Recording as Materialised Memory: The Analogue ‘Ghosts’ of John Cage’s 33⅓
In the opening pages of Specters of Marx (1993), Jacques Derrida asks: ‘What does it mean to follow a ghost?’ Two keywords— ‘ghost’ and ‘follow’— immediately foreground temporality and memory. A ghost implies the return of something from the past, while to follow, must imply a future that is also linked to the follower’s present. Thus, a fragmentary ‘spectral moment’ as Derrida would call it, occupying ‘time that is out of joint,’ where past, present and future are locked in a restless and unstable ‘now.’ Herein lies the basis for contemporary understandings of hauntology, and particularly in its interface with analogue technologies of memorialisation, recording and dissemination. The concept of the ghost conjures up images of the lost and the missing, it transports us to the realms of memory, while also evoking the world of sepia tinted photographs, and the crackle of old records, the hiss of decaying tape, and the smell of warm plastic that is so redolent of obsolete media. Although once the technological hope of the future, these ghostly media now allow us to literally hold the past in our hands, endlessly turning and repeating, traversing a landscape of tangible memory through the decaying records of events long past.
Hauntology: popular buzzword of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, dragging increasingly diverse fields into its ever-increasing orbit, while itself being subsumed into wider obsessions with the ghostly and the spectral, nostalgia, memory, and a past that simply will not let go. First appearing in Derrida’s Specters of Marx, hauntology has evolved into an influential and much more broadly construed creative strategy, moving across the arts and wider 21st century culture, while being retrospectively applied to music from the mid twentieth century and earlier. Utilising 300 LPs and twelve phonographs, and performed by its audience, John Cage’s 33⅓ (1969) is an extraordinary exercise in archive based, group composition, where pops and crackles—the sonic signifiers of analogue recordings—are subsumed into a vast and indeterminate collage of materialised musical memory. LPs were chosen by chance and after the first performance most of the them disappeared – taken as mementoes by the audience in a further act of remembrance. John Dinwiddie, who was present at the world premiere, recalls that the overall effect was ‘most of the time, a complex collage of music; at one point…an older gentleman proceeded to turn everything off, only to have them turned on again almost immediately by other, more gregarious audience/participants.’ (Dinwiddie, 2011) This talk will explore how 33⅓ embodies multiple layers of memory in its performance, its materials and its afterlife, examining Cage’s approach to authorship and materiality, and what it is to ‘perform’ within complex and mobile hierarchies in a groundbreaking piece that intersects with post-structuralism and anticipates the work of Christian Marclay, the Caretaker, and other contemporary hauntological artists.
Keywords: Derrida, Cage, hauntology, memory, recordings
Biography
Clare Lesser is an independent performer and musicologist. Since gaining a PhD in 2021, she has published widely on 20th and 21st century music, and as a performer, focusses on 20th century and contemporary repertoire, including John Cage, Wolfgang Rihm, Hans Joachim Hespos and Michael Finnissy. Her research interests include deconstruction, the experimental tradition, graphic notation and sound art. She is the founder of Abu Dhabi’s electronic music festival ‘ElectroFest.’ She has recently completed a book for CUP on mid-century hauntology and has recorded two new albums of Cage and Finnissy during 2024. 2025 will see a new volume for Palgrave Macmillan exploring the intersection between deconstruction and radio in experimental music.
Independent Scholar, United Kingdom – clarelesser76@gmail.com