Michael Gallope (University of Minnesota)
Lecture Title: Alice Coltrane’s Negative Grammar
1:30 pm
Stoeckel Hall 106
Abstract:
Alice Coltrane’s early musical experiences were as a pianist in a Baptist church in Detroit, though as her career matured, she increasingly drew on the mystical traditions of Hinduism. Following her husband’s death, Coltrane travelled to India and became close with the guru Swami Satchidananda. During this period, Coltrane’s music changed rapidly from bebop into an almost cinematic musical fusion of a droning tanpura, string arrangements, a harp, and an electric organ. At the same time, she began to write many of her own liner notes, while publishing four volumes of devotional diaries. In these writings, Coltrane’s newfound Hindu beliefs facilitated a mystical ascent to registers of universal consciousness, while her music became increasingly ornamented, dissonant, jagged, and stylistically fractured. This talk argues that Alice Coltrane’s mysticism stems from the way she joined a unique fusion of musical idioms to similarly obscure explanatory language—resulting in what I call a negative grammar. Her approach fractured Afro-modernist styles of bebop, while also, like Ornette Coleman, using language in ways that enhanced audiences’ sense of perplexity about her innovations. In dialogue with writings by Baraka, Mailer, Cavell, and Adorno, this talk draws broader conclusions about the ways Coltrane’s adoptions of mysticism exploited and transfigured the longstanding philosophical question of music’s ineffability.