GREY WALTER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 87

sense, the decentered quality of the musical performance hung together with
a decentered, nonmodern subject position of the performer. Fourth, I want
to comment on what I think of as the hylozoism of this sort of music, but to
get clear on that it helps to refer to the work of another pioneer in this field,
Richard Teitelbaum.
Teitelbaum was yet another person who had a transformative encoun-
ter with Walter's writings. In 1966, “by chance, I found a copy of W. Grey
Walter's pioneering work The Living Brain in Rome. Studying it thoroughly, I
was particularly interested in the sections on flicker and alpha feedback, and
by descriptions of the hallucinatory experiences reported by some subjects”
(Teitelbaum 1974, 55). Having learned of Lucier's work, Teitelbaum hit upon
the idea of using EEG readouts to control the electronic synthesizers then be-
ing developed in the United States by Robert Moog (on which see Pinch and
Trocco 2002), which led to the first performance of a work called Spacecraft
by the Musica Elettronica Viva Group on a tour of Europe in autumn 1967
(Teitelbaum 1974, 57). On the experience of performing in Spacecraft , Teitel-
baum recalled that (59)
the unusual sensations of body transcendence and ego-loss that occurred in this
music—and in related biofeedback experiences—seemed aptly described . . .
in the Jewish mystical texts of the Kabbalah: in the state of ecstacy a man “sud-
denly sees the shape of his self before him talking to him and he forgets his
self and it is disengaged from him and he sees the shape of his self before him
talking to him and predicting the future.” With five musicians simultaneously
engaged in the same activities—electronically mixing, inter-modulating with
each other and issuing from the same loudspeakers—a process of non-ordinary
communication developed, guiding individual into collective consciousness,
merging the many into one.
By the slippery word “hylozoism” I want to refer to a spiritually charged awe
at the performative powers of nature that seems to inhabit this quotation: the
idea evident in Teitelbaum's and Lucier's work (and in the New Music of the
sixties more generally) that, so to speak, it's all there in nature already, that
the classically modern detour through human creativity and design is just
that, a detour that we could dispense with in favor of making nature itself—
here the alpha rhythms of the brain—audible (or visible). 84 Let me just note
for the moment that this idea goes very well with the cybernetic ontology
of performative interaction. Again we can understand Teitelbaum's work as
cybernetic ontological theater—an approach to music that at once conjures