The mind music of Yoko Ono: Screams and silences at the intersection of the real and the imagined

John Lennon famously described Yoko Ono as "the most famous unknown artist. Everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does." Therefore, throughout my dissertation I use biography as a way into her music. Ono consciously uses her life as a source of inspiration in her music and her life experiences also manifest themselves in ways beyond the artist's control, so a listener who can make these connections will be able to more completely appreciate her music. By making her formative life experiences a primary focus of my dissertation, I also hope to show Ono as a modern hybrid artist. The sources of her musical philosophy, and the main influences on her work, include Japanese cultural ideas, Western avant-gardist principles, and pop (i.e., rock) sensibilities. These strands are revealed and entangled in a variety of specific works across her career.;Because Ono is a controversial and polarizing figure, my first chapter presents reasons why she is worthy of a lengthy academic study. Her fame and her relationship with John Lennon have, for many, skewed her status as composer in her own right. Yet, she has been consistently pursuing music as a primary creative output since she was a child and her achievements are many. Before meeting Lennon, she already had two solo shows in the Carnegie Recital Hall, and had collaborated with eminent musicians, most notably John Cage, and later Ornette Coleman. With Lennon, she produced multiple musical projects and participated in jam sessions and concerts with some of the best-known rock stars of the era. She became the first bridge between the avant-garde and mainstream culture, which was a significant influence on many subsequent musicians.;In Chapter Two, I explore Ono's status as a bridge between the East and the West, and the ways that her childhood experiences---moving between Japan and the United States and surviving the horrors of World War II---would motivate much of her art and music. For example, the title of her 1964 book, Grapefruit, a seminal work of conceptual art, is derived from her mistaken belief that the fruit was a cross between a lemon and orange, and she saw herself as a "spiritual hybrid." Her early influences would also manifest themselves in motifs that are transformed again and again throughout her career. I trace how several of these motifs---the sky, air, wind, breath, wrapping, and hiding---play out in specific works.;Ono became a member of John Cage's inner circle and she has often been considered his disciple. However, this is a notion that she firmly rejects. In Chapter Three I consider Ono's relationship to the music of John Cage. While Cage's music is abstract and remotely philosophical, Ono's music became increasingly direct and emotional. This explains why she claims that expressionist twelve-tone composers, such as Arnold Schoenberg, are a more significant influence on her than Cage.;In my final chapter I examine Ono's groundbreaking musical activities in the 1960s just prior to meeting Lennon. Ono helped to found and was intimately involved with Fluxus, the famed neo-Dadaist collective. Ono also organized a concert series with La Monte Young in SoHo in the 1960s, which is in now considered the beginning of downtown music, a major development in American concert music.;The composition portion of my dissertation is the chamber opera Darkling for four singers and string quartet. Darkling was commissioned by American Opera Projects and premiered by them in 2006. Although Darkling is somewhat abstract, in essence, it tells the story of a newly married Jewish woman in Poland who leaves her family and sets sail for New York City before the beginning of WWII. Her life in New York is contrasted with that of family members who perished in the Holocaust.