by Cosey Fanni Tutti (Music 786.7 Tutti)
The history of early electronic
music is indebted to the work of a lot of women, such as Delia Derbyshire,
Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, Laurie Anderson, Wendy Carlos, Annea Lockwood,
Suzanne Ciani, Clara Rockmore, Elaine Radigue, and Pauline Oliveros. Today,
we’re going to discuss another woman who belongs on that list: musician,
artist, writer and industrial music pioneer Cosey Fanni Tutti. As a co-founder
of Throbbing Gristle in 1976, often regarded as the first industrial music
band, Tutti combined work with primitive electronics and performance art. In
the 1980s, she went on to start the band Chris & Cosey with fellow TG
bandmate Chris Carter, in which they continued to innovate in a variety of
electronic music styles, particularly early iterations of many styles that
ended up becoming the norm in dance club music of the 80s and 90s—many of these
records are part of a reissue series that started in August of this year. Tutti
has also done solo albums, worked with visual art and film, and she published
her autobiography in 2017. Her newest book, Re-Sisters, was published last year, and you can
borrow it from the Polley Music Library.
The existence of this book is a
fascinating story unto itself, which Tutti discusses in an introductory
author’s note. You could say that this book is vaguely a “pandemic project,”
though Tutti is a very busy artist and remained so even during COVID shutdowns.
She was commissioned to compose music for a documentary on the life of composer
Delia Derbyshire in 2018, and to prepare for writing this soundtrack, she
conducted lots of research into Derbyshire’s life and work, meeting with her
surviving friends and coworkers, and poring through the Derbyshire archives
held at the University of Manchester. Around the same time, Tutti happened to
be reading The Book of Margery Kempe, the autobiography of the
medieval-era Christian mystic that many consider to be the first
English-language autobiography. Tutti was also working on a film related to her
own biography, and eventually the work of all three women (Derbyshire, Kempe,
and herself) came together in her thinking as representing a trio of
“re-sisters,” or women who charted their own pioneering paths, and expressed
themselves on their own terms.
This book is a fascinating
combination of styles: Tutti writes with approachable, conversational prose,
smoothly combining elements of autobiography and historical biography of her
other subjects. There is also an essay-like quality to the book, as she brings
its three protagonists together in comparison, documenting the continuity of
the kinds of struggles they faced no matter the era in which they lived. Many
of their struggles, though, are not light reading. As those who have read
Tutti’s autobiography might expect, elements of the sexual abuse she lived
through appear again in this book. Horrific as parts of her own past were,
Tutti finds in reading Kempe’s book that she arguably went through even more,
partially as a product of simply living as a woman in the pre-Enlightenment
era: “The recording of her process of self-transformation, with all its trials
and tribulations, exposes misogyny, male entitlement and female subjugation on
a level difficult to relate to from a twenty-first century perspective.” These
women all went on to become pioneers in their fields, but one can’t help but
imagine how much more they could have done if they hadn’t been held back by
circumstances beyond their control.
There is also a fantastic brief
biography of Daphne Oram near the beginning of the book. Oram was the founder
of the Radiophonic Workshop where Derbyshire went on to produce much great
work, and she persisted for years pressuring her management about the need for
an electronic music department at the BBC, going so far as to come into the
office after hours to cobble together electronic music equipment and produce
music on her own. But despite her founding the Workshop, Tutti’s research found
that it continued to be a sexist work environment during Derbyshire’s tenure
there, and there appears to even be residual inequalities in place even today.
The main narrative structure in the
book, though, mostly follows the working process that Tutti used to compose
music for the Derbyshire documentary. It’s clear that she approached this
project with the utmost of respect for Derbyshire’s legacy. Even while working
on other projects, Tutti set aside a kind of extra studio within her own studio
just for Derbyshire-related work, so that it could retain its own focus and
reflect some of Delia’s own working methods. Her research involved not only
reading about Derbyshire’s life and speaking with colleagues, but also getting
access to some of her personal audio materials. Though they had a very
different manner of working — Tutti is intuitive, and Derbyshire was very
organized — Tutti acted both as listener and composer, in a sense, finding
particular kinds of sounds and approaches that seemed to reveal the innermost
essence of Derbyshire’s musical voice, and then bringing those forward in her
music for the film.
I didn’t think I would be as
interested in the sections on Margery Kempe, as she has some conceptual distance
from Tutti and Derbyshire. She is represented through writing as opposed to
music, for example, and her story is one of reaching for a kind of Medieval
spirituality that’s hard for us to even conceptualize fully in our era. But I
ended up learning a lot from Tutti’s thoughts on Kempe, and she drew some
fascinating connections between her life and conditions we find in modernity.
An unexpected but very interesting connection that especially resonated with me
is that Kempe lived just a generation after the Black Plague had swept through
Europe, an era in which social, religious, governmental, and economic impacts
of the Plague continued to affect European society. It’s fascinating that Tutti
was reading this just as COVID-19 swept across the world, and it too has
exposed many cracks in our societal infrastructure that are likely to continue
to impact our lives for some time.
All told, Re-Sisters is a great book that hits on a
refreshingly wide range of subject areas, yet keeps them all interrelated and
flowing as a meaningful narrative by virtue of Tutti’s sharp thinking and broad
set of life experiences. While it will have a lot of appeal for musicians and
music lovers, I think that its readership could extend into other areas of
history and women’s studies, and the force of pure creativity that shines
through will resonate with artists of all mediums as well.
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try BBC Radiophonic Workshop: A Retrospective by William L.
Weir or An Individual Note: Of Music, Sound and Electronics by
Daphne Oram.)
( official Cosey Fanni Tutti web site )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!
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