Tuning in and Dropping Out: The Disturbance of the Dutch Premiere of Stockhausen’s Stimmung
The disruption of the Dutch premiere of Stockhausen’s Stimmung in June 1969 has become an often-told aspect of the piece’s early history, but existing accounts—including Stockhausen’s own—significantly misrepresent the event. The performance was interrupted, not (as Stockhausen later claimed) by young, politically engaged composers such as Peter Schat and Louis Andriessen, but by a group of composition students who wished to ‘participate’ in the piece. In an impromptu debate following the aborted performance, Schat and Andriessen defended Stockhausen’s right to have his music heard in silence. I interpret this clash of young Dutch musicians in terms of the sharp schism that emerged in 1969 between Amsterdam’s thriving hippie counterculture, whose communal ‘happenings’ encouraged the dismantling of the performer–audience distinction, and the city’s student movement, whose emphasis on political action found reflection in Schat’s and Andriessen’s growing interest in communism. It is clear, however, that Schat’s and Andriessen’s stance was also motivated by commitments to musical professionalism and to the ideology of musical progress, commitments that sat as uneasily with the musical preferences of the student movement as they did with the hippie counterculture.
Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties
List of contributors Introduction: Avant-garde Music and the Sixties 1. Avant-garde-Some Introductory Notes on the Politics of a Label 2. "Demolish Serious Culture!": Henry Flynt and Workers World Party 3. Forms of Opposition at the 'Politiek-Demonstratief Experimenteel' Concert 4. Aesthetic Theories and Revolutionary Practice: Nikolaus A. Huber and Clytus Gottwald in Dissent 5. "Music is a Universal Human Right": Musica Elettronica Viva 6. The Problem of the Political in Steve Reich's Come Out 8. ONCE and the Sixties 9. "Scream Against the Sky": Japanese Avant-garde Music in the Sixties 10. After the October Revolution: The Jazz Avant-garde in New York, 1964-65 11. American Cultural Diplomacy and the Mediation of Avant-garde Music 12. From Scriabin to Pink Floyd: the ANS Synthesizer and the Politics of Soviet Index
Continents of Liberty: Emerson and Gerald Vizenor’s Chair of Tears
Ralph Waldo Emerson protested what came to be known as the Trail of Tears in a public letter to President Martin Van Buren in 1838. Th e Cherokee Nation, he argued, had been cheated by a “sham treaty” (Emerson, “Letter” 50), the will of the people ignored, and a false acquiescence to removal written into law. In making a passionate appeal to the highest “chair” of the land, Emerson underscored the great political and moral stakes involved: