David Grubbs teaches classes in creative writing, performance, music, and technology at the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, and before he arrived in New York 15 years ago, he lived and played in bands in Chicago. A Louisville native, he’d moved here in 1990 to attend grad school at the University of Chicago, but if you knew about him then, you probably knew him as a musician. His trio Bastro, founded in Washington, D.C., in the late 80s, persisted in Chicago until 1991, then evolved into experimental rock band Gastr del Sol—which soon became a duo with Jim O’Rourke that would last for most of the rest of the 90s. Grubbs finished his dissertation after he left town in 2005, finally earning his PhD in English literature, and now he’s transformed it—adding a chapter, cutting another, and revising throughout—into a fascinating, readable, and well-researched book called Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (Duke University Press).
Grubbs’s interest in the experimental music of the 60s arose during the explosion of reissue and archival record labels brought on by the popularity of the compact disc in the 90s. Many out-of-print or never-released recordings from that decade got new leases on life, in part because CDs’ extended playing time and lack of surface noise made them well suited for, say, the quiet, long-form works of Morton Feldman. Through the medium of the CD, Grubbs gained an understanding of the music of composers who’d disdained recordings in the first place.
As a dissertation it really spanned a pretty considerable length of time. Some of the material in the AMM chapter came out of a paper I wrote in graduate school [in 1993], and I remember conversations with John McEntire [of Bastro] and Jim O’Rourke [of Gastr del Sol] about precisely the rhetorical strategies of AMM in the [1990] reissue of [the 1966 album] AMMmusic. When I finished the dissertation I had a brief period, probably like most people who write dissertations, of wanting to erase all traces of it. It was something that I conceptualized for so long as having a readership of about three people—a dissertation committee—and then it just had to be rewritten.
What do the historical figures you spoke to say about the changes in availability of this music?
Did you see this as more of an inquiry, to understand these methods of thinking and how they changed?
I guess I would say one of the defining characteristics of experimental music was that it couldn’t adequately be represented as a record. That was a kind of badge of pride—that it couldn’t be commodified in that way, it couldn’t be sold in that way—and a lot of people ran with that in different directions. I think that Cage is really the figure who sets the pace. Some people move to one extreme, like La Monte Young, of keeping an absolute, tight lack of access to the material, and some people move in opposite directions, like [composer and bandleader of the United States of America] Joseph Byrd and John Cale, where their way of moving past Cage is to create this experimental rock band or to serve as producers.
Sat 5/24, 3 PMCorbett vs. Dempsey1120 N. Ashland, third floor, free, all-ages
