Pushing the Envelope: Experimental Music Before and After Fluxus

In conjunction with the Zimmerli’s exhibition, at/around/beyond: Fluxus at Rutgers, Rosanne Vita Nahass presents a mini-history of musical works that have “pushed the envelope” by seeking new structural freedoms and exploring thefurthest limits of tonality and sound. Composers such as Wagner, today accepted as a canonical Western composer, was a ground-breaker in his time, especially in his theories of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, which is considered the basis of performance art, an essential element of Fluxus.The performance includes works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century mavericks, including Liszt, Satie, Debussy, Ives, Schoenberg, and John Cage; composers associated with Fluxus in the 1960s; and Annie Gosfield, a twenty-first-century composer inspired by the Fluxus legacy.