Conclusion
I was selected for a Center for Archival Research and Training (CART) fellowship in the late spring of 2020. UC Santa Cruz’s Special Collections department has a unique program which gives students an opportunity to gain hands-on experience surveying, cataloging, and exhibiting donated materials. I was going to work with the Ray and Mariam Rice papers… but as we are all aware, the devastating 2020 COVID–19 pandemic began ravaging the globe.
In California, everything came to a grinding halt around early March. Institutions like UC Santa Cruz began questioning how learning in higher education could exist completely online. Being somewhat naïve or maybe cautiously optimistic, I thought that what we were experiencing would last for a month or maybe two at the most. Partially attributed to a nightmarish four years of failed leadership in our federal government, the pandemic rages on and has claimed close to 600,000 lives. Many communities were disproportionately affected. As a graduate student, I am fortunate enough to have only experienced minor anxieties.
Theoretically, I would be at an archive conducting research or giving a conference paper in another state or country. I would be at the library picking up materials or sitting with my colleagues vis-à-vis listening to and debating ideas. Countless day-to-day normalcies completely evaporated. Like many, I re-evaluated what community means and began exploring the Bay Area.
Over the summer, the campus closed and, in all reality, the United States shut down. Fortunately, my advisor Dr. Amy Beal loaned me books and suggested texts for me to read. I drove to El Cerrito for the first time and gave copies of Larry Polansky’s fantastic “another book of rounds” to the wonderful Charles Amirkhanian and reconnected with my undergraduate colleague Margaret Jones who now holds her Ph.D. in musicology from Berkeley.
Margaret Jones and I attempting to make strange faces while conforming to social distancing standards in Berkeley, California.
I had the urge to get back into an archive and remembered that I photographically documented and wrote extensive notes on a small portion of the John Cage Mycology Collection. Amy mentioned that I should get in touch with Rita Bottoms, as she was the founder and former head of Special Collections. I received her email address through our Supervisory Archivist, Kate Dundon. Rita and I began communicating and this led to a handful of meetings while socially distancing. She discussed her friendship with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and mentioned the Butler Institute of American Art.
It was kind of shocking that she mentioned the Butler Institute of American Art and that she also co-curated an exhibit on Graham Nash and Marc Holbert. I finished my undergraduate degree at The Dana School of Music which is literally across the street from this museum and where I met many friends. This is the place where I studied saxophone and music under the tutelage of incredible professors. “The Butler” is a place where “Wednesday at Noon” concerts happen and where students (including myself) showcase pieces they’ve been working on. Rita and I have very fond memories of this place but in different contexts.
During these meetings, Rita gave me access to some of her personal files on the history of Cage’s mycology collection. I became interested in and began writing about how and why these materials exist in our Special Collections department. Other memorable meetings occurred when Rita invited me and my good friend who is a marine scientist / sketch artist Natasha Vokshoori over for several socially distanced and locally famous concerts (I compare Natasha’s sketches of bivalves to that of Lois Long’s mushroom illustrations in the sense that they can both be studied for their beauty and scientific exactness). On most of these occasions, we listened to Paul Rangell and Emily Abbink play in a Tohono O’odham fiddle tradition while enjoying local Santa Cruz wine.
Marine Scientist / Sketch Artist Natasha Vokhshoori and I listening to Paul Rangell and Emily Abbink play in a Tohono O’odham fiddle tradition at Rita and Tom Bottoms's house. Santa Cruz, CA.
In some ways, this project is an extension of the research I conducted throughout my masters program at Arizona State University. I turned my attention back to John Cage but focused on an entirely new aspect of his life. My knowledge at the time on Cage and mycology was very limited. Further, the idea of local musicology, or studying regional history became a driving force into why I wanted to examine this collection. California and specifically Santa Cruz remains an enigma to me as a Midwesterner but an incredibly special and unique place in my life and current studies.
As the new academic year approached and the summer came to a close, it became clear that the University of California schools would not continue in class instruction. Therefore, CART gave its fellows different options to work on remote projects. I chose “artist in the archives,” where fellows independently developed ideas based on their own research interests, mainly using UC Santa Cruz digital collections for inspiration. Throughout the ten–week winter quarter 2021, I explored the archival materials housed in the Cage collection.
Although I have only searched through four of the fifteen boxes before the university shut down, Alix, Jessica, and Rita provided access to a majority of the other primary sources. In fact, some of the materials they found and forwarded to me are astonishing. The first section, From Music to Mycophile, I used secondary literature to construct a narrative of Cage and then used primary resources to reinforce aspects of the timeline. I developed the second section, A History, through oral and electronic interviews while also consulting the collection for specific dates. There are many voices in the story. Rita is the person who was directly involved in every step regarding the acquisition and beyond. The most apparent issue is maintaining the collection, which was and continues to be expertly handled.
Digital exhibits are a new forum for the dissemination of archival scholarship and I was able to explore this new medium because of the pandemic. I must admit that there were some difficulties using the Scalar platform to express certain ideas, but I designed every page whether it was the audio or the visual element to highlight the text. I hope that the reader will find the organization of information and citation of specific resources useful. In conclusion, I want to thank the CART fellowship program for giving me this opportunity. My project is ongoing and I look forward to in-person collaboration with the individuals that helped me create this digital exhibit and the people I have yet to meet.
Short Biography:
Joseph Finkel is a second-year graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts at degree at Youngstown State University in Ohio and his Master of Arts degree at Arizona State University. Some of his interests include late twentieth–century experimental music composition, politics, and environmentalism. Joe has given papers on John Luther Adams, Ben Johnston, and La Monte Young. He has also published works on the music and ideas of Alvin Curran and John Cage. Recently, Joe has been examining ambient music and Southern California minimalism. He is also interested in independent music publications around the United States (ca. 1970s) and specifically intersections of culture, identity, and narrative, in EAR magazine.
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