Issue 154

The opera Have A Good Day! is striking for its focus on something no other opera deals with: the working conditions of supermarket cashiers. Written by Vaiva Grainytė but conceived with her collaborators Lina Lapelytė and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, the opera’s libretto is divided between characters representing different aspects of supermarket work as well as the drastically different personalities and temperaments that animate this division of labor. Yet another layer emerges in how the structure of the score itself reflects the subject matter by reproducing a division of labor among the librettist (Grainytė), composer (Lapelytė), and director (Barzdžiukaitė): music produced collaboratively, by design, typically needs to employ methods of separating tasks between different individuals. While this might seem obvious, the consequences of such organizing principles are not well understood, especially in terms of how they place limits on the artistic result from the outset.

Socially progressive ideas cannot be contained in a regressive form—a modernist principle familiar to readers of Walter Benjamin and Władysław Strzemiński. Left-wing modernist music followed the same tenet, which is why Cornelius Cardew could condemn John Cage:

“Cage serves imperialism and will go under with imperialism. But is it true to say that his music bears no relation to the lives of the working or oppressed people? In a way such music does reflect the conditions under which people work, with the productive forces catastrophically out of step with the relations of production, and in doing so it intensifies our oppression.”

Cardew’s lectures and writings were filled with analyses of music that reproduced the exploitative relations of labor. In classic communist style, they also included self-criticism. This special issue of e-flux journal (a sequel to issue 144 from April 2024, which I also guest-edited) includes a conversation with musician and composer Anton Lukoszevieze on Autumn ’60, one of Cardew’s compositions that Cardew himself condemned in his later period. The complex set of rules it is based on create a unique blend of limits and freedoms as well as relations within the performing ensemble.

Also in this issue, Sandra Skurvida shows a different aspect of Cage’s work—his attempts to construct constellations of human and inhuman powers. Skurvida focuses on aspects of Cage’s work that are rooted in the politics of anarchism, which Cardew still saw as harmful to the workers’ cause. Yet it was especially in Cage’s last pieces that his ability to think of labor outside the humanist worldview started to become apparent. Sezgin Boynik’s essay in the issue also considers musical propaganda that closely resembles the late activity of Cardew. Focusing on the antinomies of agit-punk developed by The Pop Group, Boynik shows how Mark Stewart’s project attempted to create a punk structure for conscious political work through form, lyrics, and methods of production.

The rise of open scores in the 1960s was part of an ideology of emancipating the performer to take creative license in interpreting cues offered by the composer. Yet this opening could also be understood as delegating more work to the performer, who now needed to step in and fill all the blanks in the score, as a composer might have done previously. One could argue that such a “liberation” simply relocated the burdens of production onto the workers, in accordance with the general logic of capitalism. After all, performing music is a form of labor, as exposed in the poems by Witold Wirpsza (1918–85) published here, based on photographs from The Family of Man exhibition. This conviction was also strong for another left-wing modernist composer, Luigi Nono, who made a striking comparison: “I’ve understood that there is no difference if I write a score or organise a strike. They are two aspects of the same thing. For me there is no longer any difference between music and politics.” How can a strike and a score be the same? A strike is a refusal of work and a score is an instruction for how to work. And yet labor is central to the existence of both.

The issue also features four musicians and composers reflecting on their own experiences with divisions of labor in performing and writing music. A conversation between Marianne Ritchey and Greg Stuart deals with the interpretation of assigned labor in the twentieth-century New Complexity school of composition. Sarah Hennies addresses questions of exploitation in classical music performance while showing how a score might be a tool for exploring new forms of relation based in mutual understanding. This is similarly important for trumpet player and composer Nate Wooley; his essay recounts his attempts to treat a score as a basis for anarchism-rooted (though not necessarily Cageian) social relations within the ensemble, where utopian scenarios might be realized. David Grubbs uses his experience performing an open score by Pauline Oliveros to show how a written document becomes a basis for creative unity ensured by a humble yet charismatic leader.

The issue opens with an opera and ends with opera. The last document is a synopsis of a stage musical performance by Liam Gillick based on his 1995 novel Erasmus Is Late. The period of the musical is vaguely determined by a meaningful moment: the rise of workers as a social class. The characters, even if historically marginal, represent tendencies in labor management, and the opera depicts the nonevent of their meeting by doing exactly what the opera is about: dividing the labor of performing liberalism.

—Daniel Muzyczuk

Vaiva Grainytė—Have a Good Day!: An Opera for Ten Singing Cashiers, Supermarket Sounds, and Piano
Fifteen years ago, my ex-partner called me and described a shopping experience in vivid detail: “The cashier lady who was scanning my bread was having some tubes attached to her back. I think they are not allowed to go to the bathroom!” This disturbing image fueled my imagination, and became the very first lines of the chorus—about a full bladder and daydreaming of the summer resort Palanga (in the English version it became Miami Beach). Lina composed a catchy tune, which ended up becoming the conceptual framework for the entire piece: music resembling the monotony of the checkout conveyor belt, repetitive songs, static cashiers, an opera about the routine of buying and selling.

Nate Wooley—Failing Toward Utopia: The Musical Score as a Site for Dreams
The score can be read as a blueprint or explicated like a poem. There are scores hanging behind glass at eye level, removed from any sound-making at all and begging to be recognized as objets d’art. There are others that are innately useful, becoming well-loved maps meant to guide students through a musical geography. Understanding a score may require the translation of an expert, or it may be immediately obvious to an untrained eye; it can exist as a historical document or as a work of science fiction. The score does not need to communicate, nor does it even need to be innately musical. A score can be an idea or a feeling, a fragment of life. And if this is so, then the score can become a site for thinking that moves beyond the musical and into the way society is mediated. 

Sandra Skurvida—Labor and Anarchy in John Cage’s First and Last Compositions
Cage’s ethos of anarchist individual liberty was not always compatible with the collective labor of music production. Orchestra musicians sabotaged performances of Cage’s music by not following the score and not rehearsing, and even by destroying electronic equipment they regarded as a threat to their training, status, and livelihood. Cardew described this resistance “as spontaneous expression to the sharply antagonistic relationship between the avant‑garde composer, with all his electronic gadgetry, and the working musician.”

Marianna Ritchey and Greg Stuart—Accessibility and Instrumentality: A Conversation
In short, we might say that New Complexity, which deploys impossible notation in order to demand personal choices and creative, interpretive decisions from every performer, is the opposite of “high” modernism, which sought to remove performers from the equation altogether. To casually assert that such scores demonstrate a lack of “empathy” for performers not only assumes what scores have (always) been for, but also that all performers are the same.

David Grubbs—Pauline Oliveros: Music Out of the Corner of One’s Eye
Conceiving of music as a by-product or unintended result can be a fruitful approach to a range of activities: music by other means, music as one outcome among many, music out of the corner of one’s eye. With the Sonic Meditations, it’s helpful not to be too eager for fortuitous beauty, not too preoccupied with fugitive glimmerings. Pauline’s thematizing of modes of attention is valuable in itself, and for me never registers as a boondoggle or workaround by which music remains the goal, whether disavowed or not. Its defamiliarization of the practice of making music—to begin with, by inviting participants who wouldn’t otherwise think of themselves as musicians—is among the most welcome of her gifts.

Sezgin Boynik—AGIT   PUNK   FORM
If post-punk was what Mark Fisher called “popular modernism,” then the Pop Group—which mixed punk with free jazz, dub, and avant-garde elements—is worthy of this definition. By the summer of 1980, when the Pop Group performed in Helsinki, their songs had evolved from raw and visceral punk to a sound influenced by Rock Against Racism and the philosophy of anti-Nazi funk.

Witold Wirpsza—Commentaries on Photographs
Commentaries on Photographs (Komentarze do fotografii, 1962) is a unique book. Written by the Polish experimental poet Witold Wirpsza, it was created as a response to The Family of Man, the Museum of Modern Art’s 1955 travelling exhibition of photography. In his book, Wirpsza used a selection of the original photographs and juxtaposed them with his commentaries and poems written partly as ekphrases. In a note found in the poet’s archive, Wirpsza reported that his commentaries arose from the conviction that The Family of Man “serves not so much to reveal something, but at least to hide something.”

Daniel Muzyczuk—The Melancholy of the Jellyfish Form: A Conversation with Anton Lukoszevieze on Autumn ’60 by Cornelius Cardew
I think the sense of melancholy in Autumn ’60 is connected with failure. It’s always only partly a success, but it is also designed to fail because of the intrinsic structure—in conventional terms. When it was written in 1960, literally everyone who was a male composer, especially in Europe, was trying to fix music, trying to make everything highly notated. They thought truth was in the details and how things were made. This was the peak of total serialism, even if total serialism never actually existed. So I think that one could describe Autumn ‘60 as a melancholic piece, but not because of its possible sadness.

Sarah Hennies—The Composer Keeps the Score: Writing Music, Sharing Power, Hearing Possibility
In an ideal composer-performer relationship, you make each other better. For me, it is most exciting when performers bring my music somewhere beyond what I thought was possible. A performer is always going to transform the written score, even if only in small ways, but some of my most valuable experiences as a composer have been when a performer sees something in the work that I do not, bringing their own taste, experience, judgment, and ideas into its realization. The score and the social relationship between composer and performer are inseparable. In the best possible scenario they are in a beautiful, mutually elevating symbiosis.

Liam Gillick—Ibuka!: A Musical in Three Acts Based on the Book Erasmus Is Late
Erasmus, like all the other characters, has very specific moods. He appears slightly bilious at all times, as if he has heartburn, a mild stomach ulcer, or just indigestion. On top of this he is clearly out of it. Already under the influence of a heavy narcotic but never drunk. He can speak and sing clearly but his manner on stage indicates some near-complete inebriation. He meanders around. Clearly wise but lacking in direction. Despite all these things he remains lucid, if rather dreamy. This is a time for reflection, and a peculiar form of nonaction for Erasmus and his portrayal should indicate this from the outset. He will become increasingly disturbed as the musical develops.