Steve Lacy's "Politics of Survival: Experimental Improvisation and the War of Position

Steve Lacy’s “Politics of Survival”: Experimental Improvisation and the War of Position

By Daniel Blake, Ph.D.

The relationship between musical improvisation and contemporary resistance movements in the West is rooted in a complex dialogue between African American and European cultural politics. As expressed through the heterodoxy of post-War musical modernism, this dialogue helped move the elitist “social ineffectuality”1 of the European avant garde toward a freedom cry with explicitly revolutionary overtones. Such a musical-political nexus is embodied in the brief collaboration between soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy and Musica Elettronica Viva (hereafter: MEV). During Lacy’s time with MEV, the group pioneered an approach to “participatory improvising”, which brought audiences directly into the process of musical creation. MEV’s ideological commitment to improvisation as a vehicle for radical democracy carried tangible economic sacrifices, which this paper will explore through the combined lens of Steve Lacy’s “politics of survival” and Antonio Gramsci’s revolutionary “war of position” strategy. As the paper will argue, behind an artist’s ability to struggle and survive is a desire to steer public consciousness toward a revolutionary stance, where the aesthetics of free improvisation come to represent the medium of the revolution.

Steve Lacy, a white Jewish member of the mostly African American free jazz community in New York City, moved to Rome in dire economic straits. His understanding of “political music” is rooted in the economic alienation he experienced during his time in New York, most notably while working with pianist and Afro-modernist pioneer Cecil Taylor:

1

Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde, (Minneapolis, MN: Manchester University Press, 1984), 27.

“At that time, I was starting to learn what music is and the politics of survival, playing music that no one wants. For me, politics is a question of social values and music is an act…it’s also an economic question. You have to struggle for it and that becomes political because you have to survive. You have to be paid for that music no one wants. Cecil Taylor was really prepared to struggle [emphasis added].”2 Like many musicians of the Black Arts Movement, Taylor gained a degree of cultural capital as an “artist” while his aesthetics were “bohemianized”, leaving him essentially excommunicated from both the music industry and high art cultural institutions until much later in his career.3 The systemic racism undergirding this phenomenon is made apparent by the extensive networks of support set up in the Post-War years to perpetuate Euro-American modernist composition.4 In a 1973 issue of Black World, bassist Reggie Workman reflects on this situation as “welfare” for European composers, and “self-help” for African American jazz musicians: “[Composers] have no audience…in fact they have to use our money to create an audience while we must subsidize ourselves, nurture and nourish the Madison Avenue Corporations and all the while still try to survive [emphasis added].”5 Writing for the same issue, Muhal Richard Abrams and John Shenoy Jackson of the Chicagobased Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) state that the “Black

2

Steve Lacy, Conversations, ed. Jason Weiss, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 6465.

3 Bernard Gendron, “After the Revolution”, in Sound Commitments, ed. Robert Addlington, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 214-215.

4 Amy Beal, New Music, New Allies, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 157160.

5 Diane Weathers, “The Collective Black Artists,” Black World, November 1973, 75.

creative artist must survive and persevere in spite of the oppressive forces which prevent Black people from reaching the goals attained by other Americans [emphasis added].”6 As Lacy suggests, to survive this environment of economic alienation is to engage in a political act. Put another way, surviving and “reaching the goals” of creative self-determined expression and selfsufficiency is made possible by an African American legacy of revolutionary struggle and the steadfast preservation of cultural memory over many generations. At the same time, improvisation is critical to such a revolutionary attitude, as historian Cedric Robinson states: “the revolution caused the formation of revolutionary consciousness and [was] not caused by it - the revolution was spontaneous.”7 Although Lacy eventually chose to leave New York City like many of his colleagues, the musical culture in which he was mentored remained a factor in his future musical development.

While MEV co-founders Alvin Curran and Frederic Rzewski initially moved to Rome to study composition supported by academic fellowships, they quickly abandoned this support to pursue a more radical political agenda. Their understanding of “survival” is distinct from Lacy’s, who at that time would have lacked the social mobility of Ivy League educated composers like Curran and Rzewski. Nevertheless, by 1967 both Lacy and the members of MEV cohabitated in what Curran remembers as:

6

Muhal Richard Abrams and John Shenoy Jackson, “The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians”, Black World, November 1973, 72.

7 Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 238.

“an old, damp, soot-covered foundry in Travastere…a place to pool collective resources…so as to assure the survival of [MEV’s] budding revolutionary mission [emphasis added].”8 Survival refers here not to economic survival per se but to MEV’s “mission”, which Rzewski describes as the overthrow of “the solitary genius myth…another form of musical dictatorship which calls itself ‘strict composition’.”9 MEV’s weapon in this mission would be “pure spontaneity”, the negation of “strict composition”. In his 1968 Parma Manifesto, Rzewski defines an idealized improvisation as being “out of nothing”, pointing to “the highest possible future”. He continues that: “in order to survive I must do more than merely survive – I must create…[a] sense of emergency in a state of tranquility where there is no threat to individual survival…its decision cannot be governed by structures and formulas retained from moments of past inspiration.”10 This understanding of spontaneity is distinct from the mindset Lacy brought to MEV, where a “leap into the unknown” is possible because of “all your years of preparation and all your sensibilities and your prepared means…”11 The concept of survival here is contested. At issue is what happens after a musician survives, and how they understand and react to the arrival of “the unknown”.

8

Alvin Curran, “A Guided Tour Through Twelve Years of American Music In Rome,” Soundings, 10, 1976, http://www.alvincurran.com/writings/12%20years%20music%20rome.html.

9 Quoted in David Bernstein, “Listening to the Sounds of the People,” Contemporary Music Review 29, no. 6(December 2010) 540.

10 Frederic Rzewski, “Parma Manifesto,”Leonardo Music Journal, 9 (1999), 77-8.

11 This description of spontaneity, as well as the Lacy quote is found in George Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950,” Black Music Research Journal, 16, no. 1(Spring 1996), 233.

The complex relationship between survival, musical tradition, and resistance ideology came to a head in the participatory works staged by Lacy and MEV throughout 1969. These ritualized “Soundpools” achieved maximal uncertainty because audience members were invited to play instruments placed around the performance space. In putting Rzewski’s notion of pure spontaneity to the test, MEV sought to empower the audience to summon sounds Lacy later described as “completely unheard of”.12 The sheer intensity of these audience-initiated sounds inspire a sense of danger and discovery, with uncertainty virtually guaranteed. One such performance is documented on the recording The Sound Pool, whose second side is introduced by a chorus of voices from the audience. The chorus is cacophonous yet unified, swelling into a dramatic glissando texture giving way to an electro-acoustic drone produced by MEV. By the end of the side, the division between audience and performer is almost completely blurred, with the audience’s choral introduction morphing into an intense collective scream.

As experienced musicians who all possessed developed musical technique, a symbol of embodied musical memory, the “Soundpools” created a situation where that technique carried less weight. However, Lacy was not so quick to cast aside musical memory in his recollection of these performances: “a fellow would make a sound that was so unexpected…that my response was something from far, far away which I had completely forgotten: a quotation from old music that I hadn’t heard in thirty years or so…it’s always surprising to see something come back from far away.”13

12 13

Lacy, Conversations, 70.

Ibid., 75.

For Lacy, it appears that memory is a feature of a successful improvisation and not a shortcoming. MEV members also experienced some tension around this point, with members like cellist John Phetteplace viewing his hard-won instrumental virtuosity as an asset not so easily relinquished.14 On the other hand, Rzewski and Curran willingly negated their formidable instrumental mastery in search of new techniques and “unheard of” sounds. In embracing antivirtuosity as a musical virtue, however tentatively, Lacy and MEV attacked the dominant political ideology governing European modernism. In place of the more elitist notion of a specialized musical technique, the embrace of novel sounds produced by audience members in the “Soundpools” placed every individual on an equal footing, representing a true shift in the social utility of musical performance.

The notion that musicians can persuade the public to adopt and even to help realize a ritualized and communal musical performance environment is prefigured by Antonio Gramsci’s revolutionary strategy he named the “war of position”. In his formulation, Gramsci places the revolutionary “new intellectual” in the uniquely important position of replacing the institutions of civil society with new revolutionary ones that will serve as a “line of defense” for a culminating and decisive “war of manoeuvre”, which will take down the state once and for all. A prerequisite for this revolutionary civil society is the tilting of public consciousness toward a revolutionary mindset, something Gramsci insists can only happen when intellectuals fully adopt their role as “permanent persuaders”: “The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active

14

Amy Beal, “Music As a Universal Human Right,” in Sound Commitments, ed. Robert Addlington, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 107.

participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator…”15 The social role of “permanent persuader” belies the notion that artists are creators of aesthetic objects for enjoyment, which Gramsci would call a “specialized”, as opposed to a “directive”, pursuit.16 The metaphor of civil society as a system of defensive trenches carries great intensity, with its imagery of the epic existential struggle Gramsci observed in the First World War. Writing his Prison Notebooks as a political prisoner amidst the rise of Italian fascism, Gramsci knew firsthand how “directive” actions could incur devastating consequences, leading him to advise: “new intellectuals…are not demoralised, nor do they abandon their positions, even among the ruins, nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future…when the State [eventually] trembles a sturdy structure of civil society [is] at once revealed.”17 Steve Lacy’s notion of a “politics of survival”, an insight based on his experience working in the African American free jazz community, is a basis for such directive action. Persevering to making “that music no one wants” is synonymous with Gramsci’s direction that intellectuals refuse to “abandon their positions”. Rzewski and MEV try to extend this Gramscian strategy by posing the “Soundpools” as a ritualized revolutionary action qua musical improvisation.

15

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, trans. Quentin Hoare, Geoffrey Nowell Smith, (London: ElecBook, 1999), 141-142 16 Ibid., 142.

17 Ibid., 489-90.

In the final analysis, the effectiveness of participatory improvisation as revolutionary action is unsettled. Reflecting on the “Soundpools” in a 1972 essay, Alvin Curran claimed victory, describing the performances as “having unleashed some dormant and powerful energies, having liquidated the imaginary enemies, having felt together, united with the others, having felt free – having won the battle for survival.”18 Lacy remembers things a bit differently. One of the principal reasons he left MEV was due to what he perceived as a deficit in the ideological and musical commitment on the part of audience members. Noting the lack of engagement on the part of the public over time, Lacy described the Sound Pool rituals as an “artificial situation”: “…we had lost the freshness of the situation because it was an artificial situation, effective but which didn’t last forever…at the beginning [the participants] were very grateful and nice, and after a while they became mean.”19 While the novel sounds introduced by audience members provided useful fodder for musical research, Lacy ultimately saw more utility in returning to a conventional performance format with a traditional division between audience and performer.

Whether or not they “won the battle for survival”, MEV’s participatory work with Steve Lacy pioneered a way to pair revolutionary politics with a sharp critique of modernist aesthetics, one that the group unflinchingly put into practice. This period left a lasting impact on Lacy who went on to develop a style that can be heard as an extension of the MEV years. The first evolution of this “post-MEV” style is observable on the album Roba, which Lacy recorded directly after leaving MEV as a regular member, and directly before he departed Rome. There

18 19

Alvin Curran, Twelve Years…

Lacy, Conversations, 70-71.

are three intersecting features of Roba that show resistance ideology becoming part of Lacy’s “professionalized” style that he would explore for the remainder of his career. First, Lacy’s playing demonstrates a conceptual commitment to improvisation as a means for discovering “unheard of” sounds. The album was created on the heels of a series of improvisation workshops Lacy gave to amateur players at the American Center in Rome. These workshops inspired his explanation of the work’s title as “the possibility of taking any material at all and using it any way you want…to play, to juggle with the sound material, with the Roba.”20 Second, as with the commercially released Sound Pool recording, novel and unexpected sounds lead to a unified and ritualized sonic texture. For example, in the opening minutes of the second side of Roba, a distant whistling can be heard that Lacy identifies as Alvin Curran, who was assisting as the engineer for the session.21 Despite his close creative and professional relationship with the musicians, the exteriority of Curran’s whistling on the recording places him in the role of outsider or “audience”, where the “tune” he whistles becomes material that is refracted through the ensemble. The result is a chorus of wind sounds that subsume Curran’s whistling, leading to a dense texture reminiscent of the Sound Pool recording discussed above. Finally, Roba demonstrates Lacy’s adaptation of “unheard of” sounds to his own idiosyncratic technical interests as a saxophonist. From his extraordinary command of the horn’s stratospheric edge, to his broad multiphonic vocabulary, Lacy evinces a willingness to turn toward the aesthetically bizarre. His interest exploratory approach to practicing and performing is supported by his willingness to encounter the unknown with regard to his own personal practice.22 While he was

20

Lacy, Conversations, 169.

Ibid., 248.

22 As a student of Lacy’s in 2003, he would consistently emphasize to this author the importance of approaching practice as a beginner.

21

not directly engaged in political activism as in his MEV years, Lacy’s later work carries the aesthetic “residue” of this radical period, as does the later work of Curran and Rzewski.

Embedded within the “politics of survival” is a resistance to conventional modes of creating and distributing music, pointing to a larger anti-capitalist critique that is at the heart of many resistance movements since the 1960s and more generally in the modern era. In many ways, the revolutionary impulses of both African American jazz musicians and what Bernstein calls the “liberated white majority”23 presage the contemporary situation facing 21st century politics, where survival has come to define politics in ever more obvious ways. Anthropologist Marc Abélès points to a situation where as the sovereignty of nation-states declines, more informal political actors emerge out of a paradigm with “the horizon of survival and threat at its center, orienting political action around that horizon.”24 While the question remains as to what kind of civil society lies behind the curtain of the dominant ideological structures that govern civil society. Gramsci, Lacy and Rzewski leave behind the notion that an ability to decide this question will be predicated upon a collective will to struggle and survive in order to engage the public with a music that challenges their imagination. In choosing an aesthetic expression that educates, enlivens and provides new rituals for public participation, musicians can provide a model of resolve and perseverance, showing the way to a more inclusive and civilized society.

23 24

Bernstein, “Listening to the Sounds of the People,” 541.

Marc Abélès, The Politics of Survival, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), xiii.

Works Cited Abélès, Marc. The Politics of Survival. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

Abrams, Muhal Richard and John Shenoy Jackson. “The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians”, Black World (1973): 72-74.

Beal, Amy. “Music As a Universal Human Right.” In Sound Commitments. Edited by Robert Addlington. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, 99-120. ____. New Music, New Allies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006.

Bernstein, David. “Listening to the Sounds of the People: Frederic Rzewski and Musica Elettronica Viva (1966-1972).” Contemporary Music Review 29, no. 6 (2010): 535-550.

Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant Garde. Minneapolis, MN: Manchester University Press, 1984.

Curran, Alvin. “A Guided Tour Through Twelve Years of American Music In Rome.”

Soundings, 10 (1976): http://www.alvincurran.com/writings/12%20years%20music%20rome.html (accessed 13 September, 2019).

Gendron, Bernard. “After the Revolution: The Jazz Avant-garde in New York, 1964-65.” In Sound Commitments. Edited by Robert Addlington. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, 211-231.

Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. trans. Quentin Hoare, Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: ElecBook, 1999.

Lacy, Steve. Conversations. Edited by Jason Weiss. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. ____. 1971. Roba. Live recorded in Rome, 1969. Saravah 10026. Vinyl, LP. Lewis, George E. “Improvised Music after 1950.” Black Music Research Journal, 16, no. 1 (1996): 215-246.

Musica Elettronica Viva. 1970. The Sound Pool. Live recorded in France, 1969. BYG/Actuel 26.

Vinyl, LP. Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Rzewski, Frederic. “Parma Manifesto.” Leonardo Music Journal, 9 (1999): 77-8.

Weathers, Diane. “The Collective Black Artists.” Black World (1973): 74-77.