After the Party. Joshua Chambers-Letson
‘assimilating styles’ and ‘mixing styles into new composites.’ ”61 The result of this sonic hybridity led Bach’s friend and contemporary Johann Adolf Sheibe to complain of the “disorder” of his compositions: “Everything is so chaotically mixed together that one cannot find a dominant style or a proper expression.”62 Against Sheibe’s condemnation of Bach’s disorganizing effects, I am suggesting that it is the refusal to reproduce “a dominant style or a proper expression” that made Bach into Simone’s unlikely professor in the art of minoritarian performance.
Describing the experience of performing Bach, Simone mobilized the seemingly chaotic metaphor of a “great storm,” emphasizing the creative capacities of his disordering and reorganization of sound: “When you play Bach’s music you have to understand that he’s a mathematician and all the notes you play add up to something—they make sense. They always add up to climaxes, like ocean waves getting bigger and bigger until after a while when so many waves have gathered you have a great storm. Each note you play is connected to the next note, and every note has to be executed perfectly or the whole effect is lost.”63 Simone assimilated Bach into her repertoire, mixing the classical with the popular to produce a new composite.
When listening to Simone’s rendition of “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” during her first performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1959, for example, one encounters an extraordinary piano-guitar duet with lifelong collaborator Al Schackman. The variations, extension, and development of the melodies that comprise their duet “add up” to produce (or make) something new; they make sense. And at the precise moment the notes produced by her piano and his guitar “add up” to something, they also exceed it. Crashing up against the limits of containment “like ocean waves getting bigger and bigger,” the ordering of sound gathers into the simultaneously creative and destructive force of the tempest of freedom’s becoming in the song’s explosive conclusion. That this development occurs through an improvisation in the style of the Inventions is of critical importance. Simone is teaching us something in the style of her teacher.
In 1873 Philipp Spitta published a Kant-inflected study of Bach’s life and work.64 In the section focusing on the Inventions, Spitta teaches us about Bach as a teacher. “Of all the great German composers,” he reflected, “Bach is the only one round whom are grouped any great number of disciples—men, too, who do not owe their chief glory to their masters.”65 By Spitta’s account, Bach developed the Inventions to teach techniques that would transcend the harpsichord’s mechanical and “soulless tone.”66 He affected the “intrinsic animation [of the clavier] by means of polyphony and rich harmonic treatment, of a steady and thoroughly progressive melodic development; and … of increased rapidity of action.”67 On the one hand, the Inventions disciplined the pupil’s body so that it could “cleanly” and “neatly” perform these feats. But on the other hand, they affected the emancipation of the body from itself, disorganizing, dehabituating, and deterritorializing the extremities in order to free the player’s body up to new possible uses and the invention of Bach’s new sound.68 To an extent, Bach’s Inventions aim for the unworking of the body, rendering inoperative both the body and its expressive functions.
Inoperativity can be thought of as a practice of deactivating a thing or a body as much as it can be a process that brings about the cessation and abolishment of work in and for the thing or body. Nancy describes inoperativity as the “unworking of work,” but it is Giorgio Agamben who thinks the concept in relationship to the realm of performance.69 Agamben insists that inoperativity is pure means, or a means without end, most commonly activated through play. As pure means, play “emancipates” and “liberates” habituated behavior, but may also emancipate subjects from the relations of subjection and domination that are produced through behavioral routines.70 In the realm of human activity, performance becomes a way of playing with the body and rendering it inoperative: “Consider the dancer as he or she undoes and disorganizes the economy of corporeal movements to then rediscover them, at once intact and transfigured, in the choreography.”71 In performance the body’s corporeal activity is placed on display while its movement and gestures are liberated from their traditional uses, ends, and modes of signification in order to “dispose [the body] toward a new use, one that does not abolish the old use but persists in it and exhibits it.”72
Spitta notes that Bach would often teach his students through performance, “urging them on to higher aims with all the earnestness of a teacher, by performing the examples he had set them.”73 Then, he images the scene:
To release the note, the tips of the fingers were not so much lifted as withdrawn; this was necessary to give equality to the playing, because the passing of one of the middle fingers over the little finger or the thumb could only be effected by drawing back the latter; and it contributed to the cantabile [singing style] effect, as well as to clearness in executing rapid passages on the clavichord. The result of all this was that Bach played with a scarcely perceptible movement of his hands; his fingers hardly seemed to touch the keys, and yet everything came out with perfect clearness, and a pearly roundness and purity. His body, too, remained perfectly quiescent, even during the most difficult pedal passages on the organ or harpsichord; his pedal technique was smooth and unforced as his fingering.74
We learn many things from this passage. First, we learn that (with unforced fingering) Bach had the potential to be pretty good in bed. Sex, like performance, is the realm of corporeal inoperativity and Bach’s (and Simone’s) climactic compositional structure mimics the cumulative force of orgasmic climax. But we also see how, like good sex, the Inventions opened up the performer’s body to a new use and the creation of a new sound. And, in the end, we learn that, rather than resulting in the complete emancipation of the player’s body, Bach’s pedagogy tames and contains it in perfect quiescence.
As Bach performs, sound emerges from a motionless player “with perfect clearness” from fingers that “hardly seemed to touch the keys [and the] scarcely perceptible movement of his hands.” At once emancipated from its previous habits, the player’s body is freshly dominated by the order imposed by the technical demands of the composition. It was as if, by mastering the technical demands required of playing “neatly” and “correctly,” the body of Bach’s student had to be contained as the sound was cleaved from the disruptive messiness of the flesh. If we could say that the soul was finally infused into the soulless clavier, this was achieved only by alienating it from the body of the performer in the process.
Both the proletariat and the black performer know that there’s an inherent danger to corporeal alienation and the disciplining of the flesh: the making of the body “perfectly quiescent.” Simone’s play on and intervention in work like Bach’s Inventions would broker no such comportment. Willfully refusing the order demanded by his pedagogy, she exceeded it and journeyed into the great beyond that it simultaneously promised and foreclosed. But this is not failure, or if it is, it is the kind of queer failure that opens up new ways of being in the world.75
“Love Me or Leave Me” is exemplary of what I mean when I talk about the emancipatory pedagogy of minoritarian performance. Appropriating the Inventions for the song, Simone realizes their emancipatory will, their intention to disorganize the body. But she also refuses their command to be neat and orderly and instead follows them through to the creative space to which Bach was drawn, but could not fully free himself up to get to.
Performing the song on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1959, her fingers move across the keys “executing rapid passages,” but with a heavy and at times kinetic force that draws the spectator’s attention back to her body, centering and emphasizing the fact that it is a black woman who is producing this ingenious sound. Toward the conclusion of this passage, the wandering figurations crash into and explode against each other, abandoning the “neat” and “clean” sound desired by Bach. Now press fast forward and jump to 1966, when Simone re-recorded the song for Phillips Records and included it on the album Let It All Out.76 Here, Simone is finally capable of emancipating the Inventions from Bach’s call to order in order to explore the emancipatory terrain of the “attained self of hoping” that Bloch located in Bach. Start the track and listen as about fifty seconds into the recording, the voice withdraws to give the keys center stage. Simone launches into a standard improvisational jazz solo. But soon, as if the fingers couldn’t be contained