So in another life, ages ago, I wrote this thing called a dissertation, in support of a doctoral degree that I currently get approximately zero material use out of.
Here is the eighth installment (a necessarily short introduction to what is one of the longer chapters) of a series that will finally get the whole damned thing out there for public consumption. I'm going to present it verbatim, though I'm sure my thinking has changed in some ways since I originally wrote it (between 1998 and 2004).
Enjoy, if you can!
PREVIOUSLY:
Introduction, part one
Introduction, part two
Chapter one, part one
Chapter one, part two
Chapter two, part one
Chapter two, part two
Chapter two, part three
Chapter Three: Authenticity and Written Music (part one)
In 1983, Art Jarvinen, composer and member of the California EAR Unit, a Los Angeles new music ensemble, commissioned a piece from composer Frank Zappa. Entitled “While You Were Art,” the piece was to be debuted as part of the Monday Evening Concert Series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a regular haunt for the “new music” audience in Los Angeles. Once the members of the group looked over the new score, however, they concluded that it would be too difficult to learn in time for the scheduled concert. In an effort to salvage the commission, Zappa offered to provide a high-quality digital tape recording of an electronically-sequenced performance of the piece which, he suggested, could be played through the PA system while the members of the ensemble mimed “actually performing.” On the evening of the concert, to make the illusion complete, all of the trappings of a performance were put into place: wires were dangled from the instruments (as Zappa told the musicians: “Any sound the audience hears that might be deemed ‘synthesized’ will be overlooked because there’s a wire coming out of your instrument” (175, italics in original)), nonfunctioning mics and “[a] lot of useless electronic equipment” were scattered about the stage, and so on (Ocker).
David Ocker, Zappa’s copyist and assistant at the time, indicates what happened next: “As soon as they turned on the sound system I knew there was a problem. I described it as ‘a wall of hiss.’” Previously, Zappa had recorded a version of the piece to a cassette tape, which had been provided to the group as a reference -- and it was this tape, not the high quality digital recording, that was mistakenly being used for the LACMA performance. Ocker:
I slunk down in my seat, I was sure that every one in the audience would instantly know what was going on. I mentally prepared myself for a disaster [...] Much to my surprise the audience sat quietly throughout. And there was polite and extremely unenthusiastic applause afterwards. The Unit trudged out for a bow and then went right on to the next piece.
After the concert I went on-stage to talk to Art. He was standing in a small group -- one of whom was the composer Morton Subotnick -- a former teacher of mine whose music is frequently performed by the EAR Unit. I told Art “It sounded awful!” Bad-mouthing a performance directly like that is a “no-no” in the chamber music world and this comment was greeted with some surprise. When it was explained that the “awful” comment referred to the quality of tape-reproduction, it became immediately clear that the audience had not understood the pantomime quality of the performance.
Zappa’s recounting of the event is featured in his autobiography (though we should remember that Zappa did not attend the performance and thus was basing his own interpretation of what happened on second-hand evidence):
Final result? The man who ran the concert series didn’t know the difference. The two classical reviewers from the major Los Angeles newspapers didn’t notice anything either. Nobody in the audience knew, except for David Ocker, my computer assistant, who had helped prepare the materials. Nobody knew that the musicians never played a note.
It produced quite a scandal in “modern music circles.” Several members of the ensemble [Ocker mentions one: cellist Erika Duke], mortified by all the hoo-ha, swore they would never “do it again.” (Do what again? Prove to the world that nobody really knows what the fuck is going on at a contemporary music concert?) (175-6, emphases in original).
But what really was the “hoo-ha” here? Was it simply a matter of the audience having been “fooled”? Or is it assuming too much to argue that nobody in the audience had any idea what was going on? There are indications, for instance, that some people did not accept the performance entirely at face value; Ocker points out that one individual who sat nearest to the stage was overheard wondering “why there wasn’t more direct sound from the instruments themselves.” And Jarvinen notes that guitarist Steve Vai, also in attendance, “knew immediately,” complaining that the piece should have been “actually performed,” as it was not as difficult as some of the other material on the program. More importantly, there are other explanations for the fact that the audience as a whole did not explicitly comment on the performance. What was interpreted as audience ignorance may have actually been a muted expression of scorn; as Ocker indicates, the concertgoers were not really interested in Zappa’s music, and thus it is possible that they did not care enough to pay attention to what was happening. On the other hand, the Monday Evening Concert series is known as a forum for new music, and as such, the presence of electronics, tape or a performance art element would not necessarily have been considered out of place. Thus, it is quite possible that the audience did recognize that what they were experiencing was mimed performance accompanied by a tape recording, and they simply assumed this arrangement was intentional.
In the final analysis, of course, we are forced to make assumptions about the audience reaction to this event, because nobody actually did a survey of those in attendance. Nevertheless, the “While You Were Art” performance is still useful because of what it demonstrates: not the ignorance of audiences, necessarily, but the tension between opposite and morally-loaded poles of aesthetic “truthfulness” and “artificiality.” The strong emotional reactions suggest that the issue here is “authenticity” -- a slippery term that is defined in various ways but ultimately depends on an assumption that it is possible for art to be “real” (as opposed to “unreal”). In actuality, as the metaphor of transduction suggests, art is always mediated, so that instead of a single, clearly-defined work, each composition should be considered in terms of an infinite number of works. This idea of mediation / transduction will inform the critique of authenticity laid out in the next two chapters.
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