JOHN CAGE- The Works for Percussion.pdf

7/22/2019 JOHN CAGE- The Works for Percussion.pdf

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“It’s not a physical landscape. It’s a treserved for the new technologies. It’s ascape in the future. It’s as though you utechnology to take you off the ground alike Alice through the looking glass.”

— Jo

John Cage came of age during the ping era of electronic technology in the 1With new inventions improving the fidphonographs and radios, a vast array ofvoices, sounds and music entered the Ahome.As a boy, Cage witnessedthe innings of this new technology through histhe noted inventor, John Cage, Sr., whoradio that ran on alternating current andged into the family’s living room lamp. credits his father for inspiring his experapproach to composition; an approachterized by an obsessive quest for new s

and for expanding the boundaries of wacceptable in music. The works includerecording, Credo in Us (1942) and the aginary Landscapes , capture a crucial pCage’sdevelopment as he establishedthation of electro-acoustic music in Ame

Cage declares his interest in new elsounds in his 1940 manifesto, “The FutuMusic: Credo,” wherein he calls for theation of musical laboratories to promot

Cage’s Credo: The Discove

New Imaginary Landscapes

JOHN CAGE: The Works for Percussion 1

Percussion Group Cincinnati

1. CREDO IN US (1942) 12:58

for percussion quartet (including piano and radio or phonograph. FIRST VERSION

With Dimitri Shostakovich: Symphony No.5, New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein

Published by DSCH-Publishers. Columbia ML 5445 (LP)

2. IMAGINARY LANDSCAPE No. 5 (1952) 3:09

for any 42 recordings, score to be realized as a magnetic tape

FIRST VERSION, using period jazz records. Realization by Michael Barnhart

3. IMAGINARY LANDSCAPE No. 4, “March No. 2” (1942)4:26for 12 radios. FIRST VERSION

CCM Percussion Ensemble, James Culley, conductor


for 2 variable-speed turntables, frequency recordings, muted piano and cymbal,

to be performed as a recording or broadcast. With Joey Van Hassel

5. IMAGINARY LANDSCAPE No. 2, “March No. 1” (1942) 6:49

for percussion quintet


for percussion sextet. With Matthew Hawkins, Mark Katsaounis, Jacent Mraz

7. IMAGINARY LANDSCAPE No. 4, “March No. 2” (1951) 4:29

SECOND VERSION

CCM Percussion Ensemble, James Culley, conductor


SECOND VERSION, using recordings of Cage’s music. Realization by Michael Barnhart

9. CREDO IN US (1942) 15:00

SECOND VERSION

With 78-rpm recordings of Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No.3, Amsterdam Concertgebouw

Orchestra/Willem Mengelberg, Capitol EFL-2502. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.4,

Minneapoli s Symphony Orchestra/Dimitri Mitropoulos , Columbi a M-468. Richard Wagner:

Lohengrin, Prelude to Act III, Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Frederick Stock, RCA Victor 7386-B.

Franz von Suppe: Light Cavalry Overture, BBC Symphony Orchestra/Adrian Boult,

RCA Victor 11837-A



World War came along, I talkedto mysdo I think of the Second World War? Wthink it’s lousy. So I wrote a piece, ImagLandscape No. 3, which is perfectly hi

To depict this dark mood, Cage usetery of extra large tin cans and muted gcombined with an expanded electronicpalette using an oscillator, variable speeturntables (again playing frequency recings), a buzzer, amplified coil and amplmarímbula (a Caribbean instrument wi

tongues that are plucked, attached to anant box). The work opens with a masscussion and electronic noise texture folby an eerie descending drone (using a ing of an electric generator’s whine) soulike an airplane about to crash. Cage reto the electro-percussion texture in the section, which concludes with an explosound created striking the amplified cooverall effect is, as Cage intended, oneimpending destruction.

The association of sound with ideas

feelings is central to Cage’s “intentionapressive” wartime works. He describesheightened expressiveness in a catalog music that includes descriptions of the prepared-piano works, like In the NamHolocaust (1942) andThe Perilous Nigh44), as well as ensemble works like CreUs , one of Cage’s most popular works fthis period.

Credo in Us was composed for a d

part, create the illusion of floating body parts.Bird explained: “I discovered I could do thingslike create a body that covered the wholestage… . You would see a head, Merce’s head,way up, and then sliding down the side whiletwo sets of legs walked down the stage. It wasfascinating. And I would have the rectangleinterrupt the two, and they’d skitter away. Oryou’d see only hands moving in space.”

Cage’s electro-acoustic score served as anideal backdrop for Bird’s experiment in move-

ment. By broadcasting his mix of electronicand acoustic sounds, Cage created his owndisembodied soundscape— an ideal accom-paniment for the macabre (yet humorous)theme of the dance.

There are two versions of the Imaginary

Landscape No. 2. The first, composed in 1940for another dance (about trees) by Bird, waslater withdrawn. The second, a quintet writtenin 1942 for Lou Harrison’s percussion ensem-ble in San Francisco, was later re-titled Imagi- nary Landscape No. 2,“March” . Since many

of Cage’s percussion works were written for acombination of amateur and experienced per-cussionists, the parts vary widely in difficulty.On this recording, the Group performs all fiveparts with ease, in part by using specially cre-ated instruments (see DVD).

Composed in Chicago in April 1942, thesecond Landscape uses two “electric” ele-ments: a doorbell buzzer, and a coil of wireamplified using a phonograph needle as a con-

tact microphone. For the coil, Cage suggestedto the Group using an amplified Slinky ® (yes,the toy also known as the “original walkingspring toy”); they create sounds ranging fromrumbling thunder to explosions by striking orstroking it with different materials, like a finger-nail or cloth. Other instruments include gradu-ated tin cans, conch shell, ratchet, bass drum,buzzer, water gong, metal wastebasket and alion’s roar.

The designation “March” is ironic, perhaps

a reflection of Cage’s ambivalent feelings aboutWorld War II. After a loud cacophonous intro-duction, Cage teasingly introduces a quietmarch rhythm played on a tin can. This dra-matic contrast in dynamics, particularly theuse of quiet sounds, are key elements of Cage’s wartime works, as he describes in his“Lecture on Nothing:” “Half intellectually andhalf sentimentally, when the war came along,I decided to use only quiet sounds. Thereseemed to be no truth, no good, in anythingbig in society. But quiet sounds were like lone-

liness, or love or friendship.” Conversely, loudsounds for Cage signified destruction and theactions of large institutions, like governmentsand corporations.

In contrast to the irony of the secondLandscape , the Imaginary Landscape No. 3,written shortly before the second in February1942, is a more direct expression of Cage’sfeelings about the war, which he later de-scribed in an interview: “When the Second



fields for silence and the rest for radio fcies. Once the charts were complete, Casked questions, should there be soundsilence at a specific moment? Determinanswer required tossing three coins six to build a hexagram (pictograms found I Ching ); each hexagram refers to a spefield in the I Ching master chart, whichsponds to the same field in Cage’s sounwhere the answer is found.

The discipline and time required to

the charts and the hundreds if not thoucoin tosses needed to determine even sminute of music is staggering to contemCage’s goal in these works was “to mamusical composition the continuity of wfree of individual taste and memory (psgy) and also of the literature and ’traditthe art.”

In the fourth Landscape , each of theradios is“played” by two players, one tofrequency and the other volume and tiCage conducted the twenty-four player

Columbia University one evening in MaAppearing last on a long program of nemusic, the performers turned on the radnear midnight — a time when many stahad gone off the air — leaving mostly stand a few tidbits of sound. The compoic Arthur Berger noted “the word ’Korecurred, and applause greeted bits of a Mviolin concerto, which came as a balm teners eager for such pleasing sounds a

tiny and unbounded technological progress.Cunningham’s scenario and script are full

of puns and faux -French constructions. Heclaimed that the script was drawn from theSurrealist journal Minotaure , though Erdmanlater revealed that Cunningham himself wasthe author. The final line of the script, hand-written into Cage’s manuscript score, capturesthe satiric tone, “But Credo in US was Ghoul’sRage Motto And la vie bid them well to use it.”

Cage’s scorefor piano(sometimes muted

by hand), tin cans, buzzer, muted gongs, andboth radio and phonograph juxtaposes diversemu-sical genres, including a cowboy song,an “Indian” tom-tom rhythm, and a boogie-woogie for piano. In addition, random radiosounds and samples of “classical” recordings,“Dvor̆ák, Beethoven, Sibelius or Shostakovich,etc.” played on a phonograph add to thework’s satiric tone. In the original dance-drama, the phonograph samples are used onlyto accompany moments of nostalgia, specifi-cally the Wife’s flashbacks to memories of an

idealized past with her husband— the samplesfunction not only to provide a satiric tone forthe drama, but also to signal the way Ameri-cans heard classical music as representing thepast, the old world, and high-culture. Includingtwo performances of Credo on this disc specifi-cally addresses the issue that Cage’s intent isnot a commentary on any particular musicheard on the phonograph (or radio), but ratherthat these items are arbitrary artifacts in a

much larger picture.Cage’s random use of the radio and phono-

graph mark one of his earliest forays into inde-terminacy. By ceding control to the performerto select the radio sounds and record samples,Cage guarantees that Credo can never be heardthe same way twice in live performance.Through indeterminacy, Cage in part hadfound a way to remove his own intention fromthe work. A decade later, however, he devel-oped a more effective method of ego removal

with the adoption of chance procedures — aprocess informed by his study of Zen Bud-dhism with Daisetz Suzuki. In his 1948 lecture,“A Composer’s Confessions,” Cage announcedtwo “absurd” chance works for the near future:a silent piece and a composition for twelveradios.

Both the Imaginary Landscape No. 4 andNo. 5 are constructed (and re-constructed)according to chance procedures. In recogni-tion of the fact that both indeterminacy andchance allow for an infinite array of outcomes

in performance, the Group includes two ver-sions each of Credo in Us and the fourth andfifth Landscapes on this recording.

To create the chance works, Cage createddetailed charts (listing sounds, dynamics,rhythms, etc.) based on the sixty-four squaremaster chart found in the I Ching , the Chinese“Book of Changes.” Thus, the sound chart forthe Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for twelveradios resembles a spreadsheet with thirty-two



time and were quite curious about it. Thoughwe were delighted with the results (I had usedPaul Lansky’s RT software to mix and attenuatesamples taken from compact discs) further con-templation suggested that we might be missingan important timbral element— the inherentsurface sounds, clicks and pops of vinylrecords. So, a decade later I realized it again.With the editing operations converted into atemplate on my computer, I gradually came tothink of the piece as a sort of alchemical con-

tainer into which disparate musics could beintroduced to produce unique admixtures.After producing the “authentic” version using

jazz records that would have been available toCage at the time, I was thrilled to be presentedwith a suitcase (literally) filled with not only alarge collection of Mode’s Cage releases, onboth LP and CD, but also the entire history of the group’s recorded performances of Cage —archival CDs, reel-to-reels, cassettes. Theseprovided a rich field of material for an addi-tional “retrospective” version wherein Cageremixes Cage. It is particularly striking to mehow accurately the look of Cage’s score pre-saged the type of graphic interface now foundin computer audio mixing software.”

If there is one theme that runs throughthese works it is Cage’s unrelenting quest fornew sounds. They are exploratory works, sonicexperiments with a noble goal of opening ourears to the remarkable sounds around us. Cagenoted: “People may leave my concerts thinking

they have heard ’noise,’ but will then hearunsuspected beauty in their everyday life.”By blurring the boundary between art and life,Cage hoped we would hear even everydaynoises, traffic, a buzzing fan, or a passing trainas a vast imaginary landscape waiting to bediscovered.

Imaginary Landscape No. 1

by Eric Levin (on DVD only)

Imaginary Landscape No. 1 was the first

fully realized live electronic work, a proto-concrete admixture of the familiar (piano andChinese cymbal) and the alien (electronictones). Cage composed it expressly for perfor-mance in a radio studio and utilized the sonictools that he found there to form the distinctivesound signature of the piece.

Those tools were 78-rpm test tone recordsplayed on variable-speed phono turntables.The disks were used for checking the frequen-cy response of audio equipment, and typicallycontained either a selection of discrete trackswith descending frequencies, or a single,unbroken track of slowly descending pitch.1

Fortuitously, Cage’s score includes cataloguenumbers for the RCA Victor disks he used inperforming Landscape No. 1; these numberswere easily referenced2, giving us detailedinformation on the type and frequency of eachrecord required.

In the present recording, Brunswick andHMV 78-rpm disks supply, respectively, the

1,000 cycle and 200 cycle tracks used table player one; player two spins the sdisk that Cage used (Victor Frequency 84522-A) with its odd buzzer signal at quencies in its slow glissando3. Each plswitches speed— between 78 and 331

⁄ 3

according to notations in the score, andone produces rhythms as indicated, by and lowering the stylus. We recorded tlive using two RCA 44-BX microphonewere placed in approximation of the or

setup, albeit for two-channel stereo: Ocovers the piano and Chinese cymbal; tother picks up the performance of the tlists, via a studio monitor speaker. We uminimum of noise reduction in playbacrecords, to avoid muddying the tones.

Our objective was to recreate LandNo. 1 as it was heard in 1939. Cage’s agraph score, which includes some notathat were later deleted for the Peters edserved as the basis for our interpretatiowhich was equally influenced by Cageed, loose and somewhat playful performThis survives on a transcription disk, onearliest of his recorded works.

FOOTNOTES:

1. The Cornish School radio studio, site of the 19

formance/recording, undoubtedly had frequen

records on hand, though Leta Miller has found

Cage actually obtained these from Ralph Gund

(Gundlach was the psychologist husband of B

Bird, director of Cornish’s modern dance prog

Documents

JOHN CAGE- The Works for Percussion.pdf