After the Party. Joshua Chambers-Letson

that take the sound in a new direction. As you listen, she is sucked back into the swinging impulses of a mediocre show tune, which she animates with a life-giving, disruptive blackness. Then notice as the baroque returns with greater confidence. The right hand begins to wander through the upper keys and after a while the left hand moves through a series of broken chords: arpeggios moving below and beneath the melody. At first the left cedes dominance to and supports the right, developing into a subtle counterpoint. But then an expansion and melodic development as the minor hand goes off exploring on its own, introducing an unapologetic harmonic alternative as the two hands produce a polyphonic sphere composed of a unity of sonic difference. A great explosion of sound erupts from the keyboard and Simone’s hands crash down across the keys and each other, moving through and between polyphony and cacophony, reaching out and beyond the limits imposed by Bach to point toward some kind of something else.

      Minoritarian performance is sometimes an act of maroon banditry. It takes what it needs from the major and disorganizes/reorganizes it so that we can improvise new means without end. By putting the major in concert with the minor, minoritarian performance disorganizes the major, rendering it inoperative. It emancipates the minor from the major and opens up new, previously impossible possibilities within it. “The activity that results from this,” Agamben writes, “thus becomes a pure means, that is, a praxis that, while firmly maintaining its nature as a means, is emancipated from its relationship to an end; it has joyously forgotten its goal and can now show itself as such, as a means without end.”77