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Inside This Issue: Inside This Issue Jungle Jive: Race, Jazz, and Cartoons by Daniel Goldmark Taking Henry Flynt Seriously by Benjamin Piekut Hearing Hip-Hop’s Jamaican Accent by Wayne Marshall Capturing Sound and Making Beats: Review by Joseph Auner Ives's 129 Songs: Review by Gayle Sherwood Magee American Popular Music: Review by Daniel Sonenberg |
Taking
Henry Flynt Seriously by Benjamin Piekut
Henry Flynt, 1963 Photo by Diane Wakoski Philosopher, composer, and violinist Henry Flynt
occupies a unique place in the history of experimentalism in the United
States. Highly critical of established institutions of “serious
culture,” Flynt began in the 1960s to combine blues licks and country
fiddling styles with a modal approach to extended improvisation. He has
recently released ten albums, a string of recordings spanning modernist sound
experiments, hillbilly fiddling, rawkus garage rock, Hindustani-inflected
solo violin improvisations, and what might be called “minimalist
country.” Produced between 1963 and 1984, these works provide a
wonderful opportunity to re-examine histories of experimental music in the
U.S. from the critical perspective of an iconoclastic intellectual. However,
the project of interpreting the story of Henry Flynt is being
constantly deferred by what seem to be much more basic concerns: the need to
establish a historical record in the first place, to provide some sense of
the body of work under discussion, and indeed, to justify the whole
enterprise. As Flynt told me last year, “I could bring you twenty to
thirty people who would say that everything Henry Flynt ever did was totally
worthless.”1 So why do I think this obscure figure is
important for the study of U.S. experimentalisms, and how can we justify work
on such marginalized, or “outsider,” artists? I will return to
these questions, but for now I’ll begin by offering a few short Flynt
stories. As a student at Harvard in the
late 1950s, the classically trained violinist and self-taught composer Henry
Flynt was exposed to jazz and became very enthusiastic about the innovations
of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.2 At the same time, he read Samuel
Charters’s book on country blues, and sent away for the accompanying
anthology of Mississippi blues recordings.3 Upon hearing these recordings,
Flynt was turned completely around. As he later put it, “From that
moment on…I’ve been ... a conscious, dedicated enemy of …
[laughing] the European vision.”4 He soon began developing his own
blues and country style on the violin and guitar, mixing it with minimalist
tape-delay techniques and free-jazz sonic experimentation to create what he
calls “avant-garde hillbilly music.”5 In 1965 and 1966, after having taken guitar
lessons from Lou Reed, he assembled a band called the Insurrections and
recorded a series of political rock ’n’ roll songs to protest the
Vietnam war and colonialism in Africa (with songs such as “Missionary
Stew”).6 His musical activities in the 1970s included
leading the communist country band Nova’billy, taking voice lessons
with Pandit Pran Nath, collaborating with mathematician and composer
Catherine Christer Hennix, and performing a few solo violin compositions over
tambura drone. He eventually stopped making music in 1984, having only played
a few concerts over the previous twenty-five years, but amassing dozens of
hours of his performances on tape. These tapes remained unpublished until
2001.7 In 1960, a twenty-year-old
Flynt flunked out of Harvard, where he had been majoring in mathematics. In
the spring of 1961, he finished his first monograph,
called Philosophy Proper, in which he argued that
language is a short-circuited system, and that mathematics is demonstrably
false.8 Several noted scholars, including Noam
Chomsky and Saul Kripke, saw the manuscript and rejected it as worthless.9 He continued developing a very eccentric and
iconoclastic philosophy that encompasses (among many other things) aesthetics,
phenomenology, cognitive nihilism, and the logic of contradictions. His only
book, Blueprint for a Higher Civilization, was published in Milan in
1975.10 In December 1960, Flynt met the
composer La Monte Young, who at that time was at the center of an active
downtown avant-garde. Two months later, Flynt traveled to New York to give
two performances on a now-legendary concert series curated by Young and held
in Yoko Ono’s loft, where he presented
“unstructured, improvised time-filling,” poetry,
“jazz,” and other musical pieces (as listed on the concert
announcement).11 Influenced in part by Young’s short
text pieces, Flynt wrote an essay in which he described a new
aesthetic/mathematic practice, calling it “Concept Art” —
“a kind of art of which the material is language.”12 At the time, he wrote only four pieces that
he considered properly of this genre, but in the late 1980s, he would revisit
the form and make new works under this label. In the spring of 1963, while
visiting his parents in Greensboro, North Carolina, Flynt observed a civil
rights demonstration and sent a letter about the experience to the
Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party, which they subsequently printed in
their newspaper.13 After relocating to New York in 1963, he was
quite active in the organization, attending meetings, distributing leaflets,
and representing them in public on issues of race and colonialism.14 Most importantly, he wrote for their
newspaper, contributing some twenty articles in 1964 on subjects ranging from
the civil rights struggle to decolonization in Zanzibar, Vietnam, Indonesia,
and the Congo. In the meantime, Flynt was
developing a strong anti-art position. He delivered his critiques of
bourgeois high culture in public
lectures and at demonstrations outside of institutions including the Museum
of Modern Art in February 1963. He led a picket in front of two Stockhausen
concerts in 1964 in protest of the composer’s disparaging remarks on
jazz and the prevailing attitude that dismissed non-European musics as
primitive, and soon thereafter published a pamphlet urging communists to give
up on European folk and elite music, and to embrace black popular styles for
delivering the Party’s message to the proletariat.15 He eventually left Workers World Party in
1967, and in 2004 told me that his sojourn in the dogmatic Left was in some
sense a compromise to avoid being swept away into obscurity. It is
tempting to think of Flynt as a kind of willfully obscure hermit, or
“outsider artist,” so repulsed by the vulgar society around him
that he would rather work in solitude than actually engage in a meaningful
dialogue with the world at large, but this would be a mistake, for he was,
and is, constantly straining to present his ideas to the public. After a
January 1962 recording session with La Monte Young, Flynt sent tapes to
Nesuhi Ertigun at Atlantic Records, who as Flynt recalls, “…wrote
back to me and said, ‘This is the most original thing I have ever
heard, and for that reason, we cannot possibly publish it.’”16 He also submitted demo recordings to Earle
Brown at Time Records, and to Folkways and ESP, all of whom declined to
publish his music. Flynt himself has devoted several essays to exploring the
condition of outsider status. In an unpublished text from 1979, “On
Superior Obscurity,” he stressed the importance of engaging with
established institutions: What I do say
is that one must get one’s protest of stupidity on the record. I do say
that one must meet the enemy (in the military sense)…. And you must not
punish yourself because the establishment has failed you.17 His
commitment to public dialogue led him to make necessary concessions to have
his voice heard, he recalls: “I … had to make all kinds of
compromises not to simply be swept away. I mean, in other words, I …
should have simply starved in the gutter or something like that. The reason
that didn’t happen is because I started bobbing and weaving.”18 One example of this “bobbing and
weaving” was the publication of his Philosophy Proper, which
Flynt had edited down to a single-page manuscript titled “Primary Study
Version Seven” by the end of 1963. After it had been rejected by two
philosophy journals, Flynt took the advice of his friend George Maciunas and
published it in a Fluxus newspaper called V
TRE, which was being put together at the time by the artist George Brecht
(Maciunas designed the graphics). Flynt explains, “[I]n one sense that
has been a disaster, since the people that I’m dealing with…, all
that they see is that Henry Flynt has a text in Fluxus, that must mean that
the text is a Fluxus text and that Henry Flynt is Fluxus. I mean, … it
was the only way I had of placing it on the public record in any form at
all.”19 I propose that we recognize Flynt’s singular
musical vision and the many ways his story complicates our understanding of
the post-Cage continuum in New York. At a time when many composers spoke of
liberating the performer and enacting musical models of utopia, Flynt was
agitating for a different kind of freedom: freedom from imperialism, from
racial oppression, and from what he identified as elitist cultural
institutions. What’s more, he maintained that this commitment to
liberation could not proceed from a European high-art position, arguing that
the authority complex of “serious culture” was part and parcel of
global systems of domination. Furthermore, his critiques of Cage and
Stockhausen antedate the far better-known attacks of radical English composer
Cornelius Cardew,20 as well as the
leftward turn of his Harvard classmate Christian Wolff. After hearing one of my presentations on this subject, a
colleague of mine noted, “There is a ‘crackpot’ side
to all this,” and he was right—Flynt has been called a charlatan
by several respected figures in a wide range of disciplines. His often
strident tone (which he now regrets as an unfortunate product of the times)
and eccentric manner may be partially responsible for his obscurity, but
surely many celebrated artists and intellectuals throughout history would be
subject to similar charges. Rather than focusing on issues of personality or
individual psychology, I find it more productive to examine material and
structural reasons for Flynt’s disappearance from the historical record.
To put it another way, there is a difference between the terms
“marginal” and “marginalized.” That
“-ized” signals a very important shift in meaning, for it calls
attention to the way that discourses position subjects differently in
structures of power and legitimacy; the study of “marginalized”
figures necessarily entails an examination of the systems that produce them.
For example, the absence of Henry Flynt’s story from histories of
experimental and popular musics, mathematics, visual arts, philosophy, and
radical politics suggests the limits of bounded disciplines when dealing with
multidisciplinary intellectuals. But a more powerful explanation of
Flynt’s invisibility concerns the class and racial specifics of his
cross-cultural appropriations, and how greatly they differed from the
borrowings of many European-American experimentalists.21 When other composers, such as La Monte
Young, dipped into non-European traditions, their interest usually maintained
a commitment to court musics and elite audiences; in this sense, the practice
offered a limited experience of cultural difference, and bolstered already
existing social hierarchies within the North Atlantic context. Long-standing
discourses about race and authenticity in the history of modernism only sanctioned
such encounters when they confirmed notions of the European subject in
particular ways, and the differences between this familiar narrative and that
of Henry Flynt are significant (and too many to include here). In contrast,
Flynt completely abandoned modernism in favor of the music of working-class
African Americans and poor whites, wielding it as a weapon to challenge the
revolutionary bona fides of his avant-garde peers, as well as the very
legitimacy of high culture as an institution. Pierre Bourdieu has called this
refusal to play by the rules “the one unforgivable
transgression”—one possible explanation for the
near-disappearance of Flynt from historical narratives.22 More importantly, this example suggests one
way that studies of obscure figures like Flynt can expand to engage larger
social structures, and to offer broader insights on how the history of
cultural practices is written. —Benjamin
Piekut Columbia
University Editors’
note: For more information about Henry Flynt and his music, visit
<www.henryflynt.org>. Notes 1 Henry Flynt, interview with author, 2
November 2004. 2 For the following biographical passages, I
am relying on Flynt, interviews with author, 2 November 2004, 8 December
2004, and 1 April 2005. Also see Alan Licht, “The Raga ’n’
Roll Years,” The Wire (October 2004), 26-29; and Ian Nagoski,
“That High, Dronesome Sound,” Signal to Noise (Winter
2002), 50-53. 3 Samuel Charters, The Country Blues (Rinehart,
1959). 4 Flynt, interview with author, 2 November
2004. 5 Examples can be found on New American
Ethnic Music, vols. 1–3, Recorded CDs 003, 006, and 007; Back
Porch Hillbilly Blues, vols. 1 and 2, Locust Music CDs 14 and 16; and Graduation
and Other New Country and Blues Music, Ampersand ampere8. 6 Many of these songs were collected,
mastered, and released in 2004 as the album I Don’t Wanna (Locust
Music CD 39). 7 One track, “You Are My
Everlovin,’” had been released on a cassette in the 1980s. Henry
Flynt, Edition Hundertmark, Köln, 1986. 8 The text was published in full in Flynt, Blueprint
for a Higher Civilization (Multhipla Edizioni, 1975). 9 Flynt, “On Superior Obscurity”
(unpublished manuscript in author’s possession, 1979), 5. 10 See n. 3. 11 An image of the concert announcement appears
on Flynt’s website:
http://www.henryflynt.org/overviews/artwork_images/43.jpg. 12 See Flynt, “Essay: Concept Art,”
in An Anthology of Chance Operations, ed. La Monte Young (La Monte
Young and Jackson Mac Low, 1963), and Flynt, “La Monte Young in New
York, 1960-1962,” in Sound and Light: La Monte Young Marian Zazeela,
eds. William Duckworth and Richard Fleming, 44-97 (Bucknell University Press,
1996). 13 This chronology remains a bit hazy. Flynt
recalls the trip occurring in May 1962, but Workers World published
nothing on this subject until 25 May 1963, when the paper ran a story called
“I Saw the Birth of Freedom in Greensboro, N.C.” by
“Charles Henry.” (Many of the paper’s writers adopted
pseudonyms; in 1964, Flynt wrote under the name “Henry Stone.”)
It seems most likely that Flynt visited Greenboro in May 1963 after leaving
Boston and before moving to New York City permanently. 14 “WLIB: Opinions. Fwanyanga Mulkita,
Zambia’s U.N. representative, and Henry Flynt, author of ‘Behind
the Crisis Over Zimbabwe,’ discuss the racial crisis in South
Africa.” “Radio: Today’s Leading Events,” New York
Times (3 July 1966), 50. 15 Harold Schonberg, “Music:
Stockhausen’s ‘Originale” Given at Judson,” New
York Times (9 September 1964), 46. Flynt, Communists Must Give
Revolutionary Leadership in Culture (Worldwide Publishers, 1965). 16 Flynt, interview by Kenneth Goldsmith, WFMU, East Orange,
N.J., 26 February 2004. 17 Ibid., 4. 18 Flynt, interview with author, 2 November
2004. 19 Ibid. 20 Cardew’s polemic Stockhausen Serves
Imperialism was published in 1974, also the year he joined the radical
rock/folk group People’s Liberation Music. The British composer
apparently was aware of Flynt’s early anti-art activities —in Blueprint
for a Higher Civilization, Flynt quotes a postcard from the English
composer, dated 7 June 1963: “Dear Mr. Flynt, …Since I may be
depending on organized culture for my loot & livelihood I can wish you
only a limited success in your movement….” Flynt, Blueprint, 73.
21 This list would span generations, and
include Henry Cowell, John Cage, Lou Harrison, La Monte Young, and Pauline
Oliveros, to name a few. 22 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural
Production (Columbia University Press, 1983), 81. ISAM home Who we
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