Davison Room, Loeb Music Library
A Performative Cage: Mario Lavista, John Cage, and the (Im)possibilities of Silence
Ana Alonso-Minutti (University of New Mexico)
Driven by a long-life fascination with John Cage’s music and philosophy, in 1976 Mario Lavista invited Cage to visit Mexico. Cage had visited the country in 1968, at a time of much political unrest, and this new visit prompted great interest within music and art circles. An examination of Cage’s impact in Mexico reveals the asymmetries of institutionalized avant-gardes when seen from a transnational lens. As poet Augusto de Campos—who brought Cage to Brazil in the 1980s—stated, silence cannot be separated from power relations. Being inseparable from its sociocultural context, silence exposes privilege and exhibits the location of power. Drawing from oral history interviews, documented videography, and archival research, in this presentation I explore how, through a process of resignification, Cage became a symbol from which Lavista and his colleagues felt free to pursue an unprecedented degree of creative freedom. This freedom, however, was short-lived. The privileged apparatus of US experimentalism, while desirable, was never attainable within the socioeconomic context of Mexico. In a society where financial support to sound experimentation has been extremely scarce, the liberties implied in Cage’s aesthetic silence were simply a luxury inaccessible to Mexican experimentalists.
About Ana Alonso-Minutti: Ana R. Alonso-Minutti is Associate Professor of Musicology and Associate Chair of the Department of Music at the University of New Mexico. Her scholarship focuses on experimental and avant-garde expressions and music traditions from Mexico and the US-Mexico border. Among her research areas are Latina/Chicana feminist and queer theories, critical race studies, and decolonial methodologies. Her research has been published in Argentina, Mexico, Spain, and the U.S., and has presented her work in academic spaces across the Americas and Europe. She is the author of Mario Lavista: Mirrors of Sounds (Oxford University Press, 2023), and coeditor of Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2018). In addition to her scholarly work, Minutti wrote the multi-movement choral work Voces del desierto, which won the 2021 Robert M. Stevenson Prize granted by the Society for Ethnomusicology. Moreover, she directed and produced the documentary Cubos y permutaciones: plástica, música y poesía de vanguardia en México. Currently, she is the coeditor of Twentieth-Century Music journal, area editor for Grove Music Online’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality Project, member of the editorial board of Journal of Music History Pedagogy, member of the advisory board of Sonus Litterarum, and curatorial advisor for Mediateca Lavista. Originally from Puebla, Mexico, she has lived in Albuquerque since 2013.