The Musician as Philosopher: New York’s Vernacular Avant-Garde, 1958–1978

The Musician as Philosopher

The Musician as Philosopher

New York’s Vernacular Avant-Garde, 1958–1978

Michael Gallope

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2024 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2024

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83174-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83176-3 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83175-6 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226831756.001.0001

Publication of this book has been supported by a generous contribution from the Claire and Barry Brook Fund and General Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gallope, Michael, author.

Title: The musician as philosopher : New York’s vernacular avant-garde, 1958–1978 / Michael Gallope.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023027618 | ISBN 9780226831749 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226831763 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226831756 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Avant-garde (Music)—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | Modernism (Music)—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | Music—20th century—Philosophy and aesthetics. | Tudor, David, 1926–1996—Criticism and interpretation. | Coleman, Ornette—Criticism and interpretation. | Coltrane-Turiyasangitananda, A. (Alice)—Criticism and interpretation. | Smith, Patti—Criticism and interpretation. | Hell, Richard—Criticism and interpretation. | Velvet Underground (Musical group)

Classification: LCC ML200.8.N4 G35 2024 | DDC 780.9747/1—dc23/eng/20230623

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027618

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction

Part One: Maps

Chapter One: Affect—Praxis

Chapter Two: Veils—Atmospheres

Global Inequities

Intentionality and Grammar

Plays of Recognition

Atmospheres

Part Two: Studios

Chapter Three: David Tudor, Esoteric Spectacle . . . c. 1958

Tudor’s Pianism of the 1950s

Cage’s Noumena of the 1950s

Tudor—Cage—Graph J

Ferocious Ineffability

Chapter Four: Ornette Coleman, Utopian Intentionalities . . . c. 1966

Bebop Historicity

Deskilling Intentionalities

Vernacular Utopias

Harmolodic Ineffability

Chapter Five: The Velvet Underground, Eleven Rooms . . . c. 1967

Drone Alchemy

Afro-magnetism

Atmospheric Rooms

Attitudinal Virtuosity

Vital Tape

Chapter Six: Alice Coltrane, Divine Injunctions . . . c. 1971

Afrocentric Spiritualities

Ornamental Apparitions

Coltrane’s Philosophy

Divine Injunctions

Afro-futurity

Chapter Seven: Patti Smith—Richard Hell, Forces . . . c. 1974

Punk Primitivism

Poetry, Alchemy, Force

Paradoxes of the Erotic

The Aura of Unknowing

Conclusion: A Materialist Music History

Acknowledgments

Archival Collections

Notes

Index

Introduction

From 1958 to 1978 in New York, a series of irruptions emerged in the history of music, irruptions fraught with dissonance, obscurity, volume. The musicians behind these irruptions were not merely expanding musical resources into dissonance and noise with a familiar polemical edge. They were thinking with sound: crafting metaphysical portals, aiming one to go somewhere, to get out of oneself. For many artists and thinkers of the postwar period, the self was taken to be ideological, given, normal. Their musical irruptions—this strange, intense, disorienting music—was a way out, a way beyond, through the other, through the collective, through an ecstatic mystery. Their work also had new techno-material underpinnings: radios, amplifiers, televisions, multitrack recording studios, and long-playing records. Some of the results were intricate, esoteric, and fractured; some of them were massively oceanic and inconsistent. It was often difficult to tell the difference.

This book discusses the work of several musicians who played key roles in these musical irruptions: David Tudor, Ornette Coleman, the Velvet Underground, Alice Coltrane, and a final chapter on Richard Hell and Patti Smith. Their work involved a larger group of collaborators: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Don Cherry, Denardo Coleman, Billy Higgins, Charlie Haden, Maureen Tucker, La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, Lou Reed, Christa Päffgen, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Andy Warhol, John Coltrane, Jack DeJohnette, Jimmy Garrison, Lenny Kaye, Richard Sohl, Jay Dee Daugherty, Tom Verlaine, Ivan Julian, Marky Ramone, and Robert Quine. This book is a history of the thinking embedded in their collective work, and it is a critical exposition of this period of time.

Consider brief sketches of the five scenes: David Tudor, the iconic virtuoso pianist of the midcentury avant-garde who staged a deadpan commitment to esoteric atonal structures; Ornette Coleman, a jazz revolutionary with a background touring on the Chitlin’ Circuit, who celebrated a cacophonous play of contrapuntal lines accompanied by thoughtful riddles few could understand; the Velvet Underground, a decadent experimental rock band that fused together doo-wop, noise, Indian music, and Warhol’s avant-intermedia spectacle; Alice Coltrane, an extraordinary gospel and bebop pianist who became a visionary of unheard transcendental landscapes; and finally Patti Smith and Richard Hell, poets of the underground, Rimbaud freaks, who sought the force of rock to deliver their vision, unpredictably ravishing and flailing in ways that ruptured their audiences’ expectations.

These musicians all worked in New York, but they came to the city from Fort Worth, Lexington, Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, South Jersey, rural North Carolina, Philadelphia, and the suburbs of Long Island. They generally circulated downtown, often in distinct scenes that were very aware of one another but rarely overlapped. Their scenes variously crossed, reinforced, and confronted the color line. Tudor hustled with Cage in a generally white scene of classical music, avant-garde performance art, and professional dance. Coleman and Coltrane managed to carve out a space atop a prestigious corner of the jazz world, originated by Black musicians and joined by many white musicians. The Velvets struggled to find a platform for experimental rock in the late 1960s, though by the time Hell and Smith arrived in the early 1970s, a downtown avant-rock scene had emerged. Also originated by Black musicians, by the late 1960s and certainly the mid-1970s, rock scenes were overwhelmingly white. Their various scenes intersected with broader historical trajectories. Quite famously, the social inequities of this period fueled a thirst for freedom and universal self-consciousness from the civil rights struggle and the feminist movement to the anticaste movement and the decolonization of the Global South. In this context, racialized and gendered spaces of contested mimicry, turf, and genre mirrored underlying material inequities and structured the social imagination of their experimental work.

There were also a number of commonalities. Each of these artists stretched the boundaries and scraped at the corners of their genres. All, to various degrees, recognized a spiritual or mystical dimension to the creative process. Their influences also clustered and overlapped. Tudor, Cage, Coltrane, and the Velvets were inspired by Indian music and philosophy. Cage and Coleman’s utopianism was indebted to Buckminster Fuller. The Velvets, Smith, and Hell were influenced by the Beats and Bob Dylan, who were in turn influenced by Black genres of blues and jazz. Coleman, the Velvets, Smith, and Hell were directly revolutionized by—or were practitioners of—rhythm and blues.

These musicians’ touring was commonly transnational, as was their influence on others. They all went to Europe at some point in their careers, and Tudor, Cage, Coleman, Reed, Cale, Coltrane, and Smith toured in Japan. Though Warhol, Reed, and Smith became celebrities, the avant-garde’s in person appeal was limited. Their live audiences were all generally of a modest size: a CBGBs or a Five Spot audience was similar to an uptown new music ensemble of the 1970s—a few dozen people, maybe peaking at one hundred. An audience of hundreds turned up for the rare but well-promoted spectacle (Tudor or Coltrane at Town Hall in 1958 or 1966, respectively, or the Velvets at the Dom in 1967). Their work also commonly elicited widespread critical fascination—everyone discussed here, for example, was written about in the New York Times.

None were composers who were content with writing music in the form of published scores. They were invested in vernacular, deskilled, and non-Western traditions that were made newly accessible to large numbers of musicians following the birth of the LP and an explosive mass culture of music on radio and television. The postwar media ecosystem made possible radically new patterns of learning by ear outside the locality of oral transmission. In this context these musicians responded to and fused oral and self-taught traditions with a range of knowledge gained from piano lessons to church services and school bands, and in doing so they engaged in all manner of improvisation and collaborative play. Benjamin Piekut has described this mode of reproduction as a mixed scriptural economy that was native to the vernacular avant-garde.¹ These musicians were interested in participatory frameworks, regarded recordings as important influences and finished works more often than traditional scores, and often worked with stakeholders and firms in the music industry while institutions of music education played only a muted and peripheral role (if any at all).² Even Tudor, who began his career as a pianist of new music, transitioned to collaboration, improvisation, and electronic instruments in a practice that sidelined musical notation. For these reasons, I use the term musician instead of composer. By centering vernacular technicity, this book seeks to broaden and complicate what counts among scholars as a musical avant-garde.

Yet exactly what they did eluded academic and analytical understanding. This is partly by design: these musicians sought—quite purposefully—to occlude the precision of precise, teachable musical techniques. They left traditional conventions of music history behind (or forgot them, to use Coleman’s term) and took off into esoteric techniques and games into the alchemy of electrical amplification, an oblique metaphysics, and theatrical and visual hallucinations. Rules and criteria were made metaphorical, left unspoken, joked with, ironized, and scrambled. They sought to elude the philosophical coordinates of reasoned judgment. These musicians even tried to disrupt their own intentions; they sought detachment or tried to stage confusion about what was being done in the first place. Self-taught amateurs and children could be virtuosos. Their positions were painterly, spiritual, and loose, as if one were there and not there at the same time. For they did not just fracture the rules for creating music; more philosophically, these musicians fractured the rules for recognizing the rules. In this book, I call this questioning of recognition a second-order modernism. I develop this concept more fully in chapter 2.

In this book I use the terms avant-garde and modernism in mutually reinforcing but not identical ways. I define modernism broadly as any art that foregrounds the self-consciousness of modernity. The avant-garde is a pointed provocation within the broader movements of modernism. It polemically and controversially foregrounds the self-consciousness of modernity. An avant-garde musical irruption makes people think. These musicians tried to stop listeners in their tracks and then electrify them. In an era when the norms, rules, and ideas about music changed so quickly and went to so many extremes, critics frequently found themselves running low on synonyms for insanity and noise. New sounds—alongside the ideas, words, and images of the avant-garde—amplified emotions, echoed social fractures, and opened cutting-edge metaphysical paths.

Though they could be critical of the music industry and its effects on musical creativity (particularly Coleman and Hell, who ran into conflicts with record companies), these musicians eschewed Adornian and Greenbergian models of modernism that claimed the work of art was a monad of historical techniques that negated the specter of mass culture. Instead, they developed alternative critical methods based in the mimicry and historicity of the vernacular and the non-Western. They practiced a multifocal dialectics that questioned what musical form was—that is, through sound, they pressed audiences to wonder whether it could be perceived accurately at all—with the aim of scrambling the coordinates of the self. And by the 1960s their audiences were tuned in to what they were doing; their communities and fans were themselves literate in these emerging idioms and guided by an intellectually minded sphere of critics.

Though these musicians protested the social and material conditions of modernity, like any artist, they offered no material escape from capitalism. At the same time, as musicians invested in vernacular, deskilled, or non-Western traditions, their music was marked by a distinct response to social power. They commonly insisted: Do not assent to the aesthetic education of the already empowered authorities of Western civilization. Remake it yourself. Be yourself. Go get it elsewhere. And then get rid of yourself. Have the confidence or the positioning to discover for oneself, or in a group, a new grammar of art. It would be misguided to climb the intellectual heights of modernist composition; in a mixed scriptural economy of the vernacular avant-garde, the creative process was an abyss; find your own relationship with music’s technicity. Insist that aesthetic education exist outside established institutions; that is, laterally, or circuitously, or experimentally, or even terminally and nihilistically through the historicity of the dispossessed. It all had a utopian drive: these musicians sought a dissonance that sounded an escape from the self that was also an inversion, a thwarting, or a dissolution of established social hierarchies. For them, the self was both hypostatized and in crisis. With their irruptive dissonances, they sought a paradoxical goal: to be yourself and to get out of yourself—at the same time.

All these musicians thought deeply about their creative practice, and in this way, they acted as philosophers. That is, through their work, they posed foundational questions about music, life, society, and being. Each one also philosophized about the ineffability of musical sound. Of course, in doing so, they did not act as professional philosophers; their thinking did not unfold in the organized form of a reasoned argument or take on the form of a scholarly publication that patiently interrogated the assumptions guiding our beliefs. Their positions were more typically expressed as blunt provocations woven through language, music, visual appearance, and other performance choices that spanned media. As Joanna Demers notes, music’s ineffability was often acknowledged through doing rather than just writing.³ Along these lines, these musicians’ philosophy unfolded as stylistic choice, atmospheric calibration, dialogue, suggestion. It was developed above all in the complex social terrain of this music, often amid what Brigid Cohen has described as a racialized avant-garde marked by largely unspoken history of mutual fascination, crossed signals, and complicated negotiations of authority.⁴ These musicians, who navigated what Cohen describes as the ambivalence and uncertainty of avant-garde spaces structured by social and racial difference, often insisted that something was wrong with the trajectory of modernity even if their perspectives were richly varied, and even incommensurable.⁵ Their musical atmospheres dissented along the lines of a loose historical thesis of the 1960s: stop repressing and remaining silent about subjugation; we are living with and catering to far too much repression and authority. Even when they did not explicitly insist on this thesis, many at some level presumed it to be the case.

In the realm of language, the philosophy developed by these musicians was informed by different kinds of texts: religious scripture, bits and pieces of non-Western thought, spiritual writings, anthroposophy, New Age books, poetry, novels, essays, and the discourse of other musicians. Many of these influences, with all their conflicting epistemologies and vague beliefs, are sometimes presumed to be intellectually sloppy, unserious, or embarrassing.⁶ But the music of this historical period is enriched considerably by reading and grappling with the thought that was widely read at the time and that informed the terms of their creative work. Indeed, there is much to be learned about music and its histories if we credit a wider sphere of human reflection as philosophy. For this reason, this book frames philosophy as an inclusive multiplicity, an expansive definition that could entail vernacular philosophy, ethno-philosophy, and oral philosophy. At the same time, it does not disregard widely circulated texts that are traditionally designated as philosophy, particularly when a philosopher’s influence is historically integral to the musicians at issue. Canonical figures of intellectual history remain backdrops for the postwar avant-garde. At some level, for example, widely read texts by Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson, Wittgenstein, and the existentialists inform the terms of the philosophy at issue in any one chapter.

This book is a history of a messy and bustling mix of sounding and thinking that asks to be listened to, thought about, illuminated, and compared. Thus, in the pages that follow, philosophy is not applied to music; instead, it is shown to be woven into its historical and social making. In this way, this book is not a contextual history, nor is it modeled on the connective empiricism of an actor-network. Rather, what determines its emphases and shape is the problem-driven detective work of an imminent critique. These dissonant irruptions perplexed; they induced thought; they exemplified profound tensions of social imagination. How should we understand them? What did the musicians think? How did they think through the shaping of musical sound? What does their work allow others to think? Why did their work matter? How should the utopian aims of their work be positioned in the broader arc of social history and music history?

An immanent critique is guided by more than the available historical evidence. In The Musician as Philosopher, it is guided by critical explanations of social problems and their perplexing and inexhaustible relationships to histories of musical sound. Rarely are these relationships explicitly presented in historical sources themselves; to hear them requires the interventions of critique, analysis, and synthesis. In the tradition of critical theory, to critique the normativity of received wisdom, to relate ideas to their genesis in material circumstances, or, with respect to historiography, to have the confidence to reframe what counts as a historical problem—all these interventions are based in the human capacity for reason, or Vernuft.⁷ For thinkers like Herbert Marcuse in particular, the capacity for critical reason (Vernuft) was understood to be potentially utopian, offering emancipatory alternatives to the normative regularities of traditional research and understanding, or Verstand. Insofar as critical reasoning has the power to dislodge the norms of the past, in ways both subtle and explicit, the philosophers I have studied—that is, those who have informed my own capacity to reason—have inevitably shaped the questions and values I have brought to this historical study. In this way, this book’s method of immanent critique also functions as a critical reflection on the present, because what counts as musical and philosophical literacy, rigor, or competence today continues to remain ideologically restricted in a way that elevates certain traditions of music and philosophy while devaluing others.⁸ The final section of chapter one explores my approach to immanent critique in greater detail.

The musical examples in this book are sound recordings, both of live performances and from sessions in recording studios. In writing about them, I favor a mode of criticism that I take to mirror or find a consonance with the creative process as the artists undertook it. My approach is interpretive and places emphasis on what I infer would have been decisive choices for the musicians in question. This results in a minimal style that I hope is transparent and directs the ear in a way that is accessible to most readers and reflective of the underlying collaborative processes. As a medium, to me it seems self-evident that music is foundationally sonic. And in music, the precise contours of thought patterns (to use a locution shared by Coltrane and Coleman) can be elusive, to say the least.⁹ As I discuss in chapter one (and have argued elsewhere), music is a perplexing and ineffable ride, what Ryan Dohoney calls affective atmosphere, a fiery locus of social desire and erotic entanglements.¹⁰ At the same time, it is inescapably structured by techniques, economies, and forces that are integrated with feeling, anger, love, and cathexis, spoken and unspoken. Raymond Williams once gave this composite phenomenon the name structures of feeling.¹¹ All that gets unleashed in the complicated flux of practicing, tinkering, composing, arranging, rehearsing, collaborating, performing, recording, and playing back. For this reason, I try to listen dialectically. Sometimes this means the affective heights of music are held in tension with a disturbing inequity or blindness; indeed, aesthetic production is never ideologically blameless.¹² In fact it may be that such contradictions are the medium’s most honest moments. For music is the intertwined traffic of sounds, desires, anxieties, and affective and intellectual worlds in their deepest and messiest insolubility. This book seeks to bring to life the speculative polyphony at work in its resounding dissonance.

. . .

This book is organized into two parts.

Part 1, titled Maps, develops some key concepts that circulate throughout the book and positions its method and outlook. Chapter 1 discusses aesthetic properties of music generally: the inconsistency of sound, music’s affective intensity, its ineffability, and musical praxis as a basis for thought, in dialogue with writings by Susanne Langer, Angela Davis, and Fred Moten. It focuses particular attention on a conception of musical affect that is dialectically mediated by social praxis, modern technology, and economic structure. Affective praxis is not unique to postwar music; it is a general way of regarding musical practice. But it is especially important for this book, for a meaningful history of the period requires recognizing the peculiarity of music’s affective praxis as a historical object and agent. Along these lines, the chapter situates the project in relation to methodological debates in the fields of music studies: the question of ineffability; the status of semiotics, the mediation of affect by cognition, institutions, and politics; and the political question of practicing immanent critique when normative definitions of what counts as music, philosophy, and sound practice are ever widening.

In chapter 2, I revisit the question of what kind of dialectics animate the musical avant-gardes of this historical period. It begins by developing the idea of a second-order modernism that emerges during the 1960s. As noted above, a second-order modernism goes beyond the expansion of musical materials and resources and begins to fundamentally question our capacities of perception and recognition. Chapter 2 then proposes two interrelated trajectories of the postwar avant-garde: tense and intricate patterns of intersubjectivity (or plays of recognition) and new ruptures in style history conditioned by revolutions in the electrification of and social access to the sphere of musical reproduction. I then explore the dynamics of intersubjectivity through a discussion of raced and gendered inequities in late capitalism as they relate to fantasies of otherness and modernist resistance.

The final section of chapter two develops three concepts of stylistic change in the second-order modernisms that cut across the studio chapters—atmosphere, hyperfracture, and alchemy. In this book, modernist atmospheres transgress the positive certitude of musical elements and the fracturing of known musical grammars in order to envelop perception and alter its conditions. Hyperfractures are modernist atmospheres in which a fascination with abundance and excess results in a loss of transparency of the virtuosic object. Hyperfractures tend to involve esoteric, aleatoric, mystical, elaborate, illogical, or exotic forms and rules; they fuss over numbers and numerologies, code books, elaborate procedures, or intricate logics that may or may not make sense to listeners. Alchemies are modernist atmospheres that use electricity and modern recording techniques to develop a more empirical relationship to sound; through experimentation with collaboration, mixing, editing, and loud volumes, they seek out a transformative, even hallucinatory, sense of intensity. Each of these stylistic concepts describes musical forms that challenge the midcentury norms of traditional Western musical literacy.

Part 2 turns to the musicians themselves in the form of studio chapters. Here, I write as historian, critic, and comparatist to develop philosophical problems on the terrain of social and collaborative musical life. Some studio chapters are focused on notable musical events that range out into associated activities; others are focused on albums that are part of a time line and a network of cultural life. These chapters reason from the work of musicians, taking their thinking and action as itself philosophical, as a critical reflection of society. In the space below I offer brief summaries of each of the studio chapters:

David Tudor, Esoteric Spectacle . . . c. 1958 explores Tudor’s departure from the philosophical parameters of traditional Western notation via a study of his premiere of the graphic notations in John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958) at Town Hall. An iconic avant-garde pianist of the 1950s and early 1960s, Tudor developed a philosophical approach to performance that blended a rigorous method of realizing existing scores with a surprisingly open-ended performance style that anticipated vernacular practices in experimental music of the coming decades. By sight reading customized realizations of indeterminate scores in live performance, Tudor kept the drastic vitality of the performance alive while cleaving to the guardrails of esoteric procedures that involved elaborate calculations. The result had a philosophical effect on his perception that was akin to meditation. In his words, my mind had to completely forget and not relate the next incident to the previous one.¹³ The chapter reconstructs the key influences on Tudor and Cage’s collaboration through discussions of writings by Antonin Artaud, Carl Jung, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Mary Caroline Richards, Rudolf Steiner, and Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki. By treating notation as a means to defamiliarize the act of performance, Tudor staged a hyperfracture—which sounded to many critics as a cacophonous, even absurd, violence at the piano—that aimed to decircuit the Westernized, ego-driven capacity to perceive musical sound.

Ornette Coleman, Utopian Intentionalities . . . c. 1966 focuses on The Empty Foxhole (1966), Coleman’s collaborative recording session with Charlie Haden and Ornette’s ten-year-old son, Denardo Coleman. Before recording, Coleman had taken it upon himself to teach his son to play the drums and then invited Denardo to collaborate at the session in New Jersey. The album also features Coleman’s debut of solos performed left handed on the violin, an instrument he taught himself to play, with no aim of learning to play it correctly. Critics responded with bewilderment as to how to evaluate the latest collaboration from the by-then-notorious figure of the jazz avant-garde. Based in a range of historical reviews, interviews, and articles on Coleman as well as close study of his recordings, this chapter argues that The Empty Foxhole presented a hyperfracture that challenged the horizon of intentional and perceptual criteria held by US jazz critics during the 1960s. The chapter positions Coleman’s hyperfracture in context with two discourses: one is Amiri Baraka’s dialectical conception of Afro-modernism in Blues People (1963, initially published under the name LeRoi Jones), the other Coleman’s own vernacular philosophy of harmolodics as it is expressed in various interviews and writings from the 1970s onward. It concludes by showing how his words about his music skate around ambiguously, mirroring a sense of music’s ineffability by evading the assignment of precise technical terms to the album’s sounds and techniques. Coleman’s harmolodic philosophy aspired to a socially inclusive utopia that both affirmed the multiplicity of vernacular grammars while thwarting their synthesis by way of numinously indeterminate rules and intentions.

Chapter 5 is titled The Velvet Underground, Eleven Rooms . . . c. 1967. Like Tudor, Cage, and Coleman, the Velvet Underground harnessed music’s ineffability by withholding communication and refusing to adopt a transparent intentional stance. Yet in their eschewal of notation and in their emphasis on collaboration and improvisation, the Velvets’ second-order modernism reconfigured hyperfractures into electrified alchemies. They fused together Lou Reed’s Beat-influenced songwriting and singing, John Cale’s droning experimentalism, Nico’s unmappable, ambiguously gendered vocals, and Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker’s hypnotic grooves into an atmosphere that was equal parts physiological and characterological. Like Cage, Tudor, and Coltrane, a calibrated fantasy of India was a crucial element, but the stylistic framework of their music foundationally appropriated Black rhythm and blues and doo-wop. In a further layer of racialized appropriation, the Velvets adapted Afro-modernist techniques of modal improvisation and deskilling, which they associated with musicians like Coleman and John Coltrane. Philosophically, the band’s cacophonous approach to rock music sought to excavate the darkest and strangest depths of the self and the psyche. The philosophy embedded in their work—one that staged a complex intersubjective scenario of erotic and psychological excess—came across in interviews, in critical responses to their work, and through the layered choices embedded in their first studio album, The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967).

Chapter 6, Alice Coltrane, Divine Injunctions . . . c. 1971, explores the ways Alice Coltrane’s spiritual philosophy underpinned a mystical ascent to registers of self-consciousness in her solo LP, Universal Consciousness (1971). By contrast to Tudor, Coleman, and the Velvets, Coltrane’s alchemies aimed to challenge the norms of musical perception by reimagining the stylistic parameters of Afro-modernism via an explicitly devotional stance toward metaphysical truth. Musically, her work traversed a number of stylistic boundaries: her talents as a keyboardist had moorings in gospel, bebop, and her late husband John Coltrane’s increasingly free and ecstatic sheets of sound that lent her music a certain historical basis in hyperfractures. But by the early 1970s, Alice Coltrane had developed an alchemy that abandoned the acoustic conventionality of jazz in favor of concept albums that featured genre fusion, tape splices, tanpura, solo harp improvisations, and surprisingly exact transcriptions of works by Stravinsky and her late husband. This chapter shows how her work as a philosopher became key to her musical experimentalism, specifically in the way she mobilized song titles, liner notes, and her spiritual writings to ask philosophical questions about her music’s alchemical ineffability. To do so, the chapter positions her work in broader social histories of the Black reception of Hindu spirituality, for philosophically she had discovered in Hinduism a distinctly utopian vision of human universality that mirrored the social desires of the civil rights era. Like Coleman, Coltrane’s work challenged her listeners’ perception about what musical sounds could metaphysically accomplish. At the same time, Coltrane went further than the many musicians of the 1960s (like the Velvets) who sought to appropriate Indian motifs; she actually invited listeners to join her practice of ecstatic devotion. The chapter concludes by positioning Coltrane’s work in dialogue with emergent discourses on Afro-futurism in the humanities.

Chapter 7, Patti Smith—Richard Hell, Forces . . . c. 1974, explores Patti Smith and Richard Hell’s transitions from poets to rock musicians in the Lower East Side as the long 1960s evolved into the postindustrial 1970s. Commonly influenced by bohemian icons like Rimbaud, Artaud, Jackson Pollock, the Beats, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, Smith and Hell were poets keenly interested in the way language could excavate levels of reality repressed by the fabric of social norms in the US. During the years 1971–76, they became performer-icons in the downtown scene around CBGBs, Smith as a singer, and Hell as a singer and bass player. In finding their way as artists, they both discovered that the ineffability of rock music’s affective force could set loose an alchemy that transformed their poetic reflections into primitivist, atmospheric rituals. As was the case with the Velvets, the energizing, dissenting realism of their work was built on an inversion of gendered and racialized inequities. Smith in particular achieved notoriety in producing a newly assertive grammar for women through a combination of existential affirmation, popular accessibility, and cheeky rebellion. But Smith’s and Hell’s musical and poetic debts were Black: with formal grammars based in ecstatic vocals, backbeats, repetitive riff-based grooves, and the use of minor pentatonic scales. Their primitivism—which would prove to be foundational for the emergent genre of punk—was both blind in its appropriative whiteness and remarkable in its use of an irruptive dissonance to elevate the possibilities of indeterminate dissent.

In these studio histories, there is much to listen to, meditate on, and be excited by in their rich confluences of irruptive dissonances and philosophical thought. There is also, particularly in the instance of the white musicians who appropriated and profited from traditions they only superficially understood and whose social history they did not share, much to critique. I hope the reader embraces this messiness, even when it makes for uncomfortable reading. The complexity of these entanglements is endemic to the history at issue, for the very substance of the postwar vernacular avant-garde was fueled by the traffic of racialized and sexualized otherness across lines of social inequity. In this way my choice of musicians is not merely about changing who is recognized in music history; its comparative scope aims at the deeper conditions and meanings for how and why what counted as an avant-garde dissonance changed so drastically in the 1960s. At the same time, though the book is comparative, critical, and explanatory, no effort is made to be comprehensive. Given that these studios cross genres (classical, jazz, rock) that have distinct scenes and histories, I realize the diversity of figures could give the impression that they are representative of New York experimentalism as a whole. They are not. Scholarship on experimental music has continued to broaden its ears and definitions, and this book can only be a small effort in this direction.¹⁴ The social and aesthetic complexity of this period is staggering, and part of its magic is that it has resisted summary.

But that does not mean broader historical conclusions cannot be drawn. Indeed, it is key that an immanent critique reasons dialectically and ventures critical perspectives on underlying patterns of social and stylistic change. Along these lines, the book’s conclusion takes a step back to consider the larger methodological question of a materialist approach to music history. It argues that musical sound should be regarded as having a distinct sense of historical agency in relationship to social and economic changes in late capitalism. It specifically proposes that a key inflection point in style history—the transformation of hyperfractures into alchemies—dramatized or electrified the crisis of the self during the long 1960s with unprecedented irruptions of dissonance that were at once popular and insane.¹⁵ That is, following an argument in Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, just as the late modern self acquired social advancement, these irruptive vernacular atmospheres brought the self under critique by inviting questioning, disturbance, and a thirst for transcendence. The final section positions the book’s method against the neo-Dahlhausian strains of historiography in musicology that quietly allow conventional style histories to underpin increasingly contextual and material inquiries; it instead argues that music history ought to think of music and its historical styles as a distinct kind of historical object and agent. From this perspective, a music history can seek to explain the medium’s role as a fundament of social change.

I invite the reader to choose their own path forward through the text. Some readers may want to read it in its published order: to first work through the conceptual Maps in part 1, and then hear how they connect elements of the studio histories in part 2. Others may want to begin with the vernacular philosophies in part 2 and return to part 1 to reflect on the broader conceptual questions that emerge in the studio chapters. Either approach works.

. . .

When writing my first book, Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable, I was enthralled by the conceptual intricacies of philosophers: from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Bloch, Adorno, Jankélévitch, and Deleuze and Guattari. My fascination with these authors and their thought remains. A basic political question haunting any philosophy of art is the deceptively simple one of what is included and made literate, audible, and visible. And for all their astounding virtuosity, the philosophers in Deep Refrains had only the thinnest sense of the racialized and gendered social tensions of late modernity, let alone all the magical, electrical, improvised, loose musical techniques and atmospheres of the postwar period that bent the social imaginary into unprecedented territory. If this book began as an effort to address music that I am convinced these philosophers should have written about, over time it became a far more exciting project of listening to the way the musicians themselves thought about the powers of sound during this extraordinary period of social upheaval.

In his essay Music Discomposed (1967), Stanley Cavell noted that convention as a whole is now looked upon not as a firm inheritance from the past, but as a continuing improvisation in the face of problems we no longer understand.¹⁶ Cavell did not propose to restore any firm inheritance from the past—that was not his project—but, as I will contend in chapter 2, his way of hearing the improvisation of social life might be reworked for the philosophical dramas of a broader avant-garde than the narrow world of serial composition addressed in his essay. And in recovering and reconstructing a wider array of forms, intentions, and metaphysical positions, we might avoid simple token inclusions and instead elevate the thinking of a broad swath of practices themselves that cross all manner of social and generic boundaries. As each of these musicians show us, the indeterminacy of unknowing is a new world, a portal, and a critical philosophy. Its forms of sound soared with a force that was at once peculiar and magnetic.

Part One

Maps

[ Chapter One ]

Affect—Praxis

In Philosophy in a New Key (1942), Susanne Langer claims that human societies are foundationally invested in the ideation of meanings and symbols. The source of our investment is not, however, an a priori capacity of cognition; rather, our ideations are spawned by the ineffable grip of affect. In her discussion of the anthropology of ritual, she illustrates her claim with a memorable—and somewhat terrifying—example: An arriving train may have to embody nameless and imageless dangers coming with a rush to unload their problems before me.¹

The affective response