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Mediating the Method

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2015

Jacob Gallagher-Ross
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Extract

The scene is New York City, 1958. That year, in two disparate arenas, American culture was attempting to come to grips with the difference between noise and art. A twenty-five-year retrospective concert of John Cage's work at New York's Town Hall helped create an intellectually coherent canon out of Cage's experiments, which critics had often treated as puerile provocations or exercises in whimsy to be regarded with bemused toleration. For some forward thinkers, noise was becoming intellectually exciting material for experimental music, whereas the audible audience outrage preserved by the recording of the Town Hall concert testifies to the continuing rearguard pique of more conservative sensibilities. Cage himself couldn't have imagined a more apt illustration of his theories than this aleatory auditory event, preserved for posterity by the recording apparatus.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 291 - 313
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2015 

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References

Endnotes

1. For an evocative account of the Town Hall concert and its place in John Cage's body of work, see David Grubbs, Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

2. Brustein, Robert, “America's New Culture Hero: Feelings without Words,” Commentary 25 (January 1958): 123–9Google Scholar.

3. Ibid., 123.

4. For recent considerations of these and other questions the Method and its legacy raise, see David Krasner, ed., Method Acting Reconsidered: Theory, Practice, Future (New York: St. Martins, 2000); Rosemary Malague, An Actress Prepares: Women and “the Method” (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Enelow, Shonni, “The Method and the Means,” Theatre Survey 53.1 (2012): 85–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2008), 37.

6. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. and intro. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 23–4.

7. Cage predicted this new mode of music making in his 1937 essay-manifesto “The Future of Music: Credo,” reprinted in Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 3–6.

8. Juan A. Suárez, Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2007), 8.

9. Ibid., 8–9.

10. Ibid., 9.

11. Richard Blum, American Film Acting: The Stanislavski Heritage (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), xvi.

12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 4e. I first encountered this enormously suggestive fragment in Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

13. Robert H. Hethmon, ed., Strasberg at the Actors Studio: Tape-Recorded Sessions (New York: Viking, 1965), 118. Cited hereinafter directly in the text with parenthetical text references.

14. See Strasberg's discussion of these exercises in A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method (New York: Plume, 1988). Strasberg at the Actors Studio contains several pages of evocative photographs of students performing the exercises in the classroom.

15. Conroy, Marianne, “Acting Out: Method Acting, the National Culture, and the Middlebrow Disposition in Cold War America,” Criticism 35.2 (1993): 239–63Google Scholar, at 249.

16. Harold Clurman, “Introduction,” in Robert Lewis, Method—or Madness? (New York: Samuel French, 1958), xi–xiii, at xi.

17. Lewis, 5.

18. Ibid. Lewis also admits (jokingly?) that he can't prove it's really Salvini on the record. (“It better be—I paid the guy enough for it.”)

19. Ibid., 11.

20. Rogoff, Gordon, “Lee Strasberg: Burning Ice,” Tulane Drama Review 9.2 (1964): 131–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 141.

21. Ibid., 140.

22. Lewis, 109.

23. See Harold Clurman, “Actors in Style—and Style in Actors,” New York Times Magazine, December 7, 1952, 26–7, 34, 36, 38, at 38.

24. Michael Redgrave quoted in Conroy, 247.

25. Howard Taubman, “A Tender Three Sisters,” New York Times, June 23, 1964.

26. Ibid.

27. Conroy, 253.

28. Elia Kazan, Kazan on Directing (New York: Vintage, 2009), 57. Also see Brenda Murphy, Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 53–4.

29. Conroy, 255–6.

30. Marks, Laura, “Video Haptics and Erotics,” Screen 39.4 (1998): 331–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 331.

31. Kazan, 157.

32. Suárez, 10.