Contextualizing Experimentalism

The word "archaeology" occurs repeatedly in Meredith Monk's program notes, interviews, and titles (e.g., American Archaeology No. 1). It is also a dominant image running through her many operas and intermedia pieces. (The construction workers who explode a brick wall and thereby open a portal to a medieval French village at the beginning of Book of Days are archaeologists of a sort.) The term has even become a kind of cliché in the critical reception of her work, and has been associated in one way or another with the many versions of the past featured therein, from Neolithic Dolmens to the Holocaust. Yet the specific significance of this trope for Monk and her commentators has been scarcely elaborated. This talk digs up sources that informed Monk's conception of archaeology and explores broader aesthetic and social currents that these refracted. Indeed, during the 1970s archaeology attained a "new prestige," in the words of Michel de Certeau, pervading both the popular imagination--owing in part to the tremendous success of the touring Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition--and theoretical discourse, most notably in Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge. Ultimately, however, I argue that for Monk the archaeological was not just a faddish theme but a musical-theatrical technique intended to resolve antinomies within New York avant-garde art practice. 
            Drawing on archival documents from the collections of the NYPL and interviews, the talk opens with a consideration of Monk's Vessel (1971), a site-specific "opera epic" about Joan of Arc performed in "reality spaces" around lower Manhattan (including a vacant parking lot). I read the tension between the work's fantastical imagery and the gritty, even abject, urban environment in which it was staged as indicative of a transitional moment in the New York avant-garde. The layer of "reality" was an inheritance of the anti-illusionistic aesthetics of the intermedia "life-art" scene in which Monk first emerged in the mid-1960s. The magical/pseudo-medieval imagery was an early attestation to the return of subject matter and narrative in performances of the 1970s. I interpret these competing impulses through another dichotomy: on one hand, Monk explained her version of archaeology as fundamentally visual ("a way of seeing"); on the hand, as sonic ("I'm almost a musical archaeologist"), and, moreover, as specifically vocalic ("uncovering voices from an ancient past"). Monk's increasing gravitation toward a poetics of the primordial voice sought to resolve these various conflicts and yielded a distinct archaeological practice. This was an archaeology founded on the presumed magical power of the voice to bridge the gulf between past and present, to suture together representation and reality, and to elide the distinction between the symbolic and the expressive. I advance this argument through musical, phonemic, and choreographic analyses that are sensitive to the many intertextual allusions in Monk's work, from Roman Jakobson's discussion of infant babble to Julia Kristeva's theories of the pre-symbolic voice, and from Carl Jung's primitivist travelogue-memoir to the burgeoning of "world music." 

In 1970, a performance of Pauline Oliveros's _In Memoriam: Nikola Tesla, Cosmic Engineer_ found three musicians executing "simple practical experiments" in order to determine the resonant frequency of a theater. Though many musical works around this time invoked the language of science, the analogy with scientific research has been vigorously contested on the grounds that such works do not conform to the framework of testing and confirmation that characterizes the individual scientific experiment (Brooks 2012; Mauceri 1997). Yet recent scholarship in the history of science suggests that the single experiment may not be the most salient reference point in experimentation per se, prompting a reconsideration of the comparison between the activity of music and the activity of science.


In this paper, I evaluate the extent to which musical compositions by Pauline Oliveros and David Tudor from the period 1968-1973 can be understood not as experiments, but as "experimental systems" as characterized by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. The experimental system refers to the loose coherence of objects, instruments, and technologies through which research questions are materialized, and within which context individual experiments become meaningful (Rheinberger 1992). Through performance analysis and close reading of composer and performer accounts, I contend that the open-ended, technologically-mediated musical works by Oliveros and Tudor place the performers in a role analogous to that of the scientist, whose possible research questions are guided more decisively by the material qualities of their experimental system than by theory.


In each work discussed, sound is presented as a way of knowing about the world in that the production of sound correlates with the production of new knowledge. In David Tudor's _Rainforest_, for example, the performer observes an object's resonant qualities by causing it to audibly vibrate. Just as the experimental system is designed to allow for the emergence of what Rheinberger calls "epistemic things"-the unexpected and ambiguous harbingers of new knowledge-I argue that these compositions are oriented towards the production of epistemic sound. Furthermore, this reading emphasizes Tudor and Oliveros's divergence from the Cagean conception of experimental activity, in which the material role of the system-and scientist-is diminished (Piekut 2012).

In the 1980s, the pro-industry agenda of the Reagan administration sparked a revitalization of environmental organizations. While most modern environmental movements were primarily concerned with the conservation of the natural world for human use, the deep ecology movement, spearheaded by philosopher Arne Naess, argued that the natural world has intrinsic value unto itself, independent of its human-use value. Deep ecology writers including Bill Devall, George Sessions, and Warwick Fox argue that nature's intrinsic value can be fully realized through a cultivation of ecologic consciousness, in which humans become aware of the actuality of the natural world and no longer perceive a boundary between human consciousness and the surrounding environment. Like deep ecologists, composer and performer Pauline Oliveros shows a preoccupation with consciousness and the environment in her meditative deep listening practice. Since her foundational Deep Listening album, recorded in 1988, Oliveros' practice of deep listening has widely influenced sound artists, musicians, and composers for decades. A practice which includes body work, interactive performances, and listening, both to the environment and one's own body, deep listening enables an expansion of perception in order to "cultivate a heightened awareness of the sonic environment." For Oliveros, the expanded consciousness facilitated by deep listening allows one to connect intimately with the "whole of the environment and beyond."
In this paper, I argue that Oliveros' practice of deep listening is the sonic enactment of deep ecology theories. I demonstrate that Oliveros and her work belongs in dialogue with philosophers and environmentalists working in 1980s North America to cultivate a deeper understanding of ecological consciousness. Ultimately based in sonic meditation, deep listening requires the listener to become performer, interpreter, and audience simultaneously in order to perceive "the whole space/time continuum of sound" and encounter the "vastness and complexities" of the universe. By considering Oliveros' philosophies of deep listening in the context of deep ecology, I argue that she was a part of a larger movement flourishing in the 1980s North American that was concerned with expanding human consciousness to include the the whole of our environment.