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Nina Simone and the Work of Minoritarian Performance

Side A: Emancipation

I made you a mix tape, but in truth, it’s not a mix tape. In the twenty-first century, we have its less affectively charged, immaterial digital descendent: the playlist. It’s hard to describe the pleasures that came with a tape that a friend had carefully DJ’d and dubbed for you. Analogue technology could make big feelings happen. Truthfully, the mixtape is an anachronistic metaphor because this is a Nina Simone mixtape and at the time Simone produced these recordings, the mixtape didn’t exist. I’ll tell you why I’m playing out this anachronism later, but for now let’s just pretend that’s what this is. Slip on your headphones and slip back to April 7, 1968—three days after the assassination of Dr. King. This is the beginning of our Nina Simone mixtape. I made it for you. I hope that it can provide some kind of something. Something. Whatever it is that you need tonight.

Track 1. “Sunday in Savannah”

Press the play button and listen to the applause of the audience competing with her hands as they stretch across the keyboard with a displaceable attentiveness to the sound. Her piano doesn’t so much accompany her monologue as it meanders purposefully beside and beneath it. We’re listening to a cut from the extended version of Simone’s 1968 album, ’Nuff Said!, consisting mainly of recordings from a performance at the Westbury Music Fair in Jericho, New York, on April 7, 1968. Introducing the song “Sunday in Savannah,” she speaks in earnest, not singing; but in earnest she is singing in the way that she speaks:

We’re glad to see you. And happily surprised that so many of you. We really didn’t expect anybody tonight. And you know whyyyyyy. Everybody knows everything. Everything is everything. Everything is everything. You know why. But we’re glad that you’ve come. To see us. And hope that we can provide. Some kind of something. For you. This evening. This particular evening. This Sunday evening. At this particular time in 1968. We hope that we can give you something. Something. Whatever it is that you need tonight.1

It’s hard to translate into language what it does to you to listen to her voice as she sings her way across these spoken passages. How the voice glides up the word “why” and meanders in the spaces between “everyone” and “everything.” Her cadence and the repetitive recitations of “something,” “everything,” “why,” and “particular” are like a steady drumbeat drawing the ear toward something and somewhere, without giving away the what or where. All these pauses and breaks, giving the listener a second to breathe, think, and ask the following: What kind of something?

On this particular evening in 1968 something was missing. Some kind of something. And not just something: someone. Three days earlier, on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel, a shot rang out and a great hope died. She doesn’t have to say it because it’s already been said. Everybody knows everything. Everything is everything. But still, she insists on the fragmenting singularity and incommensurable particularity of the moment (the parts of the performance that will disappear and withdraw from presence). “This evening,” she says, before looping back to emphasize the singularity of “this particular evening,” before looping back to draw us into “this Sunday evening,” before looping back to “this particular time in 1968.” And then the offer of a gift she can’t but fail to give: “We hope that we can give you something.” What thing? Something that is everything and so nothing and can’t be named but has to be named because we need it. Something for which we could use the word “freedom,” but knowing that every word imaginable is insufficient to name that thing (whatever it is), let’s settle instead on the capaciousness of something. Some kind of something. Whatever it is that you need tonight.

Simone was many things: a brilliant recording artist, a classically trained pianist, a formal iconoclast, an A-list celebrity, an intellectual, a freedom fighter, a black woman, a mother, and a theorist and practitioner of black freedom. She was a performer, which is to say that performance was her job. She toured extensively, recorded prolifically, and this labor took a toll. But as Daphne Brooks, Shana Redmond, Salamishah Tillet, Amber Musser, and Malik Gaines have all variously taught us, Simone put performance to work to effect an insurgent black feminist disorganization and reorganization of the limits and conditions cast upon her body in order to conjure into being something else, something new.2 It was through performance that Simone appropriated the limited materials proffered by a limiting world to improvise new lines of flight, carrying her listener toward something like black freedom. Some kind of something. Whatever it is that you need tonight.

Track 2. “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”

Press play and listen as she improvises on the theme of freedom. An interviewer asks her, “What’s free to you?” She responds by telling a story about the work of minoritarian performance. Freedom, she explains, is a sense. It’s a feeling that exceeds and refuses containment by language: “It’s just a feeling. It’s just a feeling. It’s like how do you tell somebody how it feels to be in love? How are you going to tell anybody who has not been in love how it feels to be in love? You cannot do it to save your life. You can describe things, but you can’t tell them. But you know it when it happens. That’s what I mean by free. I’ve had a couple of times on stage when I really felt free. And that’s something else. That’s really something else.”3 It’s just a feeling because “words don’t go there,” to quote Fred Moten quoting Charles Lloyd: Language is inadequate to the task of communicating that which is incommunicable.4 You can describe things, but you can’t tell them. Freedom as just a feeling is fugitive from linguistic capture. In this way, it’s not unlike sound. “On the one hand,” writes Moten, “‘words don’t go there’ marks the inadequacy of verbal representation of sound while at the same time signaling the excessive, out-from the-outside motion and force with which sound infuses the verbal. Words don’t go there; words go past there.”5 Freedom as just a feeling, like sound, infuses the body with an out-from the-outside motion and force that resonates across, through, and beyond the body. Simone’s music bodies forth the going past and going beyond the “what should be” of freedom’s horizon.

Freedom, for Simone, is “really something else.” A few years earlier, in 1964, when Ernst Bloch and Theodore Adorno gave a joint account of the material, revolutionary, and world-making capacities of utopian aesthetics, they too stumbled upon some kind of something. As Bloch remarked to his friend “Teddy,” while imagining the horizon of communist society:

Thus, now, if a world were to emerge that is hindered for apparent reasons, but that is entirely possible, one could say, it is astonishing that it is not—if such a world, in which hunger and immediate wants were eliminated, entirely in contrast to death, if this world would finally just “be allowed to breathe” and were set free, there would not only be platitudes that would come out at the end and gray prose and a complete lack of prospects and perspectives in regard to existence here and over there, but there would also be freedom from earning instead of freedom to earn, and this would provide some space for such richly prospective doubt, and the decisive incentive toward utopia that is the meaning of Brecht’s short sentence, “Something’s missing.” This sentence, which is in Mahoganny, is one of the most profound sentences that Brecht ever wrote, and it is in two words. What is this “something”?6

For Bloch, utopian longing—wishing, hoping, and dreaming of and for something better than this—is that which allows us to survive and sustain in the face of negation and deprivation. To know that “something’s missing” is to feel the absence of something, an encounter with lack that “activates and galvanizes us towards the goal of a better life.”7

Something missing could also be the lack of action and galvanization. In the wake of the murder of four little girls in the 16th Street Church, Dr. King gave a sermon: “They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. So they have something to say to us in their death.”8 Lauren Berlant associates King’s “something” with the “something” that surfaces in two novels animated by the 16th Street Church’s bombing: Toni Morrison’s 1977 Song of Solomon and Michelle Cliff’s 1989 No Telephone for Heaven. In the latter, “something” appears in the text thus: “Today there is a story which should have caused the sun to eclipse the earth—something … something in the heavens should have objected.”9 In these three cases, Berlant argues,

Something … stands for the irreducible violent sublimity of American racism in 1963, 1977, 1987, and beyond; something, a word that holds the place for a demand to produce something like a language … which in this instance might attest to the random encounter of systemic racial violence with individuals who happen to be somewhere, at some time, doing, then suddenly not doing, some “thing.” Always crucially after the fact, these texts take the “fact” back so they create a decolonized history of the “something” that didn’t happen, the thing to be specified, endlessly, just beyond what seems possible.10

Something “stands in” for that which doesn’t have, but needs, a language. Something is an attempt to name “the irreducible violent sublimity of American racism,” the fact that something “didn’t happen,” as well as that something which is “just beyond what seems possible.”

If it’s anything, freedom is something that’s just beyond what seems possible. Something, for Berlant’s King, holds the future of justice. It is mobilized “on behalf of creating at least a prosthetic future where a real scene of justice might take the place held, here, by the word something.”11 So while Simone’s description of freedom illuminates the disruptively and productively excessive, uncontainable capacity of black performance to go past there (“just beyond what seems possible”), it also points to the impossibility of freedom within the conditions secured by the present. Freedom is something that’s missing, so freedom is just a feeling.

For Bloch, the “feeling of freedom” is a kind of placebo—an appearance of freedom that arises to cover over the fact that freedom isn’t here. Within liberal capitalism’s regime of individual (and individuating) civil rights, the “feeling of freedom” masquerades as something like freedom while being tautologically “guaranteed by freedom.”12 For this reason, Bloch derisively observes that, “freedom as feeling does not appear in utopia but in natural law.”13 Freedom, within liberalism and capitalist modernity, is a legal fiction (in terms of rights), rather than an ontological condition; it’s just a feeling. That’s all it is. What we need is freedom of a material kind. This notion of freedom is not the freedom secured by the bourgeois revolutions (the bondage of the “freedom to earn”) but some other kind of freedom that comes with “freedom from earning.”

Press the button and loop back around to the top, but layer the tracks so that it’s Bloch and Simone singing in syncopated polyphony. When we have nothing else, the longing for the feeling of freedom might be the only thing we’ve got to keep us alive. Especially for those with nothing but their labor to sell. So, it’s not our fault that we don’t know how to imagine freedom, that it comes to us as just a feeling. Black people know that freedom is mostly because we know what it is not to have it. We might thus differentiate between the experience of freedom as a sense (Simone’s “just a feeling”) and the Blochian “feeling of freedom” promised by the liberal order. That is, we might consider how Simone mobilizes black performance in order to produce a means to sustain people “with courage and hope, not by looking away from the real, but, on the contrary, by looking into its progress, into its horizon” and by letting the sense of freedom radiate out from her performing body to sustain her listener in turn.14 Between the space of the imaginary and the corporeal (which is the realm of performance), the feeling of freedom glimmers as both concrete reality (as experienced in the body) and anticipatory dawning. When Simone posits freedom as “just a feeling,” she is describing something that is not yet freedom. This something is akin to the way Bloch describes utopia, “it is not yet in the sense of a possibility; that it could be there if we could only do something for it.”15 Whatever freedom is, and whatever something we could do for it, our experience of it has been paradoxical. We have never been free, but we have been being free.

Track 3. “Little Girl Blue”

Press the play button and listen as the right hand introduces us to the familiar melody of “Good King Wenceslas” before folding the song into a Rodgers and Hart tune prepared in the style of Bach. As the right hand climbs the keyboard, the left hand journeys in the opposite direction toward a lower register that keeps us tethered to the earth. The voice hovers between the two as she enters with a lyric that gives a name to herself: “unhappy little girl blue.” Developed during her earliest performances in a small, forgettable bar in Atlantic City, “Little Girl Blue” became a central part of Simone’s repertoire during the mid to late 1950s and it lent its name to her debut album, released by Bethlehem records in 1959.16 Years later, when she performed the song at Montreux in 1976, she amended the lyrics slightly to refer to herself as “liberated little girl blue.”17 How, one wonders, does one get from “unhappy” to “liberated”? Minoritarian subjects know about the need for freedom, but we also know that emancipation is not the same thing as freedom. Emancipation is the ritual act of becoming free, but what comes after is usually not freedom, but its disappointment.

There is a resonance between minoritarian performance, which stages the becoming of freedom’s becoming, and what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a “minor literature.” “How many people,” they ask, “today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve?”18 Twenty years before they wrote this, Simone was already offering a lesson in becoming minoritarian and the deterritorializing capacities of minoritarian performance. This was perhaps most evident in her appropriation of Bach. To get a sense of what this sounds like, press play and wander back into Simone’s first performances on the stage of an Atlantic City bar.

Little Girl Blue was recorded with little production support in a single, grueling fourteen-hour recording session at New York’s independent Beltone studio.19 As Brooks describes the album, “It remains the first (public) record(ing) of Nina Simone’s counterintuitive brilliance as an artist who defied the center, ran circles in the margins, and wove together ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ forms to create an off-beat repertoire that was what some might argue, ‘emo’ before ‘emo,’ Afropunk, folk eclectic, jazz torch song magic.”20 In order to grasp the significance of Little Girl Blue as an event, it’s important to understand how the new sounds contained on that album emerged from the domain of performance as work and Simone’s mobilization of performance to effect the unworking of work.21 But one needs to clarify and distinguish the work of minoritarian performance from performance as a form of labor (or a job) for minoritarian subjects.

At the beginning of her career, Simone’s work as a popular musician was merely employment: a means to raise money for a formal education in classical music. “I didn’t even think of it as music,” she would later reflect; “it was a job.”22 José Muñoz insisted on a minoritarian performance theory that would be “disarming of a celebratory precritical aura that shrouds some performative research. It is important to keep in mind that not all performances are liberatory or transformative.”23 Capitalism transforms every conceivable area of human activity into a source for the extraction of value.24 Performance, as labor, is no exception. Within a racialized division of labor, people of color in the United States are commonly denied access to sustainable and fulfilling employment. Performance has long been one of the few means for getting dinner on the table, but it’s not always an emancipatory one. “Minoritarian subjects do not always dance because they are happy,” wrote Muñoz; “sometimes they dance because their feet are being shot at.”25 Performance is work. Hard work. And when performance is reduced to work for the minoritarian subject, it comes with what he describes as a “mandate to ‘perform’ for the amusement of a dominant power block.… Performance, from the positionality of the minoritarian subject, is sometimes nothing short of forced labor.”26

When freedom is reduced to the “freedom to earn,” masquerading as the “feeling of freedom,” our access to freedom is blocked by work, which in turn blocks our capacity to imagine other ways of being beyond the “freedom to earn.” “The problem with work,” Kathi Weeks tells us, “is not just that it monopolizes so much time and energy, but that it also dominates the social and political imaginaries.”27 So when performance becomes work, it too becomes a blockage to freedom. This is why it’s critical to issue a distinction between performance as work for the minoritarian subject and the work of minoritarian performance (which is the emancipatory unworking of work). If Simone’s repeated insistence that performance was her job teaches us anything, it is that not all performances by women of color, queers of color, or trans people of color will be minoritarian performance. To this extent, Simone’s own (auto)biography is expressive of the antagonism between the emancipatory work of minoritarian performance and performance as a form of minoritarian labor.

Press play and let Little Girl Blue tell you a story about what it might have been like to watch twenty-year-old Simone performing in a dark, smoky bar. Presaging Phillip Auslander’s observation that early forms of mediated performance often strove to reproduce the experience of live performance, Simone once described Little Girl Blue as a reproduction of one of her famed sets at the Atlantic City bar where she was discovered: “When you listen to that Bethlehem album you’re hearing the songs played as they were at the Midtown Bar.”28 In addition to the title track, the lineup included her surprise hit cover of Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy,” the show tune “Love Me or Leave Me” (featuring an inversion of Bach’s Inventions, discussed below), and a version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” mashed up with Beethoven’s “Midnight Sonata.”

The sound of Little Girl Blue was the cumulative effect of a life spent working as a performer. From an early age, Eunice Kathleen Waymon, as she was known back then, pursued her mother’s dream to “become the first black American concert pianist.”29 Raised in a musically inclined family, she began playing piano in the home. She cultivated her prodigious talent as she learned the fundamentals of improvisation and audience engagement in the black church, playing piano at services and revivals to support her mother’s Methodist ministry.30 “Gospel music was mostly improvisation within a fixed framework,” she wrote. It “taught me about improvisation, how to shape music in response to an audience and then how to shape the mood of the audience in response to my music.”31 Framing improvisation as a formal aesthetic register, technique, and collaborative practice, Simone reminds us that improvisation is something that a performer learns (whether being taught by another and/or by oneself). In doing so, she avoids the reduction of improvisation to an intrinsic, inherent, or biologically determined trait of black artists. If improvisation is often associated with black people, this proximity might be best apprehended as evidence of the creative genius by which black people adapt to conditions of annihilation, learning how to improvise freedom and sustain life from within the fixed coordinates determined by white supremacy.

Even as a child, while accompanying her mother’s ministry, performance was her job. As her talent gained recognition from both white and black community members in the small, segregated town of Tyron, North Carolina, a group of women (led by Simone’s mother) worked together to raise funds for formal training with a local piano teacher named Muriel Mazzanovich. Throughout her childhood, Eunice performed concerts of Bach and Rachmaninoff to segregated audiences in order to raise money for her education—first with Mazzanovich and later at the Allen School (a private boarding academy in Asheville, North Carolina). Following graduation, Mazzanovich helped her to secure a scholarship for study at the Julliard Academy in New York in order to prepare her to audition for Philadelphia’s famed Curtis Institute of Music. Waymon was ultimately denied admission to Curtis and you know why. The rejection gutted her and played a critical role in the development of her race consciousness.32

After being rejected from Curtis, she had to get a job to support her training as well as her family so she started to work as an accompanist and vocal coach. Working as a private tutor gave Eunice access to the vast trove of popular music that would eventually comprise her repertoire. She would dig through boxes of sheet music looking for obscure show tunes to teach her students, committing the songs to memory “rather than us[ing] sheet music [because] it saved time.”33 Soon she got hip to the fact that you could make even more money playing music in local bars than teaching private lessons, and she landed a seasonal gig in Atlantic City at a place called the Midtown Bar. All the while, she continued her training, enrolling as a private student with Vladimir Sokhaloff (an instructor at Curtis).

It was at the Midtown that Nina Simone was born. She assumed the stage name to hide from her minister mother the fact that she was playing “the Devil’s Music” for a living. While her gigs may have helped with material survival, in the beginning they were hardly emancipatory. Above everything else, it was waged labor: “I performed from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., with a break of fifteen minutes every hour. For that I got ninety dollars a week plus tips.”34 The Midtown was a dark, narrow room dominated by a long bar and featuring a small stage with a piano set up at the back. In spite of the inauspicious surroundings, Nina treated her Midtown sets as if she were playing in a premiere concert hall. When she was a child, Mazzanovich trained her in the corporeal habitus of a classical musician, issuing lessons in “how to bow after a recital, how to walk gracefully on and off the stage, and how to sit up straight at the piano and look elegant and composed while I was being introduced.”35 She incorporated all the seriousness of her training into her first performances in the bar, embodying these rituals, and even donning a chiffon evening gown while sipping on a glass of milk as she played popular songs for an often empty room of drunk regulars.36

Simone made a distinction between the emancipatory work of performance, which she felt when performing classical music, and the alienating drudgery of her job in the Midtown Bar. The performance of classical music was a means through which she could touch upon the promise of autonomy and a life in freedom in happiness. To the young Eunice Waymon, the music of Bach, Czerny, and Liszt “was real music, and in it I found a happiness I didn’t have to share with anyone.”37 But while she initially regarded popular songs with relative disdain, rather than succumb to the drudgery of her 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift, she began to play with her material, transforming her work at the Midtown into a condition of possibility.

She started by imagining the performance as occurring elsewhere, “closing my eyes and pretending I was somewhere like Carnegie Hall or the Metropolitan Opera.”38 But soon enough she mobilized her performances to improvise a way out of the stultifying and disappointing prospects of her job as a bar musician: “So the only way I could stand playing in the Midtown was to make my set as close to classical music as possible without getting fired.… The strange thing was that when I started to do it, to bring the two halves together, I found a pleasure in it almost as deep as the pleasure I got from classical music.”39 If Simone’s performances at the Midtown began as the alienating experience of work, it was through performance that Simone was able to emancipate herself (if only momentarily) from the depressing drudgery of work: “I sat down, closed my eyes and drifted away on the music.”40 Through performance Simone was able carve out a zone of autonomy, pleasure, and happiness in which she could begin a song in the Midtown Bar and close her eyes to travel to a concert hall in her imagination where she could be some kind of free.

To use the language of autonomy is to highlight a resonance between what Simone was doing on the stage at the Midtown and what Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi describe as the “central theme of” the Italian workerist Marxism known as “Autonomia”: “the struggle against work, the refusal of work.”41 Inspired by the young Marx, the Autonomists have long understood the regime of work to be an alienating domain of coercion and unfreedom. The collective refusal of work (paradigmatically exemplified in the general strike) is one of the few means laborers have to force capital to alter its course of development.42 But the refusal of work also promises a path out of capitalism, as Lotringer and Marazzi suggest: “Only when the worker’s labor is reduced to the minimum is it possible to go beyond, in the literal sense, the capitalist mode of production.”43

Young people began to gather nightly for her sets, as she improvised a new aesthetic born from a unique fusion of popular standards, show tunes, gospel, hymns, and classical composition: “I knew hundreds of popular songs and dozens of classical pieces, so what I did was combine them. I arrived prepared with classical pieces, hymns and gospel songs and improvised on those, occasionally slipping in a part from a popular tune.”44 While performing popular music, she eschewed the short-form traditional pop standard to transform each piece into an extended theme and variation that could last for the entirety of the set: “Each song—which isn’t the right way to describe what I was playing—lasted anywhere between thirty and ninety minutes.”45 Improvising beyond the limits of genre, Nina Simone was producing and setting free a new sound: “I was creating something new, something that came out of me.”46 As she performed, she was offering her audience members a lesson in how it would feel to be free.

Track 4. “Love Me or Leave Me”

Performance and pedagogy are conjunctive terms. Pedagogy often relies on the embodied rituals and protocols of performance and theatricality as much as performance has a pedagogical function. Think, for example, of Joseph Roach’s enigmatic definition of performance as “the process of trying out various candidates in different situations—the doomed search for originals by continuously auditioning stand-ins.”47 This definition productively and curiously makes no immediate reference to the expected vocabulary of presentation, theatricality, and aesthetics, focusing instead on embodied processes of exploration, transfer, and surrogacy—all elements that are critical to the pedagogical scene.

Diana Taylor expands on this line of thought to consider the epistemological valences of performance. For Taylor, performance functions as a means for the transmission of knowledge and affect vis-à-vis embodied practices defined as the repertoire. “The repertoire requires presence,” writes Taylor. “People participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being a part of the transmission.”48 What, we could ask, is pedagogy but a performance of the transmission of knowledge? But if Taylor insists on presence, her position on this point is ameliorated by her simultaneous insistence that the act of transmission can reconstitute (often in a new form) that which has seemingly disappeared or is no longer present: “Multiple forms of embodied acts are always present, though in a constant state of againness. They reconstitute themselves, transmitting communal memories, histories, and values from one group/generation to the next.”49 In other words, performance is pedagogical: “Embodied and performed acts generate, record, and transmit knowledge.”50 If minoritarian performance is a means for realizing the freedom drive, the pedagogy of minoritarian performance is the transmission and sharing out of the feeling of freedom.

Press play and jump forward to a master class in minoritarian performance on Little Girl Blue’s “Love Me or Leave Me.” We can only imagine what a twenty- to thirty-minute version of “Love Me or Leave Me” might have sounded like in the Midtown Bar, but the central passage in both of Simone’s major recordings of the song (and a live performance on TV in 1959) offers us a hint. As the first verse comes to a conclusion, Simone’s dominant hand stretches right to play around in a higher register, jumping across the keys in syncopated rhythm until a melody coheres into a riff evocative of Bach’s Inventions.

The Inventions were designed as teaching tools, and Simone’s routine employment of Bach and his Inventions is perhaps indicative of the fact that, next to gospel and Mazzanovich, Simone credited Bach with being one of her most influential teachers. Of all the composers Simone played (and played with), Bach was her favorite. As she studied him, she came to study with him. In the pedagogical scene, Bach was conjured from the past, into the presence of Simone’s performing present. To say that Bach was one of her teachers is also to say that it was through Bach’s compositions that her teacher (Mazzanovich) taught.

Early in their training together, Mazzanovich abandoned the primers designed for introductory music students to introduce her prodigious pupil to Bach.51 As strict as Mazzanovich may have been, her pedagogy was no mere imparting of knowledge into a willing, passive receptacle, or what Jacques Rancière describes as teaching born from “the explicative order.”52 Instead, Simone describes her training as an experience of opening up to an encounter with the pleasures of performance: “It was hard work, but Miz Mazzy had shown me how good it could be to spend time in the company of genius, so the more familiar I became with Mozart and Beethoven, Czerny and Liszt, and my beloved Bach, the more I enjoyed it. As I grew older I had a sense that my future was as much in my own hands as in those of my teachers—that they pointed me in various musical directions, but I was doing the exploring on my own.”53 This gesture to “my teachers” could just as well be a reference to Mazzanovich and Sokhaloff as to Mozart, Beethoven, Czerny, Liszt, or her “beloved Bach.” In Mazzanovich’s home, Bach was more than just a composer for Nina to master. He was a presence in the room with Eunice and Mazzanovich. “You must do it this way Eunice,” Mazzanovich would say. “Bach would like it this way, do it again!”54 Conjured by Eunice’s teacher, Bach entered the room, speaking and teaching through Mazzanovich as much as Mazzanovich spoke and taught through Bach’s composition.

Simone conceived of the pedagogical scene less as a hierarchy of transferred knowledge than as an intersubjective encounter in which the construction of her future as artist “was as much in my own hands as in those of my teachers.” Having asked us to look at the hands of her teachers, however, she offers a clue as to what she needed from them, asking us to look at what their hands were doing: “They pointed me in various musical directions.” This image of the teacher’s pointing hand is resonant with a passage in Eve Sedgwick’s essay on pedagogy, where she describes the problematic of conceiving of the Buddha’s record of pedagogy (his “many sutras”) as akin to a finger pointing to the moon.55 The problem, she observes, is that the student often becomes attached to the sutras (the finger) and mistakes the lesson for being the moon itself. For Sedgwick, “The implication of the finger/moon image is that pointing may invite less misunderstanding than speech, but that even its nonlinguistic concreteness cannot shield it from the slippery problems that surround reference.”56 The student attached to the pointing finger risks mistaking the means (pointing) for an end (the moon), getting lost in the swamp of slippery reference while failing to grasp that the moon is not an end that is reached through the proper execution of the teacher’s presumed (but to a degree unknowable and unknowing) intentions. This is why it is critical that Simone follows the pointing fingers of her teachers not to a presumed destination but, instead, to a realm of improvisation, exploration, and pure means. And it’s for this reason that her incorporation of Bach’s Inventions into “Love Me or Leave Me” must be understood as a master class in getting free.

To get a sense of what I’m trying to say, press the play button to go forward but you’re really going back before 1968 in Jericho before 1959 at the Beltone studios before 1941 in Muriel Mazzanovich’s house. Go all the way back to a classroom in Leipzig, Germany, in 1723 and listen to the sounds of Bach as he teaches through performance, playing the Inventions for a student in order to teach the student how to play.

Inventions were short pedagogical exercises composed and used by Bach (and his German contemporaries) to teach students how to play (and compose for) the new and increasingly popular clavier (or harpsichord).57 By Bach’s own account, the Inventions were meant to teach students “a plain way … to play neatly … to play correctly … [and] not only to acquire good ideas, but also to work them out themselves, and, finally to acquire a cantabile [a smooth, flowing, singing] style of playing.”58 The intended result was not the domination of the pupil, however, but instead the emancipation of students’ creative and exploratory potential, achieved by allowing them to gain “a strong predilection for and foretaste of composition.”59 The Inventions are thus marked by a productive tension between the imposition of a newly established order and the disorder of the creative, emancipatory freedom drive of compositional practice.

I like to think that Nina turned to Bach because she sensed Bach’s minoritarian tendencies. Caught in the break between order and freedom, Bach is both major and minor. As Bloch describes him, “Bach speaks out of the lyrically attained self of hoping, albeit intricately-consummately, and as the eternal corrective to all beyond within the dramatic form.”60 Bach shuttles frenetically between the emancipatory hopes and drives of minoritarian becoming and the normative correctives issued and enforced by the majoritarian order. He is undoubtedly major in that he’s Bach, but one also senses his minority insofar as (in spite of or perhaps because of his attempt to produce a well-organized world in which every note falls into its absolutely perfect place) there is an exhaustively imaginative, great going beyond to Bach that cannot be contained.

Music theorist Vasili Byros (following David Ledbetter) teaches us that “Bach’s general predisposition—and possibly his pedagogical prescription [in the Inventions]—was for ‘assimilating styles’ and ‘mixing styles into new composites.’ ”61 The result of this sonic hybridity led Bach’s friend and contemporary Johann Adolf Sheibe to complain of the “disorder” of his compositions: “Everything is so chaotically mixed together that one cannot find a dominant style or a proper expression.”62 Against Sheibe’s condemnation of Bach’s disorganizing effects, I am suggesting that it is the refusal to reproduce “a dominant style or a proper expression” that made Bach into Simone’s unlikely professor in the art of minoritarian performance.

Describing the experience of performing Bach, Simone mobilized the seemingly chaotic metaphor of a “great storm,” emphasizing the creative capacities of his disordering and reorganization of sound: “When you play Bach’s music you have to understand that he’s a mathematician and all the notes you play add up to something—they make sense. They always add up to climaxes, like ocean waves getting bigger and bigger until after a while when so many waves have gathered you have a great storm. Each note you play is connected to the next note, and every note has to be executed perfectly or the whole effect is lost.”63 Simone assimilated Bach into her repertoire, mixing the classical with the popular to produce a new composite.

When listening to Simone’s rendition of “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” during her first performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1959, for example, one encounters an extraordinary piano-guitar duet with lifelong collaborator Al Schackman. The variations, extension, and development of the melodies that comprise their duet “add up” to produce (or make) something new; they make sense. And at the precise moment the notes produced by her piano and his guitar “add up” to something, they also exceed it. Crashing up against the limits of containment “like ocean waves getting bigger and bigger,” the ordering of sound gathers into the simultaneously creative and destructive force of the tempest of freedom’s becoming in the song’s explosive conclusion. That this development occurs through an improvisation in the style of the Inventions is of critical importance. Simone is teaching us something in the style of her teacher.

In 1873 Philipp Spitta published a Kant-inflected study of Bach’s life and work.64 In the section focusing on the Inventions, Spitta teaches us about Bach as a teacher. “Of all the great German composers,” he reflected, “Bach is the only one round whom are grouped any great number of disciples—men, too, who do not owe their chief glory to their masters.”65 By Spitta’s account, Bach developed the Inventions to teach techniques that would transcend the harpsichord’s mechanical and “soulless tone.”66 He affected the “intrinsic animation [of the clavier] by means of polyphony and rich harmonic treatment, of a steady and thoroughly progressive melodic development; and … of increased rapidity of action.”67 On the one hand, the Inventions disciplined the pupil’s body so that it could “cleanly” and “neatly” perform these feats. But on the other hand, they affected the emancipation of the body from itself, disorganizing, dehabituating, and deterritorializing the extremities in order to free the player’s body up to new possible uses and the invention of Bach’s new sound.68 To an extent, Bach’s Inventions aim for the unworking of the body, rendering inoperative both the body and its expressive functions.

Inoperativity can be thought of as a practice of deactivating a thing or a body as much as it can be a process that brings about the cessation and abolishment of work in and for the thing or body. Nancy describes inoperativity as the “unworking of work,” but it is Giorgio Agamben who thinks the concept in relationship to the realm of performance.69 Agamben insists that inoperativity is pure means, or a means without end, most commonly activated through play. As pure means, play “emancipates” and “liberates” habituated behavior, but may also emancipate subjects from the relations of subjection and domination that are produced through behavioral routines.70 In the realm of human activity, performance becomes a way of playing with the body and rendering it inoperative: “Consider the dancer as he or she undoes and disorganizes the economy of corporeal movements to then rediscover them, at once intact and transfigured, in the choreography.”71 In performance the body’s corporeal activity is placed on display while its movement and gestures are liberated from their traditional uses, ends, and modes of signification in order to “dispose [the body] toward a new use, one that does not abolish the old use but persists in it and exhibits it.”72

Spitta notes that Bach would often teach his students through performance, “urging them on to higher aims with all the earnestness of a teacher, by performing the examples he had set them.”73 Then, he images the scene:

To release the note, the tips of the fingers were not so much lifted as withdrawn; this was necessary to give equality to the playing, because the passing of one of the middle fingers over the little finger or the thumb could only be effected by drawing back the latter; and it contributed to the cantabile [singing style] effect, as well as to clearness in executing rapid passages on the clavichord. The result of all this was that Bach played with a scarcely perceptible movement of his hands; his fingers hardly seemed to touch the keys, and yet everything came out with perfect clearness, and a pearly roundness and purity. His body, too, remained perfectly quiescent, even during the most difficult pedal passages on the organ or harpsichord; his pedal technique was smooth and unforced as his fingering.74

We learn many things from this passage. First, we learn that (with unforced fingering) Bach had the potential to be pretty good in bed. Sex, like performance, is the realm of corporeal inoperativity and Bach’s (and Simone’s) climactic compositional structure mimics the cumulative force of orgasmic climax. But we also see how, like good sex, the Inventions opened up the performer’s body to a new use and the creation of a new sound. And, in the end, we learn that, rather than resulting in the complete emancipation of the player’s body, Bach’s pedagogy tames and contains it in perfect quiescence.

As Bach performs, sound emerges from a motionless player “with perfect clearness” from fingers that “hardly seemed to touch the keys [and the] scarcely perceptible movement of his hands.” At once emancipated from its previous habits, the player’s body is freshly dominated by the order imposed by the technical demands of the composition. It was as if, by mastering the technical demands required of playing “neatly” and “correctly,” the body of Bach’s student had to be contained as the sound was cleaved from the disruptive messiness of the flesh. If we could say that the soul was finally infused into the soulless clavier, this was achieved only by alienating it from the body of the performer in the process.

Both the proletariat and the black performer know that there’s an inherent danger to corporeal alienation and the disciplining of the flesh: the making of the body “perfectly quiescent.” Simone’s play on and intervention in work like Bach’s Inventions would broker no such comportment. Willfully refusing the order demanded by his pedagogy, she exceeded it and journeyed into the great beyond that it simultaneously promised and foreclosed. But this is not failure, or if it is, it is the kind of queer failure that opens up new ways of being in the world.75

“Love Me or Leave Me” is exemplary of what I mean when I talk about the emancipatory pedagogy of minoritarian performance. Appropriating the Inventions for the song, Simone realizes their emancipatory will, their intention to disorganize the body. But she also refuses their command to be neat and orderly and instead follows them through to the creative space to which Bach was drawn, but could not fully free himself up to get to.

Performing the song on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1959, her fingers move across the keys “executing rapid passages,” but with a heavy and at times kinetic force that draws the spectator’s attention back to her body, centering and emphasizing the fact that it is a black woman who is producing this ingenious sound. Toward the conclusion of this passage, the wandering figurations crash into and explode against each other, abandoning the “neat” and “clean” sound desired by Bach. Now press fast forward and jump to 1966, when Simone re-recorded the song for Phillips Records and included it on the album Let It All Out.76 Here, Simone is finally capable of emancipating the Inventions from Bach’s call to order in order to explore the emancipatory terrain of the “attained self of hoping” that Bloch located in Bach. Start the track and listen as about fifty seconds into the recording, the voice withdraws to give the keys center stage. Simone launches into a standard improvisational jazz solo. But soon, as if the fingers couldn’t be contained by the demands of genre, the right hand erupts into rapid, baroque embellishments.

At times, these incursions appear to have the “clean” precision demanded by Bach, but at others the notes willfully and forcefully crash together, issuing miniature disruptions that take the sound in a new direction. As you listen, she is sucked back into the swinging impulses of a mediocre show tune, which she animates with a life-giving, disruptive blackness. Then notice as the baroque returns with greater confidence. The right hand begins to wander through the upper keys and after a while the left hand moves through a series of broken chords: arpeggios moving below and beneath the melody. At first the left cedes dominance to and supports the right, developing into a subtle counterpoint. But then an expansion and melodic development as the minor hand goes off exploring on its own, introducing an unapologetic harmonic alternative as the two hands produce a polyphonic sphere composed of a unity of sonic difference. A great explosion of sound erupts from the keyboard and Simone’s hands crash down across the keys and each other, moving through and between polyphony and cacophony, reaching out and beyond the limits imposed by Bach to point toward some kind of something else.

Minoritarian performance is sometimes an act of maroon banditry. It takes what it needs from the major and disorganizes/reorganizes it so that we can improvise new means without end. By putting the major in concert with the minor, minoritarian performance disorganizes the major, rendering it inoperative. It emancipates the minor from the major and opens up new, previously impossible possibilities within it. “The activity that results from this,” Agamben writes, “thus becomes a pure means, that is, a praxis that, while firmly maintaining its nature as a means, is emancipated from its relationship to an end; it has joyously forgotten its goal and can now show itself as such, as a means without end.”77