Ice(d) Music/Cello/Bodies

Re-staging Charlotte Moorman's Ice Music (1972–2018)

Bibliographic Data

ID21728520
AuthorsCaitlin Schmid (0000-0002-0746-8074, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume17
Issue2
Pages213-245
Publication date2020-06-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
Venuetwentieth-century music (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1478-5722 • E-ISSN: 1478-5730
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1478572220000067
OpenAlexW3015265041
LanguageEN
References cited34

1972: Charlotte Moorman walked onto a concert hall stage – nude – and played a cello made of ice until it melted. 2001: Joan Jeanrenaud re-staged Moorman's piece wearing a wetsuit and brandishing a pitchfork. 2017: Seth Parker Woods performed a ‘protest’ version on an obsidian-coloured ice instrument. In this article, I argue that Ice(d) Music/Cello/Bodies has become a musico-political palimpsest, a measure of the way Moorman and her art have been recuperated through performative historiography. Through a reconstruction of the historical circumstances under which Moorman, Jeanrenaud, and Parker Woods realized their performances, I show how contemporary discourses of gender and race are materialized through the physical and metaphorical resonances of human bodies in proximity to an unusual musical instrument. I explore the ‘palimpsest’ both as a theoretical lens that insists on texts as simultaneously overwritable and recoverable and as a methodology providing an analytic framework for broader study of avant-garde re-enactment

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Cello · Literature · Palimpsest · Performative utterance · Visual arts · Diverse Musicological Studies · History · Music History and Culture · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Psychology

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