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Ice(d) Music/Cello/Bodies: Re-staging Charlotte Moorman's Ice Music (1972–2018)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2020

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Abstract

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.

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Articles
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Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 213 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

My thanks to Seth Parker-Woods and Joan Jeanrenaud for their insights into Ice Music and beyond; to Scott Krafft and Sigrid Perry at Northwestern University's Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Jill Vuchetich at the Walker Art Center Archive, and Corinne Forstot-Burke at the University of Kansas Sound Archive; to Lucy Caplan, Monica Hershberger, Emily MacGregor, Carol Oja, Sindhumathi Revuluri, and Anne Shreffler for their close readings at every stage of writing; and to the anonymous readers of this article for their useful comments and suggestions.

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