Okay, so we're now going to talk about an experimental piece, a performance piece that Jackson Mac Low created as a memorial to Peter Innisfree Moore. It's called "A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore", let's listen to a few seconds of the recording of the 1975 performance. That was by the way Jackson who said "freer". Here are some of the words that appear, 960 words derived how? Anna? From a rearrangement of the letters of PeterInnisfree Moore. And words, letters are never used more than the number of times that they occur in that Peter Innisfree Moore happens to be a nice word, three word name for this because there's a lot of... There aren't any Ys in there and there's no Us. But here are some of the words among the 960 "reimport" that's been said by Jackson himself, you can hear him. "Rinse", "spicier", I like that. "Renin renin renin" and I'm not sure what that means but I think it's a word, "prefer emotion". "Rimer" I guess R-I-M-E-R, there's no Y. That's also said by Jackson. "Pristine", "freer", "error", "Semite", "Smite" "this weekend" "premonition" "Real real real" That's Jackson Mac Lowe "pioneer" "terror" "repent" "intone" "rope" "erosion" "mortar fire" "sniper" "opinion" "sortie" "norm" "opinions" "sortie" "norm" "Premier" "trip" "inspire" "motion" "pensioner" "enemies" "eerie". And then at some point several of them call out for "Mr Morris". Or it might be "Norris" Mr Norris, Mr Norris. Okay this is just, these are just the words that have a denotative definition. There are many other words that seem to be neologisms and nonsense words and then there are tones sung and played. Okay, so when you hear a word like "freer" or or "inspire" or "premonition" or "pioneer" or "repent" what do you do as opposed to a word you don't understand what happens to you? You've listened to seven minutes or so of this much longer piece. Let's let's start first, what's it like to listen to it? If you're at your most patient. Ellie? I actually really really enjoy this. Because, I think the more times you actually allow yourself to listen to it I think immediately it's more frustrating than... Why frustrating because you're hoping they would mean something? No just because... Well yes to a certain extent but also because it's so sounds like something, I don't know, almost a cliche of just really... Nonsense. Yeah. But... Yes experimentalism, avant-gardism for its own sake, a coterie of people performing for their buddy that no one else can understand. But I think that, that kind of initial nonsensicalness actually ends up being my favorite part about it because at the very, at the beginning of that excerpt that we listened to, not in that you know that is provided. I think the first word is a reimport and then is a note that kind of simultaneously is played. As someone says "I". That has always reminded me of, I don't know, the beginning of a life. There's just a note and then there's... The creation of the "I". So you began to think this piece almost as a recapitulation of the life of Peter Innisfree Moore. And of course that's just one way to interpret it, but the fact that if you actually allow yourself to listen for these things that it can become so rich. I think it's really... Okay so you, so again shifting attention and listening. We could say a lot about how it feels to witness this or to listen to it, but I want to move to, again for those who of us clinging to words that mean something, what happens in your head when you are listening to this music really, that doesn't mean semantic meaning, and then you get a word like "Freer" or "pioneer", let's take pioneer. You want to automatically associate that word with the person. Yes, you want to ascribe pioneer, it's something that you would find in an obituary. He was a pioneer in photographing the avant-garde movement of the early 1960s, and so what do we do with that impulse? Well. How did the word pioneer come about? It was just, kind of, a rearrangement of letters, like, it it's his name, it's not who he was. So it's the same thing we found in Cage, where either the word becomes less relevant because it was randomly or it was produced deterministically and not egoistically. So we dismiss it as not relevant or... Max, or we say you know it means all the more. "Pioneer, my God he was a pioneer!" and it just comes out of his name. You want to comment on that? Is that okay with you? Well, it's tricky. I think it is okay to want to say that and I think that if we had taken it or if not we would, well we could do it, if Mac Low had taken any name and generated a thousand anagrams out of it we would eventually find adjectives there that we would relate back to... They would inevitably, somehow they would inevitably do it. So that's hearing "pioneer" evacuates the automatic sentimentality of "He was a pioneer" you would say that about everybody who dies, whether they were pioneer or not. He just happened to have the name with... He happened to have a name that produced one of 960 options. One of them was "pioneer" that either that or you that makes you think "yeah, he was a pioneer, dammit" or it makes you think "Well, you know at least we're done with the cliche I don't feel any sentiment about this pioneering". Let's look quickly at the performance instructions has anybody? You read the performance instructions, this was provided to me by Jackson Mac Low before he died, on my request because I began teaching this piece and he was happy that I did and it's elaborate, very elaborate. What, give me a, Emily, give me a somewhat semi-skeptical view of having read this thing what would you say? "Too much, Jackson. We don't need all this information"? Too much Jackson. There's something interesting about the fact that we're one of the few people who are reading it who have concrete sort of proof and direction that that piece, which seems so random, is in fact meticulously constructed and provided for and planned for. And it was very important for Jackson Mac Low to provide instructions. Why do you think it was important for him to do that, Anne-Maris? So that collectively I think a piece would be successful he says specifically that all the voices should be intelligible, so that it shouldn't become white noise in the way that we would normally describe a random piece. And he also says that each of the performers must be present with complete concentration. So to me again it just shifts that emphasis from the text or the poem at a distance to something that we inhabit and have to devote ourselves fully to. So one of the things it does is it documents the occasion because it was a happening it was a performance in honor of Peter Innisfree Moore in 1975. It happened, it was created, and really the performance instructions are all that's left. It happened that someone recorded it and we have a recording but that wasn't always the case certainly in the early 60s. A lot of these things occurred and then and basically are gone. So, so we have that but we also have these instructions and there's a lot of use of the word "must", right? "The speakers must have clear diction". "The singers must be able to produce precisely all of the 12 tones". I'm not sure I would have been eligible for that. "Each performer must move the the eyes freely", I love that, you must move your eyes freely "from any word to any other word", that's an amazing statement for him to make. So here's my question to you. If the result, this piece, "Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore" is so free-seeming and so out there, so indeterminate, that we know it's determined by the process somewhat, why such a rigorous demanding instruction? If the result is so open. Why focus on these instructions, Dave? That reminds me of that quote that I think William Carlos Williams had about Stein's poetry that she's trying to break down the meaning of language and bring it back fresh and clean. And the thing I like is how meticulously these are because it injects an element of objectivity. But at the end of the day it's still extraordinarily subjective. And hard work. I think if you were one of the performers, rather than feeling liberated up on that stage, you would feel what, Mollie? Pressure to stick to the constraints given? I mean it's very, it's almost like a scientific experiment where you have to control for all the variables in order to really find out, you know find what you're looking for. So once again this course is not though I think skeptics and detractors might feel it is it is not about "anything goes". This is not art in which anything goes. You can't draw from this absolutely anything. And if you participated in the making of it, either by working on a computer program or participating in the this Mac Lowian performance, you would have to follow these instructions and if you didn't, it's possible that Mac Low was performing himself, would stop you and say "We have to start over again you didn't." "Yeah but Jackson I was just being free". "No no this is not about freedom this is about constraint". All right. Let me quote you something he said at Bard College at a conference in 1999. And and I was at that conference and I spent some time with Jackson Mac Low at this conference and he then later sent me these remarks. It was a speech that he made and let me read it to you. And it's about the community of performers, this really gets us to the point of moving from the genius modernist Stein and Williams, who were, in the case of Williams alone in his north-facing room, you know feeling "I'm lonely, I'm lonely". So I think this is a performance in which let's imagine 15 people in Bill's room dancing around and saying, "We are not lonely, we are not lonely, we are best of." He says this, you tell me what it means: "The community made up of the performers is a model of a society that has certain characteristics that I would like to see abound in the wider society. The individual performers exercise initiative and choice at all points during the piece but are also constructing an oral situation that is not merely a mixture of results of egoic impulses but an oral construction that has a being of its own". What do you get from that, Ann-Maris? I think it's a similar trend in both art and literature moving away from an unequal subject-to-object relationship. So we saw in art and it was talking to us about how before it was a depiction of a nude and then in the 60s and 70s, it moved into performance art and now it seems to be a more collaborative physical experience. And the same thing in literature, we've moved from seeing the text as supreme to more of a focus on sound and now more on the performance of it. So really it seems the point is to take us out of this sort of bow to the poet as oracle and accept his word is written in stone, and think of ourselves as the creative units that have to work collectively and listen to each other. Because this is an arrangement, it's not... It's as if Cid Corman got his wish finally, you know, where instead of just I only exists because you are reading me. Why don't you climb into the poem with me. Let's make it together, let's mean something together. Let's shift our attention together. Now, Cid Corman came of age at a time when, you know, he was still writing alone to hundreds and thousands of homes. And he went to Kyoto, Japan to get away and away from the communality of the scene and for other reasons. And in the end he wasn't going to do something communal, but he certainly would have loved it because it would have made him be, I suppose. So, what about the society? This is utopian, this is very much Cagean, you know, his comments about how we can go on and do our living when we stop using language in a certain way that it does things to people, if we do a subject to subject thing rather than what Pound either intentionally or accidentally does when he makes an object of the person who had been a subject a minute ago, eyeing him from head to toe, serving as a subject. He turns her into an object. Now what's happening is the society is built based on intersubjectivities. What is it like, Max? Is that a society you want to live in? And you know what, what are some characteristics of it, what does he mean by he wants this to work out socially? Well I'm not sure if it's a society that I would want to live in yet. There are lots of rules in Mac Low's society and lots of rules that he's writing. And if he is trying to get us to to sort of intersubjective place... He's, he's kind of, there's lots of imperatives there. He's commanding us to be to be intersubjective. To be free. To be free, yes. It's the same way, it's the same thing in Cage, where it's, it's very rigorous, there are many rules. There is a method But isn't social communality a rigorous matter? It isn't "anything goes. " Anarchism... Well we, I'm not going to open the can of worms of anarchism but, but he was an anarcho-pacifist, Jackson Mac Low. And what he's saying, implying here, he doesn't use the word "anarchism". Anarchism is hard work, if we are going to strike the balance between ourselves and others. Sure. Yeah. So I mean are you, so you're... It's probably also I mean it's probably also hard work, not only in that society, but to get to that society, it's the same way of Cage's... Cage in a way with his rigorous methods, he's waging war on syntax. So Mac Low's not really a political philosopher. He's really drawing an analogy from the performance, from art. And so let's go with the spirit of that 'cause what you said is really important and profound. I wish we had lots and lots of time to explore his manner of political philosophy, but if you think about the way the performance takes place, if we could take that collaborative performance of a more memorialization of this person, Peter Innisfree Moore, and say that's the way society be either "The Day Lady Died" performed by all of us. We were all there in Five Spot and we all held our breaths and we all miss Lady. You know that, that kind of... I think in a way maybe I'm not even asking the question here but I'd love a comment on it. Maybe it's the thing that we felt doing that performance. You do the hard work and then you realize "My God we have honored this man in a way that a traditional elegy written by one of us would not have done it." Does anybody want to go with that for just a couple of seconds? I was gonna say that I think the individual constraint liberates the community as a whole. And before we had that resistance from the Gnostics because we'd be like "Who do we attribute the creative genius to?" And it was that collective experience of Cage, Ginsberg, and us we were a part of that triangle that created that meaning. And in the same way with this performance I think the meaning is created in that space between, right, between subjectivities for the people involved and it's always just sort of this happy coincidence that that can happen and that's always a surprise. Happy. Lyn Heijinian who wrote "My Life" also wrote a book called "Happily". And what she meant by happily was hap happens not happily like ha, ha, ha, pleasant but happy. Happy is happening. Hap, I think, Thomas Hardy has a poem called "Hap". For happenstance, right. Happenstance, occurrence, not random, not arbitrary, but procedural. If we get ourselves into a constraint, we're going to produce something that will be, that will make us happy, I think this is a pleasure that Cage means. All right, let's conclude almost by footnote. Peter Innisfree Moore, he was a visual historian, he took photographs of the scene in the early 60s, the downtown scene. And he photographed the happenings. He's probably primarily the one responsible for our having any sense of what these happenings looked like. They weren't typically recorded. They were typically held in places like the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in New York, and at a recent exhibit of his photographs, the reviewer say, "That the majority of this show's viewers must rely on images like Moore's to know what those works were like." So I think we should take a few seconds to say something again about how this is actually quite an intentional elegy. How is it, Anna, that it turns out to be appropriate for Peter Innisfree Moore that this vocabulary got created? Well, if Moore was a documenter of an ephemeral performance piece, then there's really nothing more appropriate for him than to memorialize him and, I guess make elegy to him, or of him I guess, that is in itself ephemeral and you know occurs kind of... I mean because we have the instructions for performance pieces like Yoko Ono's and you have instructions for her performance pieces and we have the instructions for the elegy to Moore. So there's really nothing more appropriate than this. We do great honor. It's a descendant of let us describe, if these people went die in an accident, then I'm going to produce a so-called accident in honor of them. If Peter Innisfree Moore made attended happenings and made them memorable we are going to do one for him. So what could be better? And I think that a traditional obituary or a traditional elegy would in a way not be able to create, except semantically, this guy documented things that can't be documented. So why not produce art that honors the performative one-time only happenings quality of it. So it turns out in the end not, not arbitrary at all.
