptions of exclusion and new assertions of equality. For Rancière, ‘the permanence of democracy’ resides, not in a fixed arrangement granting equality and participation to all, but rather in its mobility, its capacity to shift the sites and forms of participation. . . . The guarantee of permanent democracy is not the filling up of all the dead times and empty spaces by the forms of participation or of counterpower; it is the continual renewal of the actors and of the forms of their actions, the ever-​open possibility of the fresh emergence of this fleeting subject.70

These themes demand to be projected back onto Rancière’s commentary on the emancipated spectator. By urging us to regard the spectator as a doer, and the performer as an observer, Rancière’s essay contests precisely an ‘order of distribution’ assumed as ‘natural’, and invites a redrawing of ‘the sites and forms of participation’. But to read ‘The emancipated spectator’ as supposing that established theatrical practice may unproblematically endure once recognised as a happy equipoise between inventive spectators and reflective performers is to miss Rancière’s larger emphasis upon ‘mobility’ and ‘continual renewal’, a process necessitated by the ever-​presence of a part with no part. Rancière’s implication is that police and politics are inseparable. To contest an order of appearances is to lay the ground for a new order of appearances; new assertions entail new exclusions. ‘Shifting the sites and forms of participation’ implies not a fixed arrangement but an orientation to ever-​new distributions of functions and places. Rancière’s philosophy, then, while resisting the ‘single regime’ of a ‘theatre without spectators’, offers a rationale for perpetual experimentation with participation, and does so on the

69 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (Verso, 2000), 11, 33–​34. 70 Jacques Rancière, ‘The uses of democracy’, in On the Shores of Politics (Verso, 1995), 39–​ 62: pp. 60–​61.

122  Musical Models of Democracy grounds of democracy. It also serves to loosen the dichotomy of empowerment and subjection, for within his model of ‘continual renewal’ emancipatory acts always augur a new form of subjection. Yet this perception is perhaps insufficient to dispel the concern of participatory theatre’s critics that authorial agendas compromise participants’ agency from the outset: in these critics’ conception, the ‘mute speech of the world’ is not ‘put back into circulation’ through participation, but is kept mute because of the complicity, obedience, and other kinds of obligation that are entailed in the participatory contract. Here the question that really needs to be asked is whether the acceptance of participation on someone else’s terms necessarily suppresses or impedes participants’ autonomy and agency. Giving oneself over to the designs of others has long been a cornerstone of artistic experience, one that may produce experiences of revelation, surprise, and excitement. Does such ‘surrender’ imply passivity, as the advocates of participatory work have often suggested? That such a conclusion cannot automatically be drawn is suggested by those philosophers and sociologists who have expressed doubts that agency and ‘patiency’ can ever fully be separated.71 No act of self-​determination, it has been proposed, takes place independently of the pressures of being acted upon; rather, ‘doing’ is in important respects a product of ‘being done to’. ‘One’s action is rarely one’s own and rarely for one’s own sake only’, Quỳnh Phạm has argued, ‘for it is pulled, pushed, harmonised, agitated, coaxed, pleaded . . . by multiple bonds. In this sense, one could say it is always already co-​authored.’72 Taking issue with the Cartesian model of the autonomous self, this perspective advocates a relational model of subjecthood in which ‘ “independence” is only ever partial, and is woven . . . from multiple dependencies’.73 (Here we revisit the idea of the mutual formation of individual and community, as explored towards the end of Chapter 2.) And while special attention is often given within these accounts to the life experiences of those subject to high levels of dependency and constraint, including contexts where ‘patiency’ entails harm, we are also called to recognise ‘the necessary dependencies that constantly and inalienably structure the lives of even the most “independent” active, capable,

71 See for example Soran Reader, ‘The other side of agency’, Philosophy 82 (October 2007), 579–​ 604; Ian Burkitt, ‘Relational agency: relational sociology, agency and interaction’, European Journal of Social Theory 19, no. 3 (2016), 322–​39. 72 Quỳnh N. Phạm, ‘Enduring bonds: politics and life outside freedom as autonomy’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 38, no. 1 (2012), 29–​48: p. 37. 73 Reader, ‘The other side of agency’, 591.

Empowering others  123 free, choosing, rational human beings’,74 with the implication that patiency should be regarded as a fundamental aspect of personhood, by no means reducible to exploitation, abjection, or detriment. As Ian Burkitt has proposed, ‘social relationships should not be understood as merely constraining or enabling agency, but as constituting the very structure and form of agency itself ’.75 From this viewpoint, the impositional aspect of any participatory initiative—​the shaping force of an organiser’s proposition—​is no necessary bar to self-​realisation. The fact that the mode of participation reflects the interests of dramaturge or composer does not mean that it may not also contribute to others enhancing and expanding their own selfhood, sometimes in pleasurable and enriching ways. When audience members for participatory performances talk positively of the ‘self-​forgetting’ that can be prompted by an unforeseen situation, or the ‘self-​transcendence’ that may arise from experiment with a new proposition, they are also talking about kinds of self-​determination.76 This is because, in the relational perspective outlined here, the self enjoys no ‘natural’ or neutral condition waiting to flourish in response to the enabling trigger of a selfless intervention. A participatory opportunity joins the welter of competing interests active upon and determining of individuals and communities, and the question of whether particular affordances are received as empowering or oppressive is difficult to judge independently of particularities of context and circumstance.

Audience participation as community organising Accepting that the invitation to participate is always governed by authorial interests, and that subjection to those interests does not necessarily come at the cost of independent personhood or agency, we are now better placed to consider the range of options open to composers. We have seen that some composers have been openly drawn to audience participation as a mechanism

74 Ibid., 603. 75 Burkitt, ‘Relational agency’, 336. 76 For these aspects of audience experience in participatory theatre, see White, Audience Participation in Theatre, 186–​ 87. Georgina Born notes similar negotiations of identity, and transactions of dominance and receptiveness, as characteristic of disco and soca performance; see Born, ‘Reinventing audiences’, 197–​98.

124  Musical Models of Democracy for control, bearing out Bishop’s contention that artistic approaches to participation stem in part from the classic avant-​garde preoccupations of provocation and antagonism. Other composers, though, have been motivated by the ameliorative instinct within Bishop’s dual lineage for participatory art, perceiving participation as a means to remedy the audience’s conventional consignment to the role of onlookers, left at the mercy of a process they cannot influence. For these composers, the challenge is not how to usher audiences into a single regime of activity that overcomes all difference; rather it is the question of how to manage authorial designs in such a way that maximises the possibility for the kinds of mobility and renewal envisaged by Rancière. How, in other words, to ensure that the inevitable shaping hand behind the participatory proposition does not simply reproduce the existing ‘distribution of bodies and functions’? A useful aid here is the theories and practices that have developed within the field of community organising. First advocated by Saul Alinsky in 1930s Boston slums, community organising typically involves the employment of one or more activists to engage with a community, with the aim of identifying shared concerns that could be more effectively represented to those in power. Community organising offers a model for a participatory intervention that serves the marginalised by contesting hegemonic democratic arrangements. In this sense it aspires to meet Rancière’s call to attend to the ‘part of those who have no part’, and thereby contributes to the renewal of the order of appearances that structures social existence. At the same time, theorists of community organising have recognised that, as we have just discussed, the impulse to empower others cannot be separated from the interests of those making the participatory intervention. As Mae Shaw has written, in community organising ‘the “unencumbered expert” is simply not an option’; ‘the question is, rather, whether values are conscious and made explicit or remain unconscious and implicit’.77 The organiser’s interests are expressed in various ways: through the identification of the community needing to be empowered; in the shaping of the actions to realise this empowerment; and by the articulation of goals towards which the intervention is oriented. These entanglements of interests can be problematic: an organiser’s perceptions of a group as ‘socially excluded’ and ‘vulnerable’ may work to entrench

77 Mae Shaw, ‘Community work today: competing demands in practice’, Concept: The Journal of Contemporary Community Education Practice Theory 4, no. 2 (2013), http://​conc​ept.lib.ed.ac.uk/​arti​ cle/​view/​2349 (accessed 5 April 2021), 6.

Empowering others  125 rather than overcome inequality; and the ideological convictions driving organisers’ analyses and proposed solutions sometimes conflict with the directions preferred by the community.78 Shaw argues that these dangers require the organiser to be highly self-​reflective, writing that ‘it is difficult to see how community workers can be a part of the solution for democratic life (as they hope and claim to be) unless they can see the ways in which they may themselves be a part of the problem’.79 The move to empower others is unavoidably also an ‘acting upon’. But these considerations do not prevent the work of community organisers from making a positive difference to people’s lives, even as they undeniably ‘author’ (or co-​author) that difference in line with their own worldview. This is because of the steps that experienced community organisers take to mitigate their own preferences within their work. In her book Democracy in Action: Community Organizing and Urban Change, Kristina Smock underlines a number of core principles intended to direct the organiser’s intervention towards the empowerment of others, rather than themselves—​ principles that, as we will see, can also be translated to musical contexts.80 The first is that the leadership offered by the outside organiser must be temporary and aimed at enabling community members to assume aspects of the organising role. In other words, a change in power relations must in due course be enacted, which ‘develops local leaders’ and ‘transforms ordinary people into effective public actors’.81 Here it is worth noting that, in contrast to Rancière’s suspicion of didactic interventions as implying abiding structures of inequality, community organising does not proscribe leadership from outside, when it serves to challenge ‘dominant, taken-​for-​granted belief systems’ and introduces ‘alternative conceptual frameworks to help residents see the connection between their own experiences and broader economic and political structures’.82 For community organisers, however, ‘democracy in action’ is not a static arrangement of roles and responsibilities, but a process in which the professional community organiser prepares the ground for handing over their organisational role, building what Alinsky

78 See Shaw, ‘Community work today’, 8; Kristina Smock, Democracy in Action: Community Organizing and Urban Change (Columbia University Press, 2004), 140–​42. 79 Shaw, ‘Community work today’, 7. 80 The three principles outlined in the following pages condense the ideas summarised in Smock, Democracy in Action, 6–​7. 81 Ibid., 6. 82 Ibid., 253.

126  Musical Models of Democracy termed ‘native leadership’.83 Without such a transfer of power, the organiser risks dominating the intervention, meaning that the changes experienced by the community will be short-​lived. Turning our attention to audience participation in music, we see that many participatory works do not facilitate this shift: audience members are often left beholden to a score, a conductor, or some other kind of instruction, and so cannot build any real independence. But potential for a kind of ‘training’ in leadership can be found in audience participation pieces where audience behaviour is closely linked to the sounds or actions of on-​ stage performers. While such linkage may be intended antagonistically, as when audience protest is stoked and then co-​opted into a composition, it is a strategy that also offers the potential for audience members to take control, once they have grasped the premise of a composition. In such works, a tipping point may be reached where the audience realises that instead of being unwillingly co-​opted into a composition, they have the power to determine its course. Something of the kind evidently happened during the first performance of Robert Ashley’s electronic piece Public Opinion Descends Upon the Demonstrators in 1962. In this work, the composer used the movements and noises of his initially unsuspecting audience as cues for bursts of electronic sound. As Lanier Sammons observes, the composer’s list of audience cues—​which include yawning, whispering, ‘physical rigidity’, and leaving the performance space—​anticipated an unsympathetic response to the work’s aggressive amplification.84 But at the premiere H. Wiley Hitchcock noticed the development of a different dynamic, in which audience members were able to utilise the compositional premise to their own ends: Before [the piece] started, the audience was arranged in four blocks, each facing a different direction, so that a person in one block was necessarily looking at the group of people in another. Then Ashley seated himself at the switchboard of a series of tape-​decks, snapped on a stopwatch and began intently to scan the audience. Several minutes passed in silence. Then someone coughed nervously—​whereupon Ashley pressed one of the switches in front of him, and we heard some of his electronic

83 Paul Bunyan, ‘Civil society, the left and community organising: towards a progressive politics’, in Looking for Consensus: Civil Society, Social Movements and Crises for Public Management, vol. 2, ed. John Diamond and Joyce Liddle (Emerald, 2013), 123–​40: p. 133. 84 Sammons, ‘Audience Interactivity’, 111–​20; the chart of expected audience behaviours is reproduced on p. 115.

Empowering others  127 music . . . . Then, silence again. Someone tittered nervously. Again, on came taped sound—​different, this time, and seemingly related to the titter. More silence. Someone, angry, stood up to stomp out of the hall. A burst of angry tape music! And so on, the audience actually cuing in the music by its own actions and reactions. . . . [By the end of the piece] some people, at least, were pleased with the peculiar effect of being able to create their own demonstration and with the interplay, not to say confusion, between ‘composer’ and ‘audience’.85

A less confrontational example of this handover of roles is the 1966 work Contactics by the Estonian-​Canadian composer Udo Kasemets (see Ex. 4.3). At the time, Kasemets was influenced by the novel communication theories of Marshall McLuhan, leading him to produce a number of open scores and performances that rethought the relationality of composer, performer, and listener through kinds of dialogical interaction.86 Kasemets described Contactics as ‘a choreography for musicians and audience’. Performed on an open stage around which the audience is encouraged to move, the work involves each member of an ensemble focusing on one particular audience member, and responding musically to his or her movements according to a predetermined code. Audience members are encouraged to identify which musician is ‘playing’ them, and once they have done so, roles should be exchanged: ‘Once the audience member recognizes the musician who follows his or her movements, he or she . . . may make a slow and detoured [sic] approach [towards the musician] with added deliberate movements, thus directing the musician in a continuing cooperative performance.’87 In this way, a kind of ‘native leadership’ is built amongst the audience, as individual audience members acquire the means to direct the ongoing course of the performance. A second key principle of community organising is that the intervention must strengthen mutual understanding within a group, thereby lending critical mass to the agreed programme of action. Community organising strives to overcome individualism in order to ‘develop the collective capacity of the community as a whole’ and to ‘expand the norms of trust and reciprocity 85 H. Wiley Hitchcock, ‘Current Chronicle: Ann Arbor, Michigan’, Musical Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1962), 244–​48: p. 246. 86 See Jeremy Strachan, ‘Canavanguard, Udo Kasemets’s Trigon, and Marshall McLuhan: graphic notation in the electronic age’, Twentieth-​Century Music 14, no. 2 (2017), 209–​43. 87 Kasemets, ‘Performance procedure’, Contactics, score (BMI Canada, 1966).

128  Musical Models of Democracy

Ex. 4.3  Udo Kasemets, Contactics (1966), full score. Reproduced by permission of the Canadian Music Centre

Empowering others  129

Ex. 4.3  Continued

130  Musical Models of Democracy

Ex. 4.3  Continued

that enable the community to work together on common goals’.88 Here a contrast can be drawn with those experiments in participatory theatre that, in the eyes of its critics at least, prioritise ‘neoliberal’ values of private satisfaction and competitive entrepreneurialism. Kristina Smock places emphasis upon the organiser’s exploration and articulation of shared interests,

88 Smock, Democracy in Action, 6.

Empowering others  131 not just individual ones. This not only builds critical mass in support of a shared agenda, but also reduces the tendency for individuals to feel pressured to collude with the organiser. Smock writes of the value of an approach that ‘transformed the participants from a collection of individuals into a united group with a specific set of issues and demands’.89 What might this strategy look like in musical participatory contexts? Unison communal singing is perhaps the most familiar kind of audience participation in the concert hall—​we saw earlier that it was precisely the device preferred by Huang Ruo for his CONNECT piece, for instance. But such collective renditions in fact generally work against the building of alliances between audience members, at least if we follow Smock’s vision of community as something that is created, not assumed or received as instruction. Some audience participation pieces have found ways to develop mutual awareness between members of an audience in a manner that doesn’t take the unanimity of the audience for granted. Eric Lemmon has recently investigated how works that allow audience members to input preferences via their smartphones may initiate ‘a process whereby individuals and groups [in the audience] can have influence on one another within participatory musics as they are produced . . . negotiating and vying to determine the shape and experience of the musical work’. Describing such works as articulating a ‘politics of aesthetic preference’, he makes a comparison with the Habermasian public sphere, which posits ‘a space in which individuals—​through rational discourse—​are able to negotiate political differences and subsequently implement agreed-​upon policy through democratic means’.90 A striking historical example of this approach is the work Microformobiles II (1971) by Brazilian composer Jorge Antunes. A pioneer in electronics and multimedia installations, Antunes’s works have frequently responded to the turbulent political events of his home country; in the early 1970s, he was involved in the avant-​garde poetry movement poema/​processo, which opposed the country’s military dictatorship.91 Microformobiles II uses audience voting to determine what the ensemble of six musicians plays, in a striking gesture of resistance to Brazil’s authoritarian government. Rather than enable the will of the people through a ballot or simple head count, 89 Ibid., 160. 90 Eric Lemmon, ‘The politics of aesthetic preference in participatory music’, Organised Sound 28, no. 1 (2022), 53–​63. 91 ‘Biography’, Jorge Antunes website, http://​jorge​antu​nes.com.br/​en/​biogra​phy/​compo​ser/​ (accessed 5 April 2021).

132  Musical Models of Democracy however, the audience is required to arrive at an agreed consensus—​‘by “democratic means” ’, as the composer writes in the score92—​in order for the performance to proceed. This is accomplished through the collective production by all audience members of different kinds of noises—​ such as tongue-​clicks, foot-​scraping, finger-​snaps, and various kinds of vocal sounds—​to indicate their relative preference between seven pages of score successively projected on a screen. (The work makes the optimistic assumption that the audience will be able to make some sense of the composer’s musical notation.) A key is provided in the concert programme indicating which kind of audience noise signifies a ‘yes’, which a ‘no’, and which determines that the piece should end (Ex. 4.4). Only when a clear preference emerges will the ensemble act upon the audience’s collective instruction, a process that creates an incentive for audience members to listen and adapt to the views of others in order for the work to continue in a particular way, or finish. In this piece, then, a community is temporarily actualised and common goals decided upon, through the sharing and negotiation of personal preferences. A third key principle guiding the work of community organisers is to develop forms of intervention in the structures of authority, with the goal of confronting the shortcomings of existing arrangements for democratic representation. Smock identifies different approaches to this challenge. One is to build ‘consensual working partnerships’ with neighbourhood ‘stakeholders’ such as businesses, banks, and churches, with the aim of improving engagement with existing structures.93 A separate approach, however, is to contest existing structures rather than trying to improve representation within them. Proponents of this second approach ‘believe the system itself is at the core of the problem’, and that ‘urban problems can be solved only through a radical restructuring of dominant political, social, and economic institutions’.94 This may require organisers to challenge communities’ tendency ‘to accept dominant political and economic arrangements as natural and inevitable’, and to encourage them instead to entertain alternative dispensations of power and forms of representation.95

92 Jorge Antunes, Microformobiles II, score, ‘Instructions for the Performance’. I am grateful to Mauritz Lisboa at Sistrum Edições Musicais (Brazil) for providing me with a copy of these instructions. 93 Smock, Democracy in Action, 17. 94 Ibid., 29. 95 Ibid., 29, 170.

Empowering others  133

Ex. 4.4  Jorge Antunes, Microformobiles II (1971), tables indicating options for audience decision-​making. Table I indicates to the audience which mode of expression they should use, according to the sounds coming from the ensemble; Table II shows how the audience can express approval or disapproval. Reproduced by permission of Edizioni Suvini Zerboni

134  Musical Models of Democracy Audience participation works of their very nature seek to reassess the roles of participants in performance. But as we have seen, this by no means necessarily entails a wholesale realignment: more common by far is a modest stretching of conventional roles which leaves the distinct boundaries demarcating composer, performer, and audience behaviours largely intact. But some works undertake a more thorough reimagining of the governance of musical performance. James Saunders’s sometimes we do what you say, but occasionally we don’t (2017) offers a reconfiguration of the terms of interrelation between audience, performers, and composer that strives to rebalance participation across all involved.96 The work forms part of a series called things to do, which investigates the process of instruction-​giving in group situations defined by different kinds of obligation and autonomy, thus complicating the traditional hierarchies within the performance of composed music.97 sometimes we do what you say is unique in the series in actively involving the audience. Prior to a performance, members of an unspecified ‘large ensemble’ are asked to choose a number of sounds in different categories (noise; pitch; ‘automated device’; recording; etc.) which they will each produce on a variety of different sound sources. This list becomes the basis for a set of spoken instructions (‘noise 1’; ‘pitch 3’; ‘device 2’; etc.) placed on four separate music stands in front of the ensemble (see Fig. 4.1). In the performance, audience members are invited to walk up to one of the stands, where they read out instructions according to their preference, each of which immediately triggers the corresponding sound from the ensemble. Audience members may remain at the stand for as long as they like and return to their seat at any point, and any number of the stands may be occupied at the same time, affording the opportunity for different preferences to be exchanged between those issuing the instructions, and potentially for a collaborative arrangement to be negotiated. But to avoid the impression of a reversed dictatorship in which the performers are entirely at the mercy of the whims of the audience, ensemble members are also entitled to move to the stands to deliver instructions. They may also ‘occasionally’ ignore the spoken instructions (hence the second part of the work’s title), deciding

96 The score of sometimes we do what you say, but occasionally we don’t can be viewed at http://​ resear​chsp​ace.bath​spa.ac.uk/​10222/​ (accessed 5 April 2021). Videos of two different performances can be viewed at https://​www.james-​saund​ers.com/​2017/​07/​21/​someti​mes-​say-​occas​iona​lly-​dont/​ (accessed 5 April 2021). 97 James Saunders, ‘Things to do’ (2017), Wolf Notes blog, https://​wolfno​tes.org/​2017/​05/​04/​james-​ saund​ers-​thi​ngs-​to-​do/​ (accessed 5 April 2021).

Empowering others  135

Fig. 4.1  James Saunders, sometimes we do what you say, but occasionally we don’t (2017), performance layout. Video still reproduced by permission of the University of Leeds

when and for how long to do so. The result, whilst not entirely effacing the ‘producer-​receiver divide’98—​for the score recognises the continuing existence of an ‘audience’, and the entire operation is governed by the basic terms laid down by the composer—​expresses complex and mobile webs of ownership, interest, and responsiveness, allowing for the exploration of both new distributions of power and new categories of participation.

The ambiguity of participation: Emancipation and control in Luc Ferrari’s Société V The field of community organising suggests approaches to the empowerment of others that hold in check the inevitable influence of the organiser over proceedings. It highlights, too, how the imprint of this guiding influence is no bar to ‘shifting the sites and forms of participation’, as Rancière puts it, and thus to the renewal and mobility that he associates with democracy. For composers who are serious about their intention to empower audiences, the key lessons are clear: move away from scriptedness; welcome

98 Sammons, ‘Audience Interactivity’, 7.

136  Musical Models of Democracy unpredictability; offer scope for the audience to discover itself, in its multiplicity, and to negotiate agreed action; abandon the pretence that compositional preferences can be wished away, or are of no significance. As we have noted throughout, however, it would be wrong to imply that all approaches to audience participation are benign and self-​effacing. Where some composers have sought to empower audiences, others have been more concerned to criticise and correct. This is partly to be explained by the longstanding perception—​and not just amongst the avant-​garde—​of the concert hall audience as itself an embodiment of privilege and hegemony, possessing the very advantages, in terms of economic and cultural capital, that are denied to the disenfranchised communities targeted by community organisers. For some composers, this has made them a group more deserving of animosity than emancipation. Moreover, as we noted at the very start of the chapter, many concertgoers cherish the behavioural conventions of silent contemplation, and resent or resist invitations to become more actively participatory.99 We should not forget that ‘passivity’ can be a preference, and thus an expression of autonomy and agency. From this conjunction of circumstances have arisen compositional approaches to participation in which the impulses to empower and to critique are difficult to separate. For instance, in One Land, One River, One People (2015) by Hannibal Lokumbe, which was written for the Philadelphia Orchestra and choirs from two historically Black colleges and universities, the composer invited the audience to shout out enthusiastically during the performance—​and led the way from his seat in the balcony with his own demonstrative vocalisations. In Benjamin Safran’s reading, this participatory invitation functioned not as a demonstration of togetherness—​for most people in the Verizon Hall audience did not join in, and instead looked ill-​at-​ease with the spectacle—​but instead ‘revealed difference’. Specifically, the work’s focus on audience behaviours served to highlight the distance of the social practices underpinning concert performance from those found in ‘performative spaces more typically occupied by Black people’.100 The intermingling of emancipatory and corrective instincts is a notable facet of Luc Ferrari’s Société V: Participation or not participation for six

99 For a recent example, see Veerle Spronck, Peter Peters, and Ties van de Werff, ‘Empty Minds: innovating audience participation in symphonic practice’, Science as Culture 30, no. 2 (2021), 216–​36: p. 230. 100 Benjamin Safran, ‘ “The hall does not make the space”: disrupting concert hall norms in Hannibal’s One Land, One River, One People’, Journal of the Society for American Music 15 (2021), 287–​304: pp. 287, 294.

Empowering others  137 percussionists, actor, and the public (1967–​69)—​a work that presents as literal a musical model of democracy as it is possible to imagine. Devised during one of the most politically turbulent periods in modern French history, it undertakes a musical analysis of the processes of electoral democracy by deploying the audience to determine the course of the piece. In the sheet of instructions handed to the audience, Ferrari describes his goals in a way that underlines the proximity to community organising: Participation or not Participation asks the public to come out of its silence. It is given a say, it can choose, demand, proclaim, formulate its opinion. It has every right to act on the form and the discussion of the Actions. It can either intervene individually or organize in the community.101

To ensure the audience’s involvement, Ferrari employs a ‘master of ceremonies’ (or ‘Meneur de Jeu’) figure, performed by an actor, who functions as compère, agitator, and arbitrator. The principal role of the Meneur de Jeu is to ensure that the audience is not allowed to ‘cool down into an inactive listening’; they do this by explaining through a megaphone what the audience should be doing at any particular moment, and by describing the evolving course of events in ways that goad audience members into further active involvement. The piece begins with members of the audience shouting out numbers and words, each of which triggers different types of notated musical material performed by pairs of percussionists (Ex. 4.5); as more members of the audience get involved, majority preferences are determined by the Meneur de Jeu. Eventually, Ferrari predicts a measure of chaos in the proceedings, causing the Meneur de Jeu to organise the election of a ‘President’ from within the audience (the percussionists mark this with a parody ‘marche militaire’), who is charged with enacting the popular preference as expressed by the rest of the audience through raised hands, voice, or applause. Ferrari, however, further predicts the rise of eventual discontent with the President, triggering another election, this time of an opposition ‘Leader’—​topically signalled by a burst of Latin American rhythms from the percussionists (Ex. 4.6). Ferrari instructs that ‘the majority must always prevail’, but extra levels of complexity are added as the work proceeds, including the provision of options for the 101 Luc Ferrari, ‘Indications pour le public’, included in the score for Société V. I am grateful to Brunhild Ferrari for generously sharing with me a copy of this unpublished score.

Ex. 4.5  Luc Ferrari, Société V: participation or not participation (1967–​69), parts for percussionists I and V showing options for responding to audience prompts. Reproduced by permission of Brunhild Ferrari

Ex. 4.6  Luc Ferrari, Société V: participation or not participation (1967–​69), ‘Latin’ percussion ensemble to signal election of opposition ‘Leader’. Reproduced by permission of Brunhild Ferrari

140  Musical Models of Democracy percussionists, which allow them to receive the audience’s instructions as general, rather than specific mandates; and the incorporation of an element of dissent between the paired percussionists themselves, intended as the composer put it ‘to unbalance the whole, and create problems and discussions at the level of the protagonists’. The end of the work is left open; as Ferrari writes in the score, there are a variety of possibilities: The opposition leader and the president can be overthrown. There may be a Putsch. The public can decide to occupy the stage. Musicians can then vote to strike. Other possibilities that cannot be imagined theoretically may also arise spontaneously, which can then be proposed to Governments for the solution of their problems.102

Société V adheres to a number of the principles that guide the work of community organisers: it gives a platform for the preferences of individuals; it inducts some of their number into leadership roles; it builds alliances between audience members; and it enables the audience to participate in the musical decision-​making to the extent that the work is, as Ferrari expressed it, open to ‘the unknown’ every night.103 The piece was an expression of Ferrari’s broader interest in cultural participation, which he was pursuing at the time in the role of animateur at the Maison de la Culture in Amiens. This work involved undertaking projects that brought contemporary music to new audiences, in keeping with the Maisons’ core mission of ‘developing’ the cultural tastes of the masses.104 But Ferrari also spearheaded initiatives intended to foster amateur creativity, for instance by encouraging members of local youth groups to experiment with portable recording devices.105 Through this work and his compositions of the time, Ferrari was keen to overturn the standard concert format, challenging the ‘ceremonial, the finely clean separation between the sender and the receiver’.106 102 Ferrari, performance instructions in the printed score for Société V. 103 Ferrari, note on Société V, Luc Ferrari website, http://​luc​ferr​ari.com/​en/​catalo​gue/​1969-​2/​ (accessed 5 April 2021). 104 On the work of the Maisons Culturelles, see Eric Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution, 217–​22. 105 On Ferrari’s work in this field, see ibid., 222–​29. 106 Ferrari, cited in Hansjörg Pauli, Für wen komponieren Sie eigentlich? (S. Fischer, 1971), 52.

Empowering others  141 Ferrari’s interest in enabling the young people of Amiens to ‘become active’107 was filtered through a personal interest in revolutionary socialism. In January 1968 he participated in the Havana Cultural Congress, a gathering of hundreds of intellectuals from around the world that examined the themes of imperialism and cultural development in the Third World, and which acted as a shop window for the new society of Castro’s Cuba. A few months later, he was active on the streets on Paris during the May uprisings, attending the occupied Odéon Theatre and capturing the sounds of street protests on tape.108 This political commitment accounts for the sceptical attitude of Société V towards aspects of representative democracy—​manifested in the musical pomp that accompanies the election of leaders, the manipulations of the ostensibly ‘neutral’ ringmaster, and the contamination of the mechanisms of government (represented by the percussionists) by internal dissent and self-​interest. Democracy is depicted as a game—​the word is used repeatedly in the performance instructions—​and in this respect Société V continues the interest of earlier works in the ‘Société’ series which recreate in music-​ theatrical form ‘social games’ from a wry or sardonic perspective.109 Société V was obviously intended at one level as critical commentary on the participatory failings of representative democracy, as viewed from the perspective of a composer drawn to alternative socialist models. Hence the question posed by the work’s title: ‘participation or not participation’? For all the scrupulous openness of the work’s conclusion, then, which allowed diverse outcomes to be determined by the participants, the work reflected the political outlook of its composer, and accordingly embodied aspirations that could not be assumed to be shared by his audiences. This became vividly evident at the work’s premiere, which took place in July 1969 at the annual summer festival of the Fondation Maeght, a private arts foundation in the wooded hills overlooking Nice. The audience for the event appears not to have welcomed the kinds of empowerment they were offered, and instead took matters into their own hands, noisily refusing the work’s expected modes of participation to the extent that the performance had to be terminated midway.110 Ticket costs were refunded and the repeat performances were cancelled; the work has languished in obscurity ever since. 107 Ferrari, cited in Drott, The Elusive Revolution, 224. 108 Drott, The Elusive Revolution, 223. 109 Luc Ferrari’s official website gives short accounts of the other works in the series; see ‘Catalog’, http://​luc​ferr​ari.com/​en/​catalo​gue/​ (accessed 5 April 2021). 110 Pauli, Für wen komponieren Sie eigentlich?, 149.

142  Musical Models of Democracy Ferrari blamed the fiasco on the ‘bourgeois’ festival audience, with its tutored expectations of finished art objects and attendant ceremonial presentation.111 Implied here is the possibility that the work might have met quite a different reception with a group of Parisian students, or with the young clientele of Amiens’ Maison de la Culture. But the disastrous premiere nonetheless allowed Ferrari to express his satisfaction at how the performance denied the Maeght audience not only the reassuring ceremony of the concert ritual, but also ‘everything that smacked of self-​affirmation’.112 It is here that we see the seamless slippage from emancipatory to corrective rhetoric: participation moves from being something that gives the audience ‘a say’ (as the work’s performance instructions had promised), to being something that deprives it of ‘self-​affirmation’. From the composer’s standpoint, both outcomes could be defended as politically progressive.113 The great irony of this performance was that for all the composer’s antagonism, the audience had in fact taken it upon themselves to do precisely what the composer requested in his performance instructions: ‘to have a say, choose, demand, proclaim, formulate its opinion’. But they did so in opposition to the work, rather than through it. Of all the models of democracy that may be encountered in musical performance, none is more vivid or stark than when an audience takes issue with the premises of a work—​a contestation normally suppressed by the polite formalities of the concert hall. The spectacle of audience protest, stoked on this occasion by Société V, reminds us of some of the key themes of our discussion in this chapter. No vision of equality and inclusion can be offered impartially. The move to empower an audience assumes a view of disadvantage and a view of appropriate remedies. This authorial shaping of participation, which has been widely critiqued as problematic, need not impede kinds of democratic renewal. Yet audiences may prefer to assert preferences that differ from those imagined for them. Some audiences, notably, find their interests best met by the ‘passive’ audiencing the participatory work seeks to overturn. Composers, in turn, have entertained complex motivations for their participatory work, within which the question of where empowerment ends and subordination begins is obstinately difficult to determine.

111 The word is Pauli’s; Für wen komponieren Sie eigentlich?, 51. 112 Ferrari, cited in ibid. 113 On the idea that ‘forcefully entering an existing discourse’ as an ‘uninvited outsider’ may constitute a democratic approach to participation, see Markus Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation (Sternberg Press, 2011).

5 Practising egalitarianism Free improvisation and the limits to inclusive music-​making

Of all the ways in which music might be taken to ‘model democracy’, its perceived capacity to forge equal and inclusive relationships between performers is one of the most widely recognised and valued. This capacity has been particularly associated with small ensembles, where individual musicians often feel they play a distinct role in a broadly egalitarian process of collective decision-​making. There is a long history of conceiving of ensemble performance in this way. In Chapter 1 we saw how the association of jazz with democracy rests on the idea that jazz performance comprises ‘a group of diverse musicians negotiating in time to create a collective expression that reflects the unique personalities and values of each individual for the good of everyone’.1 But stepping back further in time, in the early nineteenth century we find the string quartet being expressly valued for the egalitarian social relations it instantiated in performance. Critics marvelled at how, in amateur quartet playing, ‘the magic of the music makes everyone equal’, producing a ‘four-​in-​one-​ness [Viereinigkeit] in which the unity of the whole and the independence of the four voices set musical limits on each other’. Writing in 1828, A. B. Marx observed how in quartets, ‘one voice follows another freely and flexibly, . . . seeming to give up none of its own content, [even] as it makes every effort not to disturb the free progress of the others’.2 By the mid twentieth-​century, musicians openly characterised this aspect of quartet playing as ‘democratic’, as happened at the Black Mountain College’s 1944 Summer Music Institute, where violinist Rudolf Kolisch named his string quartet workshop ‘Democratic principles in ensemble playing’. The implied 1 ‘Let Freedom Swing: Resource Guide’, Jazz at Lincoln Center (2014), https://​acad​emy.jazz.org/​ wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2014/​09/​14-​15-​Let-​Free​dom-​Swing-​Conc​ert-​Resou​rce-​Guide.pdf (accessed 26 March 2021), 7. 2 Cited in Mary Hunter, ‘ “The most interesting genre of music”: performance, sociability and meaning in the classical string quartet, 1800–​1830’, Nineteenth-​Century Music Review 9 (2012), 53–​ 74: pp. 56, 59, 64.

Musical Models of Democracy. Robert Adlington, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197658819.003.0005

144  Musical Models of Democracy comparison was with the symphony orchestra, of whose performance practice Kolisch was harshly critical in his spoken introduction to the workshop: in orchestras, he proposed, ‘the leader beats and the performer must follow. Every impulse comes from a central power, the performer is reduced to a mere executive organ.’3 Ensemble playing, on the other hand, was for Kolisch ‘not only a musical but also a social activity. As such, it represents in microcosm of musical performance all the sociological and psychological problems of collective work.’4 Since then, it has been common for small musical groups of all kinds to be identified with the idea that they ‘not only symbolize but enact an egalitarian, organic community based on fundamental ethical truths’,5 an arrangement often explicitly labelled ‘democratic’. Ethnographic studies of the working practices of classical chamber groups have found democracy to be a significant value for ensemble musicians, expressed through strategies of shared leadership and a desire to respect each musician’s individual strengths.6 Publicity for present-​day chamber groups has sought to capitalise on this democratic aspect: for instance, a 2014 Lincoln Center YouTube video on the Emerson Quartet pointed to the group’s ‘unique democratic nature’, which allowed all the players to ‘develop programs, rehearse and explore options for interpretation’; and a lecture-​recital given in 2016 by the St. Lawrence String Quartet and entitled ‘Democracy in Action’ promised to illuminate ‘the origins of the quartet as a democratic institution’.7 Studies of amateur rock bands similarly speak of a ‘democratic ethos’ that contrasts with ‘the hierarchical and often impersonal structures’ of school and working life, and which supports band members to ‘work across differences and conflicts, learning

3 Kolisch, workshop introduction, cited in Jonathan Hiam, ‘Reconstructing a “shaken culture”: the re-​emergence of Schoenberg’s Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen at the Black Mountain College Summer Music Institute of 1944’, in Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–​2000, ed. Felix Meyer, et al. (Paul Sacher Foundation, 2014), 233–​43: p. 239. 4 Kolisch, workshop introduction, cited in Helen Molesworth, Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–​1957 (Yale University Press, 2015), 117. 5 Nicholas Cook, Music as Creative Practice (Oxford University Press, 2018), 23. 6 J. Keith Murnighan and Donald E. Conlon, ‘The dynamics of intense work groups: a study of British string quartets’, Administrative Science Quarterly 36, no. 2 (1991), 165–​86: pp. 181, 183; Luan Ford and Jane W. Davidson, ‘An investigation of members’ roles in wind quintets’, Psychology of Music 31, no. 1 (2003), 53–​74; Avi Gilboa and Malka Tal-​Shmotkin, ‘String quartets as self-​managed teams: an interdisciplinary perspective’, Psychology of Music 40, no. 1 (2010), 19–​41. 7 See ‘Democracy in action: St. Lawrence String Quartet plays Haydn’ (2016), Department of Philosophy, Stanford University website, https://​phi​loso​phy.stanf​ord.edu/​eve​nts/​democr​acy-​act​ ion-​st-​lawre​nce-​str​ing-​quar​tet-​plays-​haydn (accessed 8 April 2021); ‘Spotlight On . . . Emerson String Quartet’, Lincoln Center YouTube channel, https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​Bo1U​dh_​G​ Ijg (accessed 8 April 2021).

Practising egalitarianism  145 from the talents and shortcomings of those who make up one’s group, teaching what one does well to others, sharing leadership and followership, and composing music that reflects the makeup of one’s group’.8 As we will see in the course of this chapter, experimental musicians have also explored democratic approaches to ensemble music-​making and management, sometimes with the explicit intention of modelling novel kinds of sociality for the wider world. Whilst the general appeal of democracy as an analogy for ensemble music-​making is clear, the specifics are more typically left unexamined, allowing on the one hand a swathe of musical practices to be associated with an emancipatory politics, and on the other the charge to be levelled that such characterisations represent merely the ‘mythologization of musical community’, brought about by a romanticised view of music’s power to liberate and unite.9 What, in fact, is democratic about ensemble music-​ making, and what measures of inclusivity and equality are afforded therein? To answer these questions, this chapter aims to elaborate a more fine-​ grained picture of the relation of ensemble music-​making and democratic exchange, in an effort to flesh out and problematize the utopian aspirations voiced by musicians and critics over the years. Central to the discussion is the idea that the parallel between ensemble playing and democracy hinges on a specific idea of democracy—​namely, deliberative democracy. In contrast to other models of democracy, deliberative democracy lays emphasis upon discussion, listening, and the attempt to find consensus. It is today receiving growing attention as a means to address public discontent about the systems of electoral representation that have dominated democratic process within modern nation states. Deliberative democrats propose mechanisms such as the citizens’ assembly and ‘mini-​publics’ as means of engaging populations directly with decision-​making, reducing the distance between citizen and legislator, and encouraging a reflective approach to preferences. As I elaborate in the first part of this chapter, deliberative democracy is in many ways a fitting analogy to the conversational, give-​and-​ take sociality valued in small-​scale ensemble music-​making. Yet there are also limits to the parallel, notably the fact that ensemble musicians tend to share a common vision from the outset, and to be disapproving of strong 8 Ruth Finnegan, The Hidden Musicians: Music-​Making in an English Town, 2nd edn (Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 260; Randall Everett Allsup, ‘Popular music and classical musicians: strategies and perspectives’, Music Educators Journal 97, no. 3 (2011), 30–​34: p. 31. 9 Cook, Music as Creative Practice, 26.

146  Musical Models of Democracy assertions of self. In these regards, musical ensembles are poor exemplars of deliberation’s highest aspiration to mediate between those with sharply opposed points of view. Yet not all ensemble music-​making shares this orientation towards a kind of a priori unanimity. For the remainder of the chapter I direct my attention towards the ensemble practice that, more than any other, has sought to reconcile the values of egalitarianism and difference of view: collective free improvisation. Since the early days of the pioneering improvisation collectives in the 1960s, improvising musicians have highlighted the capacity of their music-​ making to accommodate—​even welcome—​difference and disagreement. This has unsurprisingly encouraged both musicians and commentators to make connections with aspects of democratic process. Extending this line of analysis, my discussion brings into focus an apparent paradox: free improvisation is often presented as a practice of almost limitless inclusivity, yet it has also occasioned strong feelings of exclusion and marginalisation amongst individual improvisers. In order to better understand free improvisation’s claims to egalitarianism and inclusivity, I propose that it is productive to take a closer look at critical writing on deliberation. Such writing notes the gap that often exists between deliberative ideals and real-​world democratic groups, and seeks to explain this by highlighting how assumptions about how to participate in a democratic encounter can significantly limit inclusion. By examining the role played by ‘citizenship styles’ within free improvisation, it becomes easier to see how a commitment to difference of view does not necessarily entail a boundless inclusivity. Deliberative theorists’ arguments for expanding the range of sanctioned participation styles also encourages consideration to be given to the potential of group improvisation for exploring not just the cooperative negotiation of difference, but also fundamental disagreements about how to belong.

Ensemble music-​making as democratic deliberation What are the characteristics of small-​ group music-​ making that have suggested a parallel with democracy? We may perceive a number of key qualities that span different genres and musical traditions. First, within small ensembles the individual musician enjoys relative musical autonomy, often having her own part, in contrast to large ensembles where many of the musicians perform in lockstep with others. Second, a relative equality

Practising egalitarianism  147 prevails: stark disparities in musical significance between individual parts are generally avoided, even where there are clear differences in role. Third, individual musicians are expected to share in responsibility for the emerging performance, not leaving the decision-​making to others. Fourth, a premium is placed on mutual awareness, involving careful listening and willingness to accommodate to others. Not all models of democracy prioritise these behaviours. Traditional models of representative democracy, with their distinction between parliamentarians and the electorate, tend to consign direct participation of the majority to occasional elections. Ensemble music-​making, by contrast, requires the direct and continuous involvement of each person, rejecting the assignation of authority to a sub-​group. But so-​called ‘participatory democracy’ also takes different forms. Direct democracy stresses the role of referenda, with policy decisions being decided not by representatives but by a public vote in which all participate. But this model, which is centred on what political theorists term the ‘aggregation of interests’, neglects a key value associated with much ensemble music-​making, namely the arrival at an outcome that reflects the interests of all, rather than just the numerical majority; to this end, individual musicians are expected to remain attentive to, and ready to adapt to, the preferences of others. Referenda may offer an effective barometer of public opinion at a particular moment, but they are not a failsafe mechanism for achieving mutual understanding or reflective decision-​making, let alone consensus.10 Instead, it is deliberative democracy that comes closest to the ideals commonly associated with small-​scale ensemble music-​making. Deliberative democracy places an emphasis upon direct participation in decision-​making, but stresses also the need for listening to others and modifying preferences in the light of other views.11 As theorists Patrick Heller and Vijayendra Rao note, ‘at the most general level, deliberation refers to a process of decision making based on discussion’.12 In deliberation, the individualistic or ‘interest-​based’ model of democracy in which individuals single-​mindedly pursue their own interests is replaced by a more ‘communally-​oriented process’ in which all 10 For a critical perspective on referenda, see Mark Clarence Walker, The Strategic Use of Referendums: Power, Legitimacy, and Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 11 For a stimulating overview, see James S. Fishkin and Jane Mansbridge, eds, ‘The prospects and limits of deliberative democracy’, themed issue of Daedalus 146, no. 3 (2017). 12 Patrick Heller and Vijayendra Rao, ‘Deliberation and development’, in Deliberation and Development: Rethinking the Role of Voice and Collective Action in Unequal Societies, ed. Heller and Rao (World Bank Group, 2015), 1–​26: p. 5.

148  Musical Models of Democracy are enjoined to attend to the opinions and reasoning of others, with the aspiration of arriving at a collective view of the outcome that best serves the interests of all.13 In the words of deliberation theorist Joshua Cohen, the goal of deliberation is ‘to arrive at a rationally motivated consensus’ through reasoned debate and reflection.14 In the process, emphasis is placed upon the weighing of alternatives, and the overcoming of ignorance of others’ points of view.15 The deliberative model thus embodies principles and ideals that have been cherished since the birth of democracy, but which in more recent times were eclipsed by the development of electoral systems deemed suitable for the governance of modern nation states. A prominent voice in the awakening of new interest in deliberation has been the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who since the 1970s has developed a model of democratic deliberation based on ‘communicative rationality’, in which public discussion would give rise to a richer understanding of shared interests and collective agreement based on the strength of ‘the better argument’.16 Subsequent theorists of deliberation have focused upon the potential of ‘mini-​publics’ or citizens’ assemblies, a group of people selected randomly to represent a larger public, and convened specially to consider a complex issue, assisted by professional facilitators and expert witnesses. Governments in Iceland and France have experimented with this model as a means to decide on policies of wide public interest; in Ireland, a citizens’ convention recommended constitutional amendments on subjects including marriage equality and blasphemy, recommendations which were subsequently endorsed in a referendum.17 But deliberative democracy is also encountered in more everyday contexts: for instance, a famous study by political scientist John Gastil examined the deliberative processes deployed in the running of a food cooperative in the United States—​a study to which I will return. Perhaps the most familiar context in

13 Paul Healy, ‘Rethinking deliberative democracy: from deliberative discourse to transformative dialogue’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 37, no. 3 (2011), 295–​311: p. 297. 14 Cohen, cited in John Gastil, Democracy in Small Groups: Participation, Decision Making, and Communication (New Society Publishers, 1993), 25. 15 Jane Mansbridge, ‘A minimalist definition of deliberation’, in Deliberation and Development, ed. Heller and Rao, 27–​50: p. 28; Gastil, Democracy in Small Groups, 24. 16 Habermas, cited in Hélène Landemore, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-​First Century (Princeton University Press, 2020), 37. 17 Landemore offers accounts of these different cases in Open Democracy. On the French Citizens’ Assembly for the Climate, see https://​www.conv​enti​onci​toye​nnep​ourl​ecli​mat.fr/​ (accessed 8 April 2021).

Practising egalitarianism  149 which deliberation plays the leading role in decision-​making is within juries for criminal trials.18 The model of deliberative democracy, with its emphasis upon participation, listening and respectful exchange, seems an attractive one for conceptualising the kinds of relationships found in small ensembles. But how far does the analogy extend? To answer this question, it is helpful to draw upon empirical research into ensemble interaction, both in rehearsal and performance contexts. As might be expected, this research generally affirms that equality is a core value within small ensembles. An influential study of string quartets’ working practices concluded that quartets comprise ‘self-​managed teams’—​in other words, they eschew hierarchical leadership structures in favour of ‘pluralistic working patterns’, in which ‘team members share or rotate leadership and hold themselves mutually responsible and accountable for a set of performance goals’.19 As this suggests, the concept of leadership is not abandoned in classical chamber performance—​a coordinating presence is frequently needed for both musical and logistical reasons—​but leadership is assigned flexibly on an ‘as needed basis’, and ‘dictatorial and controlling personalities’ are generally regarded as out of place.20 Importantly, the emphasis on shared leadership refers not just to musicians’ discussions, where one might expect to find moments of democratic deliberation over differences of opinion, but encompasses the music-​making itself. Performance researchers have increasingly emphasised the ‘collaborative [and] distributed . . . character of the creative process in music’,21 in recognition of the way that ensemble musicians share in the decision-​making during performance. Research on small-​group performance highlights not only equality but also processes of exchange. These take many forms. Rehearsals are often characterised by the sharing of different opinions about interpretation and performance strategy; such ‘interpersonal negotiation’ may be conducted 18 See John Gastil and Dennis Hale, ‘The jury system as a cornerstone of deliberative democracy’, in The Cambridge Handbook of Deliberative Constitutionalism, ed. Ron Levy, et al. (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 233–​45. 19 Gilboa and Tal-​Shmotkin, ‘String quartets as self-​managed teams’, 33, 21. 20 Ibid., 33. 21 Eric F. Clarke and Mark Doffman, ‘Introduction and overview’, in Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music, ed. Clarke and Doffman (Oxford University Press, 2017), 1–​18: p. 2. The term ‘distributed creativity’ gained currency thanks to R. Keith Sawyer and Stacy DeZutter, ‘Distributed creativity: how collective creations emerge from collaboration’, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 3, no. 2 (2009), 81–​92; in this study, the collaborative nature of the creative process, ‘with each participant contributing equally’, is highlighted (p. 82).

150  Musical Models of Democracy through verbal discussion, in a manner familiar to other deliberative contexts, but it is also pursued musically through trial-​and-​error experimentation in which the ideas of individuals are tested through playing.22 When it comes to the public performance of notated repertoire, key decisions have generally been agreed in advance; but there remains space for a conversational or dialogical dynamic in determining matters of detail and ensuring that a performance retains elements of spontaneity.23 Indeed, conversation is one of the most persistent and long-​established tropes for ensemble music-​ making spanning a wide range of genres. The conception of chamber music as civilised conversation dates back at least to the eighteenth century, and it remains a mainstay of critical commentary on the string quartet in particular.24 The relevance of conversation for improvised musics has also regularly been remarked upon. As Ingrid Monson summarises, it is the view of many musicians that ‘good jazz improvisation is sociable and interactive just like a conversation; a good player communicates with the other players in the band. If this doesn’t happen, it’s not good jazz.’25 The freedoms enabled by improvisation allow this conversational aspect to extend beyond the realm of interpretative nuance to encompass also an element of evaluation—​ thereby deepening the parallel with deliberation. In musical improvisation, Keith Sawyer proposes, ‘each member of the ensemble constantly suggests new musical motifs, concepts, styles, and moods . . . . And each musician’s new idea is subject to a social process of evaluation; the entire group collectively determines whether it will be accepted into the emergent, ongoing performance.’26 In these various ways, the parallel with democratic deliberation is grounded in specifics of musicians’ practice. Alongside these parallels, however, are 22 R. Keith Sawyer, ‘Music and conversation’, in Musical Communication, ed. Dorothy Miell, Raymond MacDonald, and David J. Hargreaves (Oxford University Press, 2005), 45–​60: p. 54; Aaron Williamon and Jane W. Davidson, ‘Exploring co-​performer communication’, Musicae Scientiae 6, no. 1 (2002), 53–​72: p. 59; Cook, Music as Creative Practice, 42, 44. 23 Jane W. Davidson and James M.M. Good, ‘Social and musical co-​ordination between members of a string quartet: an exploratory study’, Psychology of Music 30 (2002), 186–​201; Elaine King and Anthony Gritten, ‘Dialogue and beyond: communication and interaction in ensemble performance’, in Musicians in the Making: Pathways to Creative Performance, ed. John Rink, Helena Gaunt and Aaron Williamon (Oxford University Press, 2017), 306–​21. 24 Edward Klorman, Mozart’s Music of Friends: Social Interplay in the Chamber Works (Cambridge University Press, 2016), c­ hapter 2; Mara Parker, The String Quartet, 1750–​1797: Four Types of Musical Conversation (Ashgate, 2002); Hans-​ Joachim Bracht, ‘Überlegungen zum Quartett–​ Gesprach’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 51, no. 3 (1994), 169–​89. 25 Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 84. See also Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (University of Chicago Press, 1994), ­chapter 13. 26 R. Keith Sawyer, ‘Music and conversation’, 55.

Practising egalitarianism  151 limitations. In the first place it must be recognised that individuals who come together to make music generally do so because they already share some fundamental affinity with their co-​performers. While negotiation of differences is, as we have seen, an intrinsic element of much ensemble performance, these differences are typically limited in scope, even as they may occasionally give rise to passing conflict and antagonism.27 High levels of consensus can usually be assumed as a starting point for musicians’ collaboration—​in contrast to the situation that faces many deliberative discussions, where participants may be separated by sharp differences in belief, background, and outlook, and agreement is a hoped-​for goal rather than a point of departure. Ensembles often form around established friendships or common musical tastes, determining a measure of solidarity and common purpose from the start. The strength of loyalty and kinship within well-​established groups has often been likened to that of a family.28 Many performance traditions additionally impose conventions to which all musicians feel committed—​ whether this takes the form of loyalty to a composer’s score, established protocols for interaction, or other conventions of form and style.29 In their classic ethnographic study of twenty string quartets, Keith Murnighan and Donald Conlon note how the tensions that inevitably arises in small groups are held in check because ‘for string quartets . . . the task is so inspiring by itself that diversity and conflict become a secondary and relatively inconsequential interference’.30 Musical ensembles also typically feel responsibility to their audiences or to the expectations of an employer, further inclining the group encounter towards singleness of purpose from the outset. In certain musical contexts, successful ensemble performance may even be predicated upon the suspension of musicians’ individuality. Garry Hagberg highlights how in jazz ensemble playing, individual intentions are set aside in favour of the forging of a kind of ‘collective intentionality’, in which participants merge (as it were) into a ‘joint person’, the music consequently seeming to take on a ‘life of its own’.31 His analogy is with the process of two friends agreeing to take a walk, as described by the philosopher Margaret 27 On warring bands and string quartets, see also Cook, Music as Creative Practice, 25, 28, 45. 28 Deena Weinstein, ‘Creativity and band dynamics’, in This Is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at Experience Music Project, ed. Eric Weisbard (Harvard University Press, 2004), 187–​99. 29 Cook, Music as Creative Practice, 67; see also Jane Ginsborg, ‘Small ensembles in rehearsal’, in Musicians in the Making, ed. Rink, Gaunt, and Williamon, 164–​85: p. 171. As Paul Hopkins of the Emerson Quartet expresses it: ‘the music is boss’; cited in ‘Spotlight On . . . Emerson String Quartet’. 30 Murnighan and Conlon, ‘The dynamics of intense work groups’, 183. 31 Garry L. Hagberg, ‘The ensemble as plural subject: jazz improvisation, collective intention and group agency’, in Distributed Creativity, ed. Clarke and Doffman, 300–​13: p. 304.

152  Musical Models of Democracy Gilbert, in which the acceptance of the invitation creates ‘an intentional entity of a kind that cannot be reduced to two independent intentions to walk’ but instead takes the form of ‘a kind of assiduous perceptual acuity across the span of the joint or collective intention’.32 Other researchers of group performance have highlighted this ‘collective intentional entity’, writing variously of ‘shared intentionality’, ‘empathetic attunement’, ‘self-​other merging’, and ‘collaborative emergence’.33 What all of these ideas share is the sense that group music-​making frequently involves setting aside the personal differences that animate democratic debate. In the jazz traditions that Hagberg considers, for instance, it is ‘unthinkable that a player would . . . declare a belligerent independence’, for such an expression of personal interests would be counter to the production of the ‘plural agent’ selflessly produced by the collective.34 Put more simply, musicians in an ensemble appear ready to relegate their own preferences and interests, and instead to act according to ‘what the music wants’.35

Embracing difference: Group free improvisation as deliberative democracy Unanimity and the suspension of individual interests characterise much small-​group music-​making, but not all. In evaluating how small ensembles might constitute models of democracy, it is instructive to turn to the case of group free improvisation, precisely because of the way in which it has historically embraced the idea of interpersonal difference.36 Originating in diverse 32 Hagberg, ‘The ensemble as plural subject’, 302, 303. For an overview of the philosophical concept of ‘shared agency’, including Gilbert’s writings, see Roth, ‘Shared Agency’ (2017), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://​plato.stanf​ord.edu/​entr​ies/​sha​red-​age​ncy/​ (accessed 8 April 2021). 33 Murphy McCaleb, Embodied Knowledge in Ensemble Performance (Routledge, 2016), 91; Frederick A. Seddon, ‘Modes of communication during jazz improvisation’, British Journal of Music Education 22, no. 1 (2005), 47–​61; Peter E. Keller, Giacomo Novembre, and Janeen Loehr, ‘Musical ensemble performance: representing self, other, and joint action outcomes’, in Shared Representations: Sensorimotor Foundations of Social Life, ed. Sukhvinder S. Obhi and Emily S. Cross (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 280–​310; Matthias Haenisch, ‘Emergence: on a theoretical term in current improvisation research’, in Echtzeitmusik Berlin: Self-​Defining a Scene, ed. Burkhard Beins et al. (Wolke, 2011), 187–​201: p. 192; see also Sawyer and DeZutter, ‘Distributed creativity’, 82. 34 Hagberg, ‘The ensemble as plural subject’, 308. 35 David Borgo, ‘What the music wants’, in Soundweaving: Writings on Improvisation, ed. Franziska Schroeder and Mícheál Ó hAodha (Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 33–​51. 36 The category of ‘free improvisation’ has been the subject of considerable debate, with the connotations of the ‘free’ designation and the implied distinction with ‘free jazz’ proving particularly contentious; see Simon Fell, ‘Inventing the iceberg: exploring Derek Bailey’s dichotomic taxonomy’, Contemporary Music Review 38, no. 5 (2019), 504–​17; George E. Lewis, ‘Gittin’ To

Practising egalitarianism  153 musical scenes of the mid-​1960s that were committed to liberty from social and artistic strictures, free improvisation has been widely understood by practitioners and commentators as embodying ‘the values of freedom and egalitarianism’.37 In particular, improvisers have underlined the inclusivity and openness that come from dispensing with such confining concerns as the demands of a composer, a fixed score, stylistic norms, and market success. As Ritwik Banerji summarises the key tenets of collective free improvisation: No player acts as leader. Players are unfettered by the external direction of a composer, unmoored from any commitment to upholding conventions of genre or tradition, and without an obligation to organize their playing around parameters like form, harmony, or pulse. Ideally, each player hears that other players are listening, able to sense the impact of their sonic activities in how others play. At the same time, each player also feels independence from their partners, neither needing to, let alone always able to, control or guide how others play through sonic suggestions alone.38

As this indicates, the conditions of free improvisation liberate musicians not just from higher controlling powers, but also from a priori obligations to each other. For David Toop, the corollary of improvisation’s ‘spurning [of] reliance on tradition, established forms or hierarchies of labour’ and its lack of ‘plans, rules or protocols of any kind other than the act of playing through listening’

Know Y’all: improvised music, interculturalism, and the racial imagination’, Critical Studies in Improvisation 1, no. 1 (2004), https://​www.cri​tica​limp​rov.com/​index.php/​csi​eci/​arti​cle/​view/​6/​ 15 (accessed 8 April 2021). Alternative labels have been widely used, including ‘non-​idiomatic improvisation’, ‘spontaneous music’, and ‘transatlantic improvised music’; see respectively Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (Da Capo Press, 1992); Alvin Curran, ‘On spontaneous music’, Contemporary Music Review 25, nos. 5–​6 (2006), 483–​90; Scott Currie, ‘The other side of here and now: cross-​cultural reflections on the politics of improvisation studies’, Critical Studies in Improvisation 11, nos. 1–​2 (2016), https://​www.cri​tica​limp​rov.com/​index.php/​csi​eci/​arti​cle/​view/​ 3750 (accessed 10 April 2021). I persist with ‘free improvisation’ for its wide currency, and use it to denote a broad swathe of musicking that conforms to the description by Ritwik Banerji included in this paragraph. As will become clear in the course of this chapter, I share the view of others that this category encompasses a number of quite distinct practices. 37 Ritwik Banerji, ‘Phenomenologies of egalitarianism in free improvisation: a virtual performer meets its critics’ (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2018), 1. On the role of egalitarianism for free jazz and improvisation collectives of the 1960s, see David Borgo, ‘Negotiating freedom: values and practices in contemporary improvised music’, Black Music Research Journal 22, no. 2 (2002), 165–​88: p. 167; Nicholas Gebhardt, ‘Introduction: jazz as a collective problem’, in The Cultural Politics of Jazz Collectives: This Is Our Music, ed. Nicholas Gebhardt and Tony Whyton (Routledge, 2015), 1–​15; Michael C. Heller, Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s (University of California Press, 2016), 103–​5. 38 Banerji, ‘Phenomenologies of egalitarianism in free improvisation’, 1.

154  Musical Models of Democracy is that individual performers must ‘forego the option of telling others what to do or entraining them to [their] purpose’.39 Arising from this scenario, Toop argues, is the possibility of ‘a collective, dialogical practice that embraced rather than suppressed dissent, idiosyncrasy and independence’.40 The idea that free improvisation celebrates rather than irons out difference has become a mainstay of literature on the genre. Free improvisation’s ‘most remarkable characteristic’, writes David Borgo, is its ‘ability to incorporate and negotiate disparate perspectives and worldviews’.41 Others highlight free improvisation’s ‘respect for individuality and resulting differences of viewpoint’;42 its ‘accommodation of diverse outlooks, perspectives, styles, ontologies, and sounds’;43 and its capacity to ‘incorporate disagreements . . . as long as each allows the other room and recognises their existence. It’s like a . . . non-​verbal debate.’44 In contrast to ensemble practices that demand a suspension of self, David Toop observes, free improvisation ‘allows me the range of my character’ and ‘in communality with others who are also experiencing that self-​allowance I can go beyond the edges of my character’.45 In sum, Jason Stanyek proposes, in privileging ‘the dialogic, the heterogeneous, the spontaneous and the incommensurable’, free improvisation ‘is less a type of music with a definable sound-​scape than it is a set of strategies deployed by musicians to engender a very inclusive space for music making’.46 This emphasis upon difference and inclusivity has encouraged the drawing of close parallels with democracy—​and the principles of deliberative democracy in particular. Martin Gansinger takes the ‘ideal speech situation’ theorised by Habermas as a starting point for his investigation into the communicative potential of free improvisation. He notes Habermas’s ‘rule of openness’, which requires that

39 David Toop, Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom (Bloomsbury, 2015), 15, 2. 40 Ibid., 263. 41 Borgo, ‘Negotiating freedom’, 167. 42 Tracey Nicholls, An Ethics of Improvisation: Aesthetic Possibilities for a Political Future (Lexington Books, 2012), 147. 43 Jason Stanyek, ‘Transmissions of an interculture: pan-​African jazz and intercultural improvisation’, in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 87–​130: p. 106. 44 Evan Parker, cited in Richard Scott, ‘Noises: free music, improvisation and the avant-​garde; London 1965 to 1990’ (PhD thesis, London School of Economics, 1991), 257. 45 Toop, Into the Maelstrom, 2. 46 Jason Stanyek, cited in Martin A. M. Gansinger, Zur Kommunkation in kollektiv improvisierter Musik: Kommunikationstheoretische under interkulturelle Aspekte (Südwestdeutscher Verlag für Hochschulschriften. 2010), 249.

Practising egalitarianism  155 (3.1) Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in a discourse. (3.2) a. Everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever. b. Everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the discourse. c. Everyone is allowed to express his attitudes, desires, and needs. (3.3) No speaker may be prevented by internal or external coercion, from exercising his rights a laid down in (3.1) and (3.2).47

On the basis of these stipulates, Gansinger proposes that ‘the musical method of collective improvisation . . . suggests a communication structure that shows astonishing parallels with the ideal speech situation formulated by Habermas’.48 Indeed, for Gansinger, musical improvisation enjoys advantages over verbal communication in this regard. Freed from ‘the characteristic linear sequence’ and the ‘functional obligations’ characteristic of verbal discussion, musical improvisation is better placed to ensure the equal distribution of speech acts hypothesised by Habermas, and to ‘prevent those involved from being restricted in their ability to express themselves’.49 Music also affords a semantic ‘flexibility’ compared to spoken language, a quality that is especially advantageous in the context of intercultural communication.50 For Gansinger, improvised music’s lack of formal discourse structure and its semantic indeterminacy give rise to a ‘democratization of the possibilities of expression [that] ultimately ensures that each individual contribution is equally important’.51 Collective improvisation is in this way able to present ‘an actual image of social reality due to the unrestricted unfolding of relationships between the actors involved, which does not always correspond to the ideal of harmony, but is all the more able to enable the greatest possible individual freedom without the restriction of power structures’.52 Deliberative democracy also provides the cornerstone for Tracey Nicholls’ book An Ethics of Improvisation. Observing that ‘improvisation, as a musical practice, is almost always necessarily pluralist, drawing from a variety of 47 Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Polity Press, 1995), 89; these sentences are quoted in Gansinger, Zur Kommunkation in kollektiv improvisierter Musik, 132. 48 Gansinger, Zur Kommunkation in kollektiv improvisierter Musik, 133 (all English translations are mine). 49 Ibid., 162, 193. 50 Ibid., 225. 51 Ibid., 191. 52 Ibid., 186.

156  Musical Models of Democracy traditions and influences’, Nicholls seeks to elaborate ‘the shared concerns of deliberative democracy theory and improvisatory aesthetics’.53 Her point of theoretical orientation is not Habermas, but his contemporary and regular interlocutor Charles Taylor, whose writings have critiqued Habermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’ as problematic within multicultural contexts. Building on the Hegelian argument that identity is dependent on recognition by others, Taylor has argued that social justice inheres more in the visibility and parity of participation of each individual than in the laying down of rules of engagement, which may work to exclude or compromise expressions of difference. Nicholls accordingly dwells on the value of ‘a discursive space in which recognition of differences is given as high a priority as the potential for developing consensus’, and elaborates at length on the potential of group improvisation for creating such a space.54 Her larger aim is to enquire into the relevance of group improvisation for political community-​building, and specifically the link that may be drawn ‘between principles governing improvisation and possibilities for the development of radically democratic, inclusive political communities’.55 The approaches taken by improvisers, she proposes, may be fruitful in overcoming some of the impasses familiar from democratic discussions in the political field—​for instance, by disavowing the preplanning that can advantage certain parties over others, and by foregrounding the act of listening as a gesture of trust to all involved. Nicholls’s book developed in tandem with her involvement in the project ‘Improvisation, Community and Social Practice’ (ICASP), which ran at the University of Guelph from 2007 to 2013. This project explored the idea that ‘musical improvisation is a crucial, largely unexamined model for political, cultural, and ethical dialogue and action’, because of the way in which it advances ‘new, socially responsive forms of community-​building across national, cultural, and artistic boundaries’.56 Inspired by the activist and communitarian orientations of many of the founding improvisation collectives of the 1960s, ICASP sought to explore how improvisatory dynamics could form the basis for a revival of ‘the broader rights project of promoting a culture of collective responsibility, dispersed authority, and self-​active democracy’.57 The project leaders approached improvisation as addressing the 53 Nicholls, An Ethics of Improvisation, 5, 101. 54 Ibid., 57, 5–​6. 55 Ibid., 103. 56 Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (Duke University Press, 2013), 191. 57 Ibid., 198.

Practising egalitarianism  157 twenty-​first-​century need for ‘new forms of political education and practice that will deepen the democratic strata of social life, that will help people become accustomed to deliberative talk and face-​to-​face decision-​making, that will sharpen our senses of solidarity and teach us to work together democratically and productively’.58 A key element of ICASP’s programme was to convene improvisation workshops bringing together musicians from varied cultural backgrounds in order to investigate how improvisatory processes could enable interaction across social divides. The capacity of such ad hoc groups to create ‘inspired and compelling music’ lent confidence to the project hypothesis that musical improvisation could provide answers to key questions about ‘what it means to negotiate differences within a community, what it means to be living in a multicultural society’, and the nature of ‘trust, humility, responsibility, critical listening, reciprocity, and social cooperation’.59 It is, in other words, precisely through its capacity to recognise difference that ICASP cast improvisation as ‘a democratic, humane, and emancipatory practice’.60

Addressing free improvisation’s exclusions Such accounts have cemented the view of free improvisation as a domain of inclusivity, capable of embracing difference and granting rights of equal participation to all. In valuing difference of outlook as a premise for ensemble music-​making, free improvisation undoubtedly mirrors the dynamic that initiates deliberative democratic discussion. Yet the picture of boundless inclusivity is complicated by historical testimony from improvising musicians that bears witness to experiences of marginalisation and exclusion. These experiences have often coalesced around the vectors of gender and race. The Feminist Improvising Group (FIG), founded in 1977, arose in response to ‘experiences of delegitimization and exclusion’ on the part of women improvisers when participating in male-​dominated improvisation groups. Such exclusion took the form of micro-​and macro-​aggressions within the music-​making itself, manifested (in the words of FIG member Georgina Born) as



58 Ibid., xxv.

59 Ibid., 194. 60 Ibid., 191.

158  Musical Models of Democracy tiny instants or sustained passages of interactive sonic domination in which our musical ‘voice’ was rendered somehow inappropriate, or was overwhelmed and could not emerge or be heard, or in which the dynamics of turn-​taking seemed to be strenuously competitive or masculinized and to exclude other modes of musical mutuality, relation, or being.61

As Julie Dawn Smith has written, the creation of FIG demonstrated that ‘free improvisation was not free of masculinist tendencies, heterosexual expectations, or immune to gender anxieties’. These biases led to the marginalisation of women both within improvisation groups and on festival programmes.62 Limits to free improvisation’s much-​vaunted values of inclusivity have continued to be experienced by women improvisers, generating calls to ‘feminist’ free improvisation by challenging the ‘masculine individualism’ celebrated within the free improvisation canon, and to develop women-​only performance spaces as a means of enabling exploration of alternative paradigms of freedom to those favoured in male-​dominated improvisation contexts.63 George Lewis documents another kind of uncomfortable encounter between improvisers in his article ‘Gittin’ to know y’all: Improvised music, interculturalism and the racial imagination’. The 1969 Baden-​Baden Free Jazz Meeting saw what Lewis describes as ‘the first extensively documented musical collaboration’ between European and North American improvising musicians. Both communities were ostensibly committed to a non-​ exclusionary pluralism. The annual Free Jazz Meeting had been launched in 1966 as ‘an international summit of Europe’s top improvisers’;64 Lewis 61 Georgina Born, ‘After relational aesthetics: improvised music, the social, and (re)theorizing the aesthetic’, in Improvisation and Social Aesthetics, ed. Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw (Duke University Press, 2017), 33–​58: p. 54. 62 Julie Dawn Smith, ‘Playing like a girl: the queer laughter of the Feminist Improvising Group’, in The Other Side of Nowhere, ed. Fischlin and Heble, 224–​43: p. 239; Dana L. Reason Myers, ‘The myth of absence: representation, reception and the music of experimental women improvisors’ (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2002). 63 Hannah Reardon-​Smith, Louise Denson, and Vanessa Tomlinson, ‘Feministing free improvisation’, Tempo 292 (2020), 10–​20; Susan Fitzpatrick and Marie Thompson, ‘Making space: an exchange about women and the performance of free noise’, Women and Performance 25, no. 2 (2015), 237–​ 48. For further documentation of women improvisers’ experiences, see Sherrie Tucker, ‘Bordering on community: improvising women improvising women-​in-​jazz’, in The Other Side of Nowhere, ed. Fischlin and Heble, 244–​67; Marc Hannaford, ‘Subjective (re)positioning in musical improvisation: analysing the work of five female improvisers’, Music Theory Online 23, no. 2 (2017), https://​ mto​smt.org/​iss​ues/​mto.17.23.2/​mto.17.23.2.hannaf​ord.html (accessed 10 April 2021); Tina Krekels, ‘Loosening the saxophone: entanglements of bodies in the politics of free improvisation’ (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2018). 64 Paul Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 130.

Practising egalitarianism  159 describes how the European organisers adopted a ‘diplomatic model in presenting opportunities for intercultural unity . . . while framing improvisation itself as a site for musical and cultural exchange’. A similar commitment to inclusivity was expressed by Leo Smith on behalf of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), who had travelled from Chicago for the occasion; speaking to a reporter he explained that ‘we [i.e. AACM musicians] want to integrate all forms of music . . . Everything and anything is valid’. Despite these aspirations to openness from both European and American participants, the gathering exposed what Lewis terms ‘a vast aesthetic, methodological, social, cultural, and sonic gulf separating the two avant-​gardes’.65 The culminating event was a performance coordinated by AACM’s Lester Bowie that brought together every instrumentalist at the meeting in a sequence of ensemble improvisations, ‘each musical configuration representing the kind of intercultural exchange that Joachim Ernst Berendt, the meeting’s organizer, had hoped to facilitate’.66 Yet critics observed the splintering of the group during the performance, the Americans ‘separating themselves’ as an ‘inseparable brotherhood’, and eventually forming a seemingly ‘unapproachable clique’.67 Lewis casts the performance as reflecting the collision of ‘two very different ideologies and methodologies of music-​making’, defined by different conceptions of the oppressions from which ‘freedom’ was to be sought: while the Europeans centred the tyranny of notation and conventionalised idioms, the Chicagoans prioritised ‘the silencing of black perspectives’, not least through restrictive ‘notions of what American free music should sound like’.68 Lewis notes how, following this event, similar collaborations between AACM and European improvisers remained ‘very limited’, reflecting fundamental differences over how to practise an emancipated music.69 What is to be made of such experiences, in light of the wider claims about improvisation’s inclusivity? On the one hand, openness to difference is brandished as a core value of improvised music, meriting the comparisons that we have charted with deliberative democratic process. On the other, it seems that the actual practice of group improvisation has been characterised by the marking out of boundaries that work to exclude. Granted, such

65 Lewis, ‘Gittin’ To Know Y’all’, 12–​13.

66 Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 131. 67 Lewis, ‘Gittin’ To Know Y’all’, 14. 68 Ibid., 15, 17. 69 Ibid., 20.

160  Musical Models of Democracy experiences of exclusion may well be the exception rather than the norm; many improvisation groups have successfully brought together musicians of different genders, ethnicities, and sociocultural backgrounds, and improvisation has been used expressly as a tool to celebrate diversity.70 It could be argued that a distinction simply needs to be drawn between ‘undemocratic’ improvisation contexts in which experiences of exclusion or marginalisation arise, and ‘democratic’ ones, where equal participation is afforded to all. Yet recent theoretical writings on deliberation suggest the merits of a different reading. What these experiences of disappointment on the part of improvisers point to is a larger truth about deliberative democracy: namely, that an expressed commitment to the inclusion of difference does not preclude expectations about styles of interaction that favour kinds of sameness. Democratic theorists have increasingly realised that the ‘level playing field’ of deliberative exchange is not level at all, because the process of deliberation supposes certain capabilities that are unevenly distributed within any population. All manner of individual and social factors affect the different capacities that individuals possess, or are afforded, to communicate their opinions in any democratic context. As a result, any notionally inclusive situation faces profound challenges in trying to transcend inequality. The uneven ground affecting deliberative process manifests itself in different ways, and has been analysed from different perspectives. John Gastil’s classic study Democracy in Small Groups begins with a key question: ‘are the interests of all group members considered equal?’71 His book presents a detailed analysis of the management meetings of a food cooperative in Madison, Wisconsin. While equality was the declared aspiration of these meetings, it was persistently undermined by factors that were difficult if not impossible to eliminate. In particular, the different skills and personal histories of the individuals involved tended to stymy the equality after which the group strived. Individuals possessed varying speaking competences and communication styles, including differing levels of confidence to interrupt or redefine the discussion.72 They also differed in their desire to lead, willingness to follow, readiness to compromise or change views, and their attitudes towards

70 For an overview, see Franziska Schroeder, Koichi Samuels, and Rebecca Caines, eds, ‘Improvisation and Social Inclusion’, themed issue of Contemporary Music Review 38, no. 5 (2019). 71 Gastil, Democracy in Small Groups, 8. 72 Ibid., 111. See also Iris Marion Young, ‘Communication and the other: beyond deliberative democracy’, in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton University Press, 1996), 120–​35: pp. 122–​24.

Practising egalitarianism  161 assent and conflict.73 Individuals varied in their ability to sustain attention and alertness across a discussion; this mattered in the case of the co-​op because the meetings tended to be very long.74 Decision-​making was further disturbed by dynamics established ‘outside the room’, including factions and claques forged between meetings.75 Such asymmetries were in practice impossible to eliminate from the group discussion, creating perceptions of differentials in standing between group members. As many democratic theorists now recognise, such imbalances in deliberative capacity express wider social and economic inequalities. ‘Proponents of deliberative democracy’, Monique Deveaux writes, ‘have long acknowledged that social and economic inequalities negatively impact people’s deliberative capacities and standing’.76 In contrast to Habermas’s supposition that deliberation embodies ‘the power-​free flow of communication’ guided by universal standards of rationality,77 it is today widely accepted that deliberation typically takes place in ‘situations in which power massively structures the deliberative field in ways inimical to some of the parties’ interests’.78 Socially marginalised groups often face challenges in adopting ‘the modes of communication assumed or stipulated by norms of deliberative democracy’, which have historically prioritised ‘ “rationalist” forms of discourse that privilege dispassionate argumentation, logical coherence, and evidence-​based claims’.79 Structural inequalities in society may also mean that some people’s experiences, worldviews, or values are ‘dismissed or “discounted” ’.80 Further asymmetries are created by participants’ physical appearance; as Arthur Lupia and Anne Norton put it, ‘we have spoken before we speak’, on account of our ethnicity, age, gender, the clothes we wear, and our general comportment.81 The space used for deliberation, too, can play a 73 Gastil, Democracy in Small Groups, 113. Carmen Sirianni has written on these same problems as they affected feminist groups in the 1970s; ‘Learning pluralism: democracy and diversity in feminist organizations’, Nomos 35 (1993), 283–​312. 74 Gastil, Democracy in Small Groups, 104. For a stimulating discussion of the implications of disability for deliberative democracy, see Stacy Clifford, ‘Making disability public in deliberative democracy’, Contemporary Political Theory 11, no. 2 (2012), 211–​28. 75 Gastil, Democracy in Small Groups, 106–​7. 76 Monique Deveaux, ‘Deliberative democracy and multiculturalism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, ed. André Bächtiger et al. (Oxford University Press, 2018), 156–​70: p. 157. 77 Habermas, cited in Jane Mansbridge et al., ‘The place of self-​interest and the role of power in deliberative democracy’, Journal of Political Philosophy 18, no. 1 (2010), 64–​100: p. 80 n. 42. 78 Mansbridge, ‘A minimalist definition of deliberation’, 37. 79 Deveaux, ‘Deliberative democracy and multiculturalism’, 158; Nicole Curato et al., ‘Twelve key findings in deliberative democracy research’, Daedalus 146, no. 3 (2017), 28–​38: p. 30. 80 Iris Marion Young, cited in Deveaux, ‘Deliberative democracy and multiculturalism’, 158. 81 Arthur Lupia and Anne Norton, ‘Inequality is always in the room: language and power in deliberative democracy’, Daedalus 146, no. 3 (2017), 64–​76: p. 68.

162  Musical Models of Democracy role; Lupia and Norton note that ‘there is no neutral, unspeaking space’, because of the different associations that particular buildings and venues will have for participants, meaning that ‘inequality is in the room even before the deliberators enter’.82 The particular history of a democratic group may also have effects on deliberative process. In her tellingly titled book Freedom is an Endless Meeting, Francesca Polletta discusses a number of American social movements of the 1960s that aimed at radically democratic modes of self-​organisation. She lays particular emphasis upon how the circumstances of a group’s founding imposed kinds of constraint upon its professed commitment to equality. Polletta’s research identifies ‘three main deliberative styles’ shaped by whether a group originated in a friendship circle, an educational context, or a religious fellowship.83 Each style was conditioned by what Polletta terms ‘microinteractional’ norms that influenced how groups ‘framed questions and answers, considered options, dealt with conflict, distinguished insides and outsides, and sought participants’ compliance in enacting decisions’.84 These norms formed unspoken ‘rules behind the rules’, skewing the decision-​ making process and imposing limits on groups’ capacity to accommodate the preferences of all. Polletta writes of ‘differences in “tastes” for organizational styles’, which often produced the very imbalances in status that these notionally egalitarian groups wished to overcome.85 Polletta proposes that, at best, these groups manifested a ‘complex equality’, a formulation that recognises both ‘the different skills, talents, and interests’ brought by individuals to a group, but also the inevitable interference of contextual factors which worked to exclude or disadvantage.86 A crucial theoretical observation emerges from these studies, which is of consequence for any reflection on the egalitarian aspiration. This is that equal and inclusive exchange has to reckon with two levels of difference. It must recognise not just differences of opinion or interest, but also differences in preferred ways of communicating those opinions and interests—​differences, in other words, over the manner of participation in the democratic encounter. In the field of deliberative theory, this has been reflected in the emergence of a distinction between what André Bächtiger terms Type I and 82 Ibid., 69. 83 Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 17–​18. 84 Ibid., 222, 147. 85 Ibid., 216. 86 Ibid., viii.

Practising egalitarianism  163 Type II deliberation (sometimes referred to as ‘first’ and ‘second generation’ theory).87 Type I represents the ‘classic’ model of deliberation described at the start of this chapter: the sharing and negotiation of differences of opinion through rational discussion, aimed at achieving a consensus. Type II deliberation tries to recognise the fact that, as has just been discussed, ‘background inequities in resources, status, and other forms of privilege upset the communicative equality that deliberation requires’.88 Type II deliberation delineates approaches that strive ‘to broaden the scope for admissible forms of speech’, in recognition of the spectrum of ‘discursive modes’, ‘citizenship styles’, and ‘plurality of speech cultures’ that exists amongst people from different backgrounds.89 Type II theorists have sought to identify approaches to deliberative process that impartially accommodate not just a community’s different views on particular outcomes or courses of action, but also the different approaches that community members might take to participation in the decision-​making process. Iris Marion Young’s concept of ‘communicative democracy’, for instance, argues for ‘an equal privileging of any forms of communicative interaction where people aim to reach understanding’, in which the formalities of rational argument may be ‘interspersed with or [set] alongside other communicative forms’.90 For Young, this may include the involvement of things such as rhetoric, humour, storytelling, gossip, and greeting. Other theorists have gone further, exploring non-​verbal communicative forms, including dance, visual images, and a fuller recognition of the embodied aspects of all face-​to-​face encounters.91 Inclusivity towards participatory styles is necessary, Type II theorists contend, for the full realisation of democracy’s wider ideals, especially its attentiveness to difference.92 By bringing these perspectives back to our consideration of free improvisation, it becomes easier to see how a practice can both champion an 87 André Bächitger et al., ‘Disentangling diversity in deliberative democracy: competing theories, their blind spots and complementarities’, Journal of Political Philosophy 18, no. 1 (2010), 32–​ 63: pp. 33–​34; Lupia and Norton, ‘Inequality is always in the room’, 73. 88 Archon Fung, ‘Deliberation before the revolution: toward an ethics of deliberative democracy in an unjust world’, Political Theory 33, no. 2 (2005), 397–​419: p. 398. 89 Bächitger et al., ‘Disentangling diversity in deliberative democracy’, 33–​34; see also pp. 42–​48; Deveaux, ‘Deliberative democracy and multiculturalism’, 162, 15; Sirianni, ‘Learning pluralism’, 305; Curato et al., ‘Twelve key findings’, 30. As Sirianni expresses it, the goal is ‘to incorporate a recognition of difference into the heart of the communicative process itself ’ (p. 307). 90 Young, ‘Communication and the other’, 125. 91 See Arjun Appadurai, ‘Success and failure in the deliberative economy’, in Deliberation and Development, ed. Heller and Rao, 67–​84: p. 78; Clifford, ‘Making disability public’, 217–​18; Ricardo Fabrino Mendonça, Selen Ercan, and Hans Asenbaum, ‘More than words: a multidimensional approach to deliberative democracy’, Political Studies 70, no. 1 (2022), 153–​72. 92 See Sirianni, ‘Learning pluralism’, 306.

164  Musical Models of Democracy inclusive attitude towards difference, and be marked by articulations of sameness. The experiences of exclusion felt by members of the Feminist Improvising Group or participants at the Baden-​Baden Free Jazz Meeting arose not from a dispute over improvisation’s openness to difference per se, but from clashes over legitimate ways to contribute and to recognise others—​ in other words, clashes over how to be a democratic citizen. For feminist improvisers, free improvisation was (and is) frequently characterised by a dominating ‘masculinism’; in the case of the Free Jazz Meeting, two distinct methodologies of ‘free’ music-​making reflected different cultural and racial histories. In each case, the espousal of inclusivity and difference sat alongside adherence to a particular ‘citizenship style’ or ‘speech culture’ (to adopt the terms used by theorists of Type II deliberation), which served to delineate the terms on which difference was to be negotiated, and was incorrectly assumed to be signed up to by all. The presence within free improvisation of preferred citizenship styles has not gone unremarked by musicians and historians. The evolution of British improvised music during the 1970s was significantly motivated by the tensions that arose from groups’ different ideas of how to interrelate. John Stevens, who founded the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in 1966, described the importance for his group of ‘a way of being involved with each other’ that focused upon kinds of integration with other players—​‘anything but being impressive’, as he put it. This led to difficulties with colleagues such as Evan Parker and Derek Bailey, who preferred what Stevens termed the ‘original player’ approach, meaning the highlighting of distinctive individual instrumental sounds and techniques.93 Parker in turn critiqued the ‘egoless way of playing’ preferred by some improvisation groups, explaining that he was more drawn to ‘asserting myself ’.94 Eddie Prévost identified a similar contrast between AMM (which Prévost co-​founded) and the ad hoc ensembles Derek Bailey formed for his Company Weeks between the late 1970s and the early 1990s: AMM opted for ‘a group identity created by the musicians’ decision to merge their own identities’, whilst Company aimed at ‘avowed mismatch . . . the celebration of the isolated individual’.95 Such group styles have often been summed up in terms of a shared ‘attitude’ or ‘approach’—​‘being on the same page’ with your co-​improvisers, as



93 Stevens, cited in Scott, ‘Noises’, 247. 94 Parker, cited in ibid., 55–​56.

95 Edwin Prévost, No Sound Is Innocent (Copula, 1995), 143.

Practising egalitarianism  165 Parker has expressed it.96 They manifest most strongly in groups that have played together over a long period of time, or which (like some of the democratic organisations examined by Francesca Polletta) are dominated by a founding figure. But a similar sense of ensemble ‘identity’ is also often actively sought by newer groups or groups with changing memberships, even forming ‘one of the objectives of the group’s work’.97 In these situations, the different plural identities of individual musicians—​which are protected and celebrated within free improvisation, as we have seen—​are counterpointed and bounded by the singular identity presented by the group as a whole. This kind of shared understanding of how to interrelate can bring distinct pragmatic advantages. For Evan Parker, it ‘allows a discussion at a much more refined level’, enabling the exploration of nuances of collective expression that would otherwise be impossible.98 It can also facilitate the kind of lightning ensemble responses that David Borgo likens to a ‘swarm dynamic’, in which the ensemble acts collectively in ways that rely more on instinct and habituated behaviours than reflective evaluation.99 Yet notwithstanding gains such as these, musicians’ preferences for particular citizenship styles are not always loudly advertised because of the tension these preferences create with improvisation’s parallel commitment to embracing difference. This, at any rate, is one of the findings of Ritwik Banerji’s ethnographic work on free improvisers’ attitudes to the core value of egalitarianism. Perceiving improvisers’ reluctance to express critical judgements about fellow improvisers as an impediment to achieving real insight into their experience of group performance, Banerji developed a software system able to co-​perform with human improvisers, working on the assumption that improvisers would be happier to discuss the software’s strengths and weaknesses than they would those of a real musician. This experiment enabled him to extrapolate two different ‘preferred styles of

96 Gansinger, Zur Kommunkation in kollektiv improvisierter Musik, 192; Parker, speaking at ‘ “Istantanee”—​ Collective Improvisation in Europe: Techniques and Styles’, online conference, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, 20 March 2021. Elsewhere, Parker has spoken of these entrenched practices as ‘tropes’; see Raymond A. R. MacDonald and Graeme B. Wilson, The Art of Becoming: How Group Improvisation Works (Oxford University Press, 2020), 106–​8. 97 Clément Canonne, ‘Rehearsing free improvisation? An ethnographic study of free improvisers at work’, Music Theory Online 24, no. 2 (2018), online at https://​mto​smt.org/​iss​ues/​mto.18.24.4/​ mto.18.24.4.cano​nne.html (accessed 9 April 2021). 98 Parker, speaking at ‘ “Istantanee”—​Collective Improvisation in Europe’. 99 David Borgo, ‘Sync or swarm: musical improvisation and the complex dynamics of group creativity’, in Algebra, Meaning, and Computation, ed. Kokichi Futatsugi, Jean-​Pierre Jouannaud, and José Meseguer (Springer, 2006), 1–​24: p. 7.

166  Musical Models of Democracy practising egalitarianism’.100 On the one hand there are players who ‘prefer to experience a sense of sympathy, cooperation, and closeness in the way that others interact with them’; on the other, there are those who ‘prefer an interactivity of defiance, implicitly assuming that greater independence from other players leads to a stronger experience, that no player is in charge’.101 Banerji’s interviews demonstrate that perceptions of hierarchy or exclusion tend to arise when collaborating performers have different perceptions of how best to create a culture of equality. But such dissatisfactions often remain tacit in the improvisation world because of a reluctance amongst improvisers to engage in ‘normative judgments and corrective disciplining’: ‘finding a sociocultural milieu in which one can experience freedom from the evaluative scrutiny and feedback of experts or other practitioners’, he writes, ‘is what attracts many performers to free improvisation’.102 In this way, a discrepancy emerges between rhetoric and reality: the vocabulary of inclusivity continues to be used to describe practices that are significantly shaped by sameness. A similar discrepancy has been perceived within the Guelph ICASP project. Noting how the project aspired to act as ‘a neutral meeting ground for egalitarian interactions among international artists representing diverse and disparate musical traditions’, Scott Currie has observed how the workshops that staged these encounters traded in ‘preferred modes of collaboration’ that reflected very particular commitments—​and so compromised the capacity to accommodate difference.103 This manifested itself in different ways. In some of the meetings, the ‘conventions of negation’ familiar from much North Atlantic improvisation—​the inclination ‘to avoid or disrupt steady rhythms, stable key centers, and pre-​existing melodic material’—​were implicitly presented as a premise for collaboration, reflecting the view that such conventions were foundational to openness and individual freedom.104 Yet Currie emphasises how the effect of this was to ‘impose upon such encounters aesthetic ideologies of Euro-​American modernity’,105 for these same qualities chafed with the conception of egalitarian improvisatory practice preferred by musicians from other cultural backgrounds. As a result, ICASP collaborations between North Atlantic free improvisers and improvising 100 Banerji, ‘Phenomenologies of egalitarianism in free improvisation’, 186. 101 Ibid. Banerji notes that ‘while a player may express one preference in certain situations, they may prefer the opposite in others’ (p. 270). 102 Ibid., 6. 103 Currie, ‘The other side of here and now’, 2. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid.

Practising egalitarianism  167 musicians from the Global South sometimes struggled to transcend what Currie describes as ‘a vacillating juxtaposition of the disparate modes of musical interaction associated with each rather than a unified or unifying fusion’.106 At other ICASP events, this danger was avoided by bringing together musicians who already had ‘a shared propensity for playing the role of culture broker’, and thus were socialised into existing conventions of ‘world fusion’. As Currie remarks, this guaranteed in advance a strong measure of ‘consensual alignment in favour of the ideals among the organizers’, an alignment reflected in musicians’ approving comments on the virtues of the project. But at the same time, by gaming the encounter through careful selection of the participants, the ‘geographical and cultural differences’ that the project claimed to overcome were rendered largely illusory.107

The dilemma of deliberation: Between legitimacy and incommensurability As we have seen, recent theorists of deliberative democracy have criticised their predecessors for assuming the possibility of an ideal citizenship style that allows equal participation to all. But even the advocates of broadened forms of deliberative exchange have tended to insist upon certain norms of discourse—​a shared concept of civility—​as a necessary precondition for effective deliberation. This builds upon a long history of regarding democracy as impossible in the absence of agreed rules and procedures, rules and procedures that (as we saw in Chapter 1) necessarily precede the democratic exchange and dictate terms for any future amendment. Democracy, it is claimed, requires measures of legitimate conduct, and so imposes a certain sameness with regard to citizenship. Thus it is that Jane Mansbridge, in arguing the merits of a Type II expansion of deliberation’s discursive modes, nonetheless contends that any such expansion must be underpinned by ‘the deliberative democratic ideals of mutual respect, equality, reciprocity, mutual justification, the search for fairness, and the absence of coercive power’.108 Other Type II theorists deploy the idea of ‘metaconsensus’, which involves ‘recognition of the legitimacy of the different values, preferences, judgments,



106 Ibid. 107 108

Ibid., 5, 3. Mansbridge et al., ‘The place of self-​interest’, 94.

168  Musical Models of Democracy and discourses held by other participants’.109 Deliberation only gains its meaning, it is argued, if participating deliberants are prepared to focus upon exploring commonalities and the interests of others, and are willing to ‘transform their preferences according to public-​minded ends’.110 The same position is ultimately struck by Tracey Nicholls in her consideration of the ethics of improvisation. As we have seen, Nicholls is drawn to Charles Taylor’s model of discourse because it takes issue with the classic, Type I approach to deliberation, and specifically ‘its commitment to universal norms; that is, each norm is expected to satisfy everyone’s interests’.111 Taylor’s approach, in contrast, prioritises mutual recognition over consensus, and thus ‘offers an account of deliberative democracy which recognizes that, as [Keith] Spence puts it, there is “no canonical way of belonging in a thoroughly multicultural society” ’.112 But as she develops her account of improvisatory ethics, Nicholls retreats from the full implications of Taylor’s recognition of different ‘ways of belonging’. This is because of her concern that a normless collectivity would result in admitting to the deliberative table antisocial behaviours, even participants intent on sabotage and destruction. She extols instead the jazz tradition in which qualified newcomers ‘sit in’ to learn the ‘conventions for interacting within musical ensembles (learning the norms that teach us how to negotiate)’, suggesting that this is an example of the way in which improvising traditions may contribute to enabling constructive deliberation in civil society.113 Nicholls’s larger discussion lays great weight on the ‘community norms’ that she believes must guide an improvisatory ethics: these include ‘respect for difference; commitment to the empowerment of all members; generosity in contributing one’s talents, ideas, and energy; an appreciation for complexity; willingness to listen, revise, experiment, and support others; sensitivity to situation and contextual particularities; openness to negotiating and forming common ground; and solidarity’.114 This enumeration of community values will seem unexceptionable to many. But where does it leave us in relation to Nicholls’s earlier contention that improvisatory ethics determine ‘there is no canonical way of belonging’? How is it possible to establish a priori conditions for democratic participation

109 110

Curato et al., ‘Twelve key findings’, 31. Iris Marion Young, cited in Mansbridge et al., ‘The place of self-​interest’, 67.

111 Nicholls, An Ethics of Improvisation, 104. 112

Ibid., 105. Ibid., 105–​6. 114 Ibid., 160. 113

Practising egalitarianism  169 without skewing the encounter towards specific interests? Theorists of democracy have observed how any such prerequisites remain conditions for involvement that risk a lack of equity. Arthur Lupia and Anne Norton acknowledge the widespread conviction that deliberation needs to be governed by ‘norms of practice’, but issue a warning about the consequences: Deliberative meetings are governed by rules, procedures, and norms of practice. These mechanisms aim at ensuring equality and giving everyone a hearing. Those who follow the rules and observe the conventions appear to be showing a greater willingness to advance the deliberative process, to engage with others and to find common ground, but it is also possible that they are simply better served by the rules in place. Those who are most willing to search for common ground may be those who hold a strategic advantage on that ground.115

Stacy Clifford bluntly expresses the same perception in a different way: in democracy, ‘legitimacy requires exclusion’.116 As this suggests, an enduring challenge for democracy remains the question of how to translate the need for collective responsibility in the pursuit of individual freedoms into principles of interaction that do not unduly favour some over others—​a problem that emerges with particular force within culturally heterogeneous societies. From these reflections emerges a way of regarding the precarious balance between legitimacy and openness within democracy which may also serve as a means for thinking about difference and sameness within free improvisation. Democratic groups may be understood as situated on a spectrum between two poles. At one pole there is an emphasis upon participatory terms being agreed from the outset. This enables participants to engage in intelligible exchange and to work towards negotiated outcomes, but as we have seen, it also presents limits on who is able or willing to participate. At the other pole, emphasis is placed upon boundless inclusivity in relation to contrasting citizenship styles, thereby maximising the opportunities for participation; the rider is that, at this dichotomous extreme, agreement over shared discursive conventions may be difficult to achieve. The political theorist Jorge Valadez has written of how ‘in situations of deep cultural diversity . . . conflicting perspectives differ not only with regard to basic beliefs

115 116

Lupia and Norton, ‘Inequality is always in the room’, 72. Clifford, ‘Making disability public’, 215.

170  Musical Models of Democracy about the world, but also with regard to modes of justification.’117 In the absence of a ‘shared set of beliefs or principles of epistemic validation on which the participants in public deliberation can rely to reach agreement’, what Valadez terms ‘incommensurable differences’ arise.118 The price for limitless inclusivity is that the grounds needed for consensus or even mutual comprehension are difficult or impossible to establish. This dichotomy reflects what Clifford regards as the ‘dilemma’ of deliberative democracy, in which ‘two deliberative values conflict’: universal inclusion comes into tension with the shared ground needed to exchange and decide.119 There is no place on this spectrum for the dream of a limitlessly inclusive group encounter capable of forging a common understanding. The improvisation literature has tended to focus upon the merits of arrangements leaning towards the first pole, and different manifestations thereof: improvisation as a process of ‘solidarity-​ building’ as Nicholls expresses it, involving the ‘setting aside of one’s insistence on differentiation from others’.120 What about group improvisation arrangements that lean towards the second pole—​of laying down minimal conditions for inclusion? It is here, after all, that free improvisers’ oft-​stated commitment to the accommodation of difference is most strenuously tested, and that the wider aspiration for inclusivity in ensemble music-​making finds a limit case. It should be observed, first of all, that this second pole cannot simply be reduced to the valuing of disputatiousness over the communitarian. For, as Banerji’s research indicates, such disputatiousness itself constitutes a group style or discursive mode, establishing conventions that guarantee a kind of metaconsensus which allows the individual expression of difference to be stubbornly asserted by all. The inclusive pole concerns, instead, the absence of disposition to metaconsensus, asking us to consider the possibility of accommodating, for instance, the disputatious alongside the communitarian—​ in other words, the bringing together of musicians with radically different ‘preferred styles of practising egalitarianism’ (to borrow Banerji’s phrase). What might such conditionless inclusivity sound like in free improvisation? To explore this, it is valuable to turn to a performance that has become a staple of the improvisation literature for its refusal of the terms of 117 Jorge Valadez, Deliberative Democracy, Political Legitimacy, and Self-​ Determination in Multicultural Societies (Routledge, 2018 [2001]), 62. 118 Ibid., 58. 119 Clifford, ‘Making disability public’, 214. 120 Nicholls, An Ethics of Improvisation, 158.

Practising egalitarianism  171 ‘solidarity building’. At the Guelph Jazz Festival in 2004, a concert by Tuvan throat singer Sainkho Namtchylak, bassist William Parker, and drummer Hamid Drake was interrupted by festival organisers because of the way it contravened expectations of how the performance would proceed.121 At the core of the debacle was Namtchylak’s attitude to musical collaboration. From the start of her performance, she remained apparently unresponsive to the contributions of her American colleagues, preferring instead to emit a repetitive high-​pitched vocalisation—​described by one reviewer as ‘an unhappy, tuneless wail’—​lasting forty minutes.122 This impression of disengagement was underlined by her on-​stage demeanour, which involved folding her arms and repeatedly looking at her watch—​‘gestures that projected a sense of disinterest and discontent’, as members of the festival organising team recalled it.123 Sensing the discomfort of some parts of the audience, organisers decided to intervene ‘to ask Namtchylak what was wrong and to see if they might be able to rectify the situation’.124 After a break in the performance, Namtchylak returned to the stage ‘to launch into a vitriolic attack on the festival’s organizers, more droning protest vocalizing and eventually . . . some of the actual Tuvan throat singing she was contracted to perform’.125 Subsequent analysis of the event has focused on the question of whether the performance was an act of deliberate sabotage arising from Namtchylak’s grievances about mistreatment by the festival, or is better construed as advancing an exploded version of community norms. The three musicians’ previous collaboration—​documented on DVD—​had not taken such overtly antagonistic form,126 suggesting that Namtchylak’s unresponsiveness and disengagement in Guelph represented not so much an idiosyncratic preference in relation to citizenship styles as ‘an egregious breach . . . of faith and commitment to the ideals that the performance was supposed to embody’.127 121 For accounts of the performance from varying perspectives, see Banerji, ‘Phenomenologies of egalitarianism in free improvisation’, 54–​56; Borgo, Sync or Swarm, 128–​30; Currie, ‘The other side of here and now’, 5–​6; Nicholls, An Ethics of Improvisation, 157–​59; Fischlin, Heble and Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now, 205–​15; Jesse Stewart, ‘Improvised dissonance: opening statements’, in The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts, ed. Rebecca Caines and Ajay Heble (Routledge, 2015), 213–​18: pp. 216–​17. No recording survives; as Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz note, first-​hand accounts differed on the detail of what happened (p. 210). 122 Cited in Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now, 207. 123 Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now, 216. 124 Ibid., 212. 125 James Hale, cited in ibid., 209. 126 Sainkho Namtchylak feat. William Parker and Hamid Drake: Freedom Now, dir. Guy Girard, DVD recording (La Huit Production, 2004); at the time of writing this recording, made at a Paris concert in March 2004, is available at https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​acTf​Slc1​AQ4 (accessed 28 April 2022). 127 Currie, ‘The other side of here and now’, 5.

172  Musical Models of Democracy From the perspective of the ICASP project—​one of whose leaders, Ajay Heble, was artistic director of the festival—​the performance betrayed the collective responsibility intrinsic to good improvisation. Writing about the performance nearly ten years later, the project leaders link Namtchylak’s ‘dogged unresponsiveness to the other players . . . [her] refusal to participate in dialogue or even try to resolve differences’ to a neoliberal glorification of individual self-​interest that disregards the rights of others.128 ‘Does an artist have the right to do anything, to say anything, onstage as part of a performance?’, they ask.129 Fears about the consequences of the unfettered pursuit of individual freedom have peppered discussions of democracy across the ages; responsibilities as well as rights are widely seen as a cornerstone of democratic practice. For many theorists and practitioners of improvisation, it’s wrong to assume that improvisation ‘involves adherence to neither convention or protocol, that it tolerates no system of constraint’, for to do so is to entertain an idea of freedom that may ‘justify, provide license for, and naturalize intolerable behaviours and egregious abuses of rights and power’.130 Yet also at play in this performance was a difference in perception about the expectations implied in the practice of group improvisation. Namtchylak had long held the view that a lot of free improvisation ‘doesn’t sound very free to me’.131 As Banerji notes, this observation points up the ‘implicit sense of normativity’ in many free improvisers’ practice, a normativity that ‘begs the question of how free and open free improvisation may be as an experience’.132 Viewed from this perspective, the Guelph performance revealed the existence of ‘a broader range of conceptualizations of interactivity in free improvisation’ within which one might ‘value, rather than dismiss . . . Namtchylak’s choice of actions in this event’.133 As Scott Currie writes, the performance effectively shattered the performative frame through which the trio’s improvisation would otherwise have become invested with the preferred meanings of ICASP’s ideal-​type, and in so doing, revealed it as a culturally specific form of improvisational practice with its own ‘idiomatic’ conceptions, conventions, and values. In attempting to restore and recuperate these

128

Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now, 214. Ibid., 211. Ibid., 216. 131 Cited in Banerji, ‘Phenomenologies of egalitarianism in free improvisation’, 4. 132 Banerji, ‘Phenomenologies of egalitarianism in free improvisation’, 52. 133 Ibid., 55. 129 130

Practising egalitarianism  173 preferred meanings, the organizers—​inadvertently but quite manifestly—​ revealed their unmarked category as a construction of power and privilege.134

These differences in view about the preconditions for improvisation, and critics’ disinclination to ‘solicit Namtchylak’s opinion of what these values might mean for her and how her experiences in this music complicate them’,135 are especially troubling in light of the cultural and gender differences that separated Namtchylak from both the festival organisers and her on-​stage musical collaborators. We have already seen how a sense of disenchantment towards ensemble expectations may reflect not an asocial outlook, so much as the prevalence of norms of exchange that are weighted towards particular gendered or racialised perspectives. Other improvising musicians have shown active interest in incommensurability, in ways that cannot simply be reduced to the expression of disenchantment or protest. Early performances by the Instant Composers Pool—​an Amsterdam-​based collective co-​founded in 1967 by Han Bennink, Willem Breuker, and Misha Mengelberg, but regularly featuring other international improvisers as well—​delighted in extreme dissociation between the musicians, driving one critic to remark that ‘the conceptions appeared . . . irreconcilable’.136 Bailey’s Company Weeks, mentioned earlier, comprised an annual concert series in which musicians reflecting ‘a variety of improvising styles and attitudes’ were brought together in ad hoc groupings, with the aim of ‘removing as far as possible any preconceptions as to what the music might be’;137 the outcomes produced what Ben Watson describes as ‘the intriguing pleasures of music not fitting together’.138 James Harley recounts a 2006 performance by the Art Ensemble of Chicago in which founder members Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell ‘improvised for long stretches together without giving any indication at all that they were listening to each other or were even aware the other was performing’.139 Even the cross-​cultural performances documented in Scott Currie’s description of ICASP workshops emerge, in his 134 Currie, ‘The other side of here and now’, 6. 135 Banerji, ‘Phenomenologies of egalitarianism in free improvisation’, 56. 136 Cited in Robert Adlington, Composing Dissent: Avant-​Garde Music in 1960s Amsterdam (Oxford University Press, 2013), 129; on this aspect of ICP performances, see ibid., 115–​33. 137 Bailey, Improvisation, 134, 136. 138 Ben Watson, Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation (Faber, 2004), 223. 139 James Harley, review of David Borgo, Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age, Critical Studies in Improvisation 3, no. 2 (2008), 4.

174  Musical Models of Democracy analysis, as leaning towards incommensurability, with their ‘vacillating juxtaposition of disparate modes of musical interaction’.140 I have suggested that free improvisation that leans towards incommensurability is best able to lay claim to the value of inclusivity. But do such performances promise anything beyond a brute registering of difference? Critical accounts have tended to stress the sense of communicative impasse, as if little is ultimately gained from the encounter. Consider the description by John Butcher of a first-​time duo performance by Japanese sine-​tone performer Sachiko M and Norwegian vocalist Lisa Dillan: The two were like chalk and cheese. Most of what Lisa Dillan was doing caused no obvious aural response from Sachiko M, who played as if she was surrounded by silence. Maybe I imagined feeling the singer’s frustration grow, but when, near the end, she began scraping her chair noisily around the stage it was a sure sign that all else had failed. I wondered about the cultural differences in how they’d arrived at their musical voices. . . . [I]‌t could be argued that they were both equally trapped within their preconceptions. Their different personalizations of sound had developed to serve very different purposes, and floundered outside of the contexts that had produced them. This wasn’t just a mismatch of minimalism and expression, but a disagreement about what it means to improvise together.141

Butcher highlights the different citizenship styles adopted by each performer, and concludes that the performance failed. What benefit is brought by the gesture of inclusivity towards ‘preconceptions’ if it results only in an experience of frustration for performers and audience alike? In responding to this concern, it is worth noting, first of all, that feelings of frustration are hardly unknown within democratic arrangements. Discomfort, bafflement, and anger may surely be added to the list. For many, as I will discuss further in the next chapter, these have even been the predominant emotions aroused by democracy in recent times. Some commentators have connected this directly to the expansion of voices and worldviews within political debate. For Steve Fuller, the deeply divisive nature of contemporary politics is ‘the inevitable outcome’ of the democratisation of knowledge production, as ways of reasoning and admissible forms of speech 140 Currie, ‘The other side of here and now’, 2. 141 John Butcher, ‘Freedom and sound: this time it’s personal’, Point of Departure 35 (2011), http://​ www.point​ofde​part​ure.org/​PoD35/​PoD35​Butc​her.html (accessed 13 April 2021).

Practising egalitarianism  175 have radically diversified, and established norms of discourse have been questioned and dismantled.142 This is not to dispute the disproportionate role currently played by powerful individuals in the overthrowing of democratic norms, when they perceive this suits their interests; nor is it to diminish the deepening sense of disenfranchisement felt amongst minoritised groups, even as measures of ‘acceptable speech’ have broadened in other ways. But it is perhaps to be expected that, as a social arrangement becomes more inclusive of both different points of view and different ways of expressing them, so the business of ‘getting along’ becomes a more complex proposition. In this context, free improvisation arguably has a role to play in exploring how not to ‘get along’—​reflecting the reality that, as Iris Marion Young suggests, a democratic polity is typically ‘thrown together’, ‘stuck with one another’, brought into proximity principally because of the way in which the pursuits of some affect those of others.143 Frustration and difficulty are to be expected. Accepting this, we may then wish to speculate on the potential for the exploration of incommensurability to achieve other, more productive ends. For instance, it has been suggested that the ‘failure’ of incommensurable encounters in the political domain may nonetheless contribute to eventual ‘success’ in the future. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has proposed that the preferred discursive modes of the socially marginalised, although counting as ‘failed performatives’ in their non-​conformance with recognised styles of deliberative exchange, can illuminate and contest the conventions that they flout. In this reading, communicative ‘misfires’ may have generative potential when reiterated and amplified, such that marginal or subaltern discourses practised away from centres of power ‘can slowly inch their way into the public sphere’.144 ‘Taken by themselves, in single contexts’, Appadurai proposes, ‘many statements by the poor have no positive effects and may be considered failures. But as they are repeated, rehearsed, and reiterated, might their failure contain the seeds of performative success?’145 Failure asks to be viewed in the longer term, he argues, in which perspective it may end up laying the grounds for future ‘felicity’. By analogy, in free improvisation, what might manifest as a ‘vacillating juxtaposition’ or ‘uneasy oscillation’ between 142 Steve Fuller, ‘Embrace the inner Fox: post-​truth as the STS symmetry principle universalized’, Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (25 December 2016), https://​soc​ial-​epist​emol​ogy. com/​2016/​12/​25/​embr​ace-​the-​inner-​fox-​post-​truth-​as-​the-​sts-​symme​try-​princi​ple-​univer​sali​zed-​ steve-​ful​ler/​ (accessed 13 August 2022). 143 Young, ‘Communication and the other’, 126. 144 Appadurai, ‘Success and failure in the deliberative economy’, 74. 145 Ibid., 74–​75.

176  Musical Models of Democracy performers hewing to different participatory styles does not simply reinforce difference but also represents a ‘casting of performative seeds’ (to borrow Appadurai’s phrase) that carries potential to redefine the terms of future interaction. A further rationale for improvisers to explore incommensurability is suggested by David Toop, when he observes (as we noted earlier) that free improvisation not only ‘allows me the range of my character’, but also ‘in communality with others . . . [to] go beyond the edges of my character’.146 In a collective context where shared terms for interaction are not assured, participants may be thrown onto a heightened awareness of self in ways that challenge as well as affirm existing preferences. Faced with incommensurable difference, key questions about ‘the edges of my character’ arise. How do I differ from others? In what ways am I capable of changing? How do the affinities I feel reflect boundaries to acceptance? How do I navigate and respond to feelings of exclusion or misunderstanding? What expectations do I have of others’ capacity to self-​reflect in this way, and are these reasonable? Such, at least, are the kinds of self-​reflection one can imagine Toop undertakes, and which he evidently finds beneficial, even when common ground with fellow musicians is in short supply. Of course, the present-​day political landscape reminds us that other participants may respond quite differently to communicative impasse—​by hunkering down on established identity, for instance, or opting to ignore or disparage difference rather than to engage with it. A group practice fully committed to inclusivity with regard to citizenship styles aspires to avoid determining preferred behaviours in advance, even when this might appear to invite attitudes deemed unproductive. In practice, improvisers rarely come together in ways that completely forego agreement on principles of conduct, even if these are not reflected on the surface of the music-​making. The spectrum model I am proposing here recognises that practising egalitarianism requires adoption of a position somewhere between the two dichotomous extremes of complete agreement on terms and total incommensurability; borders have to be drawn, even if only of the most minimal kind. As such, free improvisation offers at best a diagnostic for some of the most pressing dilemmas in contemporary democracy, rather than an easy solution. As I suggest in the next chapter, somewhere near the heart of the challenge faced by democracy in the ‘post-​truth’ era is the question of whether

146 Toop, Into the Maelstrom, 2.

Practising egalitarianism  177 the gains brought by reasserting traditional norms for democratic citizenship justify the losses that will be entailed by ruling certain discursive modes as illegitimate. Free improvisation maps this terrain by taking a range of positions on the question of shared terms and the definition of difference, and by reminding us of how inclusion may act as an insuperable obstacle to agreement. In so doing, it contributes to the task urged on us by the democratic theorists discussed throughout this book—​namely, to move away from the attempt to establish a definitive basis for democracy, and instead to focus attention on the exclusions and shortcomings that attend any democratic arrangement. Through interrogating and contesting the presuppositions for their practice, improvisers serve to articulate these limits, and the ways in which they shape the egalitarian aspiration.

6 Ungrounded Musical models of democracy in the age of epistemic chaos

Post-​foundationalism and post-​truth The invasion and occupation of Washington’s Capitol Building on 6 January 2021 was widely regarded as marking a historic low point for the fortunes of democracy. Directed at the very heart of American democracy—​the Capitol is the meeting place for Congress, where legislative authority is placed in the hands of elected representatives—​and galvanised by the inflammatory rhetoric of outgoing president Donald Trump, the assault appeared to represent a terrible culmination of the global rise of strong-​man politics and associated disregard for the norms of democratic governance. The symbolism could not have been more stark: violence and the mob threatened to replace civil debate and balanced representation. In the days that followed, the vocabulary of ‘coup’, ‘insurrection’, ‘anarchy’, and even ‘terrorism’ was widely called upon. Democracy itself appeared imperilled, a threat that, in the eyes of many, hardly lessened in the months that followed, as Trump’s supporters persisted with their narrative of the ‘big steal’. Yet while the events of 6 January offered confirmation of the disenchantment and suspicion of many American citizens towards the established mechanisms of democratic rule, they could not simply be explained in terms of a rejection of democracy. Trump’s 2016 election had been fuelled by the feeling of many ‘ordinary Americans’ that the political establishment, far from protecting democracy, ruled as ‘an elected aristocracy’ that primarily served its own interests. The choice facing electors in 2016, Trump’s advocates had proclaimed, was ‘between a government of the people, by the people and for the people’, and an ‘elective despotism’ in which ‘lies, corruption and tyranny are embraced by the political-​media establishment’.1 It was thus by no 1 Lawrence Sellin, ‘Why Donald Trump appeals to ordinary Americans’, The Hill, blog (9 June 2016), https://​theh​ill.com/​blogs/​pund​its-​blog/​presi​dent​ial-​campa​ign/​294​596-​why-​don​ald-​trump-​ appe​als-​to-​ordin​ary-​americ​ans/​ (accessed 13 August 2022).

Musical Models of Democracy. Robert Adlington, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197658819.003.0006

Ungrounded  179 means universally accepted that to question the legitimacy of the declared result of the 2020 presidential election, even to pursue this cause through violent direct action, was to seek to overthrow democracy. On the contrary, objection to the ‘big steal’ could be (and was) projected as motivated, above all, by democratic principle. These were the terms in which the Republican Party chose to reject the U.S. House of Representatives’ Select Committee, convened to investigate the events of 6 January; the Committee, a Republican National Committee resolution declared, was ‘a Democrat-​led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse’.2 The assault on the Capitol thus acted as a reminder of the perpetually contested nature of ‘government of the people’—​a contentiousness that, as we have seen throughout this book, has been argued by political theorists as intrinsic to democratic politics. ‘Democracy’, Ernesto Laclau proposed, ‘is the very placing in question of the notion of ground’.3 But if present-​day political life thus appears to bear out a core argument of Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Claude Lefort, Jacques Rancière, and others, this hardly seems a matter for celebration. Indeed, the events of 6 January arguably provide compelling evidence of the very real dangers of bringing democracy’s foundations into question. Trump’s 2016 electoral triumph and the enduring appeal of his brand of politics have been explained as reflecting a shift in public opinion towards something resembling the post-​foundational stance advanced in this book. David Roberts has argued that, over the course of several decades, American citizens’ faith in ‘transpartisan authorities’ essentially collapsed.4 Trump’s rise was sustained by a perception that those institutions traditionally understood to safeguard the integrity of political discourse and dispute—​the press, academia, science, judiciary, and the legislature—​had been colonised by political opponents, and so were not neutral arbiters at all. Once political institutions and norms were deemed irredeemably corrupted by partisan interests, there then no longer existed any basis for assertions of truth, beyond what a particular interest group believed to be true. In place of agreed yardsticks of common understanding sprang what Roberts terms ‘tribal epistemology’—​in 2 The full RNC resolution is reproduced in The Washington Post, 4 February 2022, https://​www.was​ hing​tonp​ost.com/​cont​ext/​rnc-​res​olut​ion-​to-​cens​ure-​che​ney-​kinzin​ger/​cf48e​bbc-​aeb2-​42c2-​9a6b-​ 38021​8620​3e3/​ (accessed 13 August 2022). 3 Cited in David Keenan, Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (California University Press, 2003), 103. 4 David Roberts, ‘Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology’, Vox, website (19 May 2017), https://​www.vox.com/​pol​icy-​and-​polit​ics/​2017/​3/​22/​14762​030/​don​ald-​trump-​tri​bal-​epist​emol​ogy (accessed 13 August 2022).

180  Musical Models of Democracy other words, ‘the systematic conflation of what is true with what is good for the tribe’. Lacking transpartisan institutions to distinguish between truth and falsehood, ‘for all intents and purposes, there is no truth—​only individual and tribal truths . . . . Politics becomes a pure contest of power.’5 This suspicion towards traditional authorities and retreat to the closed belief systems of the tribe has been accelerated and deepened by the penetration of new digital technologies into all aspects of daily life. Writing shortly after the 6 January events, American political theorist Shoshana Zuboff connected the scenes at the Capitol to ‘the other coup’ that she had documented at length in her 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism—​namely, the covert extraction by global technology corporations of unprecedented quantities of personal data, and the consequent accumulation of power by these corporations over every dimension of citizens’ existences.6 Zuboff draws attention to corporations’ willingness to place this data at the disposal of political forces intent on exploiting largely unregulated digital platforms to advance their interests. Unbound by the traditional media’s obligations to balance and fact-​checking, the new technology enables ‘the profit-​driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation’.7 The result is what Zuboff terms ‘epistemic chaos’, the ‘splintering of shared reality’, in which there no longer exists any general agreement about facts or truth. Surveillance capitalism, she argues, is ‘radically indifferent’, disinclined to regard norms of evidentiary proof or reasoned argument as constraining on the right to assert an interpretation, deliver a judgement, or proclaim a justified course of action. These are the conditions that allowed the belief that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election, but had been denied victory by widespread voter fraud, electoral irregularities, and the conspiring of the so-​called Deep State, to gain widespread credence, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary. At the time of writing, a majority of Republicans and 35% of the overall US population still believe that the election of Joe Biden as 46th President was fraudulent.8 5 Ibid. 6 Shoshana Zuboff, ‘The coup we are not talking about’, New York Times (29 January 2021), online at https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2021/​01/​29/​opin​ion/​sun​day/​faceb​ook-​surve​illa​nce-​soci​ety-​tec​hnol​ ogy.html (accessed 13 August 2022); Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Profile, 2019). 7 Zuboff, ‘The coup we are not talking about’. 8 Sara Swann, ‘No, most Americans don’t believe the 2020 election was fraudulent’, Politifact, website (2 February 2022), https://​www.pol​itif​act.com/​fac​tche​cks/​2022/​feb/​02/​viral-​image/​no-​most-​ americ​ans-​dont-​beli​eve-​2020-​elect​ion-​was-​f/​ (accessed 13 August 2022).

Ungrounded  181 For Zuboff, the impression of ‘radical indifference’ is just that—​an impression. She is clear: epistemic chaos cannot be accounted for purely in terms of the inevitable coexistence of different interests and worldviews within modern pluralist societies, or a culturally relativist approach to values and truth. Rather, it is an expression of the acute power asymmetries of contemporary neoliberalism, and a willingness on the part of large corporations to promulgate outright lies for private benefit. Because the production of dissensus is today attached to a profit motive, it comes to serve and be sustained by those with the biggest wallets. The ‘radical indifference’ of surveillance capitalism is thus not indifferent at all, because the deliberate ungrounding of civic discourse feeds entrenched interests—​specifically, the businesses whose margins are benefitted by attention-​grabbing ‘content’, and their clients who wish to preserve political power as their own. Epistemic chaos emerges precisely when citizens are unable to evade technological manipulation and are left in thrall to demagoguery. Zuboff concludes from this that ‘we may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both’.9 Her solution to this predicament, shared by others concerned at the fate of democracy in the post-​truth era, places her in direct contradiction with the post-​foundationalists: democracy can only be revived by reasserting foundations. Authoritative barometers of truth, reason, and objectivity have to be reinstalled at the heart of social and political life. The world needs not scepticism towards impartiality but clear measures, based on shared principles of rationality, that will help determine best courses of action. ‘Without reason, without truth, there is no real democracy because democracy is about true choices and rational decisions’, the French President Emmanuel Macron told the US Congress in 2018.10 Only in this way can the irrational fears sown by fake news and misinformation be combatted. In turn, political actors must subscribe once again to established conventions of democratic citizenship, if society is not to collapse into lawlessness and chaos. What Zuboff terms ‘trustworthy, transparent, respectful institutions of social discourse’ are necessary in order to navigate difference of view and social change. Without such ongoing commitment to norms of deliberation and negotiation, society leaves itself entirely vulnerable to the ‘chaos machine’ of social media, ‘in which norm violation is key to revenue’.11 9 Zuboff, ‘The coup we are not talking about’. 10 Cited in Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou, Post-​Truth, Fake News and Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehood (Routledge, 2020), 1. 11 Zuboff, ‘The coup we are not talking about’.

182  Musical Models of Democracy

Musical models of democracy in the age of epistemic chaos Where does this leave us in relation to the post-​foundational theories of democracy that have been proposed throughout this book as offering a compelling way to understand musicians’ engagement with democracy? By entertaining the idea that democracy is an ‘essentially contested concept’ which will always be ‘an object of political and social struggle’,12 do we not risk playing into the hands of those—​largely (but not solely) situated on the far right of the political spectrum—​intent on overthrowing all measures of common understanding, and whose baseless conspiracy theories served to legitimise the violence of 6 January 2021? To regard post-​foundationalism not as a guarantor of democracy but, on the contrary, as a grave danger to it, would be to impel quite different readings of the musical practices examined in earlier chapters. For instance, if shared norms of interaction are the only way to avoid disintegration of the social order, then the critics of improvisers who spurn common ground rules would indeed have reason to be alarmed: the pursuit of incommensurability in the name of inclusivity would necessarily be ruled antisocial, even an act of violence. Composers of indeterminate music could similarly claim justification for their concerns about the tendency of performers to ‘go their own way’, for without a regulating code of conduct of the sort that composers typically urge upon their performers, the liberties offered to performers by indeterminate scores risk becoming the basis for all manner of disruptive misdemeanour. Clearer rulings on the distinction between democratic liberty and autocratic oppression would reduce the ambiguity around empowerment and domination in audience participation contexts—​while of course simultaneously implying, as rulings inevitably do, the installation of a new governing regime. And the opponents of post-​ foundationalist thought would surely be inclined to argue that the search for an ideal form of democratic citizen, of the kind modelled in Carter’s brusquely individualist counterpoint, remains a legitimate and urgent task. In short, grounds would be sought for musicians to feel entitled to imagine that their creations modelled not just a contestable idea of democracy, but rather the best (and only) way to be democratic musically, with all the political and cultural kudos that this would carry. For hermeneutics, too, the responsible task would be to analyse musical models of democracy in

12 Farkas and Schou, Post-​Truth, Fake News and Democracy, 5.

Ungrounded  183 terms of the democratic fundamentals that the post-​truth era’s critics urgently demand that we reassert. Such a reorientation to the needs of the present moment might lend to both music-​making and its exegesis a new and compelling purpose, namely to contribute directly to the effort of moving beyond the turmoil created by tribal epistemology and the ‘splintering of shared reality’. Defenders of post-​foundational thought, on the other hand, have understandably rejected the equation of their scepticism towards the possibility of a transpartisan basis for democracy with the worst excesses of post-​truth politics. It is clear, for instance, that Trump and his supporters do not reject facts and reason as such; rather, they contest the evidentiary basis for the arguments of their opponents and issue alternative truth claims of their own. In so doing, they are vulnerable to critique on precisely the terms favoured by post-​foundationalists, namely the dependence of any assertion of ‘how things are’ upon contingent grounds. Leading theorists have articulated these contingencies in different ways. Mouffe, like Zuboff, reads right-​wing populism not as an authentic expression of popular discontent but rather as the product of neoliberal ‘oligarchy’.13 This analysis motivates her call for a ‘left populism’, which she conceives not as a permanent solution to democracy, but as a necessary counter-​hegemonic challenge to a prevailing power structure that manifestly excludes and oppresses large swathes of the population. Rancière analyses Trump’s success in terms of an abiding ‘passion for inequality’, a passion ‘that allows both rich and poor to find a multitude of inferiors over whom they must at all costs maintain their superiority’.14 For Rancière, this passion does not express a departure from reason, as critics of the ‘politics of emotion’ have asserted; on the contrary, it needs to be understood as a particular manifestation of the ‘dominant rationality’ that Rancière has analysed across many of his writings (and which were explored in Chapter 4), in which citizens are assigned places within society according to ‘the logic of inequality’.15 Underpinning such rebuttals is the perception that to reassert ‘the rule of truth and reason’ as a precondition for democracy is to favour conceptions that have historically neglected the experiences and realities of those excluded from power and privilege. The belief that ‘if only truth could once again be reinstated as sacred, self-​evident and singular, 13 Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (Verso, 2019). 14 Jaques Rancière, ‘The fools and the wise’, Verso, blog (22 January 2021), https://​www.ver​sobo​oks. com/​blogs/​4980-​the-​fools-​and-​the-​wise (accessed 13 August 2022). 15 Ibid.

184  Musical Models of Democracy then politics would once again become civil’, Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou argue, risks simply deepening the alienation from political process that led to the current democratic crisis.16 Amidst such debates about democracy’s ills and the means of remedying them, it is perhaps not surprising to find musicians, rather than attempting to adjudicate between them, favouring a different response, in which democracy is not extolled as a source of hope, freedom and social harmony, but is instead regarded above all as cause for anxiety, disillusion, and doubt. Little hermeneutic effort is today needed to elucidate the ambiguities of musicians’ ideas of democracy; rather, the fault-​lines and dilemmas are often laid out for all to see. I close this book with an examination of recent works by three composers that take different approaches to the modelling of democracy, each dwelling upon aspects that appear to make impossible the realisation of familiar democratic ideals. In advancing such problematised perspectives, musicians have not abandoned familiar devices for exploring democratic principle: as we will see, multilayered textures, indeterminacy, audience participation, and improvisation all continue to be powerful symbols for democracy’s pursuit of pluralism and liberty. But in addition, attention is increasingly given to digital technology as a domain that mediates both twenty-​ first-​ century democracy and experimental music practice, and so offers a potent basis for exploring the relation of both democratic and musical processes. The early years of the internet saw musicians exploit this new communication technology to enable hitherto impossible kinds of connection and co-​participation, often explicitly yoked to democratic ideals.17 This utopian approach to networked musicking can still be traced in projects such as Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir and the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, which target social media platforms as a mechanism for enabling public participation at a global scale, and initiatives such as the ‘Opera by You’ production, which seek to democratise the production of new work by crowdsourcing online collaborators.18 And yet, as the effects upon democracy of social media discourse and its underpinning algorithmic logics have

16 Farkas and Schou, Post-​Truth, Fake News and Democracy, 130. 17 Christopher Haworth, ‘Network music and digital utopianism: the rise and fall of the Res Rocket surfer project, 1994–​2003’, in Finding Democracy in Music, ed. Robert Adlington and Esteban Buch (Routledge, 2021), 144–​63. 18 These and other digital collaboration projects are explored in Sabrina Pena Young, ‘The compositional collective: crowdsourcing and collaboration in the digital age’, New Music USA, NewMusicBox blog (12 September 2012), https://​newm​usic​usa.org/​nmbx/​the-​compos​itio​nal-​col​lect​ive-​crowds​ ourc​ing-​and-​collab​orat​ion-​in-​the-​digi​tal-​age/​ (accessed 13 August 2022).

Ungrounded  185 become clear, so the consequences of digital technology for popular politics have become a focus for suspicion and critique. The fraught standing of the internet as a space for civic connection and exchange has invited pointed compositional treatment. Alexander Schubert’s WIKI-​PIANO.NET (2018), which was written for and co-​devised with the pianist Zubin Kanga, offers an investigation of ‘the evolution of community behaviour’ on the internet. The work’s title cheerfully advertises its subscription to a core model of online content development, namely the open resource to which any user may contribute. A specific point of inspiration was the 2017 ‘r/​place’ project on community sharing platform Reddit, in which over a million users contributed individual pixels to create a complex digital canvas—​an initiative widely acclaimed as demonstrating the internet’s potential for enabling purposeful collective creativity.19 Schubert’s work similarly adopts the form of an open website that can be edited online by any member of the public; the resulting ‘score’ is accordingly perpetually evolving, and embodies the ideas of multiple authors. The site is structured around a sequence of modules that allow different kinds of material to be added, edited, or deleted; these include musical notation, verbal text, drawings, images, video, soundfiles, and other webpages.20 In contrast to r/​place however, which permitted only tiny, incremental contributions to be made by individuals, WIKI-​PIANO.NET allows more sweeping interventions into the evolving score, affording participants considerable influence over the shape of the work at any individual moment. Because the content of the work is constantly changing, each individual performance is substantially unique, offering a snapshot of ‘community behaviour’ up to the point of performance (Ex. 6.1). Ostensibly hailing the internet as a space of unfettered creative freedom—​ a kind of apotheosis of the empowering aspirations of much audience participation work—​WIKI-​PIANO.NET delivered in practice a demonstration of the acute limitations of user-​generated technologies for achieving community goals and dispelling embedded hierarchies. In place of the collaborative spirit and mutual accommodation envisaged by the early champions of ‘Web 2.0’, WIKI-​PIANO.NET projects the online world as a space dominated

19 Zubin Kanga, ‘WIKI-​PIANO: examining the crowd-​sourced composition of a continuously changing internet-​based score’, Tempo 294 (2020), 6–​22: p. 8. 20 At the time of writing the score remains ‘open’ and available for editing: https://​wiki-​piano.net/​. An archive of performances is also available at this site.

Ex. 6.1  WIKI-​PIANO.NET (2018–​), screenshot of start of score, 28 July 2022. Reproduced by permission of the composer

Ungrounded  187 by destructiveness, frivolity, and egregious attention-​seeking. As Kanga describes in his analysis of the project, users chose variously to delete all existing materials, to obsessively imprint their personal signatures on the score, to ridicule the premises of the project, and to submit Kanga (as performer) to humiliating actions in his performances of the work.21 Evidence of mutual recognition between contributors, whether through individuals responding constructively to the contributions of others, or through the kinds of organised groups that enabled the construction of r/​place, was scant. As Kanga notes, close collaboration on single modules was unexpectedly rare . . . . Most of the content was aimed at making an individual mark, sometimes in extreme ways. . . . Competitive one-​upmanship [was] more prevalent than cooperation. These trends suggest that individual identity was more important to the users than collective effort.22

This pervasive individualism was also evidenced by the many ‘in-​jokes’ and clips from other works that users inserted into the different fields; these displayed what Kanga terms a ‘humour of superiority through the obscurity of users’ references and codes’.23 WIKI-​PIANO.NET thus highlighted some of the consequences of unregulated digital spaces that enable individuals to act however they please; in such an environment, ‘empowerment’ comes to mean a distinctly limited set of individualistic behaviours. Paradoxically, however, in spite of the ‘egotistical, competitive approach’ that the platform elicited,24 WIKI-​PIANO.NET also brought to the fore the subservience of user-​generated content to online platforms’ larger authorial designs—​a phenomenon central to Zuboff ’s critique of surveillance capitalism. While some users ‘seemed to be revelling in their (apparent) ability to exert enormous control over the performer’—​ for instance, by instructing Kanga to engage in absurd behaviour or to read out a string of obscenities—​the work’s creators had agreed in advance upon firm ground rules for any performance, including that each rendition should be ‘tightly structured and coherent’, ‘have a compelling dramatic

21

Kanga, ‘WIKI-​PIANO’, 11–​17.

22 Ibid., 19. 23 Ibid., 21. 24 Ibid., 20.

188  Musical Models of Democracy arc’, and exhibit ‘an aesthetic kinship with Schubert’s other works’.25 To facilitate these priorities, Kanga created a ‘cheat sheet’ which determined key aspects of his interpretation of the crowd-​sourced content. Thus while the score encouraged the public to ‘perceive themselves as authors’, in practice their contributions ‘merely change the details of the space I [Kanga] have to explore in enacting a singular aesthetic vision . . . the work’s identity resides in the interpretive strategies’.26 This enduring authority over the contributor-​participants reprises a dynamic highlighted in Chapter 4’s discussion of audience participation pieces—​and in this instance, the project’s initiators were well aware of the irony of the situation. As a ‘mirror held up to the internet public’,27 then, WIKI-​PIANO.NET reflects back an arrangement characterised by narcissism, mutual disregard, and ongoing asymmetries of power. Musical critiques of twenty-​first-​century democracy are not always presented from such a detached and ironic point of view. In his composition We Can Change the Country, which was premiered on the eve of the 2020 US presidential election, Darius Jones presents democracy in a highly ambiguous light, at once insisting on the importance of democratic participation, and expressing acute anxiety about the capacity of modern politics to bring about meaningful change. Scored for ten female vocalists, violin, bass, banjo, fife, and drums, the work combines varied found texts, both spoken and sung, with instrumental improvisation in a flexible structure that assigns considerable authority to the conductor; counterpointing the music is a film documenting the injustice experienced by Black Americans and the historical struggle for racial justice.28 As a call to action, the work is first and foremost an appeal to make use of the power of the ballot box: the vocalists regularly chant ‘vote, vote’, and the performance was accompanied by a website containing links to organisations assisting citizens to register to vote and advising on voter rights.29 In 2020, this call to exercise one’s democratic mandate could no longer be taken as a politically neutral expression of confidence in the political system; on

25 Zubin Kanga, ‘Performing WIKI-​PIANO.NET: strategies for realizing Alexander Schubert’s ever-​changing internet-​composed piano work’, Leonardo 54, no. 2 (2021), 234–​41: p. 235. 26 Ibid., 240. 27 Kanga, ‘WIKI-​PIANO’, 22. 28 The premiere performance may be viewed here: https://​m.faceb​ook.com/​roule​tteb​rook​lyn/​vid​ eos/​dar​ius-​jones-​we-​can-​cha​nge-​the-​coun​try/​26832​1515​1945​225/​?_​rdr (accessed 13 August 2022). 29 Darius Jones, ‘We can change the country’, website (2 November 2020), https://​www.votefo​rdar​ ius.com/​(accessed 13 August 2022).

Ungrounded  189 the contrary, widespread concerns about voter suppression in Republican states, including measures that impacted especially upon communities of colour, motivated energetic voter registration campaigns aimed at young and non-​white voters, whose efforts were widely seen as a crucial factor in toppling Trump.30 As this would suggest, Jones’s piece is far from a dispassionate enquiry into the nature of democracy. On the contrary, it projects a set of very explicit political messages, motivated in substantial part by the composer’s feeling that the preceding twelve months had been ‘hunting season for Blacks in this country’. In published diary extracts, Jones documented the terror and despair of this period, as coronavirus ‘raged like a Biblical plague through Black and Brown communities’, and Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd died at the hands of white ‘law enforcers’.31 Through the texts proclaimed and sung by the vocalists, which draw liberally upon the proclamations of civil rights leaders and grief-​stricken statements about the victims of police violence, and through the film collage anthologising the activism of Black leaders and media coverage of police outrages against the Black community, the work presents its political leanings without apology: it excoriates injustice against Black citizens, loudly asserts the rights of women and LGBTQ+​people, urges mask wearing (all the performers wear face masks, at a time when right-​wing politicians in the United States and elsewhere were campaigning against them), and is in every way viscerally anti-​ Republican and anti-​Trump. In the United States in autumn 2020, to attempt an ‘objective’ or non-​partisan depiction of democratic process hardly seemed possible or desirable. And yet the piece is also drawn to modelling the processes of democracy in ways that reach beyond the composer’s positionality. Pluralism emerges as a key concern. Amongst the found sources for the texts proclaimed by the vocalists are slogans reflecting other political perspectives, including the words of Trump himself. Jones writes of a desire to reflect ‘the chaos that I feel our society is in’, and to place ‘wisdom alongside madness and see 30 For a report on voter suppression before and after the 2020 election, see Will Wilder, ‘Voter suppression in 2020’, Brennan Center for Justice, website (20 August 2021) https://​www.brenna​ncen​ter. org/​our-​work/​resea​rch-​repo​rts/​voter-​supp​ress​ion-​2020 (accessed 13 August 2022). 31 Darius Jones, ‘We Can Change the Country, essay’, New Music USA, NewMusicBox blog (29 October 2020), https://​nmbx.newm​usic​usa.org/​we-​can-​cha​nge-​the-​coun​try-​essay-​2020/​ (accessed 13 August 2022); Darius Jones, ‘Year of demon (my life inside 2020)’, The Brooklyn Rail (September 2021), https://​brook​lynr​ail.org/​2021/​09/​music/​Year-​of-​Dem​oon-​My-​Life-​Ins​ide-​2020 (accessed 13 August 2022).

190  Musical Models of Democracy

Fig. 6.1  Darius Jones, We Can Change the Country (2020), performance layout. Photograph reproduced by permission of Laura Sofía Pérez

which one will be heard through the noise’.32 This is explored through the familiar compositional device of multi-​layered superimposition: the vocalists often sing and speak different texts simultaneously, and the improvising instrumentalists frequently appear to be playing entirely independently of each other. As Jones explains, ‘I create a compositional environment where a multiverse of boxes and zones carries the sonic textural language of varying perspectives’, with the aim of creating ‘an environment of sensory overload as an attempt to reflect the mania-​by-​design of these past four years’.33 The hazy dividing line between democratic pluralism and impenetrable clamour is avowedly a preoccupation of this work. In this context, the physical spacing of musicians necessitated by the pandemic (see Fig. 6.1) inevitably also connotes the tendency for social media to divide citizens rather than bring them together: in effect, the robust individualism celebrated by Elliott Carter in his String Quartet No. 2, where the composer instructs that the musicians should be physically spaced apart from each other, is here inverted into troubling comment upon the damaging effects of isolation and separation upon the social fabric. 32 Cited in listing for performance on Roulette website, https://​roule​tte.org/​event/​dar​ius-​jones-​we-​ can-​cha​nge-​the-​coun​try/​ (accessed 13 August 2022); Darius Jones, ‘We Can Change the Country, essay’. 33 Darius Jones, ‘We Can Change the Country, essay’.

Ungrounded  191 Alongside pluralism, We Can Change the Country draws attention to the role within democracy of a guiding frame or constitution. Using language that alludes to America’s Founders, Jones explains that the composer’s traditional role as ‘Framer’ is here substantially ceded to the conductor, ‘who oversees the implementation and direction of the musical content given throughout the piece’.34 Jones’s handling of this role encapsulates the dilemma that emerges from debates about how best to respond to post-​truth politics. On the one hand, the work recognises the belief of democracy’s traditional guardians that constitutional norms protect freedom and equality. ‘The conductor’s overall role’, Jones writes, ‘is to create an environment where the performers (citizens) can be successful in their endeavours’; this reflects his view that ‘from my perspective, the Constitution is a living document similar to a guided improvisational score, but meant for a society’.35 Yet at the same time, Jones acknowledges that ‘the conductor’s (leader’s) own ideas and desires around the musical content will ultimately determine how the piece is interpreted’. This is a situation that by definition cannot guarantee fairness for all: echoing the concerns of the post-​foundationalists, he observes that ‘just like this composition, America is a game where the rules and instructions are not the same for everyone’. Emerging from this nuanced picture is a sense of the acute tension that arises from being both drawn to the order that the Framer promises, and repelled by the asymmetries that this entails. The result, Jones admits, is ‘something that might terrorize or tantalize’, and is consequently aptly uncomfortable as an encapsulation of democracy’s present quandaries. Jones’s work presents the determining influence of digital media upon democratic exchange allegorically, variously projected by the machinations of the conductor, the ‘mania-​by-​design’ of textural superimposition, and the limited responsiveness of musicians to each other. More direct engagement with the forces of internet technology is possible for those musicians who use computers and networked communication as their primary tools. Referred to as ‘networked music performance’, or simply ‘network music’, such practices have for several decades sought to exploit the potential of the internet for connecting musicians in remote locations and for fostering novel kinds of ensemble interactivity, often with explicitly democratic



34 Ibid. 35 Ibid.

192  Musical Models of Democracy goals.36 Yet as the ‘digital utopianism’ of early internet pioneers has increasingly given way to concern about the internet’s effect upon democracy, so attention has shifted to the ways in which digital technology unsettles and distorts free and equal exchange. Here the centrality of algorithmic processes to practices such as live coding becomes a potent focus for investigation, reflecting growing anxiety about the role of strategically programmed machine-​learning technologies in the shaping of opinions and public discourse.37 For improviser and composer Shelly Knotts, the democratic affordances of digital network music lie not simply in the ethos of egalitarianism that the field inherits from acoustic improvisation, but also in the potential that the genre offers for literally ‘ “composing democracy” . . . [through] creating a musical structure out of shifting group dynamics, with political action at the forefront of the compositional design’.38 In a sequence of works exploring the influence of pre-​programmed algorithmic processes upon different kinds of ensemble improvisation, Knotts throws intense light on the disruptive effect of automated computer protocols within democratic contexts. In Controller (2014), the focus is upon disturbing the collective negotiation and consensus-​forming behaviours that characterise much group improvisation.39 This is implemented by filtering the improvisation of a laptop quartet through a ‘mediating control mechanism’ in the form of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) which gives each player randomly allocated authority to control the sound-​making options available to other players. As Knotts observes, the effect of this is to ensure that the ‘algorithms have ultimate social control’:40 they randomly allocate different kinds of power; they render controls unusable or unpredictable in various ways; and they seed doubts about whether the impediments presented to individuals’ music-​making are determined by the machinations of the software or by other performers. 36 Useful surveys include Álvaro Barbosa, ‘Displaced soundscapes: a survey of network systems for music and sonic art creation’, Leonardo Music Journal 13 (2003), https://​muse-​jhu-​edu.libacc​ess.hud. ac.uk/​arti​cle/​50691; and Shelly Knotts and Nick Collins, ‘The politics of laptop ensembles: a survey of 160 laptop ensembles and their organisational structures’, Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (2014), https://​www.nime.org/​proc​eedi​ngs/​2014/​nime2​ 014_​521.pdf. 37 On the wider history of algorithmic music, see Alex McLean and Roger T. Dean, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music (Oxford University Press, 2021). 38 Shelly Knotts, ‘Social systems for improvisation in live computer music’ (PhD thesis, Durham University, 2018), 11, 92. 39 For an analysis of these tendencies, see Knotts, ‘Changing music’s constitution: network music and radical democratization’, Leonardo Music Journal 25 (2015), 47–​52. 40 Knotts, ‘Social systems’, 17.

Ungrounded  193 In Union (2015), the algorithmic mechanism performs a different function, imposing an idea of ‘consensus’ upon the collective improvisation of a number of remotely located laptop performers.41 The work arose from a concern to address the hierarchies that can emerge within group improvisation, which the system seeks to minimise by creating an audio mix that favours performers whose sonic output is more similar to others’, and in turn reduces the audibility of outliers. Yet in so doing, the work effectively installs a new hierarchy in which the algorithm has decided in advance upon the characteristics of legitimate citizenship—​a ‘non-​neutral decision’, as Knotts acknowledges.42 Both of these pieces evoke the paranoia that citizens today increasingly feel about the shaping effects of digital technologies upon their opinions, their interaction with others, and their grasp of the wider world; it is little surprise that participating performers described their experience of playing Controller in terms of ‘disempowerment and disengagement’.43 Yet to cast performers as citizens, and the algorithmic system as the inevitably partisan framework that mediates and distorts their interaction, is only one way of modelling contemporary democracy in network music settings. In Flock (2015), Knotts implements a radical inversion: here, it is the algorithm that embodies the electorate, while the performers become the equivalent of politicians, seeking to win the preferences of the ‘system’ that determines their success within the performance. The set-​up is complex and intriguing. As in Union, the algorithmic system controls the mix of the participating performers’ audio, with those performers deemed by the system to be more ‘successful’ gaining precedence in the mix. This requires the system both to attend to the output of each performer, and to make recurring decisions about which performer to favour, with automated ‘votes’ taking place every 10 seconds. Knotts’s ‘population of simulated voters’ is programmed to exhibit behaviours characteristic of real-​world populations. The system comprises a number of ‘agents’ (or citizens) with voting rights, each of which possesses an individual profile determining their audio preferences and the strength of those preferences. But there are additional complications: voters differ in their ‘autonomy’—​that is, the degree to which they are influenced by other voters’ preferences; they become marginally 41 A performance of Union can be found at https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​zmtL​DbWX​NeI (accessed 13 August 2022). 42 Knotts, ‘Social systems’, 51. 43 Ibid., 18.

194  Musical Models of Democracy

Fig. 6.2  Shelly Knotts, Flock (2015), sample visuals showing voter preference in relation to the three performers. Reproduced by permission of the composer

more influential when they vote for the ‘winning’ candidate in any one election; and they have a limited life-​span, being progressively replaced with new agents that may either be ‘children’ of existing agents, and so share similar preference sets, or unrelated newcomers.44 The shifting preferences of voters are reflected not just in the final audio mix, but are also represented visually on a screen, so that both performers and audience can trace the work’s electoral dynamics (Fig. 6.2). From this nuanced modelling of a diverse and changing population emerges a picture of democratic process that lays stress on unpredictability, irrationality, and vulnerability. Central is the tendency of citizens to ‘flock’ (hence the work’s title), which is to say, to be affected by the preferences of others. Knotts was influenced here by the ‘flock theory’ of Devan Rosen, which attempts to capture the organisational strategies of decentralised

44 Ibid., 75–​76, 108–​11; Knotts, ‘Flock’, Shelly Knotts website, https://​shell​ykno​tts.wordpr​ess. com/​proje​cts/​soc​ial-​syst​ems-​for-​improv​isat​ion-​in-​live-​compu​ter-​music/​flock/​ (accessed 13 August 2022).

Ungrounded  195 protest groups.45 In particular, Rosen’s thinking prompted Knott to recognise compositionally the susceptibility of individual citizens to be influenced by neighbours, and the potential for individual actions to become rapidly amplified into larger group response. Writing in 2010, Rosen assigned a positive role to social media platforms like Facebook in enabling protest movements to successfully leverage these behaviours, citing opposition groups in Colombia and South Korea as examples. Knotts’s piece, however, evokes a more problematic association with social media, by linking the ‘flocking’ voter preferences directly to message audibility. Because a performer’s failure to attract votes means that their sounds will be entirely omitted from the final mix, the flocking process impacts directly on arguments that can and cannot be heard. As a result, as Knotts remarks, ‘the vote can be seen as a directive rather than merely a suggestion’.46 This arrangement inevitably rekindles the fear that social media platforms no longer simply enable communication, but rather determine—​through algorithmic mechanisms—​the scope of political debate and the range of opinions to which citizens get exposed. The result of Flock’s modelling of the democratic process is to produce what Knotts describes as a ‘chaotic game of cat and mouse’, in which the politician-​performers are forced to chase popularity in order to remain visible (or audible), and these repositionings in turn generate new flocking voter behaviour.47 Reporting her own experience of performing the piece, Knotts notes the strong desire to ‘develop strategies for taking more control of my input into the system’, and the need to ‘compete with’ other performers ‘rather than to play musically sympathetically’.48 Such may be familiar instincts to politicians struggling to attract the attention of the electorate. But a consequence of the work’s set-​up is to jettison the idea that political discourse might be grounded in stable reference points—​of fact, values, or beliefs, for instance—​that would guide determination of the ‘best’ course of action, in favour of the brute pursuit of accord between electors and elected. Is this vision of democracy to be welcomed or abhorred? Where one stands on this question is, as so often, a matter of perspective. It can certainly be

45 Devan Rosen, Jang Hyun Kim, and Yoonjae Nam, ‘Birds of a feather protest together: theorizing self-​organizing political protests with flock theory’, Systemic Practice and Action Research 23, no. 5 (2010), 419–​41. 46 Knotts, ‘Social systems’, 74. 47 Ibid., 67; Knotts, ‘Flock’. 48 Knotts, ‘Social systems’, 78–​79.

196  Musical Models of Democracy argued that political choice should not be limited by what gets served up on dominant media platforms. Others will contend that, within a democracy, the satisfaction of a majority of voters is all. Flock contrives a system strongly inclined towards the latter point of view, and thus faithfully reflects prevailing tendencies in today’s democratic politics. In foregrounding fears and uncertainties, these recent musical models of democracy mark a distinct departure from earlier treatments, which consistently presented democratic arrangements in positive terms—​reflecting the way in which, for the second half of the twentieth century at least, democracy had ‘become the most general term of approval in the political lexicon’.49 This was the case even for figures like Elliott Carter, John Cage, and some improvising musicians, who felt strong reservations about the form taken by democracy in political life. Yet this book has suggested that what is explicit in these recent examples may be implicit in all musical models of democracy: each provides a vision of how rule by the people may be instantiated, and in so doing allows us to interrogate the inevitable tensions, inequities, and constraints that any such vision necessarily entails. In not a few instances, this act of imagining has brought real benefits for those involved, enabling new kinds of creative freedom, new participatory opportunities, and new ways of experiencing community. As I have suggested in earlier chapters, these gains have not come without costs of other kinds—​notably to those who may hew to different conceptions of self, emancipation, agency, and citizenship. A larger significance can be claimed by these musical experiments, nonetheless, in their presentation of particular ideas of democracy that may sit beside all the other ways in which democracy has been imagined by differently situated actors. In so doing, they contribute to the dissensus that many theorists have seen as unavoidable when contemplating how we are most justly to exist together. Faced with these diverse and flawed models of democracy, every democratic citizen is better equipped to take a stand, affirming or revising their existing opinions on the nature of social life, and ready to engage with, learn from, resist, or debate the conflicting conceptions of others.



49 David Beetham, Democracy: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2005), 1.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Figures are indicated by f following the page number agency, 28, 98–​100, 113–​16, 118–​19, 122–​24, 136, 196 Albertus, Michael, 17–​18, 20, 22 Alinsky, Saul, 124–​26 AMM, 164 anarchism, 72–​74 Antunes, Jorge Microformobiles II, 131–​32, 133f Aperghis, Georges, 107–​8 Appadurai, Arjun, 175–​76 Arbery, Ahmaud, 189 Aron, Raymond, 50–​51 Artaud, Antonin, 116–​17 Art Ensemble of Chicago, 173–​74 Ashley, Robert Public Opinion Descends Upon the Demonstrators, 126–​27 Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, 158–​59 Attali, Jacques, 9–​10 audience, 70, 93–​94, 104–​5. See also audience participation audience participation, 28, 102–​42, 182–​83, 184–​88 Babbitt, Irving, 34–​35, 54 Babbitt, Milton, 33 Bach, J.S., 57 Baden–​Baden Free Jazz Meeting, 158–​59, 163–​64 Bailey, Derek, 164, 173–​74 Banerji, Ritwik, 152–​53, 165–​66, 170, 172 Baraka, Amiri, 15–​16 Bianchi, Oscar, 102 Bishop, Claire, 106–​7, 108, 113–​16, 123–​24 Black Lives Matter, 18–​19 Blitzstein, Marc, 35 Boulanger, Nadia, 35, 45

Boulez, Pierre, 66–​67 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 102–​3 Bowie, Lester, 158–​59 Brecht, Bertolt, 106–​7, 116–​17 Lehrstück, 106–​7 Brown, Earle, 27–​28, 66–​67, 69, 70, 74–​75, 81, 82–​85, 93–​94 Four Systems, 84–​85 Cage, John, 27–​28, 33, 66–​101, 107–​8, 196 26’1.1499,” 90 Atlas Eclipticalis, 91–​92, 93 Concert for Piano and Orchestra, 73–​74, 85–​86, 91–​92 Essay, 72–​73 Music of Changes, 68–​69, 84–​86 Solo for Piano, 85–​86 ‘Solo for Voice no. 8’, 91 Variations II, 87–​90, 88f, 93, 94–​95 Winter Music, 85–​86 Capitol Building attack (6 January 2021), 178–​80, 182 Cardew, Cornelius, 79–​80, 100–​1 Carnevale, Graciela Encierro, 108, 109, 113–​14 Carter, Elliott, 27, 30–​65, 196 Concerto for Orchestra, 38–​40, 63–​64 Penthode, 63–​64 Piano Concerto, 38–​40 Pocahontas, 35–​36 String Quartet no. 1, 31–​32, 36–​38, 55–​56 String Quartet no. 2, 40, 43–​44, 189–​90 String Quartet no. 4, 40, 41f, 43–​44, 46, 52, 60, 62–​64 A Symphony of Three Orchestras, 35–​36 ‘Voyage’, 35–​36 ‘Warble for Lilac Time’, 35–​36 Castro, Fidel, 141

220 Index Central Africa, 24–​26 citizenship, 2, 18–​20, 146, 162–​64, 167–​68, 169–​70, 174, 176–​77, 181, 192–​93, 196 civil rights, 3–​4, 19–​20, 47, 189 Cold War, 36–​38, 47–​48, 55–​56, 59–​60, 70–​71, 93 colonialism, 16–​17 communism, 36–​38, 47, 50–​51, 55–​56, 70–​71 community arts, 107–​8 community music, 2, 118–​19 community organising, 28, 105–​6, 123–​36, 140 Company Weeks, 164, 173–​74 conductor, 9–​10, 11, 191 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 36–​38, 47–​48, 50–​52, 55–​57 consensus, 6–​7, 10, 21–​22, 43–​44, 46, 47, 55, 131–​32, 145–​46, 147–​48, 150–​51, 155–​56, 162–​63, 166–​67, 168, 169–​70, 192–​93 constitution, 20, 191 Copland, Aaron, 35 counterpoint, 39–​40, 52, 57–​59, 61–​62, 182–​83, 189–​90 COVID–​19 pandemic, 189–​90 Cowell, Henry, 58–​59 Crane, Hart, 35–​36 Crawford, Ruth, 58–​59 String Quartet, 58–​59 Currie, Scott, 166–​67, 172 –​73

Eastman, Julius, 91–​92 enlightenment, 24–​26 ensemble music-​making, 28, 143–​77, 191–​92 equality, 3–​4, 5–​7, 12–​13, 18–​21, 24–​27, 28, 47–​48, 52–​53, 55–​56, 67, 74–​75, 116–​18, 120, 121, 142, 143–​77, 191 European Union, UK’s departure from, 7–​8, 12

Dada, 106–​7 deliberation, 28, 143–​77. See also deliberative democracy deliberative democracy, 6–​7, 145–​46, 147–​48, 149, 155–​56, 159–​60, 161–​62, 167–​68, 169–​70 democratic transition, 17–​18 demos, 5–​7 Derrida, Jacques, 76–​77 digital technology, 184–​85, 191–​93 Dillan, Lisa, 174 direct democracy, 6–​8, 33–​34, 43–​44, 60–​61, 147 Drake, Hamid, 170–​71

Gansinger, Martin, 154–​55 Gastil, John, 160–​61 Ghandi, Leela, 16–​17, 22 Grainger, Percy, 58 Guelph Jazz Festival, 170–​71

Feldman, Morton, 27–​28, 66–​67, 69–​70, 74–​75, 80–​81, 82–​84, 87, 101 Intersection 3, 68–​69 feminism, 62–​63, 158 Feminist Improvising Group, 157–​58, 163–​64 Ferrari, Luc, 140–​41 Société V: Participation or not participation, 105–​6, 136–​42, 138f, 139f Floyd, George, 189 Fluxus, 107–​9 Folk music, 2–​3 freedom, 3–​4, 6–​7, 12–​15, 18–​19, 24–​27, 36–​39, 47–​48, 50–​52, 55–​56, 66–​67, 69–​70, 76, 91, 101, 111, 152–​53, 155, 158–​59, 162, 165–​67, 171–​72, 184–​87, 191, 196 free improvisation, 28, 146, 152–​77 Freeman, Jason Sketching, 111–​13 free jazz, 15–​16, 158–​59

Habermas, Jürgen, 131, 148–​49, 154–​56, 161–​62 Hayes, Kate Open Symphony, 111–​13 hegemony, 21–​22, 58, 124–​25, 136, 183–​84 Helbich, David Keine–​Pause (Audience Observations), 109

Index  221 Held, David, 6–​7 Hindemith, Paul, 106–​7 Hobbes, Thomas, 49, 62–​63 Hooker, Juliet, 18–​19 improvisation, 12–​16, 107–​8, 149–​50, 182–​83, 184–​85, 188–​90, 192–​93. See also free improvisation Improvisation, Community and Social Practice (ICASP) project, 156–​57, 166–​67, 171–​74 inclusion, 2, 3–​4, 5–​6, 16, 19–​21, 28, 116, 142, 143–​77, 182–​83 indeterminacy, 27–​28, 66–​101, 107–​8, 155, 182–​83, 184–​85 individualism, 15, 32, 47–​56, 102–​3, 158, 182–​83, 189–​90 Ingold, Tim, 98–​100 installation art, 111–​13, 114–​15 Instant Composers Pool, 173–​74 internet, 107–​8, 180–​81, 184–​88, 191–​92 Ives, Charles, 30–​31, 33–​34, 43–​44, 58, 59–​61 String Quartet no. 2, 43–​44 jazz, 12–​16, 69, 91–​92, 111–​13, 143–​44, 149–​50, 151–​52, 168. See also free jazz Jones, Darius, 189 We Can Change the Country, 188–​92, 190f Kanga, Zubin, 185–​88 Kasemets, Udo Contactics, 127, 128f Knotts, Shelly, 192–​96 Controller, 192–​93 Flock, 193–​96, 194f Union, 192–​93 Knouf, Nicholas, 89–​90 Knowles, Alison String Piece, 109 Kolisch, Rudolf, 143–​44 Kramnick, Isaac, 47–​49 Laclau, Ernesto, 22, 64–​65, 179–​80 Latour, Bruno, 95–​96, 97–​98

leadership, 10, 13–​14, 34–​35, 54, 125–​26, 127, 140, 144–​45, 149 Lefort, Claude, 22, 27–​28, 67–​68, 76–​84, 92–​93, 96–​98, 99–​100, 101, 121, 179–​80 liberalism, 6–​7, 17, 19–​20, 27, 47–​48, 50–​52, 56–​57, 62–​63, 64–​65. See also neoliberalism Ligeti, György Die Zukunft der Musik, 109 listening, 45–​46, 75, 79–​81, 93–​94, 104–​5, 117–​18, 145–​46, 149 live coding, 191–​92 Lockwood, Annea, 107–​8 Lokumbe, Hannibal One Land, One River, One People, 136 London Sinfonietta, 102 Love, Nancy, 3–​4 Lucier, Alvin, 95, 98–​99 Chambers, 95 I Am Sitting in a Room, 95 Music on a Long Thin Wire, 95 Macron, Emmanuel, 181 Marsalis, Wynton, 13–​15 Mason, Christian, 102 In the Midst of the Sonorous Islands, 111 McLaughlin, Scott, 98–​100 Fringing, 99–​100 Strata, 99–​100 McLuhan, Marshall, 127 Menaldo, Victor, 17–​18, 20, 22 Miller, David, 89–​90 Milliken, Cathy, 102 mobile technology, 107–​8, 111–​13, 114–​15, 131 Moorman, Charlotte, 90, 91–​92 Mouffe, Chantal, 21–​23, 26–​27, 79, 121, 179–​80, 183–​84 musical instruments, 94–​97, 98–​100 Music Biennale Zagreb, 93 Nabokov, Nicolas, 36–​38 Namtchylak, Sainkho, 170–​73 neoliberalism, 102–​3, 116, 127–​31, 171–​72, 181, 183–​84 network music, 191–​93

222 Index New York Philharmonic Orchestra, 91–​92 Nicholls, Tracey, 155–​57, 168–​69, 170 Oliveros, Pauline, 107–​8 Olsen, Joel, 18–​20, 22 orchestra, 9–​11, 24, 143–​44 Parker, Evan, 164–​65 Parker, William, 170–​71 participatory democracy, 6–​7, 147 Pisaro, Michael space: for audience, 111–​13 pluralism, 27, 30–​65, 155–​56, 184–​85, 189–​90 Polletta, Francesca, 162, 164–​65 popular music, 2–​3 populism, 9, 183–​84 post–​foundationalism, 22, 26–​27, 121, 178–​81, 182–​84, 191 Pousseur, Henri Votre Faust, 111–​13 Prévost, Eddie, 164 protest, 1–​2, 38–​39, 63–​64, 109, 126, 141, 142, 194–​95 Punchdrunk, 102–​3, 116 race, 18–​20, 158–​59, 163–​64, 188–​89 Radigue, Eliane, 98–​99 Rancière, Jacques, 22, 28, 105–​6, 116–​18, 119–​22, 123–​26, 135–​36, 179–​80, 183–​84 ‘The emancipated spectator’, 116–​18, 121–​22 referendum, 7–​8, 147 relational aesthetics, 102–​3 representative democracy, 6–​8, 141, 147 revolution, 18, 49, 106–​7, 141 Riesman, David, 51–​52, 56–​57, 59–​60, 64–​65 The Lonely Crowd, 51–​52, 59–​60 Ruo, Huang, 102, 131 The Sonic Great Wall, 111, 112f Rzewski, Frederic, 75 Sachiko M, 174 Saunders, James sometimes we do what you say, but occasionally we don’t, 134–​35, 135f

Schnebel, Dieter Concert sans orchestra, 109, 110f Schubert, Alexander WIKI–​PIANO.NET, 185–​88, 186f Second Viennese School, 58–​59 Seeger, Charles, 58–​59 Seeger, Pete, 2–​3 Silone, Ignazio, 36–​38 slavery, 19–​20 Smock, Kristina, 125–​35 social media, 181, 184–​85, 189–​90, 191–​92, 194–​95 South Korea, 24–​26 Spontaneous Music Ensemble, 164 Stevens, John, 164 string quartet, 143–​45, 149–​51 Taylor, Breonna, 189 Taylor, Charles, 155–​56, 168 theatre, 102–​3, 105–​6, 111–​13, 115–​18, 122–​23 Thoreau, Henry David, 33, 72–​73 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 27, 47–​56, 60–​61 Democracy in America, 27, 32, 47–​56 Toop, David, 153–​54, 176 Trilling, Lionel, 50–​51, 54–​55, 56–​57, 59–​60 The Liberal Imagination, 55, 59–​60 Trump, Donald, 8, 9, 28–​29, 178–​80, 183–​84, 188–​90 Tudor, David, 83–​90, 93, 94–​95, 97–​99 Rainforest, 95 US Constitution, 14–​15, 191. See also constitution Valadez, Jorge, 169–​70 Vautier, Ben Audience Piece no. 1, 109 Shower II, 108 Venables, Philip, 102 visual art, 102–​3, 106–​7 voting, 111–​13, 114–​15, 131–​32, 137–​40, 188–​89, 193–​96 Whitehead, Alfred North, 34–​35 Whitman, Walt, 35–​36, 53–​55 Democratic Vistas, 53–​54 Leaves of Grass, 53

Index  223 Wishart, Trevor, 107–​8 Wolff, Christian, 27–​28, 66–​67, 69, 70, 75, 83–​84, 100–​1 For 1, 2 or 3 People, 75, 76f Music for Six or Seven Players, 75

Young, Iris Marion, 162–​63, 174–​75 Zen Buddhism, 71, 72–​74, 91 Zuboff, Shoshana, 28–​29, 180–​81, 183–​84, 187–​88 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 180–​81