Excavating experimentalism: Investigating musical space, the Electric Circus, and nineteen-sixties New York

"Excavating Experimentalism" is a challenge to normative histories of post- World War II American music that favor genre and style as a primary mode of organization. It gives emphasis instead to the geographic concept of space as a mode of understanding how localities affect musical production and intersection. The study takes as its point of focus the musical practices converging at a single site, the" Electric Circus, a music, visual art and dance club located on New York's Lower East Side from 19671971. By drawing on interviews, newspaper reports, and archival information, this dissertation documents and analyzes several events and performances at the Electric Circus to examine the cultural logic of musical environments seeking to be both radical and commercially successful in the late 1960s.In their efforts to meld popular and experimental electronic music, the Electric Circus owners and artists sought to capitalize upon the growing interest in the countercultural movement of the late 1960s. At the same time, these artists and entrepreneurs used new musical sounds to carve out a commercial space for conceptual, experimental music outside of academia. These efforts revealed, in turn, the inherent contradictions in the celebration of such 1960s utopian spaces, whereby the very innovation that audiences were seeking was sold back to patrons.Ultimately, this study works to develop a methodology for investigating the intersection of music, social structures, and individual agency in a given time and place. "Excavating Experimentalism" further suggests that the late 1960s provides an excellent example of a moment in contemporary U.S. history when the commercial failure of artistic and social egalitarianism nonetheless promoted new ways of hearing and imaging contemporary culture. Spaces like the Electric Circus advanced the development of new music technologies and provided consumers and artists with wider access to experimental sounds. The inherent contradictions bound to these experimental musical spaces further inspired the birth of postmodernism in the academy as a way to conceive of the crisis of modernity.