Protecting History, Resisting Legibility: Voice and Defiance in Making Art

Abstract

A composer/writer reflects on the struggle to create work of integrity in a captive and commodified culture. Approached from a biographical perspective and from the privileged position of a dual Canadian and American citizen, the author explores the possibilities for the creation of art that arises from historical engagement and process; art that does not conflate the vanities of personal revelation with power of expression or the manipulation of market categories with the steel of intellection. Sources of identity, voice and the faded issue of “authenticity” are examined in the context of legibility and its resistance as American cultural norms.