QUESTIONS OF TRUST, BETRAYAL, AND AUTHORIAL CONTROL IN THE AVANTGARDE: THE CASE OF JULIUS EASTMAN AND JOHN CAGE.

• Author: Lester, Toni

Introduction I. CAGE, EASTMAN, AND THE SOLO CONTROVERSY II. TRUST AND COMMUNICATION DEFINED AND APPLIED CONCLUSION "Permission Granted. But not to do whatever you want." (1)

--John Cage

"[I]t [seems] a common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human." (2)

--Edward Said in Orientalism

"Control/It's what I got/because I took a chance/I don't wanna rule the world, just wanna run my life." (3)

--Janet Jackson

Introduction

Igor Stravinsky said that "music should be transmitted ... not interpreted, because interpretation reveals the personality of the interpreter rather than that of the author, and who can guarantee that such an executant will reflect the author's vision without distortion?" (4) Ernst Krenek, however, once countered that while it is totally understandable for a composer to need to "'get his message across ... in undistorted and unadulterated fashion[,]' ... [he] should have sufficient confidence in human nature to 'enjoy rather than to fear the medium of personal life through which his message is filtered.'" (5)

One place where these contrasting views might be resolved is in the world of chance-based music. (6) The late white, gay, composer, and poet John Cage often used the I-Ching as a source of inspiration, (7) leaving open-ended instructions on how his pieces should be performed. (8) In a piece called Solo for Voice #8 ("Solo") from his 1960s collection of ninety vocal pieces called Song Books, (9) Cage gave this instruction: "[P]erform a disciplined action.... Fulfilling in whole or part an obligation to others." (10) Since no details are given about what the action should entail, performers would seem to have a great deal of leeway in what they can do.

In 1975, however, the late African American, gay, vocalist, and composer Julius Eastman turned Cage's innocuous directions on their head by engaging in a politically provocative, overtly queer, interpretative performance. (11) Cage was infuriated because he felt Eastman had inserted identity politics into a piece that transcended those issues. The next day, in a post-concert talk to students, Cage lambasted Eastman for being "closed in on the subject of homosexuality." (12) Was Cage's anger or Eastman's behavior justified? More importantly, why were the two men unable to negotiate a mutually agreed-upon course of action beforehand?

A typical intellectual property law analysis would focus on the competing rights of Cage and Eastman. Namely, Cage's right to own his work as if it were a piece of property, (13) a right from which other rights flow, including the right to withhold permission from others wishing to publicly perform the work, the right to create derivative iterations thereof, and the more ethereal moral right to control the work's reputational and even spiritual dimensions from being diluted or defamed. (14) On the other side would be Eastman's free speech right to appropriate Cage's work for the purpose of critiquing or sufficiently transforming it, (15) sidestepping having to get Cage's permission altogether. But what would happen if the focus was on the extent to which a different kind of conversation could have taken place between the two men before the event--one built on trust and self-awareness? What if the dynamic shifted from the adversarial to the relational? Would that have produced a different outcome?

Law scholar Carys Craig observes that "[i]f the communicative function of authorship were not lost beneath the commodified object of copyright, the significance of appropriation as communication would be evident, and the value of its contribution to cultural dialogue could be appreciated." (16) Inspired by feminist relational theory, she notes, "We can also perceive the nature of authorship as a form of dialogue through which individuals actively participate in a cultural conversation." (17) Cultural conversations like this only exist in the abstract, however. Real face-to-face dialogue can be messy, especially when issues concerning race, sexuality, and privilege are at play. One of feminist relational psychology's main tenets is that healing can only occur when we try to talk to each other in such instances. (18) Perhaps this can lead to opportunities for the creation of compelling collaborative art that bridges some of these painful divides.

What I want to explore then is not the rights of performers to reshape a work in order to critique it, but how the idea of trust-based dialogue can give us an alternative understanding about the nature of authorial control and interpretation across identity-based differences. Part One will discuss the respective personal stories, philosophies, and competing historical understandings that influenced Cage's creation of Solo and Eastman's interpretation thereof. Part Two will offer definitions of trust and communication from the fields of feminist relational psychology, (19) philosophy, (20) and law. (21) Throughout Part Two, I will reflect on the extent to which a trust-based dialogue could have taken place between Cage and Eastman. My general sense is that the answer is "no." Both men had fairly fixed views about the trajectory their art should take, and talking about it probably would not have changed that. Nevertheless, with my conclusion later, I suggest that contemporary composers/authors should still try to create the conditions under which honest, self-aware dialogue about control and trust can arise. Who knows what kind of joint innovative and thought-provoking work could be developed as a result.

1. CAGE, EASTMAN, AND THE SOLO CONTROVERSY

   With the contemporary gay rights movement well underway, (22) Julius Eastman stepped onto the stage to perform his now-infamous rendition of Solo in 1975. (23) He is supposed to have tried to undress a woman (who resisted) and succeeded at undressing a male student--both of whom were invited by him to come on stage. (24) He then emitted a series of campy, burlesque "ahs" at the naked man as he gave a mock lecture. (25) Cage later ranted that Eastman focused on his sexuality too much in the performance. (26)

   Cage once said he wanted his art "to diminish ... the ego and ... increase the activity that accepts the rest of creation." (27) For him, the rest of creation was a nonpolitical space where the experiences of African Americans, gays, women, and other marginalized groups should not be highlighted. By taking this stance, however, he risked the all too frequent practice of people in majority cultures equating their concept of reality with actual reality. Talking about how this phenomenon plays out in cross-racial relations, cultural studies scholar Richard Dyer says that "[a]s long as race is something only applied to nonwhite peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they ... function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people." (28) Thus, Cage's concept of the universal was not as all-encompassing as he asserted.

   In 1975, you probably could not have come across two similar, yet dramatically different, artists at a critical time in the history of modern music and American sexual and racial politics. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Cage, along with his lover and creative partner Merce Cunningham, had created some of their most innovative and influential works at Black Mountain College, a place where "nascent ideas and emerging artists seemed to effortlessly cross-pollinate." (29) By 1975, Cage was in his 60s and firmly established as a pioneer in modern music and performance art. (30)

   With a graduate degree in composition from the Curtis Institute, Eastman became a member of SUNY Buffalo's Creative Associates in 1966, a group of young artists aligned with composers Lukas Foss and Morten Feldman. (31) When Feldman put together the 1975 concert that is the subject of this article, Eastman was already a recorded vocalist on a Grammy-nominated album and had his work conducted by the Brooklyn Philharmonic. (32) With his 1973 ensemble piece Stay On It, he was employing elements of experimental notation, pop music, and improvisational features, (33) "forecast[ing] things that would be happening to the [minimalist] movement fifteen years hence." (34)

   Cage and Eastman took very different approaches to their sexual orientation in their artistic personas. For Cage, "silence was a strategic aesthetic historically appropriate for Cold War America...." (35) In his book Story/Time: The Life of An Idea, contemporary dancer/choreographer and noted African American, gay artist Bill T. Jones said that Cage "represented for me everything cool and removed and sophisticated at a time when I was trying to wend my way into the art world." (36) Jones tried to get Cage to endorse the kind of politically-charged work Jones and his partner Arnie Zane were doing, but Cage's reaction was "like 'No way! ' We were too 'obvious.' We were too 'in your face.'" (37)

   Silence about homosexuality, however, "was not ... the only option practiced by gay artists, musicians, and poets" (38) in the mid-1970s. (39) Eastman frequently participated in and contributed to the underground gay music scene in New York in the late 1960s and 1970s. (40) For him, "[e]xperimentalism was ... as much sexual as it was musical, and it often took the form of critical camp." (41) Further, long before the concept of intersectionality became an au courant term, Eastman's defiant sense of himself, as both gay and African American, (42) made its way into seminal pieces like Crazy Nigger (1980) (43) and Gay Guerilla (1980). (44) Of his tenacious personal and artistic radicalism, poet R. Nemo Hill, writer and early lover of Eastman, said:

   His categorical refusal to play by any rules he suspected of even the slightest infraction of his core principles, his refusal to obey any authority other than that which he had identified in his own conscience as the Law--this program was...