The Musician as Philosopher: New York's Vernacular Avant-Garde, 1958-1978

by Michael Gallope

Overview

An insightful look at how avant-garde musicians of the postwar period in New York explored the philosophical dimensions of music’s ineffability.
 
The Musician as Philosopher explores the philosophical thought of avant-garde musicians in postwar New York: David Tudor, Ornette Coleman, the Velvet Underground, Alice Coltrane, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell. It contends that these musicians—all of whom are understudied and none of whom are traditionally taken to be composers—not only challenged the rules by which music is written and practiced but also confounded and reconfigured gendered and racialized expectations for what critics took to be legitimate forms of musical sound. From a broad historical perspective, their arresting music electrified a widely recognized social tendency of the 1960s: a simultaneous affirmation and crisis of the modern self.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226831756
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	03/15/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Michael Gallope is associate professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
 

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: Maps
Chapter 1 Affect—Praxis Chapter 2 Veils—Atmospheres Global Inequities
Intentionality and Grammar
Plays of Recognition
Atmospheres
Part II: Studios
Chapter 3 David Tudor, Esoteric Spectacle . . . c. 1958 Tudor’s Pianism of the 1950s
Cage’s Noumena of the 1950s
Tudor—Cage—Graph J
Ferocious Ineffability Chapter 4 Ornette Coleman, Utopian Intentionalities . . . c. 1966 Bebop Historicity
Deskilling Intentionalities
Vernacular Utopias
Harmolodic Ineffability Chapter 5 The Velvet Underground, Eleven Rooms . . . c. 1967 Drone Alchemy
Afro-magnetism
Atmospheric Rooms
Attitudinal Virtuosity
Vital Tape Chapter 6 Alice Coltrane, Divine Injunctions . . . c. 1971 Afrocentric Spiritualities
Ornamental Apparitions
Coltrane’s Philosophy
Divine Injunctions
Afro-futurity Chapter 7 Patti Smith—Richard Hell, Forces . . . c. 1974 Punk Primitivism
Poetry, Alchemy, Force
Paradoxes of the Erotic
The Aura of Unknowing
Conclusion A Materialist Music History
Acknowledgments
Archival Collections
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"“In his first book Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy and the Ineffable (2017), musician and academic Michael Gallope explored the ways in which music inspired modern European philosophers. With The Musician as Philosopher, he turns to the philosophical thinking of musicians themselves, with a focus on the ‘strange, intense, disorienting’ musical irruptions of New York’s postwar avant-grade. It’s refreshing to see [Ornette] Coleman’s philosophy taken seriously and Gallope pays equal respect to Alice Coltrane's engagement with Eastern philosophy. The Coltrane chapter is perhaps the richest in the book, bringing her musical and spiritual practices together… While tracing the commonalities between these artists, Gallope recognizes the complex dynamics of class, race, gender and sexuality… He describes his approach as an immanent critique and it would be fascinating to read his take on the vernacular avant-gardes of disc, hip-hop and no wave, all vital sites of hyperfracture and alchemy."

The Wire Stewart Smith

"The Musician as Philosopher counts to my mind as the highest achievement to date of Michael Gallope’s already storied career. In work ranging from history to high theory and taking in everything from philosophy to recording technologies and extended techniques to a large array of documentary archives, The Musician as Philosopher gives us a nuanced dive into an American avant-garde previously unimagined, and emerges with a persuasive thesis: that a diverse strain of experimental American musicians of the 1950s-1970s were resistant vernacular philosophers. Wildly divergent in their positions, mainstream to minoritized, and making use of different affordances, they nevertheless shared a driving ambition to push the boundaries of conventional musicking in ways diversely aligned with utopianism, mysticism, and Black traditions, and with common inclinations toward valuing process over product, exploring non-Westernisms, and experimenting variously with esotericism, ecstasy, deskilling, “oblique metaphysics,” irony, hallucination, self-shedding, nihilisms, and other kinds of what Gallope calls “alchemies.” Here at last is a book that shows brilliantly how to write history and philosophy at the same time."
 

Martha Feldman

"Michael Gallope’s The Musician as Philosopher is a fascinating book since it is one of the few to center musician’s theorizing (Brent Hayes Edwards’ Epistrophies, and Daphne Brooks’ Liner Notes for the Revolution, are two other important contributions). There is of course a rich history of the role of musician’s thinking for academic scholarship, both in the humanities and the sciences, but the musicians themselves and their voices have not received much attention as themselves being creators of critical theoretical texts (both in terms of actually written language and music, amongst other forms of disseminating ideas). I am excited by the prospect of thinking about how the inclusion of artists and specifically musicians’ ways of theorizing within the space of so-called knowledge production may shift how we understand the role of not only scholarship, pedagogy, and knowledge, but also artists, and especially musicians and music making, within our society."

Jessie Cox

" . . . one great strength of The Musician as Philosopher is Gallope’s nuanced exploration of the intertwined professional and ideological forces that influenced the experimental directions of these very different artists . . . . Gallope is particularly adept at picking apart the webs of appropriation and societal prejudice that informed many of the musicians’ perspectives, with or without their conscious knowledge. One leaves these character studies with a rich appreciation for the mélange of trends and forces, both historical and contemporary, that helped shape the perspective of each artist."

Notes

" . . . . anyone seriously interested in
the artists concerned will find much to get
their teeth into here."

Shindig! Magazine

"Michael Gallope’s The Musician As Philosopher is an inspired and dilative look at the maelstrom of creative work in music and sound emanating from thinkers and doers living and working in mid-twentieth century New York City. . . . Pivoting fluidly between sound and media analyses, aesthetics, political economy, musicology, and critical perspectives on praxis, reception, and consumption, Gallope presents new frameworks for understanding some of the thinking and feeling behind the recorded works now canonized as exemplars of a gritty and resourceful vernacular avant-garde. . . .Understanding these musicians as philosophers, Gallope offers readers a deep history of sounds, styles, and ideas that ushered in music’s future."

Kwami T. Coleman