After the Party. Joshua Chambers-Letson
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popular music, she eschewed the short-form traditional pop standard to transform each piece into an extended theme and variation that could last for the entirety of the set: “Each song—which isn’t the right way to describe what I was playing—lasted anywhere between thirty and ninety minutes.”45 Improvising beyond the limits of genre, Nina Simone was producing and setting free a new sound: “I was creating something new, something that came out of me.”46 As she performed, she was offering her audience members a lesson in how it would feel to be free.
Track 4. “Love Me or Leave Me”
Performance and pedagogy are conjunctive terms. Pedagogy often relies on the embodied rituals and protocols of performance and theatricality as much as performance has a pedagogical function. Think, for example, of Joseph Roach’s enigmatic definition of performance as “the process of trying out various candidates in different situations—the doomed search for originals by continuously auditioning stand-ins.”47 This definition productively and curiously makes no immediate reference to the expected vocabulary of presentation, theatricality, and aesthetics, focusing instead on embodied processes of exploration, transfer, and surrogacy—all elements that are critical to the pedagogical scene.
Diana Taylor expands on this line of thought to consider the epistemological valences of performance. For Taylor, performance functions as a means for the transmission of knowledge and affect vis-à-vis embodied practices defined as the repertoire. “The repertoire requires presence,” writes Taylor. “People participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being a part of the transmission.”48 What, we could ask, is pedagogy but a performance of the transmission of knowledge? But if Taylor insists on presence, her position on this point is ameliorated by her simultaneous insistence that the act of transmission can reconstitute (often in a new form) that which has seemingly disappeared or is no longer present: “Multiple forms of embodied acts are always present, though in a constant state of againness. They reconstitute themselves, transmitting communal memories, histories, and values from one group/generation to the next.”49 In other words, performance is pedagogical: “Embodied and performed acts generate, record, and transmit knowledge.”50 If minoritarian performance is a means for realizing the freedom drive, the pedagogy of minoritarian performance is the transmission and sharing out of the feeling of freedom.
Press play and jump forward to a master class in minoritarian performance on Little Girl Blue’s “Love Me or Leave Me.” We can only imagine what a twenty- to thirty-minute version of “Love Me or Leave Me” might have sounded like in the Midtown Bar, but the central passage in both of Simone’s major recordings of the song (and a live performance on TV in 1959) offers us a hint. As the first verse comes to a conclusion, Simone’s dominant hand stretches right to play around in a higher register, jumping across the keys in syncopated rhythm until a melody coheres into a riff evocative of Bach’s Inventions.
The Inventions were designed as teaching tools, and Simone’s routine employment of Bach and his Inventions is perhaps indicative of the fact that, next to gospel and Mazzanovich, Simone credited Bach with being one of her most influential teachers. Of all the composers Simone played (and played with), Bach was her favorite. As she studied him, she came to study with him. In the pedagogical scene, Bach was conjured from the past, into the presence of Simone’s performing present. To say that Bach was one of her teachers is also to say that it was through Bach’s compositions that her teacher (Mazzanovich) taught.
Early in their training together, Mazzanovich abandoned the primers designed for introductory music students to introduce her prodigious pupil to Bach.51 As strict as Mazzanovich may have been, her pedagogy was no mere imparting of knowledge into a willing, passive receptacle, or what Jacques Rancière describes as teaching born from “the explicative order.”52 Instead, Simone describes her training as an experience of opening up to an encounter with the pleasures of performance: “It was hard work, but Miz Mazzy had shown me how good it could be to spend time in the company of genius, so the more familiar I became with Mozart and Beethoven, Czerny and Liszt, and my beloved Bach, the more I enjoyed it. As I grew older I had a sense that my future was as much in my own hands as in those of my teachers—that they pointed me in various musical directions, but I was doing the exploring on my own.”53 This gesture to “my teachers” could just as well be a reference to Mazzanovich and Sokhaloff as to Mozart, Beethoven, Czerny, Liszt, or her “beloved Bach.” In Mazzanovich’s home, Bach was more than just a composer for Nina to master. He was a presence in the room with Eunice and Mazzanovich. “You must do it this way Eunice,” Mazzanovich would say. “Bach would like it this way, do it again!”54 Conjured by Eunice’s teacher, Bach entered the room, speaking and teaching through Mazzanovich as much as Mazzanovich spoke and taught through Bach’s composition.
Simone conceived of the pedagogical scene less as a hierarchy of transferred knowledge than as an intersubjective encounter in which the construction of her future as artist “was as much in my own hands as in those of my teachers.” Having asked us to look at the hands of her teachers, however, she offers a clue as to what she needed from them, asking us to look at what their hands were doing: “They pointed me in various musical directions.” This image of the teacher’s pointing hand is resonant with a passage in Eve Sedgwick’s essay on pedagogy, where she describes the problematic of conceiving of the Buddha’s record of pedagogy (his “many sutras”) as akin to a finger pointing to the moon.55 The problem, she observes, is that the student often becomes attached to the sutras (the finger) and mistakes the lesson for being the moon itself. For Sedgwick, “The implication of the finger/moon image is that pointing may invite less misunderstanding than speech, but that even its nonlinguistic concreteness cannot shield it from the slippery problems that surround reference.”56 The student attached to the pointing finger risks mistaking the means (pointing) for an end (the moon), getting lost in the swamp of slippery reference while failing to grasp that the moon is not an end that is reached through the proper execution of the teacher’s presumed (but to a degree unknowable and unknowing) intentions. This is why it is critical that Simone follows the pointing fingers of her teachers not to a presumed destination but, instead, to a realm of improvisation, exploration, and pure means. And it’s for this reason that her incorporation of Bach’s Inventions into “Love Me or Leave Me” must be understood as a master class in getting free.
To get a sense of what I’m trying to say, press the play button to go forward but you’re really going back before 1968 in Jericho before 1959 at the Beltone studios before 1941 in Muriel Mazzanovich’s house. Go all the way back to a classroom in Leipzig, Germany, in 1723 and listen to the sounds of Bach as he teaches through performance, playing the Inventions for a student in order to teach the student how to play.
Inventions were short pedagogical exercises composed and used by Bach (and his German contemporaries) to teach students how to play (and compose for) the new and increasingly popular clavier (or harpsichord).57 By Bach’s own account, the Inventions were meant to teach students “a plain way … to play neatly … to play correctly … [and] not only to acquire good ideas, but also to work them out themselves, and, finally to acquire a cantabile [a smooth, flowing, singing] style of playing.”58 The intended result was not the domination of the pupil, however, but instead the emancipation of students’ creative and exploratory potential, achieved by allowing them to gain “a strong predilection for and foretaste of composition.”59 The Inventions are thus marked by a productive tension between the imposition of a newly established order and the disorder of the creative, emancipatory freedom drive of compositional practice.
I like to think that Nina turned to Bach because she sensed Bach’s minoritarian tendencies. Caught in the break between order and freedom, Bach is both major and minor. As Bloch describes him, “Bach speaks out of the lyrically attained self of hoping, albeit intricately-consummately, and as the eternal corrective to all beyond within the dramatic form.”60 Bach shuttles frenetically between the emancipatory hopes and drives of minoritarian becoming and the normative correctives issued and enforced by the majoritarian order. He is undoubtedly major in that he’s Bach, but one also senses his minority insofar as (in spite of or perhaps because of his attempt to produce a well-organized world in which every note falls into its absolutely perfect place) there is an exhaustively imaginative, great going beyond to Bach that cannot be contained.
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