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

Online ISBN:
9780226831756
Print ISBN:
9780226831749
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

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

Michael Gallope
Michael Gallope

Associate Professor

University of Minnesota
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Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
15 March 2024
Online ISBN:
9780226831756
Print ISBN:
9780226831749
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

The Musician as Philosopher explores the philosophical thought of a series 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, in its ambiguous thirst for freedom, justice, transcendence, realism, and rebellious erasure. In so doing, these musicians developed an affectively disturbing—yet productive, and honest—refusal of a normative self. That is, during the period when cries of cultural, political, and economic liberation were widespread and spiritual leaders pushed aside dogmas of the past to declare, with Swami Satchidananda, “the guru is within,” these musicians held up the self while also insisting, in the same stroke, to question and even liquify it.

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