Duke University Press Log

Records Ruin the Landscape: An Annotated Playlist by David Grubbs

Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording argues that, following John Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s actively thwarted the form of the LP.  These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation.  How could mercurial performance practices such as these adequately be represented on an album?

 And yet, like it or not, present-day listeners’ understanding of experimental music from the 1960s increasingly has come to rely on recordings.  Distaste for recordings as imperfect representations has come to be recognized as a period attitude of the 1960s.  In their day, surprisingly few of these works were available in recorded form.  By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter works not only through a flood LP and CD releases of archival recordings, but also in greater volume through Internet file-sharing and online resources such as UbuWeb, DRAM, and Archive.org.  Records Ruin the Landscape considers the odd fact of listeners coming to know a period through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians that largely disavowed recordings.

In this spirit, what follows is a brief, annotated itinerary of recordings that have not always been at one’s fingertips.

“John Cage Interviewed by Jonathan Cott” (1963)

It can seem that in the 1960s nearly everyone was eager to voice an opinion about John Cage.  A fascinating, emblematic, and deeply strange artifact of this period is this radio interview with Cage by nineteen year-old Jonathan Cott, who would later become an editor at Rolling Stone. The audibly nervous Cott begins by reading a voluminous, confrontational quasi-question containing two lengthy quotations about Cage that are not critical so much as they are fundamentally dismissive.  It’s a prime example of an anti-Cage backlash in full swing—as well as a remarkable document of teen chutzpah. 

 John Cage, Variations IV (1963)

Performed by John Cage and David Tudor

This recording comes from a January 1965 concert (on David Tudor’s 39^th birthday) at the San Francisco Museum of Art that was recorded by the radio station KPFA; the recording was never commercially released, and remained unavailable until it was posted online as part of the Other Minds Audio Archive.  A different concert recording of Variations IV from later in 1965 appeared on the Everest label.  This concert of live electronic music finds Cage and Tudor enjoying themselves in a cacophonous, heterogeneous, difficult-to-map sonic terrain.

Pauline Oliveros, Sound Patterns (1961)

Pauline Oliveros is a composer whose work is currently available on dozens of commercially-released recordings, but before 1970 her music was represented exclusively by her contributions to two Music of Our Time compilation albums: Extended Voices and New Sounds in Electronic Music.  Sound Patterns, her piece on Extended Voices, lasts a fleeting four minutes.  By contrast, to celebrate Oliveros’s 80^th birthday in 2012, Important Records released Reverberations, a 12-CD collection containing more than ten hours of her largely unreleased tape and electronic music from the 1960s, beginning with a 1961 work of musique concrète that utilizes recordings made in her bathtub and moving through thirty-four subsequent works created in that decade.

Morton Feldman, The King of Denmark (1964)

Performed by Max Neuhaus

It used to be that if you were interested in Max Neuhaus’s realizations of music by Cage, Stockhausen, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman, you would have had to pay dearly for an out-of-print copy of his 1968 LP Electronics and Percussion: Five Realizations from Columbia Records’ Music of Our Time series. It’s a marvel that Neuhaus’s work was even represented on a major label; surely this ranks as one of the most abrasive and one of the most dynamically extreme records ever released by Columbia.  Neuhaus’s performance of Morton Feldman’s The King of Denmark is aptly and marvelously hushed, and the label did justice to the piece by not significantly raising its volume level in the mastering process. 

Henry Flynt, “Sky Turned Red”

With the single exception of a cassette released in 1986 in an edition of 350 copies, Henry Flynt’s music didn’t see commercial release until the twenty-first century.  And then, at the century’s turn, the floodwall gave.  Within three years, three American independent record labels had released ten compact discs featuring hours upon hours of archival recordings of Flynt’s music.  Terms like “personal,” “informal,” and “solitary” are aptly descriptive of the two volumes of Back Porch Hillbilly Blues (recorded in the early and mid-1960s, but first released in 2002), home-quality solo recordings for violin, ukulele, guitar, and occasional vocal accompaniment, in which Flynt’s voice veers between the gentle, wordless moan of “Blue Sky, Highway and Tyme” and the extremely nasal, high-lonesome wail of “Sky Turned Red.”

Evan Parker / Derek Bailey / Han Bennink, “Fixed Elsewhere” (1970)

If the year is 1970 and you’ve heard tell of Derek Bailey’s curious manner of playing the guitar and would like to judge for yourself but can’t make it out to his weekly gigs in London, you would also have had the option of sitting down and spending time with Incus Records LP1, the album The Topography of the Lungs by the trio of Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, and Han Bennink.  But when you do so, each listen increasingly resolves into something closer to a musical composition those tempestuously brittle, battling slivers of sound that otherwise arrive prefractured in a thousand sizes, shapes, and velocities.  Quoth Bailey: “Recording’s fine if it wasn’t for fucking records.”

 

David Grubbs is Associate Professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts and Creative Writing. As a musician, he has released twelve solo albums and appeared on more than 150 commercially released recordings. Grubbs was a founding member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has appeared on recordings by the Red Krayola, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Will Oldham, and Matmos, among other artists. He is known for cross-disciplinary collaborations with the writers Susan Howe and Rick Moody and the visual artists Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, and Stephen Prina. A grant recipient in music/sound from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grubbs has written for The Wire, Bookforum, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Celebrate Mardi Gras with our Journals

Maybe Mardi Gras isn't celebrated in your city, but who says you can't get into the spirit? Duke University Press has published many journal articles on Mardi Gras, and we've made these two freely available for the holiday—so don your beads and mask, cut a slice of king cake, and dive into these articles.*

"Spenser and Milton at Mardi Gras: English Literature, American Cultural Capital, and the Reformation of New Orleans Carnival" by Richard Rambuss in boundary 2 (27:2)

Read an excerpt:

Milton may be far from mind when one now thinks of or, better, experiences what is advertised as the world's greatest free party. Yet, as we have begun to consider, a rather detailed, even learned usage of literature—particularly English Renaissance and classical literature—played a structuring role in Comus's endeavor to appropriate and dignify the residual Latin traditions of Carnival. Propounding a caste status for its founders that was then more an aspiration than an actuality, a commemorative booklet issue by the Mistick Krewe in 1947 thus explains that 'as the members of Comus were socially important this meant that their celebration of Mardi Gras was orderly, educational and cultural.' (pages 49-50)

For more of "Spenser and Milton at Mardi Gras," click here.

 

"Mardi Gras Tourism and the Construction of Sydney as an International Gay and Lesbian City" by Kevin Markwell in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (8:1-2)

Read an excerpt:

Mardi Gras attracts many domestic and international tourists to Sydney during February, and their numbers peak just prior to the parade and party at the end of the festival. The festival, parade, and party are major events on Australia’s tourism calendar. There is a strong representation from countries such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, as well as increasing numbers of tourists from Southeast Asia, and Mardi Gras packages are advertised in the gay and lesbian press in European and North American countries. While approximately 15 percent of the eighty events at the festival are free, many of the most popular ones require tickets... Full participation in the festival is an expensive undertaking, especially when coupled with the costs of outfits; body treatments such as waxing, tanning, gym training, hairstyling, and party drugs; and, for tourists, accommodation and transportation costs. Many people are willing, however, to spend large sums because Mardi Gras becomes for them the major yearly event that helps define their gay or lesbian identity. (page 84)

For more of "Mardi Gras Tourism," click here.

 

Don't forget to check out Matt Sakakeeny's new book Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans while you're on your Mardi Gras kick!

 

*If you're in a location that really celebrates Mardi Gras, don't be concerned. You can still read these articles through the end of the month. Recover from your festivities and then get to reading.

Ernest Tubb Centennial

February 9 marks the centennial of the birth of country music star Ernest Tubb, who stormed the country music scene in the 1940s with a new honky tonk sound and a string of hits that included “Walking the Floor Over You.”

 

We published Ronnie Pugh's biography of Tubb in 1996. Pugh will celebrate the centennial today in Nashville with a panel discussion on Tubb's life and legacy at the Nashville Public Library. Here's an excerpt from the preface of his book, about why he is a Tubb fan. 

 

Why did I become an Ernest Tubb fan? Why does anyone? Delving into my psyche and my past for a subjective look at the great Tubb career, maybe I can answer the second question alongside the first.

My Tubb fandom was in many ways against the grain, a leap I had to make across generational and cultural barriers. I grew up in a comfortable, middle class, East Texas home, one of three grocer's sons. A mid-baby-boomer (born 1953), I was seriously out of step with more publicized members of my generation; but then, if I hadn't been, I might never have loved Ernest Tubb. From my parents I first learned certain values that I have never seriously questioned. We were Republicans well before most Texans were, liking Ike (and Richard Nixon), at odds with our "Yellow Dog Democrat" surroundings, which had been Ernest Tubb's East Texas a generation before. Even more antithetical, perhaps, to any appreciation of Ernest Tubb was a belief instilled by my old-school Methodist parents, that decent people do not smoke or drink. It pains me to go into a nightclub to hear a country singer, though on rare occasions I have done it. 

The lifestyle chronicled in so many country songs may have been worlds away from mine, but the music was always acceptable, to my parents and to me, and I warmly embraced it. It was my first and only favorite popular music, the choice of my adolescent years, and I never once wavered in the face of peer
pressure from my rock-loving contemporaries. Mom loved and taught us the music of her youth—gospel that ranged from Stamps-Baxter to the Cokesbury (Methodist) Hymnal—and Dad, though not musical himself, was a big country music fan. He had actually seen Rodgers perform in Marshall in 1932, an admirable accomplishment that I rated right up there with his attending the first All-Star game in Chicago the next year. 

In the spring of 1966, I first saw Ernest Tubb on television, and Tubb's TV show soon became my hands-down favorite. I agonized when Saturday afternoon NBC baseball games of unplanned length preempted, The Ernest Tubb Show, though I've always loved and still love baseball. Just a few weeks after meeting
Tubb through television I bought my very first album, at the Famous Discount center in my hometown of Marshall, Texas: Ernest Tubb's debut LP with Loretta Lynn. In the next few months I purchased every Tubb LP that Marshall stores carried; a few more years passed before I knew about mailorder from the Ernest Tubb Record Shop.

For years Tubb records topped my want lists, and during high school years I started tuning in the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights. If Ernest was on the Luzianne Coffee show at 8:30, then I'd do my best to stay up right on through the Midnite Jamboree, to hear his songs and to learn where he and the Texas Troubadours would be playing in coming weeks. I gladly forsook a high school band trip to Galveston, Texas, to see Tubb in person for the frrst time on Shreveport's Louisiana Hayride, March 22,1969. Concerts that I attended were so rare as to be memorable. I guess most of his East Texas-area dates were at nightclubs like Longview's Reo Palm Isle, where I wouldn't dream of going, even if I'd been old enough—but there were always fan club publications, infrequent new records, and best of all, new old records. What struck me from the beginning was Tubb's sheer staying power. At the time Tubb was still a major star and a force to be reckoned with, a full twenty-five years after his first hits. Thinking back now on those impressionable days, I recall that veterans in all walks of life fascinated me. A favorite TV show was David Wolper's Biography; my favorite baseball player just before his retirement was Warren Spahn, who pitched his last in 1965, the year before I discovered the great country music veteran Ernest Tubb via syndicated television. Small wonder that history later became my academic major. I could not have said just why longevity as such impressed me; I did not then infer from it such admirable qualities as perseverance, flexibility, or determination. One new Tubb record I particularly enjoyed from those days even spoke (tongue in cheek, perhaps) of his own staying power-looking ahead to the day "When My Getup Has Got Up and Gone."

It never occurred to me then that Ernest Tubb was not a "good" (i.e., "trained," "smooth," "melodious") singer; unlike the drunks hanging around the jukeboxes, I never imagined I could do as well or better. I only knew that he was fun to listen to, even on the sad songs. He enjoyed singing, and he made me enjoy his singing. I discovered him through television, and there I could plainly see a man singing right through a smile. Tubb had fun teasing his band during instrumental breaks, and he faced the camera with a succession of smiles and winks. Only years later could I divorce that visual image from his sound sufficiently to realize a truth that his radio audience of a previous generation had perceived: Ernest Tubb sang with an audible smile. You didn't have to see him: something in that warm, drawling baritone told you he was happy. 

The songs themselves had a directness, simplicity, and clarity that made them easy to understand and easy to remember. "Waltz across Texas" and "There's a Little Bit of Everything in Texas" naturally appealed to a fellow Texan. While our shared Texas origins went some distance toward cementing my admiration of Tubb, the same factor didn't help his TV show co-star Willie Nelson; I couldn't wait for the idiosyncratic Willie to quit so I could hear more of Tubb. Ernest Tubb matched each song to the appropriate emotion. I sympathized when he sang "Our Baby's Book," and while I certainly didn't know what "l've been untrue" meant, it was as though he felt and made me feel the narrator's anguish for wrongdoings in another early favorite, "Try Me One More Time." 

When I later saw Ernest Tubb on stage—several times ultimately—my admiration increased. Here was a man who'd go to almost any lengths to please his fans. He certainly pleased me, and I could tell he pleased the others who came. At his best on stage before a live audience, Tubb seemed genuinely glad that you cared enough to come; you left a concert feeling almost that you had done him a favor. That kind of favor you wanted to do more often.  

Reading about Ernest Tubb in country music's periodical literature—the record of his many accomplishments and the words of praise from his peers—learning, in short, what he meant to country music certainly enhanced his appeal for me. That's still true, even after the years of research that went into this book (including those years of fandom only, which I didn't know at the time were research years). I have tried to be objective, to rise above mere fandom, in this book; but I can truthfully say that learning of Ernest Tubb's darker side, his human failings, has not lessened my esteem for him or my love for his music.

Copyright Duke University Press, 1996.

Barry Shank on the Drone of the Velvet Underground

In light of the death of Lou Reed, we offer an excerpt from Barry Shank's forthcoming book The Political Force of Musical Beauty (out in April 2014). This is from Chapter 4, which considers The Velvet Underground.

 

A restricted field of cultural production is Bourdieu’s term for artists who produce for other artists and the prestige they can convey, not directly for a market of consumers and the cash they provide. Unlike the typical restricted field, the restricted field that the Velvets created was not the mere reproduction of an avant-garde within the popular, mimicking the efforts of so-called downtown composers to transform the means of production of music. This restricted field was instead a specific intervention into the field of popular music. John Cale’s viola would have meant little without Lou Reed’s deep investment in the precise craftwork of the popular song. Sterling Morrison’s commitment to the capital R of “rhythm guitar” and Moe Tucker’s reversion of the bass drum back to its primary function as the keeper of all beats, not simply the downbeat, produced a rhythmic reinforcement of the drone that characterized the sound of the Velvets even after Cale was forced out of the band. The drone of the Velvet Underground reopened the question of the popular by alienating it from its dominant concretization—the market.

The Velvets’ drone-infused restricted field enabled popular-music artists to claim the authority of the popular while they articulated values that ran directly counter to mainstream beliefs. I am not referring here to the simple and obvious point that the Velvets wrote and performed “pop songs” about heroin and sadomasochism. Instead I argue that the drone that is foregrounded in the band’s signature sound was the central sonic technique used to establish a restricted field of popular-music production. By establishing this possibility, the music of the Velvets made audible the popular critique of the dominance of market evaluation—as a mainstream popular standpoint. This critique worked at the level of music before it was a conscious thought or desire held by the musicians. That is, their music was heard and felt as a meaningful sound before the musicians conceptualized its function. The drone was central to their music not because it was believed by the musicians or their fans to be a critique the market definition of the popular, but because the drone was beautiful. Indeed, the power of Velvets’ drone-based critique was rooted in its beauty.

David Grubbs Performing at Hopscotch This Saturday

It's not every day we can post that you can see one of our authors in concert, but this Saturday, September 7, at Hopscotch Music Festival in Raleigh you have the chance to do just that. David Grubbs, author of the forthcoming book Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (March 2014), will play at the Kennedy Theater at 11 p.m.

As someone who has released twelve solo albums and appeared on more than 150 commercially-released recordings, Grubbs writes about recordings from an informed perspective. However John Cage didn't embrace recordings in the same way, and the title for Grubbs's book—Records Ruin the Landscape—comes from a comment Cage made during an interview. Cage repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work.

In Records Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill-suited to be represented in the form of a recording. Even those works that were recorded had limited releases. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter works not only through a flood LP and CD releases of archival recordings, but also in even greater volume through the Internet, particularly through websites like UbuWeb. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs thinks through the implications of this irony.

This Saturday you have the choice to hear David Grubbs live or you can stay at home and listen to his music online at Drag City or UbuWeb. What would John Cage do?

Author photo by Thatcher Keats.

 

Jesse Weaver Shipley Talks Hiplife at South by Southwest

Jesse Weaver Shipley, filmmaker, anthropology professor, and author of Living the Hiplife: Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music, was at South by Southwest last week to talk about digital media and music in Africa. He appeared on a panel with several African DJs and then did a popular booksigning event.  To hear some of the artists Shipley discusses in his book, check out this podcast created by DJ Rab and DJ Black, both Ghanaian musicians. They're pictured below along with some of Weaver's other African music contacts. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Left to right: Jesse Weaver Shipley, Nigerian media executive Michael Ugwu of iROKOtv, Nigerian musician  Ice Prince Zamani.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jesse Weaver Shipley ready to sign his book

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Left to right: DJ Black of Joy FM in Accra, Ghana, Jesse Weaver Shipley, DJ Rab Bakari of Universal Music Group.

Authors at the Virginia Festival of the Book

We're excited that two of our authors will be participating in the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville this weekend. 

On Friday, March 22 at 10 am, geologist Orrin Pilkey will speak about "The Rising Oceans: Where to Go from Here". Batiks by artist Mary Edna Fraser that appeared in their book Global Climate Change will be on display. 

Also on Friday, March 22, at 6 pm, Natalie Hopkinson, author of Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City, will appear on the panel "Shake, Rattle, and Roll: Popular Music in America."

 

If you're near Charlottesville this weekend, be sure to check out these great talks and many others at the Festival.

 

Best Books of the Year

It's the most wonderful time of the year . . . the time for best books lists! We're excited that several of our books have appeared in prominent year-end roundups. 

The Village Voice named Jonathan Sterne's MP3: The Meaning of a Format one of its best of 2012. Reviewer Nick Murray writes "As it turned out, the most rewarding music book of 2012 wasn't about an artist, a genre, or (thank the lord) the glory days of punk. Instead, it told the story of MP3, the digital audio standard that author and communications professor Jonathan Sterne traces from early-20th-century telephone research up through contemporary debates over piracy and file-sharing. Along the way, we're taken on fascinating detours through the invention of perceptual coding, the construction (and critique) of the ideal hearing subject, international corporate debates, and an extended discussion over whether or not music should be considered a "thing." All file formats should be so lucky."

Over at Spin Magazine, they chose Natalie Hopkinson's Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City as one of their best music books of 2012. Hopkinson's book is a social history of black D.C., told through go-go, the party music that emerged in inner-city Washington in the 1970s, generating a distinct local culture and underground economy.

And Annette Kolodny's In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery was chosen as one of Indian Country Today's best books of the year. They write, "Annette Kolodny did an exceptional job of untangling the myths, politics and conventional history surrounding the 'discovery'of Turtle Island to reveal the narratives of first European contact." 

 

Is K-Pop the Next Big Thing?

With the near ubiquity of Korean rapper Psy's video and song "Gangnam Style," most Americans have now had some exposure to the phenomenon of K-Pop, or Korean pop culture. Although K-Pop has been popular and influential in Asia for decades, many Korean artists have had trouble breaking into the US market. In this article in Spin, Kyung Hyun Kim, author of Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era, comments on PSY's ability to break into the U.S. market without sacrificing his Koreanness. "The tendency and thinking so far seems to have been that you have to erase Korean identity somehow to achieve success in the U.S. or overseas," he told Spin. "But I think that's been proven wrong with PSY's success. He's engaged in satirical humor — that I didn't know would translate, but apparently it does — and a kind of grotesque body humor, as well, that I always found outrageously funny when I saw him on [Korean] television over the years. I actually didn't even know he was a musician and a producer and a composer himself because he was just a funny face."

Kim is also the editor, with Youngmin Choe, of the forthcoming book The Korean Popular Culture Reader, which we are publishing in October 2013. The comprehensive and richly illustrated book of original essays will go well beyond current K-Pop phenoms like PSY to cover music, film, television, travel, and food. Contributors include Boduerae Kwon, Michelle Cho, Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, Sohl Lee, and Rachel Miyung Joo. The essays are fun and accessible and the book is suitable for courses as well as for fans of K-Pop. Check out an excerpt from the introduction on our Tumblr. We hope you'll keep an eye out for the book next year. 

Asian pop culture fans will also want to check out Rachel Miyung Joo's recent book Transnational Sport: Gender, Media, and Global Korea; and two books coming out this spring: Christine R. Yano's Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty's Trek across the Pacific and Ian Condry's The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story. 

 

Natalie Hopkinson Events this Fall in DC, MA, and MD

This fall if you’re in Washington D.C., Massachusetts, or Maryland, catch Natalie Hopkinson talking about her new book Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City. She’ll be reading from and signing copies of her insider’s view of the social history of black Washington through its go-go music and culture. As

David Simon, creator of the television series The Wire and Treme, has said, "Natalie Hopkinson's Go- Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City demonstrates the essential connections between culture and community in an American city. For generations now, go-go music in Washington D.C. has not only given the authentic, nonfederal parts of that city its musical milestones, but it has—in the voice of so many great lead talkers—marked the civic and political time. From Chuck Brown forward, go-go has proven resilient and real. They say you can't understand this music unless you are there in the club, in the moment, but this book comes close."

Monday, September 17, 2012

6:30 p.m. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library 901 G St. N.W., Washington, DC

Friday, September 21, 2012

4:30 p.m. Panel Discussion: The Power of Music from a Historical, Cultural & Spiritual Perspective with Natalie Hopkinson, Ledisi, MC Lyte, and Dr. Obery Hendricks, moderated by Brother Ah. Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Author Pavilion, Walter E. Washington Convention Center Exhibit Hall E, Booth 521 801 Mt Vernon Pl NW, Washington, DC

Friday, September 28, 2012

3:00 p.m. Harvard Book Store 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

Saturday, October 13, 2012

2 p.m. Prince George's Memorial Library System, Spauldings Branch 5811 Old Silver Hill Rd., District Heights, MD

Save the date- On Saturday, January 26, 2013 DC's Anacostia Community Museum will host Natalie Hopkinson for an author event.

A listing of all DUP author events is also available on our Google calendar.