The New York Schools of Music and the Visual Arts

Steven Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136532672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Musicians and artists have always shared mutual interests and exchanged theories of art and creativity. This exchange climaxed just after World War II, when a group of New York-based musicians, including John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and David Tudor, formed friendships with a group of painters. The latter group, now known collectively as either the New York School or the Abstract Expressionists, included Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, Phillip Guston, and William Baziotes. The group also included a younger generation of artists-particularly Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns-that stood somewhat apart from the Abstract Expressionists. This group of painters created what is arguably the first significant American movement in the visual arts. Inspired by the artists, the New York School composers accomplished a similar feat. By the beginning of the 1960s, the New York Schools of art and music had assumed a position of leadership in the world of art. For anyone interested in the development of 20th century art, music, and culture, The New York Schools of Music and Art will make for illuminating reading.

[1]
Getting Rid of the Glue

The Music of the New York School

David Nicholls

I

The term New York School is usually applied to a number of American visual artists working in and around Manhattan from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. The group included abstract expressionists, abstract impressionists, and action painters; among its leading lights were Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Franz Kline (1910–1962), Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) and Philip Guston (1913–1980). The typical features of New York School art were innovative individual expression and a rejection of past tradition. The sum of the school's activity was a characteristically American radical approach that had much influence internationally: indeed, it has been said that “Abstract Expressionist painting … made New York the center of the postwar international art world.”¹ Within the school, though, there was no single group style, but rather a number of independent styles: “On the one hand there were painters whose work was wholly or mainly based on gestural drawing: not only [d]e Kooning and Jackson Pollock, but Robert Motherwell [1915–1991] too … On the other hand, Clyfford Still [1904–1980], Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman [1905–1970] relied on large fields of colour to produce solemn and elevated effects.”² Apart from these artists—who might be thought of as the New York School's first generation—there was also to some extent a second generation, including most pertinently Robert Rauschenberg (1925-) and Jasper Johns (1930-). Although Johns and Rauschenberg have been viewed primarily as important precursors of the pop art that emerged in the late 1950s, “A desire to assimilate but also transcend the lessons of Abstract Expressionism was a strong motivating force in Rauschenberg's early work.”³ The same could be said of Johns.

However, New York School has also been used as a term to describe the composers John Cage (1912–1992), Morton Feldman (1926–1987), Earle Brown (1926-) and Christian Wolff (1934-), together with the pianist/composer David Tudor (1926–1996). The group worked together principally during the early 1950s, at times intensively so. Like their colleagues in the visual arts, they rejected past traditions and cultivated innovative, personal expression; equally, there is no single style that identifies them. But their work—individually and collectively—has had a profound influence on contemporary music, particularly in America and Europe.

The primary focus of this chapter is the work of the New York composers; but the use by critics and commentators of an identical term to describe two supposedly separate groups of artists working in different media is no mere coincidence. Rather, it is indicative of the surprising number of links—both personal and professional—that exist between the two groups. Significantly, the music of Cage and his colleagues was in its early years more appreciated by visual artists than by musicians, and several of the composers cite their relationships with painters as a strong influence on their development. Cage was a member in the late 1940s and early 1950s of the Artists Club, which “became the primary arbiter of what would be called abstract expressionism.”⁴ On three occasions, he was invited to speak to The Club on subjects of his own choosing; these lectures were “Indian Sand Painting or The Picture that is Valid for One Day” (1949), “Lecture on Nothing” (1950), and “Lecture on Something” (1951).⁵ He was also an invited contributor to periodicals produced by other Club members, including The Tigers Eye and Possibilities. As Caroline A. Jones has noted, “the club was nonetheless ambivalent in its relation to Cage, and he to it.”⁶ But while there was particular antipathy between Cage and Jackson Pollock—Cage, uncharacteristically, once quite bluntly stated that he “couldn't stand the man”⁷—both for a time shared similar aesthetic views, as the title of Cage's 1949 lecture suggests. Pollock's work was influenced by that of Navaho sand painters, an art form Cage referred to in both his Artists Club talk and a contemporaneous article for The Tiger's Eye, entitled “Forerunners of Modern Music.”⁸

Cage became particularly associated with another (similarly disaffected) member of The Club, Robert Rauschenberg. Cage's well-known silent piece, 4′33′' (1952) was in part inspired by the example of Rauschenberg's all-white and all-black canvasses. Although Cage had imagined as early as 1948, in the context of his autobiographical talk “A Composer's Confessions,”⁹ a work he called “Silent Prayer,” it only became a reality in 1952 once he had experienced Rauschenberg's work. “I was afraid,” said Cage, “that my making a piece that had no sounds in it would appear as if I were making a joke. In fact, I probably worked longer on my ‘silent’ piece than I worked on any other. … what pushed me into it was not guts but the example of Robert Rauschenberg. His white paintings. … When I saw those, I said, ‘Oh yes, I must; otherwise I'm lagging, otherwise music is lagging.’”¹⁰ Or, put more succinctly, “The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.”¹¹

The twenty-five-year retrospective concert of Cage's music, held in New York's Town Hall in May 1958, was only made possible through the financial support of Rauschenberg and Johns. (Johns had met Cage, probably in 1954, at a party “after one of two concerts of contemporary American and European music that [Cage] had arranged, somewhere on 57th Street.”¹²) Although the work of neither Johns nor Rauschenberg had at this stage begun to sell, since 1955—as “Matson Jones”—they had jointly undertaken creating commercial window displays, mainly for Bonwit Teller and Tiffany.¹³ In association with entrepreneur Emile de Antonio (who was also middleman in Cage's burgeoning mushroom supply service¹⁴), Rauschenberg and Johns supported the Cage retrospective both directly, and through the organization of a complementary exhibition at the Stable Gallery; Rauschenberg's work was displayed downstairs, while pages from Cage's music manuscripts were shown upstairs. (It is worth noting that the scores produced by the New York composers are often more akin to visual art than to conventional music notation. The most obvious examples include Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra of 1957–58, which received its premiere at the Town Hall concert, Earle Brown's December 1952, and some of the graphed pieces of Morton Feldman.) The Cage scores shown at the Stable Gallery—several of which were sold—“caused a considerable stir in art circles. The exhibition caught the fancy of the art press; the flavor of the reviews [was] captured in Art News' opening observation that ‘John Cage exhibits scores in autograph of his own compositions as works of visual art. And they are.’”¹⁵

Feldman—in an autobiographical essay of 1962—described Philip Guston as his “closest friend who has contributed so much to my life in art.”¹⁶ (Feldman had first met Guston, probably in 1950, in Cage's Monroe Street apartment, part of the so-called Bozza Mansion in which Feldman himself subsequently became a tenant.) Feldman's essays are peppered with stories about Guston and other artists, and the importance of artistic concepts to his work is apparent from a number of quotations appearing later in this chapter. It might also be noted that (on the recommendation of Cage) Feldman provided the soundtrack for a 1951 documentary film about Jackson Pollock,¹⁷ and that a number of Feldman's works—including For Franz Kline (1962), De Kooning (1963), Rothko Chapel (1971), and For Philip Guston (1984)—are either dedicated to New York School artists or refer to them in their titles. Earle Brown, too, has been profoundly influenced in his music by the work of visual artists, especially Jackson Pollock and sculptor Alexander Calder (1898–1976).

The New York School composers came together rather serendipitously, as Feldman has explained: “My first meeting with John Cage was at Carnegie Hall when Mitropoulos conducted the Webern Symphony [on January 26, 1950]. The audience reaction to the piece was so antagonistic and disturbing that I left immediately afterwards. I was more or less catching my breath in the empty lobby when John came out. I recognized him, though we had never met, walked over and, as though I had known him all my life, said, ‘Wasn't that beautiful?’ … We immediately made arrangements for me to visit him.”¹⁸ Cage was by this time well established as a leading figure in the American avant garde and was beginning to receive recognition in Europe. He had achieved some notoriety for his percussion music (a 1943 concert at the Museum of Modern Art had been covered in detail by Life magazine) and for his development of the prepared piano (a concert grand whose sound is fundamentally changed through the insertion between its strings of various objects, including pieces of metal and rubber). In January 1949, his large-scale prepared piano piece Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48) ha been well received at its Carnegie Hall premiere, performed by Maro Ajemian. Feldman, in complete contrast, was an unknown student of the composers Wallingford Riegger (1885–1961) and Stefan Wolpe (1902–1972).

Feldman noted that he had already become friends with David Tudor while studying with Wolpe, and that it was he who introduced Tudor to Cage.¹⁹ Shortly afterwards, in April 1950, Christian Wolff—a high-school student wishing to study composition with Cage—joined the group as a result of contacts through another pianist, Grete Sultan.²⁰ Earle Brown's initiation took place only two years later, in 1952; he and his wife moved east from Denver in response to an invitation from Cage and his partner, choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919-). Carolyn Brown was to dance in Cunningham's company, while Brown himself was to participate in Cage's “Project for Music for Magnetic Tape.” This project was funded by Paul Williams (dedicatee of the 1953 Williams Mix), who—like Robert Rauschenberg—was a former student of Black Mountain College, which Cage and Cunningham had first visited in the summer of 1948.²¹

Feldman's memory of subsequent events, chronological inaccuracies notwithstanding, gives some indication of their intensity and sense of excitement: “Between 1950 and 1951 four composers—John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolffand myself—became friends, saw each other constantly—and something happened.”²²

II

In his article “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” Cage writes, “[Henry] Cowell remarked at the New School before a concert of works by Chris...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• General Introduction
• Introduction
• 1 Getting Rid of the Glue
• 2 The Physical and the Abstract
• 3 Stefan Wolpe and Abstract Expressionism
• 4 John Cage and the "Aesthetic of Indifference"
• 5 A Question of Order
• 6 Painting by Numbers
• 7 Feldman's Painters
• 8 Jasper Johns and Morton Feldman
• About the Contributors
• Index