Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties

Linda M. Montano

Part One: SEX

Montano: What was sexual about your childhood?

Corner: Nothing. I have no memories at all, although I vaguely remember an atmosphere of repression, a nonsensual atmosphere where I was not free with my body. I want to be fair to my mother and don't want to say that she ever told me not to touch myself if she didn't, but I somehow feel that there was an aura of restraint. I remember being struck by the image of corsets, girdles, brassieres, and things like that hanging to dry in the bathroom. They always struck me as disgusting. I always had a sense of the beauty, or maybe it wouldn't be too much to say a yearning for nakedness or wanting to see the body in a free and uninhibited way, which is the way I felt deep down. I remember seeing the reproduction of the painting by David called The Rape of the Sabines--no, it was the one where the women come between the men to stop them from fighting--and there were a lot of heroic bodies lightly draped, carrying a sword or shield or wearing a helmet just for modesty's sake. And I remember the comment went like this, "Why is everyone naked?" And my mother's answer was, "In those days the artists thought that human bodies were beautiful."

Around the age which was prepubescent, when it was cute to have a girlfriend, I remember being shamed by the attitude of my family, which was a kind of sniggling. Not repressive, but not a positive attitude either. I remember my aunts saying something like, "Do you have a little girlfriend? Hee, hee, hee, hee, hee." That always made me feel that it was not the kind of thing to have. That comment went deeper than I knew consciously and left a sense that having a girlfriend was an all-too-human weakness that I would never let myself fall into, but at the same time it also got to me that I didn't have one--a girlfriend.

Montano: What is either sensual or sexual about your work?

Corner: It's sexual because it's sensual. I have never allowed the immediate qualities to be subjected to formal systems. Not that I don't use formal systems, but there is always a sense in which the system doesn't impose itself. I associate sensuality with immediate presence and apprehension of the quality of sound, and to obtain that, the work has a minimum of manufactured qualities. I have problems with electronic music and have hardly done any because that kind of purity and refinement of sound strikes me as being antisensual, and I can't use it except occasionally as a trip to the monastery of abstract essences. I do use electronics to magnify small, natural sounds--rock sounds, metal sounds--and have done that a lot because I like the complexity, richness, and immediate sensuality of natural substances. I use the microphone as an approximate ear, which can then be amplified so that scratching and rubbing seems to happen very close to or even in the listener's ear. That physical proximity is sensual.

When Metal Meditations was done as an installation, the audience went physically close to the sound source, but in other pieces I have carried sounds to the audience and played them close to people. There is nothing inherently sexual about that aspect of the work, except that sensuality and sexuality are related to each other. Another thing: my music has never been bereft of pulsations. I come from a time when the avant-garde was Stockhausen, Boulez, and the like, so of course my work was moving toward that, but I eventually rejected it precisely because of the sterility of it and the sense that you had to sacrifice everything to the intellectual ordering. My liberation came from Cage, who combined the irrational texture and great richness of sound, which I saw as sensual but sensual in a detached way, in the Zen or ascetic way that you look at a rock. But it's not sexual. There's no tactility in it aside from the sense that visual things can be sensual at a distance with their substance imagined. That kind of cool awareness comes from the absence of pulsations, which are the essence of a life pulse.

All the life processes like the heartbeat, pulse, and sex are an extension of that pulsation. Pulsation is the hallmark of organic entity. In my work the sine qua non for having that aspect of sensuality which is related to an organism, and therefore can express sexuality, is to have some sense of pulse. Even in my early music in the fifties there was some way in which pulses came in. They might come in and disappear, but they were never totally absent. That reflects my interest and my own inner processes. I don't just look out but feel from within. Eventually, that became paradoxically abstracted into one of the elementals in a totally systematic search for the limits of interest, so that I finally got down to a single, unbroken, regular pulse. I found that the beat, although it's just a single pulse, allows you to get carried away so that you start identifying with your own heart, and sometimes listeners consider the possibility of expressing themselves in explicitly sexual movements. That happens even when I am performing a single, unvaried pulse. By going to the simplest element, the pulse, I have been able to clear myself of a whole lot of stylistic debris.

Just around that time I coincidentally started working with the gamelan, and one of the things that did was to bring me into more measured and regular things--simpler rhythms, coordinated rhythms, and things that suggest those simple pulses and, by extension, the possibility of music that makes you move physically and suggests sexuality the way pop music does. I think a lot of my more recent music does express that very explicitly. For the first time in my life, I have been able to write successful marches, which move the body physically! Structure is something that helps me get back into the world. It is at best a formal device, never to be seen, but allowing so much irrational and sensual overplay that you sometimes can't even hear the structure anymore. In most cases there is a kind of balance, and several times the music has been called orgiastic. As a matter of fact, last year when I was doing a piano piece at a party in Verona, one lady said, "Quel orgasmo musicale!" When my music provokes that kind of response, I'm pleased.

Montano: Is sex your muse? Is sex music? Does your personal life feed your music?

Corner: I write words. I also make designs, drawings, calligraphy. All of that comes out of my music, and I see it as word music, visual music. In that sense I don't presume to write literature. My scores don't have notes; they have words. But I also do erotic writing, and in that I express the inexpressible, the sensual, the details and finesse of ephemeral experience. Language is about generalizations that objectify and distance phenomena. To express sexuality in words is really to fight against language itself. That's why most pornography is so awful. It doesn't bridge the gap between what it looks like and what it feels like, and in sex it's crucial to express feeling. In erotic pornography, people are shown humping away and exposing the plumbing of the erotic experience, but that is at odds with the true nature of sex, at odds with the depth and richness of sex.

The thing that disappears when you are lost in sensuality is distance, because everything gets magnified. Language is incapable of dealing with that magnification, but music relates to the specifics of experience in a way that is similar to an erotic one. Music is moment to moment and produces that same magnification that sex produces, so you have the same problem describing music as you do sex: neither can be reduced to generalizations. To adequately speak about the unspeakable, the language has to be music itself. The language of writing has to transform itself, so when I write erotica, I fracture the language/grammar, destroy the syntax of words, and get into something less gross than "they fucked," when that could mean thirty-six hours of experience. (That number came up spontaneously. I wouldn't want to give an exaggerated impression. The longest, unbroken embrace for me was more like twenty hours.) Or even if it were one minute of touching fingers together, words are paltry compared to what that experience is.

Montano: Do you think that you are drawn to this way of working because you are a twin and have known the sensuality of closeness that way?

Corner: That's possible, but I do know that sex inspires and charges me. Erotic experiences get into me, transform themselves into words that want to be written down. I see it as a perpetuation--the writing, that is. Traditional morality is repressive. It talks about the wages of sin, indulgence, dissipation, and "What do you do when it is all over?" I find that a cowardly response to something that is ephemeral, ungraspable--maybe a fear of that space. My erotic writing externalizes the ephemeral. It validates it and values it by turning it into something permanent which is as true to it as it can be. That's the underlying motive. When I have had an erotic experience, it stays in my mind, plays around, creates the word and wants to be written down. Now I have hundreds of pages of writing.

Montano: Anything to add?

Corner: Not only is writing about sex and music, art; but sex itself, making love is itself an art, a corporeal music. The nature of that art is not pornographic, nor can it be defined as getting you off, but it is erotic and properly erotic by contrast. And sex intentionally has its purpose for you not to come or be brought to orgasms unless as a fecundation of the inner mind.

Philip Corner, a teacher, poet, and composer, was born in the Bronx in 1933. He was educated as a composer, although his musical scores have evolved into pure graphics and poetry. Corner has been a member of Fluxus, and his lifelong interest in both spirit and body has led to meditative improvisations with dancers, including most recently Phoebe Neville, his wife. He has published in numerous poetry magazines and has performed extensively the works of contemporary composers on piano and trombone. He has lived in Reggio Emilia, Italy, since 1992.

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