Institutions Against Art Music—Curation, Rehearsal, and Contemporary Art

Abstract

This chapter analyses the work of contemporary artists who use alternative institutions to challenge accepted notions of art music. Kevin Beasley’s 2019 curatorial collaboration with The Kitchen, Assembly, reframes heterogeneous musics as contemporary art through the transformational act of curation. In Rehearsing Philadelphia (2022), Ari Benjamin Meyers displays the process of musical rehearsal within temporary music organisations. The chapter contends that whereas Meyers devalues a range of music by refiguring it as rehearsal, Beasley and The Kitchen transvaluate musical practices historically understood as nonart into contemporary art—and, potentially, into art music—via the powers of the curator. Beyond calls to throw out labels and categories, such projects turn on the concrete determination of what art music is while implicating contemporary art in its potential critical reconstruction.

1 Introduction

Institutions are pivotal in shaping and defining today’s art music. Music organisations of various stripes commission new works, fund festivals, support educational programmes, and—in a recent disciplinary borrowing from the art world—curate concerts and performances.¹ Recently, some such organisations have begun to conceive music programming and curation together as a driver of social change, one answer to a broader call for increased diversity through the demographic restructuring of new music. In a rarer development, artists have participated directly in music programming efforts not by taking on jobs as arts administrators but by composing temporary organisations that exist both alongside and partially within existing institutions, formations I’ll refer to in this chapter as parainstitutions.² This chapter analyses the recent work of contemporary artists who use such alternative organisations to challenge art music’s historical ideological construction while gesturing towards its material transformation. Yet in a more radical disciplinary crossing, these artists reframe heterogeneous musics as contemporary art through, in one example, the transformational powers of art curation and, in another, by displaying musical rehearsal within novel parainstitutions. Ultimately, I argue that the consequences of these specific reframings of music as contemporary art are not simply a matter of labels and categories but rather include the concrete determination of what art music is, a determination with significant implications for music’s timely demographic issues. Analysing such projects will nonetheless require separating out the disciplines of art and art music, while it also involves their overlap.

Consider authorship, for instance. Traceable to the coterminous emergence of the musical work-concept and the autonomous art object alongside bourgeois property rights during the eighteenth century, authorial attribution in both traditions remains discrete and singular despite production’s requisitely social and collective nature. The artist and composer Ari Benjamin Meyers’s watershed social practice project, Rehearsing Philadelphia (2022), consisted of a series of musical events—referred to as Solo, Duet, Ensemble, and Orchestra—held over 2 weeks in various locations throughout the eponymous city. The finale performance by Meyers’s Public Orchestra took place on the Cherry Street Pier, a century-old public space now home to an indoor marketplace, artist studios, and artisanal shops. In one sense, the event appeared as an ordinary orchestra programme. Conductors led a large group of musicians surrounded by audience members who listened attentively to a programme of individual musical works. In another sense, the musicians departed from the symphonic tradition in terms of both repertoire and instrumentation. While comprising string, brass, and woodwind sections, the fifty-piece orchestra also included performers of the Bouzouki, Oud, Koto, Latin and Korean percussion, turntables, and synthesisers, along with vocalists whose melismatic ad libs resonated perhaps more with contemporary R&B than a symphony chorus. Performers were also amplified, and the sound production felt top notch. Regarding repertoire, the programme spanned the traditions of jazz, spoken word, popular, and art music with commissions from musicians and composers currently or formerly based in Philadelphia—poet and recording artist Ursula Rucker; singer-songwriter Xenia Rubinos; the surviving member of The Sun Ra Arkestra, Marshall Allen; the interdisciplinary artist Ann Carlson—and Meyers himself. But beyond his own orchestra composition, Meyers claims authorship of the entire 2-week Rehearsing Philadelphia event, which despite contributions from over 200 artists contains the subtitle A Metascore by Ari Benjamin Meyers. Remarkably, Meyers conceives this project not as music programming or even curation but as a socially engaged artwork (Meyers 2022).

This is not to suggest that Meyers uncritically applies authorship conventions from contemporary art to music, nor is it to contend that presenting music programming as an artwork is even a novel idea, but it is to acknowledge a tension perhaps between this apparent authorship hierarchy and the project’s stated goal of challenging “institutions of power”.³ Challenging is of course not overthrowing. And rather than rejecting institutions outright, Meyers operates within and alongside them. The project was produced in collaboration with the Curtis Institute of Music and Drexel University’s Westphal College of Media Arts & Design and received major funding from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Understanding ‘institutions’ more broadly, though, not only gets at the project’s use of parainstitutions but also its decidedly participatory conception of social practice, an art movement that takes publics, communities, and collectives as its materials.⁴ For instance, the project sought to unsettle the dichotomy between performer and audience (each perhaps an “institution” in its own right). In Duet, performers located in Philadelphia’s Love Park (named after the iconic Robert Indiana sculpture it hosts) asked passersby, “Would you like to sing with me?” before inviting each parkgoer to rehearse Meyers’s 2014 vocal work Duet. (Para)institutions may have social as well as architectural dimensions. For Ensemble, musicians from Curtis invited attendees of a temporary art gallery for music—what the Berlin-based American Meyers calls a Kunsthalle for Music—to sit in on rehearsals of modern and experimental scores for various instruments, voice, or, in the case of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music (1972), the hands. In this sense, Meyers points to various participatory aspects of music that led critics such as Claire Bishop to position it as a prewar forerunner of social practice art—despite, I would add, the significant postwar disciplinary asymmetries between art and art music.⁵ These are myriad, but in short: music has remained ideologically modernist, while art understands itself as contemporary. While art music still understands itself as aesthetically organised sound, it is art’s postconceptual contemporaneity that allows it to conscript virtually any object or material—artistic or non-artistic; art music or popular music—into or even as its products (Barrett 2021). Expanding the notion of ‘institutions’ even further, to the level of discipline, may let us meaningfully intervene in these asymmetries.

Recent contemporary artists have used such disciplinary incongruities between art and art music to challenge core conceits of the latter while invoking timely questions for music’s institutions. For instance, how can organisations offer inclusive programming—especially across race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and class—when art music’s very concept (combining notions of ‘Western’, ‘high’, and ‘art’) is ultimately based on a series of exclusions: ‘non-Western’, ‘low’, and ‘popular’ or nonart? It may be tempting for music institutions to simply throw out such distinctions in favour of a seemingly progressive pluralism. Yet some contemporary artists working with music have both complicated and critically expanded such gestures through the use of parainstitutions that recontextualise music as contemporary art. Such work relates, genealogically, to institutional critique, a movement starting in the 1960s that has reflected on art’s organisational support structures including but not limited to the gallery and museum systems, while pointing to their imbrication in broader social, economic, and political realities.⁶ Social practice further extends the project of institutional critique beyond the art world by intervening in, and even creating, social formations at large. Through their use of musical parainstitutions, the artist-led projects discussed below construe music as one such at-large social formation while shifting institutional critique’s art-world purview to one of its performing arts cousins. Institutional critique’s influence continues to be felt in contemporary art, yet a parallel movement has never quite occurred in music despite the latter’s above-noted relevance to social practice. The works described in this chapter, along similar lines, speak to art music’s failure to reinvent itself since artistic modernism and the resulting gulf between it and today’s contemporary art (Barrett 2021, see also Osborne 2018).

This chapter considers how contemporary artists’ experiments with musical parainstitutions have challenged art music’s historical conception and its present instantiations. Can such projects reimagine art music towards more egalitarian ends, then, or do they risk reinscribing exclusionary dimensions inherent to its concept? To be sure, diversity and inclusion were explicit goals of Rehearsing Philadelphia. Linking aurality to social identity, one of the project’s texts contended that, “A sonically diverse orchestra is a diverse orchestra” (Meyers 2021b).⁷ Recall the mix of jazz, spoken word, and popular music included in the project’s finale. Does Meyer’s orchestra programme elevate these vernacular musical practices to the status of high art? Or does it redouble their status as nonart culture by construing such music as fodder for his social practice ‘metascore’? The chapter argues that Meyers does devalue these musics, but he similarly debases art music, ultimately figuring them equally as pedagogical vehicles for rehearsal.⁸ Meyers challenges the status of art music, then, by presenting these rehearsals—and his parainstitutional containers for them—rather than finished musical performances, as musical artworks. The chapter compares Meyers’s project to Assembly (2019), an installation and two-week, multi-event performance programme jointly organised by the artist Kevin Beasley and Lumi Tan, Tim Griffin, and Nicole Kaack from The Kitchen, a hybrid art and performing arts institution in New York City.⁹ Like Meyers, Beasley works within and alongside existing music and art institutions. Also like Meyers, Beasley and The Kitchen deliberately cross musical codes of high and low through site-specific performances and by “thinking about access and collectivity”.¹⁰ For instance, the opening event featured a performance by the composer Pamela Z in The Kitchen’s third-floor office space followed by the hip-hop musician Suzi Analogue singing and DJing for a dance-floor audience gathered on the ground floor.¹¹ Unlike Meyers, Beasley and The Kitchen construe Assembly not as an artwork but as a curated series of musical performances taking place within Beasley’s site-specific installation. And whereas Meyers devalues a range of music by refiguring it as rehearsal, I contend that Beasley and The Kitchen transvaluate musical practices historically understood as nonart into contemporary art—and, potentially, as art music—via the powers of the curator. Both projects, the chapter concludes, use contemporary art to issue timely responses to the problem of what art music is today.

2 Re: Assembly—Curation Contra Art Music

At once working within and outside art music, Beasley and The Kitchen use contemporary art curation to reimagine music’s ideological and institutional structures. In doing so, they pit one set of organisational and artistic norms (contemporary art) against another (art music) through a third, parainstitutional alternative: a temporary curatorial collaboration between an artist and an art/performing arts venue. Such a configuration not only appears as a parainstitution due to its ephemeral status but also owing to how it refigures norms and expectations of an existing institution. The result of this parainstitutional collaboration is not only a meditation on collectivity and access but also an intervention in art music’s historical ontology that reflects on the latter’s social and material consequences in the present. Diversity, or at least a version of it that decentres whiteness, was a facet: all of Assembly’s performers were artists of colour, and its audiences brought art-world regulars together with followers of new, experimental, and underground musics, as well as other performing arts. With a focus on music, Assembly’s sixteen participants also included choreographers, poets, and performance and theatre artists.¹² At the same time, the project foregrounded the work of African American artists, recalling perhaps organisational and artistic precedents such as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams founded in Chicago in 1965; or the Just Above Midtown (JAM) gallery, which the filmmaker and activist Linda Goode Bryant founded in 1973; or, more recently, Clifford Owens’s 2011 Anthology, a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 that featured the artist’s realisations of performance scores by a multigenerational and transdisciplinary group of twenty-six African American artists and composers.¹³ In addition to assembling diverse collectivities, Beasley and The Kitchen help to disassemble the collection of ideas that continue to broadly govern the concept of art music. In effect, they put forth an alternative set of criteria—criticality, reflexivity, hybridity, and transdisciplinarity—for bringing together musics ordinarily understood as ontologically disparate. Through their collaboration, moreover, they gesture towards art music’s reassembly using the powers invested in the contemporary art curator. What, then, is a curator? How does one operate?

Curation is a decidedly vertical operation. At a minimum, a curator indicates what should rise to an audience’s attention. Not unlike artists, the curator designates certain objects worthy of public display, ultimately conferring on them the status of high art. Distinct from curators, however, artists have been said to possess what Boris Groys calls a “magical ability” to levitate nonart objects to similar heights, the readymade of course being exemplary. But the distinction between artist and curator has not always been this clear cut, and is perhaps less so today. Prior to the artistic modernism that brought us Duchamp, curators of Europe’s early art museums possessed a comparable artistic ability, but rather than upgrading nonart to art they desecrated or downgraded often colonially pillaged religious artefacts to receptacles of “mere” aesthetic contemplation (Groys 2008, 43–52/43–44). This early, artist-like status of the curator, furthermore, anticipates Harald Szeeman’s 1960s vision of the “curator-as-artist”, which has seen more recent expression in the so-called curatorial turn towards “star” figures like Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nicolas Bourriaud, Koyo Kouoh, Roselee Goldberg, and the late Okwui Enwezor (Smith 2012, 131; O’Neill 2007, 15).¹⁴ The notion of ‘curation-as-art’ has strengthened further through the initially largely Scandinavian movement of New Institutionalism beginning in the early 2000s. Understood as a kind of reabsorption of institutional critique back into art organisations, New Institutionalism involves a turn away from the art object and towards the exhibition as a social project. The institution becomes a site for collaboration and activist struggle, while the curator takes a “creative and active part within the production of art itself” (O’Neill 2007, 15).¹⁵ The curator becomes an artist, and a social practice artist at that. This is not to say that today’s curators and artists are now somehow indistinguishable. But it does speak to a growing sense in which curators see themselves not only involved in the conferral of the status of art, legitimating its highness, but also as effectors of social change. No doubt today’s curators share the artist’s once unique magic.

The ‘importation’ of such curatorial powers into music appears not only a chance to address its perennial diversity issues but may also have the potential to change what art music is. To be sure, art music’s ontology differs historically yet is not separate from art more broadly. As opposed to publicly displayed objects, though, art music has understood itself primarily as a writing tradition. The audition of its resulting scores through public performance is integral yet ontologically secondary; after all, a piece of music can exist without ever being performed—a sad fact of life for composers of any era. Rather than curators, then, musical literacy has played the role of high art conferral. Certainly various other musical and institutional actors are also involved. Instrumentalists with their select repertoires might be compared to curators, just as concert halls can be said to share some territory with museums and galleries. Patrons and funding bodies cannot be ignored. But the purported uniqueness of the score and an ability to read it have functioned in ways not unlike Western literacy writ large beginning in the Enlightenment: a racialising tool used to exclude and denigrate the other. Indeed, while humanist philosophers considered those who could not read and write subhuman and thus subject to colonialism and slavery, musics not fully adopting Europe’s notation system have been deemed nonart cultural practices to be ignored, patronised, or appropriated.¹⁶ Doubtless, art music’s ontology has received significant challenges both from within and without. Regarding the latter, jazz and African American improvisational musics have invented new notational forms along with entire musical languages that operate outside them, pointing further perhaps to what George E. Lewis describes as radically “Creolized” practices (Lewis 2017). From within, the transnational movement of experimentalism has used indeterminacy to decentre the authority of the score, leaving elements of its realisation up to chance or the decisions of the performer. Sound reproduction—born alongside a musical modernism that, paradoxically, came to rely even more heavily on notation—opened up the possibility of technologically obsolescing the score, thereby reskilling composition as a democratised or “vernacular” art (Piekut 2019; Levitz and Piekut 2020).

But the magical ability of contemporary art curators to transmogrify practices historically understood as nonart may pose an even more radical challenge to art music’s ontology. The second week of performances for Beasley and The Kitchen’s Assembly featured a riveting set from Mhysa, a musician who describes herself as a “Queer Black Diva and underground popstar for the cyber resistance”.¹⁷ A tension between ‘popstar’ and ‘underground’ already alludes perhaps to her work’s simultaneous celebration and critique of star culture, a ubiquitous trope of pop art whose various musical equivalents have yet to be fully theorised. Nevertheless, Mhysa chooses the form and content of pop music for her critical work around Blackness and queerness set against a cybercultural backdrop. Her performance took place on The Kitchen’s second floor, which housed Beasley’s large-scale custom-designed audio-visual setup: long fluorescent lights vertically framed two stacks of TV monitors that sat atop speaker arrays facing the audience while bookending the performance area. If the light fixtures invoked a stripped-down minimalism found in the work of artists like Dan Flavin, everything else pointed in the opposite direction. A massive screen projected pulsating diamond collages and morphing floral imagery—along with frame-sized, all-caps flashes of “Afraid?” answered by “Tired”—all behind a lavishly costumed Mhysa who sang and rapped, mic in hand, next to her collaborator. Both musicians faced the audience behind a cloth-covered table hosting a laptop, mixers, and DJ equipment. Mhysa’s forty-five-minute set featured selections from her 2017 album fantasii, which she has referred to as “an ode to Black femmes” (Dommu 2017). After a dreamily reverbed and delay-rich homage to Beyoncé’s 2003 hit “Naughty Girl”, a driving drum machine beat entered beneath swirling, phaser-drenched synth chords. Heavy, trap-inspired sub-bass then played against a rhythmically triggered sample of a camera shutter. “So many pics, it’s like I got my own strobe light / Click, click, click, click, click”, she intoned. Amid her vocalisations, Mhysa manoeuvred through Beasley’s installation for an audience that reciprocally swayed in awe. Critical, conceptual, reflexive, intertextual, and performative—what should be so controversial about calling this music art?

Does curating such work as contemporary art ultimately mean throwing out distinctions between art music and nonart music, or does it invite their critical reconstruction? Other ‘curatorial’ projects that mix high and low music outside of contemporary art do not seem to pose quite the same problem. Consider NASA and Carl Sagan’s range of blues, Baroque, classical, folk, gamelan, guqin, jazz, mariachi, and rock music included on the Golden Record sent to space aboard the 1977 Voyager probes.¹⁸ Such a mix may eventually be enjoyed by aliens inhabiting far-off worlds without necessarily challenging human musical hierarchies back on Earth. But if a curator recasts nonart music as art within contemporary art, does that de facto make it art music? On the one hand, a negative answer might either deny curators a power considered uncontroversial by today’s standards, or suggest that art music is somehow sealed off from or immune to the workings of contemporary art. But an affirmative answer, on the other, might imply a disciplinary symmetry between contemporary art and art music that, arguably, does not presently exist despite their complex genealogical entanglement. That is, while today’s art music and contemporary art both derive from the same artistic modernism, the field of music, as noted above (and as I’ve argued elsewhere), has remained ideologically modernist versus art’s contemporaneity (Barrett 2021). An affirmative answer could also suggest the authority a genus (art) may have to determine the content of its species (art music) (Barrett 2021). Yet the categorical relationship between these two fields has not necessarily been so straightforward, and, in fact, historically the opposite was once true: recall Walter Pater’s famous insistence on modern art’s supposed striving towards the condition of music (Pater 1877). This historically shifting disciplinary relationship further complicates the question of whether contemporary art curation’s challenge to art music’s ontology ultimately comes from within or without. Are curatorial projects like Beasley and The Kitchen’s instances of music finally coming to terms with its own historical and disciplinary blind spots or something ‘imposed’ on it by an exterior force? If they prompt such a disciplinary refiguring, would those to whom a reconstructed concept of art music might apply even desire such a recategorisation? If not art music, though, what else to call this music that is also (contemporary) art?

To be certain, some music already points to a need to rethink its ontology—with or without the aid of curators. Working at the intersection of contemporary art and jazz, the composer, pianist, and artist Jason Moran foregrounds Black music as site, subject matter, and material. A prolific musician, he publishes recordings and scores extensively, and frequently collaborates with other artists such as Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, Joan Jonas, Stan Douglas, Carrie Mae Weems, and Adam Pendleton. Moran’s 2020 solo exhibition at The Whitney featured musical recordings and videos alongside three selections from Staged (2015–2018), a series of life-sized architectural recreations of legendary New York City jazz clubs that operated between the 1920 and 1970s.¹⁹ Moran appeared on the closing evening of Beasley and The Kitchen’s Assembly. An audience greeted Moran sitting at a piano in the centre of the venue’s first-floor performance area just beneath Beasley’s monumental audio-visual textile installation. Lights softly glowed through patterned tapestries and resin-coated clothing suspended from The Kitchen’s ceiling, partially covering a circular loudspeaker array. A similar set of interior-lit fabrics swept upward from Moran’s open-lid, microphoned piano to speakers that projected processed piano and varispeed audio playback throughout Moran’s roughly forty-minute performance. Initial atmospheric chordal dissonances accompanied unintelligible speech fragments—alternatingly sped up and slowed down—which altogether evolved into a chorale-like gospel texture whose plagal cadences felt both uplifting and bluesy. A pre-recorded piano chord microtonally drifted upward with multiple iterations, echoing Moran’s fixed-pitch acoustic counterpart. Rapid, single-note trills in a low register then exploded into animated, vocal-range bebop runs. Structurally, such unpredictable local disjunctures contrasted with a global series of drawn-out climactic ebbs. The speech fragments returned with a drum machine loop that gradually built intensity. Finally, Moran’s percussive yet subtle piano clusters repeatedly accented a stripped-down electronic dance music loop, both slowly fading into silence. Overall, Moran’s musical tapestry masterfully weaved jazz and African American improvised idioms together with tropes of musical modernism. If Assembly’s opening night with Pamela Z and Suzi Analogue challenged accepted musical hierarchies by juxtaposing “high” and “low”, Beasley and The Kitchen closed the event with what Lewis might locate as a “Creolized” musicality in Moran’s radical hybrid (Lewis 2017).

Broadly, Beasley and The Kitchen use contemporary art curation to reassemble a concept of music that challenges its longstanding hierarchies. In addition to curating diversity, they proffer a revised basis for assembling musical collectivity. Beyond (yet not excluding) musical modernism’s aesthetically organised sound, they suggest an alternative set of criteria for evaluating musical art: criticality, reflexivity, hybridity, and a transdisciplinary relevance to contemporary art, on the one hand, and to art music’s onto-historical constructedness, on the other. As a hybrid exhibition and performance series, furthermore, Assembly attends to the centrality of site in the generation of musical and artistic meaning. It was remarkable to observe Assembly musicians’ heterogeneous powers to shape the social, corporeal, and affective dynamics of The Kitchen’s respective spaces: one minute, a seated audience carefully attuned to Logan Takahashi’s experimental modular synth textures; another, a dance crowd collectively entrained to the pulsing rhythms of Mhysa; yet another, a mix of stillness and swaying for an experimental DJ set from Hprizm (also known as High Priest or Kyle Austin): an artist and composer known for mixes that combine the likes of Nam June Paik, Sun Ra, and Public Enemy. In this sense, despite Beasley’s not typically being associated with social practice art, the project understands the arrangement of social space as one of its primary materials, even one of its mediums.²⁰ Altogether, the project sought to recognise how, in their words, “sound and the structures of certain spaces may yet lend themselves to nuanced and rich cultural exchange”.²¹ Indeed, Assembly operationalises music’s latent socio-spatiality, mapping it onto the architecture of a notorious New York City art/performing arts institution. Not unlike Beasley’s fabric installation, Assembly sweeps across musical, artistic, architectural, and historical striations to compose alternative formations both social and (para)institutional. Like Meyers, Beasley and The Kitchen point to ways music is already a kind of social practice. Here I turn to the pedagogical resonances between practice and rehearsal in Meyers’s work, which can be said to differently provoke art music’s ontology.

3 Unlearning Art Music—Rehearsing Social Practice

If Beasley and The Kitchen recontextualise practices historically excluded from the category of art music on the basis of musical literacy, Meyers frames the latter as an intrinsically pedagogical process. Reading music is only possible, that is, through learning. Western music education has of course taken many forms, stretching back to the early integration of pedagogy and music in the ancient Greek concept of mousikē. Today, one thinks of private piano lessons, high school marching bands, university music ensembles, and community chorus recitals. All typically understood as providing a universal good for society. All sharing a common basis in rehearsal. Practice makes—well, maybe not perfect but perhaps better citizens, we’re told. Yet despite the centrality of rehearsal, it remains obscured from an audience’s direct view, implicitly a part of the musical gaze yet nonetheless concealed. Rehearsal is, as Derrida might have it, an emblematic “parergon”: supplemental to the musical work the same way a frame is to a painting (Derrida 1987, 331). At the same time, though, we invariably perceive rehearsal’s results—illustrated perhaps most grotesquely in the figure of the virtuoso, which Adorno describes as an artistic “martyr” who demonstrates that “something sadistic has become sedimented, some traces of the torture required to carry it out” (Adorno 1997, 280). Yet as much as musical modernism has produced plenty of torturous music—see, especially, new complexity—it tends to refrain from putting its rehearsals on display.²² Exceptions might be seen in Erik Satie’s Vexations (ca. 1893), a work that consists of a keyboard passage to be repeated 840 times (roughly eighteen hours’ worth), which makes its more abbreviated ‘performances’ effectively rehearsals; or in Edgard Varèse’s Tuning Up (1946), which despite its title only sounds momentarily like an orchestra tuning. Nonetheless, musical rehearsal is more complex and expressive than its conception as a mere generator of sound, organised or not. Indeed, it involves deeply musical components—bodies, spaces, rules, disciplining, learning, negotiation—that become occluded when reduced solely to its outcome in performance. When transposed to the context of contemporary art, however, rehearsal becomes not only perceivable, potentially through any number of mediums (sound, performance, photo, video, text, etc.), but also legible as social practice.

Moreover, the designation of rehearsal as contemporary art has profound implications for art music’s ontology. As opposed to Beasley and The Kitchen’s transvaluation of nonart music into art music, here I contend that Meyers devalues both forms, construing them equally as vessels for rehearsal. Rehearsing Philadelphia reimagines art music, then, not as the determinate outcome of a hierarchy built on musical literacy, but as an open-ended series of pedagogical processes involved in music’s mediation and transmission. In recontextualising rehearsal as contemporary art, that is, Meyers decentres art music’s work-concept while reframing an archetypically parergonal component of its—and other musics’—production. The object of rehearsal, Meyers further suggests, may not be restricted to the musical work, as in practicing a Bach cello suite, but can also apply to the individual musicians involved in rehearsal, as in a soloist improving their technique—a process Meyers applies to (para)institutional formations ranging from duos to ensembles to even, in the artist’s vision, an entire city. In this sense, rehearsal might be said to promote liberal-humanist values involved in producing social harmony, working towards the greater good, etc. Yet rather than a teleology beginning with scores and ending in idealised performances, Meyers asks us to attend to the messy, imperfect processes involved in music’s preparation, prior to its reification in concerts and public presentations. To paraphrase the manifesto for Meyers’s Kunsthalle for Music, music is not necessarily what one imagines it to be—not its mediation via scores or even their proper culmination in performance (Meyers 2017). By displaying rehearsal as contemporary art, Meyers iteratively returns music to an unfinished, provisional state of (social) practice.²³ He unlearns music as artistic-literary object in order to relearn its pedagogy as social process. But, alas, this is no easy task.

We soon learn, for instance, that exhibiting musical rehearsal represents a thorny paradox. Upon being displayed, that is, preparation for a performance or presentation ceases to be itself and becomes the thing presented, making a “performed rehearsal” a kind of self-cancelling aporia. This dynamic appears not only in Meyers’s larger parainstitutional formations of Orchestra and Kunsthalle for Music, but emerges perhaps in distilled form in Duet. Bundled under a red jacket and sock hat, an elder visitor to Philadelphia’s Love Park approaches Eduardo Luna, a member of the Philadelphia Heritage Chorale who beneath an unzipped hoodie dons a t-shirt emblazoned in primary colours with the Rehearsing Philadelphia logo. Both sing as they stare down at a music stand. Yet whereas Luna projects confidence with an outstretched right arm as though conducting, Jerry Forman appears tentative. Indeed, the trepidation seen on the fellow parkgoer’s face, unlike his musically trained counterpart, can also be heard in his more restrained voice (Reyes 2022). The two are performing—or, rather, rehearsing—Duet as part of Meyers’s Duo event. The three-page ‘score’ on the music stand they are reading from is, in fact, what Meyers calls a ‘text/script’: a formulation at once referring to the dramaturgical role of assigning speech to characters (Meyers has often presented his work in European theatres), and an ordinary musical score albeit partially in text form. The first page explains the process by which one performer (in this case, Luna) invites a participant (here Forman) to rehearse the conventionally notated vocal music that appears on the following two pages. Meyers suggests a couple of spoken lines for initiating the rehearsal, beginning with “Would you like to sing with me?” In its mildly self-mocking naïveté, the prompt recalls perhaps the bewildering icebreakers issued by children and museum staff in works by Meyers’s long-time collaborator, Tino Sehgal.²⁴ Yet opposed to the way Sehgal conceals the instructions for his performances, effectively rendering them immaterial, Meyers presents the process of learning and rehearsing his score as the artwork.

Rather than rejecting musical literacy, Meyers rehearses it as artistic content. Duet’s invitation to participate is labelled on the text/script’s first page as “Before”. “After” consists of thanking the participant, while “Rehearsal” is more involved. Tellingly, there is no “Performance” section. Following the invitation, “Rehearsal” attempts to explain to the newly obtained participant what exactly they’ve signed up for. While anachronistically invoking the ‘tell-teaching’ techniques of oral tradition, its conspicuous self-reference and iterative use of Jakobsonian shifters also alludes perhaps to conceptual art.²⁵ Picture Luna saying to Forman, “This is a composition by Ari Benjamin Meyers. It is called Duet. It has two parts, for two singers. One part is labeled Me, and the other part is labeled You. I will sing Me; I always sing Me”. After explaining that the ‘piece’ is not simply the resulting music, but rather “an ongoing series of fleeting moments”—that is, the rehearsal—the spoken text turns to pragmatics.

- Can you read music?

(That’s OK, neither can I…)

- There are three motives that you sing. Each motive is numbered and sung by me first.

[go through each one, by first singing and then repeating]

- Sing at whatever volume is comfortable for you.

- You can also sing the part one octave lower if it’s too high for you.

- This is the tempo.

[play metronome]

- This is the first pitch.

[play tone]

- OK? Are you ready?²⁶

An odd contradiction inheres between the speaker’s casual dismissal of a need to read music and the lines that follow which assume a veritable lexicon of musical knowledge. Motive, octave, pitch, tempo—all terms that despite having perhaps non-music-jargon equivalents are not defined or explained. Simultaneously obscurant and demystifying, at once flexible and overprecise, the instructions allow the participant to change octaves, while requiring them to sight-sing using, in the terms of solfège, fixed Do. “Volume” (and not dynamics) is a matter of comfort level, while tempo—♩ = 84 according to the next page—is exactingly determined either mechanically or electronically. No less frustrating for a beginner are the thirty-seven measures of two-part vocal music contained on the two-page score that follows. Granted, the only text is “La”, it’s in 4/4, and it consists mostly of half and whole notes. But there are also dotted rhythms, tied notes, phrasing/legato markings, a fermata, and chromatics. Furthermore, there’s no key signature (it’s definitely not in C), and the tonal centre is shifty, at times ambiguous. Motive 1 contains the first three notes of a B major scale, whose D# then begins to sound like a leading tone in E minor when the other voice answers it with a descending stepwise figure in that key. One does not need to be musically literate to sense that this is no walk in the park. Which of course is the point.

If the music were too simple, that is, there would be little to rehearse. If it were thoroughly deskilled, there’d be nothing left to teach. Kunsthalle for Music applies this principle to Meyers’s parainstitutional music gallery formation. While many works included in the gallery’s songbook dossier are written using relatively standard notation (e.g. Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question [1906] or Julius Eastman’s Stay on It [1973]), others are Fluxus event scores or text scores of experimental music. Yet, regarding the former, even Yoko Ono’s Sky Piece to Jesus Christ (1965), which calls for orchestra performers to be wrapped in gauze bandages to the point of rendering them inert, implicitly requires at least the semblance of a traditional orchestra with relatively acceptable instrumental competencies. Otherwise, a performance risks the punchline not quite landing. Although Pauline Oliveros’s The Tuning Meditation (1971) does not require a trained orchestra, it rehearses an operation common to all sorts of manipulatable pitch instruments. Oliveros, unlike Varèse, does ask musicians to tune. “Begin by playing a pitch that you hear in your imagination. After contributing your pitch, listen for another player’s pitch and tune in unison to the pitch as exactly as possible”. Oliveros’s score thus requires various musicianship skills, including the ability to produce an imagined pitch and tune to another’s sounding frequency. Not unlike Meyers’s broader project, Oliveros recasts this ordinarily utilitarian musical activity associated with rehearsal as a source of artistic meditation. As it happens, Oliveros was also involved in organising ensembles, including the feminist musical parainstitution she assembled at the University of San Diego, the ♀ Ensemble, to whom she dedicated her related Sonic Meditations (1971) (Oliveros 1981, 13; Mockus 2007, 40). Part of Rehearsing Philadelphia’s Ensemble event, Kunsthalle for Music expands the artistic frame from the ensemble to the venue and from the institution to what happens in it. Rather than scores or performances, again their rehearsal becomes the work.

This recursive operation of designating the artwork as the artwork’s preparation produces an infinite regress, as paradoxes often do. Yet Meyers escapes this vicious circle, at least in principle, by devaluing art music’s score-based work-concept and locating its ontology elsewhere: either in the ephemeral, ‘fleeting moments’ of rehearsal seen in Duet or, indeed, in the parainstitutional frames designed to host them. Prior to this re-siting—or reinstituting—of music, however, Meyers must first negate it. Meyers’s Anthem (2017) is a partial text setting of his Kunsthalle for Music manifesto. Condensing down the latter’s multiple paragraphs to a single slogan, Anthem’s only text is “Music is not!” Its two-page score is comparable to Duet, yet the single-part Anthem is considerably slower at ♩ = 60 and more than twice Duet’s duration. While roughly in C minor, it contains numerous dynamic markings and frequent time signature changes. Although Anthem appears to be for solo voice, the Kunsthalle for Music participants gathered in Drexel University’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery decided to try it tutti. This partially ad hoc group included Curtis students and faculty, a couple of gallery visitors, my nonmusician guest, and myself. The music began quietly with a drawn-out, multi-measure “mmmm” on middle C. This humming continued, not quite in unison, and we attempted a slow ornament. Upon changing from common time to 5/4—thankfully, one of the Curtis faculty conducted—the “mmmm” expanded into an entire melodic phrasing of “music”: the first syllable melismatically outlined a minor third— “muuu-UUUU…”—before a half-step descent to “…sic”. These softer “music” figures repeated, slowly building to a dramatic forte climax with a pair of melodic leaps around “is not!”²⁷ Applauding ourselves, we managed to get through the nearly five-minute score, which surely would have benefitted from more rehearsal. Reflecting on the experience, I recalled one of the philosopher Peter Osborne’s interpretations of Meyers’s “Music is not!” slogan: “The negation of what music currently is, via the negation of one or more of what are taken to be its essential predicates” (Osborne 2022, 67). While Osborne’s other two interpretations are more totalising in scope—negating music as a whole and music as such, respectively—this one produces, paradoxically, an immediate and perhaps more extreme contradiction when sung in Anthem. Although the phrase is supposed to negate what music currently is, while singing Anthem music currently is. Indeed, we’re singing it. And if we follow Meyers, this is true even—or especially—during its rehearsal. His manifesto continues: “Music is inherently not about perfection or reproducibility. Music is the act of an orchestra rehearsing” (Meyers 2017).

This brings us, full circle, to Orchestra, Rehearsing Philadelphia’s finale. Recall again the Public Orchestra’s performances of commissioned works by Allen, Rucker, Rubinos, Carlson, and Myers. If music is inherently not these virtually perfected, presumably reproducible public performances, what is it? Continuing to follow Meyers, if we had attended only the advertised Cherry Street Pier performance, we would have simply missed it. Had we skipped the Orchestra’s rehearsal and saw only its recital, we would have merely witnessed an index of the music’s preparation, evidence of this ordinarily parergonal activity. Which is to say, we’d have skipped the actual musical work because, in an inversion of convention, again, the music is its own rehearsal. At the same time, as is well known, symphonies frequently provide an exception to this convention. In fact, many orchestras offer open rehearsals, some requiring audiences to purchase tickets, while others invite the public to participate in choruses or even instrumental sections. How does this differ from Meyers’s project? More often than not, professional orchestras unambiguously separate high musical art from community outreach, just as they clearly demarcate performances from their preparation. Music may be a social practice, but it seldom rises to the level of social practice art.²⁸ For Meyers, however, the cultivation of communities along with the parainstitutional frames he puts around them—beyond their resulting performances—figures as the work, and connects further to contemporary social practice art. To return, finally, to the question of the status of the nonart music works in Meyers’s transgenre orchestra programme: does he elevate them to the status of art music or do they remain merely artistic material? I contend that Meyers demotes these works and their art music counterparts into vehicles for rehearsal. In reinstituting, re-siting art music’s ontology in rehearsal, Meyers debases these heterogeneous musics equally, indeed, by construing them as fodder for his social practice metascore. There are no more high and low, if only in a propositionally utopian sense, because none stands as a complete or finalised musical work in the first place. All become instruments for social process.

4 Conclusion: Institutions Against Art Music

In sum, the respective projects of Beasley and The Kitchen and Meyers suggest ways artistic (para)institutions can challenge art music’s ontology. Meyers’s approach, while prosocial in appearance, is propositionally destructive: again, to cite his manifesto, “Music is not!” There is no art music, at this extreme, because all music remains caught in a perpetual state of deferred preparation, construed merely as material for rehearsal within the artist’s parainstitutional contemporary art frames. While hypothetical, even theoretical at its most powerful, Meyers’s project gestures towards a levelling of musical hierarchy through the pragmatics of social practice. Rather than avoiding musical literacy, Meyers’s relativises it by presenting it as another pedagogical item for rehearsal. Yet as opposed to Meyers’s musical negation, Beasley and The Kitchen operationalise the constructive metaphor of assembly. Through their temporary artist-institution collaboration, they harness the powers of contemporary art curation, which at present uncontroversially include the ability to designate nonart as art. In their usage, this results in recontextualising practices historically understood as nonart music—rap, hip hop, jazz, pop, DJing—as contemporary art and, potentially, also as art music. This is not, however, to flatten the distinctions internal to those musical forms, nor is it to ignore the challenge that some musics already pose to art music’s ontology; recall the work of Moran. But rather than understanding musical literacy as a basis for conferring the status of art music, Beasley and The Kitchen propose a revised set of criteria for the evaluation of musical art: criticality, reflexivity, hybridity, and a transdisciplinary use of contemporary art materials along with an exhibited challenge to art music’s historical ontology.

Importantly, this transvaluation—or devaluation in Meyers—of music is not simply a matter of labels and categories, as much as it may have implications for both, but rather concerns the problem of what art music is. While art music is no doubt the result of an underlying ideology—specifically, artistic modernism in the case of new music—it is also an expression of that ideology materialised through practice, including but not limited to that of music institutions. As a hybrid concept itself—just consider the two linguistic units that compose it—art music further results from its imbrication in a broader artistic field that, crucially and paradigmatically, also includes contemporary art. Disciplinary disparities aside, contemporary art remains the current expression of that component of art music historically associated with its highness. Pretending that musical hierarchy does not exist, decreeing all musics as somehow simply equal, insisting that one need not hear labels, or even dismissing art music as irreparably colonial or racist are ultimately ways of ignoring the problem, avoiding the critical reconstruction I think art music deserves. Illustrated in the work of Beasley and The Kitchen and Meyers, contemporary art may have an important role in such a reconstructive process. With this, music institutions might be wise to take its challenges to art music seriously, to see themselves—with contemporary art—as materially and ideologically involved in art music’s transdisciplinary concept construction and critique.²⁹ This is not to say that contemporary art has the power somehow to save art music from mediocrity or social injustice. But it is to suggest that addressing this vexed problem of what art music is—a problem that no doubt cuts across multiple fields—may also, if only in a small way, provide a key to its pervasive diversity and inclusion problems. Meyers and Beasley and The Kitchen offer two models by which parainstitutions can push against art music in its current formations. Proper institutions do not necessarily need to organise against art music to push with them, towards its reconstruction.