A Letter to Charlotte Moorman

Art in America, June, 2000 by David Bourdon

Ironically, the following September, it would become legal under a recently passed New York State bill for any female to perform topless in a play, exhibition, show or entertainment. Almost immediately, a Manhattan music management firm assembled and promoted the all-female First Topless String Quartet.

You were your parents' only child, a Depression baby, born in Little Rock on Nov. 18, 1933, and christened Madeline Charlotte Moorman. You were all of 10 years old when you determined that you wanted to be a concert violinist. But you were quickly beguiled by the "masculine" voice of the cello. By age 12 you were playing cello with the Arkansas State Symphony Orchestra.

When you graduated in 1951, Little Rock's Central High School still had an all-white student body. Central High School would make headlines six years later, when Governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent its integration. The Shreveport Symphony Society awarded you a full scholarship to attend Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, from which you graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Music in 1955. You then earned your Master's Degree at the University of Texas, in Austin, enrolling for post-graduate studies at the Juilliard School. After Juilliard, the cello jobs came flying your way. You played under conductor Leopold Stokowski in the American Symphony Orchestra, and you were a member of the Boccherini Players, a chamber-music group. You continued to play with both through 1966.

Considering your lengthy immersion in classical music, what propelled you into avant-garde performance? Was it simply the company you kept? As early as 1961, you became involved in presentations of new music at Town Hall and Carnegie Hall. You met Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, Yvonne Rainer. Yoko performed "operas." One composition featured an aria that Yoko sang in a peculiar high-pitched wail that would characterize her later vocal performances. According to Jill Johnston (Village Voice, Dec. 7, '61), "Yoko Ono combines electronic sounds, vocal and instrumental sounds, body movement ... in her theater of events. I was alternately stupefied and aroused ... [Ono] concluded the work with amplified sighs, breathing, gasping, retching, screaming, many tones of pain and pleasure mixed with a gibberish of foreign sounding language that was no language at all."

After your arrest and conviction, one might have thought that you would face insurmountable difficulties in getting official permission to organize your festivals in public places. But in some ways your task was easier, because even timid politicians had heard of the "topless cellist" and were curious to meet you in person. To alleviate their anxieties, you agreed to their stipulation that the festival would display "no politics and no nudity."

On the last two days of September 1967, the 5th Annual New York Avant Garde Festival became a 24-hour marathon on board a Staten Island ferry named the John F. Kennedy. One hundred artists participated in the festival, which was accomplished with the cooperation of the New York City Department of Marine and Aviation. Ay-O created a 300-foot-long Rainbow Streamer that flew from the stern of the ferry. Included were musical pieces and performance events by Joe Jones, Robert Breer, Max Neuhaus, Bob Watts, George Brecht, Ray Johnson, Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow and others. Carolee Schneemann set up Nightcrawlers II, a pink foam-rubber labyrinth that the public pulled apart. Jim McWilliams and his troupe, dressed in black skin-divers' outfits with signal lamps strapped to their foreheads, their faces painted vermilion, lay down on the deck and pulled themselves horizontally along on a rope that encircled the cabin. There were also films (Stan Brakhage, Ed Emshwiller, Paul Sharits, Michael Snow) and poetry (Jackson Mac Low). The shipboard "variety show" was a lot of fun, but despite the worthy participants I've mentioned, it seemed insubstantial.