Yoko Ono--小野洋子
無意間看到的一篇關於小野洋子的小論文 大家一起來磨練自己的英文吧～Yoko Ono: Artistic Radical, Passionate Feminist (1)
這一篇小論文是為了回應去年小昭所寫的〈約翰藍濃和小野洋子的歌『女人是世界上最被奴隸的人種』〉與當中所討論的片段。 在討論當中，我回想起我在博士班第三個學期所修的一門課，Professor Ellie M. Hisama 所指導的 Seminar in Music History: Gender/Music/Sexuality。 一整個學期的研習中，有許許多多啟發，包括為 Amy Beach、Ruth Crawford Seeger 等前輩女性作曲家們翻案，重新審視她們對當代音樂的貢獻；還有，更深入認識了早期被歷史所忽略的藝術家，像是芬妮‧孟德爾頌和克拉拉‧舒曼 ... 等等。 這是當初所寫的期末論文當中的第一個段落，我重新整理、修改過後，第一次張貼在網站上，野人獻曝。 很抱歉沒能將之翻譯成中文，奧斯卡已經好久沒做英翻中練習啦~ 請將就著讀英文版。 若有人願意幫忙翻譯，奧斯卡很感激。 Yoko Ono 
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Yoko Ono: Artistic Radical, Passionate Feminist
Hsin-Jung Tsai
Ever since she first appeared in the New York City avant-garde art scene of the early 1960’s, people’s views of Yoko Ono have been shaped by extreme opinion. While her works have often tended to confuse and surprise critics and audiences alike, her unwavering faith in the power of the human imagination to open the mind to new ideas has touched many people. As an artist, poet, and composer, working alternatively at the edge of mainstream culture, she has been subjected to intense criticism by those not inclined to accept her uncompromising artistic vision. Once called “the high priestess of happening,” Ono has long been a pioneer in the conceptual art movement, a mantle she continues to wear more than 40 years after arriving on the scene. She once claimed that, “the only sound that exists … is the sound of the mind.“1 She has continually experimented with new techniques to extend the possibilities of the human voice to represent the sounds we all hear in our own minds. Her first performance in sound (1961) featured screams, sighs and moans, gasps and multi-phonics2, as Ono believed even then that these sounds could express the condition of the human spirit even more faithfully than the more conventional, lyrical means of expression. Her influence on performance art, sound/music, and literature cannot be ignored for, as Alexandra Munroe wrote in her article “Spirit of YES: The Art and Life of Yoko Ono”, collected in YES Yoko Ono:
“… she emerges, over and over, as a forerunner of new art forms that mix and expand different media. Her works as an antiwar activist, like the global ads for peace, have offered a kind of public instruction that carries a profoundly positive and transformative message: Image. For decades, people around the world have celebrated her meaning while critics looked on, perplexed.” In this paper we will examine several important periods in the life of the artist, and show how her thought evolved through the different eras and how this was reflected in the music she created.
Background
Yoko Ono was born into a wealthy household on February 18, 1933 in Tokyo, Japan, the eldest of three children born to Eisuke and Isoko Ono. Her maternal family was in the banking industry, and her father was a frustrated pianist who held degrees from Tokyo Universities in mathematics and economics but who had given up a career as a pianist to work as a banker in Japan. In 1935 Ono’s father left for the United States to become the head of a Japanese bank in San Francisco leaving the family behind in Japan. As a young child Ono was tutored in classical piano, and in her teens began keeping notebooks of her writing.3 Even at the tender young age of 13 Ono had thoughts of becoming a composer, but was not able to receive her father’s support in this pursuit. “My becoming a pianist had been my father’s wish, not mine.… ‘Actually, I want to be a composer, father.’ I said. There was a silence…. ‘Well,’ my father said after a considerable silence, ‘there are not many women composers in the world, Yoko. At least I haven’t heard of one yet. … Maybe it’s a question of women’s aptitude. I know you are a talented and intelligent child. But I don’t want to see you struggle in vain.’ How could he have known that it may not have been a question of gender aptitude?” Ono stated.4
In the post World War II era, the public’s perception and views on the role of women in Japanese society was still very conventional even in a large, modern city such as Tokyo. Girls were brought up to go to finishing schools and hoped to marry before people started to raise their eyebrows. Ono continues, “I am still thankful that my father cared at all about my career. … ‘Women may not be good creators of music, but they’re good at interpreting music,’ was what he said. I rebelled, gave up my voice lessons, and went to a Japanese University to study philosophy while being a closet songwriter.”5 Although she rejected her father’s will, Ono considers these years as the foundation of her future work as a composer and vocal artist. What John Lennon called Ono’s “revolutionary…sixteen-track voice” is grounded in this foundation of classical training.6
The intellectual freedom that came with the collapse of the totalitarian regime that dominated Japanese culture and society beginning in the 1930’s infused the high schools and universities across the country with a newfound vitality and creativity. Every student felt that he/she had the responsibility to effect social change and political reconstruction. This postwar “awakening” and the radical intellectual climate that was now able to spring forth from the underground, and freely express ideas that had long been suppressed influenced Ono, who had been sheltered from the ravages of World War II. Ono had been sent away from Tokyo during the war by her parents to be raised by nannies, which abandoned the 12 year-old Yoko, leaving her to fend for herself, and perhaps setting her on her course of fierce independence. After the devastation of the war, Japanese thought was about to undergo a radical change as everything was open to question and change, and among the most radical of changes would be the role of woman in Post War Japan. As Alexandra Munroe wrote, “While despair at the devastation of fifteen years of war created a post surrender psyche of exhaustion, remorse, and despondency, and out-pouring of relief, optimism, and liberation prevailed.”7
During the time when Ono studied philosophy at Gakushuin University, she was greatly affected by the dominant intellectual movements of Marxism and existentialism and modern selfhood. She was reading many of the books penned by pre-Revolutionary Russian authors such as Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyecsky as well as those by modern German philosophers such as Hegel and Marx. Ono had to refute her past in order to participate into this postwar revolution, which would have a profound influence on her worldview in later years. Her choice of philosophy as her major area of study reveals what would become evident for all to see, the artist’s fundamental interest in the nature of reality, existence, and the human mind. “My strength at that time was the ability to separate myself from the Japanese pseudo-sophisticated bourgeoisie. I don’t want to be one of them. I was fiercely independent from an early age and created myself into an intellectual that gave me a separate position.”8 She stayed at Gakushuin University until 1951 when her father was appointed head of a bank in New York and moved the family to the affluent suburb of Scarsdale, New York.
1 David W. Bernstein, “Ono, Yoko” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie
(Landon, 2000), vol. 18.
2 Ibid. In this brief biography, D.Bernstein wrote that she was “a specialist in extended vocal techniques.”
3 Gillian G. Gaar, She’s A Rebel: The history of Women in Rock & Roll, 231.
4 Yoko Ono, “Preface” of She’s A Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll by Gaar.
5 Ibid.
6 Lennon quoted in Cott, “Sixteen-Track Voice,” 14.
7 Alexandra Munroe, “Spirit of YES: The Art and Life of Yoko Ono” in YES Yoko Ono, 15.
8 Ono, interview with Alexandra Munroe, August 1997.
Yoko Ono: Artistic Radical, Passionate Feminist (2) Hsin-Jung Tsai In the four decades since Ono first performed her music publicly, her collaborators have included an array of avant-gardes, rock-music musicians, scores of veteran session musicians, as well as her son and his post-punk musical sensibility. In varying configurations, they have helped give memorable expression to Ono’s evolving music ideas. “The music of Yoko Ono would also find its reflection in punk…Ono would rarely see herself listed as an influence in rock histories.” Gillian Gaar wrote.9 For as much as her work in many different media has been characterized by a poetic tone, it was in music and as a composer that Ono began her professional artistic career. Poetry, music, objects, and actions seamlessly meld throughout Ono’s multifaceted presentations. Moreover, Ono has noted that music has always provided an essential element in her life. “Proving and re-proving her musical bona fides many times over the years, often in the face of harsh criticism, Ono has journeyed from the frontiers of avant-garde ‘art music’ to the hook-laden grooves of mainstream pop.” Edward Gomez wrote.10 Along the way, she created almost single-handedly, a style that lead to her being branded an “artistic radical” in her early years. Ono was beginning to create her own unique musical style in which she combined her earlier classical training with traditional Japanese cultural expressions learned from her mother. It was through her mother that she was exposed to Japanese singing styles and began to read Japanese musical scores, where she has observed that Japanese written music, with its minimal indications of pitches and sound durations, resembled the instructions that typify her own mature work.11 After the Ono family settled in Scarsdale, New York, Yoko Ono continued her education at Sarah Lawrence College where she studied poetry, musical composition, and English literature. Her education took place during the time in postwar music, when experimental composers were redefining the nature of musical sound and bringing convention-bursting ideas into the concert hall. It wasn’t long before Ono rebelled against her traditional family life, and conventional education and left school and settled in Greenwich Village where she met many other artists who shared her views on art and music. The Village at this time was a hotbed of intellectual activism, with artists of every type of media from Andy Warhol to Lenny Bruce, experimenting and developing a new kind of art designed to shock the public. Through the composer Richard Maxfield she met the experimental composer La Monte Young, who used to use her loft to perform his music and collaborate with her. No longer was art a passive activity, but participation would be forced upon the viewer or listener. It was at this time that Ono discovered avant-garde composers such as Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern, who were adventuresome composers who looked to twelve-tone music for inspiration, and European composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who investigated the nature of sound itself in electronic music using tape recorders. Composer Aaron Copland used to write that the postwar generation “wanted to make its own revolution in music.” They “accepted Schönberg’s role as pioneer and innovator but rejected his structural procedures and his aesthetic.”12 Ono has said, “My heroes were the twelve-tone composers – Schönberg, Berg, those people – and I was just fascinated with what they could do. I wrote some twelve-tone songs, then my music went into an area that my teacher felt was really a bit off the track, and he said, ‘Well, look, there are some people who are doing things like what you do and they’re called avant-garde.’”13 Around this same time Ono had attempted to use Western musical notation to capture the avant-garde spirit. This led her to develop her first instruction-based composition, Secret Piece (1953). (See example 1) It reads: “Decide on one note that you want to play. Play it with the following accompaniment: The woods from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. in summer.” Beneath this brief text, treble clef and bass clef appear without a time signature or measure lines, and two lonely, tied half notes on the F note on bass clef hint at prolonged hum. Above the treble clef, Ono wrote: “with the accompaniment of birds singing at dawn.” At first glace, this score is as disrespectful as it is accurate within the restrictions of standard notation. “Secret Piece suggests that birds will sing the unmarked, to-be-imagined melody in the blank treble clef against a do-it-yourself, droning rhythm in the bass.”14 It is delicate, clever, and John Cage-like, blurring the line between music and poetry. Ono moved to New York City in 1956 settling into a small loft in Greenwich Village where she found a world where all the radical young music makers began showing up in downtown Manhattan just as the Sixties were dawning. Disparate as they were, they shared dissatisfaction with the impossibility of notating on musical staff paper the sounds they were hearing in their heads: ” You can’t translate the more complex sounds into notation. The minute that you do notate it and someone plays what you’ve written, the sound becomes totally different. I wanted to capture the sounds I’d heard of birds singing in the woods, things like that. And I think the reason all these artists came to New York and got together at this time was that all of them had this dissatisfaction about just writing musical notes. They were venturing into a different area, and that’s why we all got together.”15 In November of 1961, Ono held her first public performance; a composition entitled Works by Yoko Ono, at Carnegie Recital Hall. The program featured three major works: A Grapefruit in the World of Park, A Piece for Strawberries and Violin, and AOS- To David Todor. In A Grapefruit in the World of Park, Ono combined nursery-rhyme phrases with wild laughter, atonal music, and disjointed-sounding remarks. Her compositions then included everyday “real” sounds that Ono called “by-sound” or “insound.”16 In A Piece for Strawberries and Violin, “a performer stood up and sat down before a table stacked with dishes. Her action was accompanied by a rhythmic background of repeated syllables, a tape recording of moans and words spoken backwards, and an aria of high-pitched wails sung by Ono -- a portent of the musical sound that later would become Ono’s trademark.”17 In AOS – To David Todor, Ono wrapped two performers in gauze with bottles and cans hanging loosely from them and instructed them to walk across the stage without making noise. She “made the stage very dim, so you had to strain your eyes,” she explained, “because life is like that. You always have to strain to read other people’s minds.”18 By the mid 1960’s, Ono had also recorded some of her compositions, which were often related to or realizations of her written instructional scores. Additionally, she was becoming very interested in electronic music, and started experimenting with this emerging new media. For instance, she used the new technology to make an electronic rumble sound flow through about thirty-two minutes of alternating soft and surging passages “punctuated by the gentle clicking of what appear the be claves … and by the artist’s occasional coughing.”19 Ono, like other early pioneers of electronic music and sound art, fused performance and composition in the making of her original recorded works. Since she had a successful concert at Carnegie Recital Hall and her contemporary avant-garde artists accepted her as one of their own, Ono continued to explore the sound rooted in raw emotion and the imagination. She called it “music of the mind” and presented audience-participation events. Ono did not want to present works for the audience to listen to, but used her works to shock the audience and force some kind of participation from the audience, to use her work as a stimuli to the mind of listening audience. This idea appeared again in her installations Ex It and Wish Tree of 1997-98. 9 Gillian G. Gaar, She’s A Rebel: The history of Women in Rock & Roll, 230. 10 Edward M. Gomez, “Music of the Mind from the Voice of Raw Soul” in YES Yoko Ono, 231. 11 Ono, interview with Edward Gomez, November 1999. 12 Aaron Copland, The New Music, 1900-1960, rev. ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968), 171-73. 13 Ono Quoted in “interview with Yoko Ono” in The Guests Go in to Supper, ed. Melody Sumner, Kathleen Burch, and Michael Sumner (Oakland, Calif.: Burning Books, 1986), 173. 14 Edward M. Gomez, “Music of the Mind from the Voice of Raw Soul” in YES Yoko Ono, 232. 16 Edward M. Gomez, “Music of the Mind from the Voice of Raw Soul” in YES Yoko Ono, 233. 17 Haskell and Hanhardt, “Introduction” in Arias and Objects (1991), 5. 18 Edward M. Gomez, “Music of the Mind from the Voice of Raw Soul” in YES Yoko Ono, 233. 19 Ibid. Yoko Ono: Artistic Radical, Passionate Feminist Hsin-Jung Tsai After Ono met John Lennon in London in 1966, she began exploring pop music and rock & roll, and they shared a mutual interest in exploring sound and avant-garde artistic images. Playing with Ono freed Lennon, who had tired of the Beatles’ pop image and was searching for a new direction in his music. Just as the post World War II freedom in Japan influenced Ono, Lennon was maturing in the Vietnam era, and no longer satisfied writing songs he viewed as meaningless, with nothing to say. In Ono he found inspiration, someone who was able to break out the conventional and create something new. “If somebody with a rock oriented mind can possibly listen to her stuff, you’ll see what she’s doing,” he told Rolling Stone. “It’s fantastic. She makes music like you’ve never heard on the earth. It’s like 20 years ahead of its time.”20 Ono also heard the harsh word of the critics at this time. “I think they called my work ‘too dramatic,’ because in those days, in the New York art scene, you weren’t supposed to be too animated. Basically, when John and I found each other … because of this rebellious nature in both of us. And even in the avant-garde I was rebellious about it all. It’s not just being a woman. If you’re a good girl, so to speak, and kind of following the tradition of the avant-garde and using their vocabulary, then I think they’ll allow you to exist. So that’s why I don’t really know if it was the woman in me that offended them or the fact that I was rebelling …”21 The world was changing, and Ono was changing with it. No longer was she satisfied with the intellectualism of the Beat Generation, but she was finding a new voice in the midst of the turbulent protest generation of the 1960’s. Given the respect accorded to the Beatles, it was understandable that Ono’s association with Lennon placed her directly in the firing line for near-universal condemnation and contempt, especially when Ono was brave enough to speak her mind and refused to stay in the passive position such as the other Beatle wives had done. Linda Eastman, who also attended Sarah Lawrence College albeit later than Ono, and married Paul McCartney eight years before Ono married Lennon, experienced the same problems with getting songwriting credits on songs that they later wrote with their husbands. The recording company just didn’t believe Ono and Eastman were able to compose with Lennon and McCartney.22 Ono began to write songs about her plight of Woman in a male dominated society. Her feminism had long been a central aspect of her ego but she now was becoming a more outspoken critic of the treatment of woman, and many of her songs addressed the issue of women’s equality, themes that resonated with the woman of the time just as they do today. This was never truer than during the period of the Plastic Ono Band. “I had become so lonely doing mind music that I was ready to begin screaming again,” Ono said.23 She was forced by herself to scream louder than ever against amplified instruments to expressing her true feelings. Early presentations like Cut Piece (1964), performed by the artist herself, pointed to a woman’s vulnerability – public, personal, physical, psychological – in a male-dominated society. In her music, Ono evokes a woman’s concerns in the titles and emotions of experimental musical composition. Her first overtly feminist song was ‘Sisters O Sisters,” first performed in 1971. “Sisters O Sisters” appeared on Lennon and Ono’s Sometime in New York City album in 1972. Later in 1973 Ono’s Approximately Infinite Universe explored a range of woman-centric emotions and issues in a variety of styles. “‘What a Bastard the World Is’ focused on the inequality of female/male relationships, ‘I Want My Man to Rest Tonight’ addressed the problems men have in coming to terms with their own sexism, and ‘I Have a Woman Inside of My Soul’ and ‘Death of Samantha’ were moving portrayals of women who have repressed all feelings for the sake of outward appearance.”24 In 1973, she released Feeling the Space, an album even more fearlessly feminist in message and stylistically diverse. She wrote on the back cover of this album: “This album is dedicated to the sisters who died in pain and sorrow and those who are now in prisons and in mental hospitals for being unable to survive in the male society.” On Feeling the Space, Ono took complete control of the production for the first time. The most fitting description of the music here is “angry.” Ono finds no love or sweetness where the male population is concerned, and it shows. Her anger comes through loud and clear. This album uses rich, pop-influenced melodies interwoven with lyrics of great emotional depth. Ono said of this album in 1997: “I wouldn’t say that these songs directly affected or influenced a society because there were not songs that were played that much, … But I think, … in terms of prayer, …, that these songs may have been helping.” In 1973 Ono and Lennon attended The First International Feminist Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the conference attendees stood up to join them in singing the chorus of “Woman Power” from Feeling the Space. From the Ono-as-Sphinx cover art to the plainspoken, angry songs within, Feeling the Space is Ono’s most overtly feminist album. The lyrics are surprisingly subtle and yet emotionally complex, from the painful openers, “Growing Pain” and “Yellow Girl (Stand By For Life),” through more strident tunes such as “Woman of Salem,” about the infamous witch trials in colonial America, and “Angry Young Woman,” based on the life story of a woman Ono had met at the International Feminist Conference, and honoring self-emancipation. The music is powerful rock with touches of free-jazz courtesy. “Woman of Salem” starts with rhythmic bongos, then Ono’s clean voice emerges telling the story of Sally Kegley with piano accompaniment: 1692, six in the morning of June, Sally Kegley, age thirty-four, Closed her diary she’d kept for two scores. Salem, salem, witches must be hung. Let my daughter burn my book, Let her learn to saw and cook. Teach her not to read but weave, Ask her not to speak but weep. Salem, salem, witches must be hung. Sally Kegley knows how to cure the ill, Sally kegley sees through us at will. Salem, salem, witches must be hung. All the town’s people rushing to the hill, Their eyes shining, ready for the kill. Sally’s flesh bound to the cross, Her eyes searching for the ones who are close. Oh, why? …(Repeat) Help! …(Repeat) Must kill, must hang, … (Repeat) … After the brief peaceful opening passage, the music begins getting faster and Ono’s voice takes on a stronger and angrier tone when she sings “All the town’s people rushing to the hill. Their eyes shining, ready for the kill. …” “Woman Power” is a proud anthem and Ono claims what Women wish. After a short dialogue: “You’ve heard of woman nation, well, that’s coming, baby. What we need is the power of trust, that it’s coming. You’ve heard of the law of selection, well, that’s how we’re gonna do it, baby. We allow men who wanna join us. The rest can just stay by themselves.” Then the guitar and drum starts as an introduction with Ono’s primal voice and chorus, “Woman Power!” It is always interesting to hear how Ono changes her voice and mood between the words and reprises. The idea of women’s liberation appears clearly in this song and somehow in her voice. Two thousand years of male society, Laying fear and tyranny. Seeking grades and money, Clinging to values vain and phone. Woman Power! … (Repeat) Do you know that one day you lost your way, man? Do you know that some day you have to pay, man? “Make no mistake about it, I’m the president, you hear? I wanna make one thing clear, I’m the president, you hear?” Woman Power! … (Repeat) You don’t hear them singing songs, You don’t see them living life, ‘Cause they’ve got nothing to say, but “Make no mistake about it, I’m the president, you hear? I wanna make one thing clear, I’m the president, you hear?” Woman Power! … (Repeat) You may be the president now, You may still be a man. But you must also be a human, Woman Power! … (Repeat) … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4puCtdG3Mk&NR=1 In an era of prominent female singer-songwriters, “Woman Power” was unique for the honest examination of feelings and behavior rotted in personal pain or fear from male society. Like Edward Gomez said, “Expressing anger and rage as mush as love and whimsy, Ono’s work in pop-rock modes was a precursor of the soul-scraping pop vernacular …”25 In “Men, Men, Men,” Ono examines something that women want men to be and to do, for a change, as sex objects. The music is jazz-like soft rock with improvising-atmosphere saxophone and piano, and stable drum beats. Unlike the previous songs that accuse the inequality of male society, Ono’s voice and singing turn sweet and sexy, like a coquettish ditty. J.O.H.N.N.Y., God’s little gift, cream and pie. Men,men,men,umm,umm (Repeat) God’s little gift for woman. I want you clever but not too clever, I want you bad but not too bad. I want you string but not too strong, I want you to try your rightful position. Men, men, snails and puppies, Your muscles are not for fighting in war. Your lips are not for voicing opinions, Your eyes are there for us to look into. I want you to take your rightful position. Men, men, grapes and nuts, Your pants are never tight enough, Your boots are never long enough. Your skin is never young enough, I want you to hold your rightful position. Men, men, apples and figs, I like you to be faithful but not very fussy, I like you to be behind me but not just beside me. I like you to shut up but know when to say yes, I want you to learn your frightful position. Now you know what you have to do, Now you know what’s expected of your So come up and see me sometime. Ono said in the interview with David Sheff, “It’s a basic women feeling, but I’m sure men feel that way, too, once in a while – that basic frustration of not being able to really communicate. … in the age when the communication media is expanding more and more and there’s big communication, the individual communication is getting more and more difficult. There’s an alienation between individuals. I think women feel the frustration more than men – again, it’s the woman, or at least the feminine side of men and women, that is ignored by society – the male society.”26 Ono started writing at a young age. In 1966 for The Stone, she wrote Biography and Statement, life experience made into simple poetic metaphors, and Statement is especially poignant. They were feminist statement, but they are also complex. Ono continued to explore the ideas of a radical, of someone “who refused to conform to the dictates of the norm, be it class, nation, gender, religion, artistic form, or literary convention: a focused determination to do it her way.”27 For instance, in Biography, sky becomes a metaphor for freedom, seaweeds have sexual connotations, and so on. Ono had also written an article about feminism for The New York Times, entitled “The Feminization of Society,” on 23 February 1972. In this article, she claimed in the introduction, “The aim of the feminist movement should not just end with getting more jobs in the existing society, though we should definitely work on that as well. We have to keep on going until the whole of the female race is freed.”(See example 3). In this article, she talks about lesbianism, female liberation, and generation issue, the existing social set-up. As a woman, she has suffered the abuse of men – as an Asian woman artist working in an unfamiliar terrain, she has been the victim of extreme prejudice and intentional misunderstanding. “The Feminization of Society” is a manifesto for liberation. Ono and Lennon’s collaboration, Double Fantasy, was released in 1980. Double Fantasy had Ono and Lennon trading off songs such as they had on 1972’s Some Time in New York City, but with far more effective results. This time the main subject was their personal relationship, and for the first time critical praise for Ono’s work outweighed that reserved for Lennon’s. The songs on Double Fantasy represented a change in Ono message. Compared with earlier works, it lacked much of the anger associated with the fight for woman’s rights in a male dominated society, and instead reflected on the one on one relationship between a man and a woman. “Critics and fans praised Ono’s edgy contributions to this album, hearing in her vocals antecedents and affinities to the era’s punk and new-wave styles,” Gomez noted.28 “All the most interesting material on Double Fantasy is Yoko’s,” said Charles Shaar Murray in an NME review, adding, “In the ‘80s … her music sounds vastly modern and considerably more interesting than Lennon’s.”29 Then Walking on Thin Ice was released in 1981. The song emerged from the couple’s flurry of composing and recording activity that lead up to their release Double Fantasy. “Walking on Thin Ice”, with Lennon on guitar, was the couple’s definitive response to the punk rock they both had influenced. Later, Ono used home-movie clips to create a visual montage to accompany the song. With images of the Lennon’s relaxing by a lake, playing with their son, Ono’s video showed the emotional intensity of their partnership, and it also showed the condor that had always characterized her music. 20 Gillian G. Gaar, She’s A Rebel: The history of Women in Rock & Roll, 233. 22 Gaar also said, Linda Eastman and Yoko Ono have shared the burden of being “the women who broke up the Beatles.” See also She’s A Rebel: The history of Women in Rock & Roll, 231. 23 Edward M. Gomez, “Music of the Mind from the Voice of Raw Soul” in YES Yoko Ono, 234. 24 Gillian G. Gaar, She’s A Rebel: The history of Women in Rock & Roll, 235 25 Edward M. Gomez, “Music of the Mind from the Voice of Raw Soul” in YES Yoko Ono, 236. 26 David Sheff, All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 223-24. 27 Jon Hendricks, “Anthology: Writings by Yoko Ono” in YES Yoko Ono, 269. 28 Edward M. Gomez, “Music of the Mind from the Voice of Raw Soul” in YES Yoko Ono, 235. 29 Gillian G. Gaar, She’s A Rebel: The history of Women in Rock & Roll, 281 Yoko Ono: Artistic Radical, Passionate Feminist Hsin-Jung Tsai On Death and Rebirth In recent years, Yoko Ono has successfully developed new and communicative strategies in her works, many of which are a continuation of her more significant creations and themes from 1980 the present. These strategies serve to increase the power of the work searching for the resolution toward death in order to attract the audience’s gaze and provoke the deepest reflection. In this section I will examine two of her works, the installation Ex It that first appeared in 1997 and her earlier 1981 album Season of Glass. In each of these creations, she has worked with the image of death and rebirth, which have the evocative power to release her sorrow from something one cannot avoid or change in one’s life. Thinking about Ex It, the later of the two works, brings to mind Ono’s front cover for her 1981 album Season of Glass. It is a ghastly image of despair in the aftermath of her husband John Lennon’s assassination that carries away as much as it can from the moralizing ethos of a seventeenth-century Dutch still life.30 Against a backdrop of Central Park, a view from the couple’s home in the Dakota, Lennon’s still bloodstained glasses sit next to a glass of water that is unmistakably half-empty. Of course, it would be difficult to miss that this is Ono’s point-blank portrait of the couple. Lennon is present through the grisly relic of his cold-blooded murder; she is now half-diminished and colorless. But even in death, they remain inseparable, as Lennon becomes Ono’s creative ghost-limb. On the back cover of the album, fresh flowers have replaced Lennon’s glasses, and the glass of water appears filled but still achromatic. The literalism that makes death so vivid in the photograph is unmistakably reiterated in Ex It. At the moment that she was recording this album, she might not be ready to forgive and forget because “the season that never passes is the season of glass.” However, in Ex It Ono has forgiven and released. In her interview to Michael Bracewell in 1996 (when she was preparing Ex It, En Trance, and Wish Tree), Ono says: “True freedom is freedom of the spirit, and you can’t overburden yourself with negative thinking, because negative thinking, whether it’s a grudge against somebody or the hurt that carry, only hurts you. When John passed away, I was angry and I was sad … But then I realized that this was eating me up, … and I had to refuse the negative emotions … I think the rule of the game is: if you don’t forgive, you’re not forgiven either. … then the ideas of Wish Tree and Ex It came out.“32 With first track of the Album Season of Glass, Ono makes her feelings known to the listener. “ ‘Goodbye Sadness’ is an emotional tune in which Ono sounds as if she’s started to come to terms with her fears and sadness because she ‘can’t take it anymore.’” Goodbye sadness Goodbye goodbye I don’t need you anymore I wet my pillow every night But now I saw the light Goodbye goodbye sadness I don’t need you anymore Goodbye goodbye sadness I can’t take it anymore Goodbye sadness Goodbye goodbye I don’t need you anymore I lived in fear everyday But now I’m going my way … Hello happiness Wherever you are I hope you hear my song I never want to cry again Or hold my breath in fear again (Repeat) Sometimes it hurts to listen to her pained voice, but it is necessary to hear her go through with this album. It almost serves as an exercise in dealing with life’s many brutalities and serves as a healing process allowing her to stand up and carry on. “Hearing Ono’s singing brings [people] back memories, but at the same time it also feels good to know that she’s done this.”33 “Goodbye Sadness” is not like any other songs that Ono has been involved with, not like any of her experimental, avant-garde art songs. “This is a melodic pop song. There is very little that’s abrasive about the actual music, which is mostly traditional soft rock with backing by many of the musicians who worked with Ono and Lennon on their 1980 collaboration, Double Fantasy.”34 “Goodbye Sadness” is a simple song, simple melody and repeated text, but with Ono’s sincere voice and emotion. There is none of the screaming of the typical Ono style, but in its own way, her voice is just as close to the edge as it ever was. In Jeff Tamarkin’s critic in 1983, he wrote: “ In the liner notes she admits that she was ‘all choked up and my voice was cracking’ during the recording … but then she adds that it’s ok for her voice to sound like that because ‘that’s what the critics have been saying about me all those years anyway.’” The music is pushed into the background, allowing Ono’s singing to hold its own and create the mood by itself. The music is sentimental in its thinness, and under the circumstances, more poignant. The melody of saxophone and guitar sticks out as islands of sanity to hold firmly in the center of all of Ono’s purposeful tension. It works extremely well and leaves a mark: she has always known how to get her message across. Ex It, the installation in Deitch Projects, in SoHo, New York, 1997-98, Ono neatly arranged 100 rough and inelegant wood coffins implying with the little window that permits one last look of a life giving way to death before shoveled dirt falls down from above. The 100 unpainted wooden coffins, with three different sizes, sixty for men, thirty for women, and ten for children, are punctuated by young, blossoming fruit trees, which grow up and through the petite window, and tape loops of chirping birds wafting through the starkly spotlighted room. From time to time one of the bantam leaves drifted down to the dank floor. The instructions of Ex It call for coarse, common coffins, such as those lined up on a field devastated by a catastrophe, a battle, or a massacre. A tree grows out of an opening from each normally one could see the face of the deceased. This extraordinary field of coffins moves and disturbs the audience, across ideologies and religions. As a former student and a friend of John Cage, Ono’s Ex It is also full of silent sound and chance. It is an inner forest sprouting in silence from silence itself in an atmosphere of sadness and isolation. It is a gripping meditation on the indivisibility of death and life and the natural order of coming and going. On one’s unchecked capacity for cruelty to one’s own kind, the continued blessing of rebirth, and each generation’s potential and responsibility for change. “Ex It is life as a continuation,” Ono wrote in the artist’s statement.35 The entire installation resonated with the spirit of her work prior to Lennon’s death. With Ex It Ono has made “resurrection” categorical: Death begets new life brimming with the promise of Renewal, or as she prefers, continuation. Moving and directing, Ono reflects on the human condition and the fragility of existence, on the uncertainly of regaining hope after death, and on the reclamation of anonymity. The title, Ex It, seems to imply to the exit from life or to the abandonment of one’s being, to losing one’s proper name. Her “word” signifies someone or something that has ceased to be whom or what it was. Words usually display the scenes of their own catastrophe, of a sacrifice from that the new meanings will emerge. Sometimes words are broken, interrupted, restricted by themselves like human’s lives. Ono’s acoustic environment reinforces this sensation with a colorful background “noise/music” of whispers of birds, human voices and the rustling of leaves. That recalled to me that Cage’s pleads to his students to listen to all the sounds from nature and from the environment and completely absorb them into your ears and your mind, and then translate it as your own voice. “We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments,” he advised.36 “The sound you play in your mind is different than the sound that comes out. The sounds and music in your mind…exist without the physical limitations of the real world,” Ono said, relating that she asked people at her “silent concert/exhibition” to create the music in their own mind.37 Ono called attention to the “sounds you hear in silence…when you start to feel the environment and tension and people’s vibrations… the sound of fear and darkness, like a child’s fear that someone is behind him.”38 Nature wakes up and renews itself year by year. These are the sounds of invisible conversation, of distant echoes resonating inside the empty chamber of memory as they move across it from the beginning of time. Another exhibition that Ono presented at the Andre Emmerich Gallery simultaneously, En Trance, was an assembly of works, much of it from the mid-1960s, including the 1966 Ceiling Painting (Yes), which requires the viewer to climb a ladder to see through a magnifying glass that the word “ Yes” has been written on the canvas. Ex Trance, compared with Ex It, is nostalgic. It showed the struggle, isolation and process that an artist has been making over many decades. Ono’s art, her music and poetry, sit right on the surface. Indeed, her work has proved to be nothing if not uncomplicated. Where Ex It is concerned, Ono’s despair over Lennon’s death and her faith recuperated out of tragedy appear recklessly self-conscious. While touching as autobiography, this kind of issue is perhaps less valuable when we measure its reach into contemporary culture. Where there is sympathy for this work, I found that it has been allowed to pass as an expression of “insight” magnified by the lure associated with fashion figures like John Lennon. Taken side by side, Ex It and En Trance are from the life story of a woman who was more than married to a culture icon. To be sure, the indelible link between Ono and Lennon advances her artistic works considerably. But her work is naïve, and her work has the pure insight of human. And it is as guileless as it is sentimental about an earlier and simpler time in her life. “The idealism of the Sixties still exists, the spirit is still with us.” Ono said. 39 31 Jeff Tamarkin, “Yoko Ono: Season of Glass,” CMJ New Music Report Issue, Jan. 7, 1983, 7. 32 http://www.kaapeli.fi/aiu/onolife8.html 33 Jeff Tamarkin, “Yoko Ono: Season of Glass,” CMJ New Music Report Issue, Jan 7, 1983, 7 34 Ibid. 35 Ronald Jones, “Yoko Ono: exhibit at Andre Emmerich Gallery/Deitch Projects,” Art Forum, Oct. 1998. 36 John Cage, Silence (1961; 10 ed., Middletown, Conn.; Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 3. 37 Ono quoted in “Interview with Yoko Ono” in The Guests Go In To Supper, ed. Melody Summer, Kathleen Burch, and Michael Summer (Oakland, Calif.: Burning Books, 1986), 172. 38 Ibid. 39 Ronald Jones, “Yoko Ono: exhibit at Andre Emmerich Gallery/Deitch Projects,” Art Forum, Oct. 1998 Yoko Ono: Artistic Radical, Passionate Feminist Hsin-Jung Tsai Ono Today In 2001 Ono released Blueprint For A Sunrise, which has been a critical success. This album, featuring Ono’s son, Sean Lennon, on acoustic and electronic guitar and keyboard, addresses feminism and survival – with World War II references in the liner motes. Ono’s artistic career and philosophical themes haven’t changed too much during her musical career, which has lasted for over 40 years: humanism and feminism. Especially feminism has always been her main theme, most prominently on Feeling the Space, which I think could be thematically as a companion to Blueprint For A Sunrise. Ono admits some parallels with the new album, but remarks that Feeling the Space was gentler musically, and on the fiercer Blueprint For A Sunrise “the message and the sound go together.”40 What we see today is an older; more mature Yoko Ono. Yet she remains a woman committed to the overriding principals that have always guided her approach to art since she arrived in New York’ Greenwich Village. Ono refuses to allow us to idly sit by and enjoy her works, but drags the viewer or listener into her work and forces us to think, to see the world around us in a new way, and to question our reality. For Ono the process of creating is as important to the final result as the work itself, and she has displayed a unique ability to continue to move audiences over the past forty years with a vision, and creativity unsurpassed by any woman of her generation. 40. Ono said in the interview with John Harris in 2001, “Feeling the Space was more gentle. This time around, the sound is very fierce. On Feeling the Space, on a track like ‘Growing Pain’ I wanted to keep it gentle so that message could get through. This time, the message and the song go together.” Yoko Ono: Artistic Radical, Passionate Feminist (2)
Ono’s Early Musical Development
Ono As Performer and Composer
Yoko Ono: Artistic Radical, Passionate Feminist (3)
Yoko Ono and the Rise of Feminism
Yoko Ono: Artistic Radical, Passionate Feminist (4)
Season of Glass makes people think about the dark time in Ono’s life in 1980, and it also draws the daring, those willing to be taken inside, to hear what Ono has to say just slightly more than six months after Lennon was assassinated before her eyes. Those who wish to erase incident from their minds, and who might consider Ono’s frankness offensive, which wish she wouldn’t rub it in, are best advised to stay away.31 But those who don’t ever want to forget, who are willing to open up and face this woman’s statement, and maybe find something with which to identify, will find many emotions on the album. Ono doesn’t beat around the bush, doesn’t try to forgive and forget – she is a bitter woman. But she is a very strong one. She writes of the back of this album:
Spring passes
And one remembers one’s innocence
Summer passes
And one remembers one’s exuberance
Autumn passes
And one remembers one’s reverence
Winter passes
And one remembers one’s perseverance
There is a season that never passes
And that is the season of glass.
[Ex It, New York, 1997]
Yoko Ono: Artistic Radical, Passionate Feminist (End)
[BLUEPRINT FOR A SUNRISE‧Front Cover‧ Release Date：October 9, 2001]
[Blueprint For A Sunrise ‧ back cover]
文章來源：
http://jungoscar.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2B878CE86ED888CD!1842.entry
這首歌讓我見識到小野洋子的非凡爆發力 實在叫人不敢領教：
WE'RE ALL WATER（1967）
