Conference Agenda

"God is hanging and shooting us." This line, performed by Lucille Johnson in avant-garde jazz composer Cecil Taylor's 1976 opera A Rat's Mass, changes the meaning first inscribed in Afro-surrealist playwright Adrienne Kennedy's eponymous work. Instead of conveying the psychological abjection and the mortal fatality that foreshadow Sister Rat and Brother Rat's deaths, Johnson subverts the original narrative by delivering the line with exaggerated inflections and deliberate pacings that impart irony. Her performance catalyzes the turning point in the opera by conjuring the paralysis of God's destructive force (played by Nadja Chetzyavki) and transforms the story. In Kennedy's script, the story ends in death; in Taylor's opera, in birth and renewal.

Described by Taylor in the program notes as a "psychic poem set to music" in which "people become ideas" through a "traditional formation of Black communal gatherings," A Rat's Mass stages black sociality to construct what Ashon Crawley calls an "aesthetics of possibility." Taylor's opera has been largely overshadowed by his prolific jazz discography, but a documentation film of one of the performances resides at La Mama Theater Archive. In this paper, I analyze the music and choreography in the film to show how Taylor replaced the references to the Catholic ritual of remembrance/Eucharist in Kennedy's 1967 play with those that signify traditional African and African American performances. I also compare Kennedy's script to my transcription of the libretto, showing that Taylor foregrounded the improvising body to exploit the interstices of linguistic meaning and dramatize its valences. By supplementing my analysis with sources that document Taylor's thoughts around the 1970s, I argue that sacred black sociality was an aesthetic backbone in the music of a composer who is primarily remembered for his individual style of piano playing. I suggest that musicology's relatively recent redress of racial inequality may attend to the details within the compositions staged by black composers as much as to the genres of music (and people) that they represent.

Ornette Coleman recorded his first orchestral composition, Skies of America, for jazz quartet and symphony orchestra, in April 1972 with David Measham and the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO). Music critic Richard Williams attended the recording session and described the collaborative atmosphere as discordant and uncomfortable, with several musicians in the orchestra complaining about ‘un-idiomatic’ passages in Coleman’s orchestration. This paper problematizes the LSO’s unusually strong reaction to Coleman’s piece, given that the ensemble regularly performed works in a variety of different experimental styles. I suggest that this collaboration elicited a clash between different philosophies of sound, rooted in the crossover between classical and jazz genre spheres; specifically, conflicting aesthetic presumptions about what it means to sound ‘good’ both as individual instruments, and as a socialized, instrumentalized collective. Zachary Wallmark describes the social agency and divisive potential of sound as an “ethics of timbre” whereby sounds stratify vibrating bodies, connecting individuals to groups according to various unities and oppositions (Wallmark 2016). Coleman and the LSO held conflicting intuitions and aesthetic preconceptions about what it should feel like to be implicated in timbre, or rather, to do timbre together. On one hand, the orchestra operated within a normative Eurological, western-classical aesthetic, rooted in everyone maintaining a hierarchy of focused, homogenous, individual sounds. On the other hand, Coleman’s Skies of America orchestration typified his own Afrological, Harmolodic, timbral aesthetics, in which timbre is experiential and democratic, playing on the inherent multiplicity of sounds contained within every sound, and the feelings of sounding togetherness. Coleman explained to Williams that, “It’s not meant to be a symphony orchestra playing … Not that particular sound. It’s just supposed to be the way these instruments sound when they play together” (Williams 2022). Coleman’s approach to orchestration enriches our understanding of how the symphony orchestra has been conceived as an instrumental unit that is paradoxically both heterogenous and homogenous, multiple sounds but also a coherent sound. His collaboration with the LSO exemplifies how a symphony orchestra can adapt to, but also resist, certain ideas about playing (sounding) together that stem from outside the Western classical tradition.

Read about American minimalism, and you’re bound to encounter the word “ecstatic.” Adam Shatz wrote in 2021 of the “ecstatic” quality of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, which inaugurated minimalist techniques like drones and repetition. For Mark Swed, in 1988, Philip Glass’s signature was “ecstatic music,” and in 2011, Anastasia Tsioulcas hailed the “ecstatic percussion” of Steve Reich’s Drumming. In her signal 2015 essay, Ellie M. Hisama characterized Julius Eastman’s music as “‘ecstatic minimalism.’” To call minimalist composition “ecstatic,” though, is to join in an unspoken consensus. “Ecstatic” feeling is both within reach and beyond words, easy to alight on but difficult to define. Describing minimalist idioms as ecstatic means drawing a conclusion and issuing an interpretive challenge all at once.

My paper doubles down on the prospect of an “ecstatic minimalism” while bearing down on the term critically, from the vantage of 21st-century music. I illuminate the concept of ecstatic minimalism from three angles: instrumental, programmatic, and analytical. I begin by limning Julia Wolfe’s idea of “ecstatic” psychedelia in her 2009 album Dark Full Ride, comprised of music for multiples of the same instrument. Wolfe’s immersive textures and kaleidoscopic transformations of timbre invite listeners to perform devotional work: attending to the intimacy of ensemble interactivity. I then turn to yMusic’s 2020 album Ecstatic Science, featuring pieces by Gabriella Smith, Missy Mazzoli, Paul Wiancko, and Caroline Shaw; I read the album’s theme as a reflection on the rhapsodic union of architecture, pulse, and emotion in postminimalism. Finally, I consider Nico Muhly’s use of the word “ecstatic” to describe structural elements in his music such as chords and canons; here, the word becomes a counterforce to the icy restraint of formal analysis. I end with a call to embrace “ecstatic minimalism” not only for the term’s affective appeal but also for its ethical possibilities. Ecstatic minimalism makes space for rapture—wonder and dynamism—that is (aspirationally) ecumenical and inflected by difference, by specificities of identity and musical scale. Expanding the category of the “ecstatic” will open the way for more inclusive accounts of the liberatory power of minimalist syntax.