This presentation explores the relationship between John Cage and Henry David Thoreau as Christopher Shultis presents it in the recent edition of Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition. Shultis’s work explores dichotomies of silence/self and intention/non-intention in the work of both philosophers, as well as how these notions manifest in Cage’s Thoreau settings. That Cage revered Thoreau is clear from his writing and music. However, the book sets up several unnecessary dichotomies by isolating the postmodernist approach of Thoreau and Cage from work of contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Ives, respectively.
This paper and performance attempts to reconcile the problems of dualism in Shultis’s book through the process of music performance. When an artist performs, he or she becomes part of the art itself, in a way perhaps parallel to Thoreau’s notion of being “at one” with nature. A holistic view of artistic work transcends dichotomies in music performance research; one way out of dualistic thinking in artistic philosophy is through live art experience.
A live performance of one Cage setting of Thoreau’s texts will serve as an example for a discussion of the following questions: How does this performance offer new insights into each author’s work while simultaneously creating something entirely new? How does Cage’s approach to intention challenge the role and responsibility of the performer? How does live performance address the problems in Shultis’s text? More broadly, how does this performance research of this kind challenge or transcend traditionally separate notions of artist and scholar?
About the presenterErin Heisel
Soprano Erin Heisel’s performances have been described as “brave, vivid” (The New York Times). She has performed in venues throughout NYC and abroad. She also performs and writes experimental physical theatre pieces. Her Ph.D. is from NYU with research in Johan Huizinga’s theory of play; she also has an MM from the University of Massachusetts, a BM from Butler University, with additional graduate studies in psychology and the arts at Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University. She has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Bay Path College, NYU, and Adelphi University. She also works as a freelance voice teacher, performer, and is a certified teacher of yoga and meditation.