John Cage: Music as Environmental Consciousness— November 14 and 15, 2003

One of the most provocative artists of the last century and a seminal figure in modernism for all artistic disciplines, Cage found deep affinity with the soundscapes of the natural world. SFNM's program will explore the quiet and gentle beauty of several of Cage's later pieces, which evoke and celebrate a form of environmental consciousness. The works are for varied instrumentation and media, and will include Branches, Inlets, and Child of Tree. Mezzo-soprano Kirsten Lear will be featured in "Forever and Sunsmell," based on the poem by e.e. cummings. Also on the program is 1940's Fad and Fancies in the Academy, with featured pianist Jacquelyn Helin, and the 1961 tape-piece Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?, which is perhaps even more relevant today than it was new.

Program Notes – Revisiting Cage

One of the deepest focuses of John Cage's music is on being in the moment, being present and alert to what is happening in whatever environment we find ourselves in. His notion that "music is sounds heard," is less a challenge to conventional notions of music than it is an invitation to listen closely to all aspects of life. And so it was that when he died in 1992, the spirit of his work seemed for many to feel different, knowing that his busy, joyful presence was no longer somewhere at work in the moment. That is in part because of the selfless "uncomposed" aspect of most of his music, which opens itself to chance and the sounds of different times and places. Without Cage alive, when we resurrect his scores and instructions, we are more acutely aware that the creative force behind these works is not the Composer. It is actually a wonderful synergy between Cage, the performers, audience, and most importantly, the over-arching circumstances of a moment that we might call nature. Having worked with Cage in his last years, I organized and co-directed his public memorial in New York at the behest of his partner, Merce Cunningham. On Halloween night in 1992, Merce held a large and happy/sad wake in the Cunningham Dance Studio at Westbeth. The next day at Symphony Space, we put on a 3-hour concert of Cage's music, uniting over 80 performers close to Cage, including Laurie Anderson and Yoko Ono. It was in the manner of a Cage "musicircus," with anywhere from 0-6 works being performed at a time, organized by chance operations and time brackets. It was a dense celebration of a busy and productive life. For this event, I wrote the following:

Silence
I believe that the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind thus making it susceptible to divine influences.
— John Cage, after Gita Sarabhai

We are just beginning to hear John Cage. Like a prophet, he had the personal aura of a gentle holy man, whose ascetic and dutiful lifestyle emphasized the love of labor in celebration of life, patiently offering works that were difficult for many to accept and understand. Informing his approach to music was a supreme egalitarianism, advocating the rights, beauty, and dignity of all sounds and all people. I have confidence in the plan to make life on Earth a success for everyone.

Cage's earliest surviving composition is a song from 1932, The Preacher, in which he sets Ecclesiastes' "Vanity of Vanities." That at the age of 20, Cage turned to text that laments there is no new thing under the sun, "that human effort is folly while the Earth abideth forever," provides us a perspective for his lifelong celebration of capriciousness. With his life, Cage embraced the Twentieth Century understanding of relativism, and transformed fatalism into a glad acknowledgement of the beautiful transience of nature.

Here we are. Let us say Yes to our presence together in Chaos.

Cage's sense of humor, playful approach to composition, and suspicion of meaningful art, implied to many that capriciousness ruled his work, thus diminishing its authority. After tin cans, prepared pianos, radios, silence, and chance (or one of the above!), many people stopped listening, their opinions formed that he represented musical nihilism. With his utilization of chance operations, and relinquishing of control within his art, Cage was often dismissively interpreted as an anarchist proffering the irreverence of method. Yet Cage was offering a different kind of reverence, of accepting selflessness within the web of nature, of marveling at and enjoying the anarchic entropy of the energy of the world. The responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in its manner of operation.

When we see the whole design and constellation of Cage's work, it is effervescent joy, proclaiming the dignity of tin cans, the beauty of random diversity on the radio dial, the gift of perception while listening to water turn in a conch shell, the pleasure of being a tangential part of one big mysterious work of art. In tweaking the music world with radical works that have expanded our notions of music and art, he has been on a more sobering mission of expanding our notion of life itself, of awakening awareness to the basic elements around us, unhindered by the conventions of socialization. In an era ravaged by nihilism and the vanities of the greedy, where conventional religions have been found inadequate for centering our way of being together, Cage quietly modeled a personal spirituality of great integrity, by listening to the humblest stuff of life and finding meaning in nothing." He was a prophet with a twinkle in his eye, reveling in the pleasure of seeing things more than one way.

With his silent piece, 4'33, Cage put the frame of silence around life itself. Imploding music to nothingness, nothing becomes all, and all is music, capable of making us susceptible to divine influences. What could be more affirming, and more spiritually reverent, than to look at life and say, This is music!? The implications of this view for the way we regard life are as significant as those offered by the wisest of history's prophets. Cage was a jovial prophet of our time, and we have only begun to hear the depth of his music. This program offers a wide range of Cage's work, spanning over 50 years. Every piece on the program, except 0'00", was originally composed for dance, yet it should be noted that Cage and his choreographers had always conceived of the dances and music standing alone as discrete works of art.

Child of Tree is a solo in which the performer devises sound events using chance operations. Branches was conceived as a sequel to it involving multiple performers. Cage has written of these works:

"In 1975 when I was on tour with the Cunningham Dance Company in Arizona, Charles Moulton, one of the dancers, brought a dry piece of cactus from the desert and, placing it near my ear, plucked one of the spines. Since then, in a piece called Child of Tree, composed to accompany the dance Solo by Merce, I have always used cacti along with other plant materials, amplified by means of cartridge-like attachments. As an accompaniment for the longer Cunningham events, I composed Branches, a series of variations of Child of Tree, strung together on a string of silence. After a performance in Kyoto, Japanese friends said this music was botanical music."

Forever and Sunsmell, with words by e.e. cummings, is a piece in two parts (the first dramatic, the second lyrical), connected by an unaccompanied hummed interlude. The work follows the phraseology of the dance by Jean Erdman for which it was composed. Inlets was made to accompany the dance of the same title by Merce Cunningham. It requires the amplification of gurgles obtained by three musicians tipping conch shells which are partially filled with water. The piece also includes a recording of fire and a single note from a blown conch shell; thus with great simplicity featuring the elements of air, water, and fire. 0'00" is subtitled 4'33" No. 2. It is "an amplified solo to be performed in any way by anyone", and Cage later added the instruction that it should be a disciplined action fulfilling an obligation. "The first performance was the writing of this manuscript." It was next performed by Yoko Ono, to whom it is dedicated along with her first husband, the Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi.

Fads and Fancies in the Academy, dated July, 1940, was forgotten to have existed until Cage found it in 1992, shortly before his death. It was written for a dance by Marian van Tuyl at Mills College, and was resurrected for a first live concert performance led by John Kennedy with Essential Music on May 6, 1993, in New York. It joins Cage's Credo in Us (1942) and Four Dances (1943) among his early dance scores for piano and small percussion ensemble, and features satiric humor as well as some of his most rhapsodic piano writing.

In 1987, Cage began writing his "number" and "time-bracket" compositions, which became his primary compositional method until his death in 1992. These works are named for the number of musicians participating (with subsequent pieces for the same number of players having a superscript—thus Four3 is his third quartet in this series), consist of the number of parts with no complete score, within which are various series of flexible time-brackets in which each musician is free to choose the beginnings, ends, and durations of one's notes.

Each particular performance of a work is unique, as the volition of the performers creates countless possibilities for the complete harmonic texture. Cage spoke of how this method finally solved for him the problem of harmony, creating an ever-changing texture of anarchic harmony. Four3 was composed for the Cunningham dance Beach Birds and carries the subtitle Extended Lullaby. The piano passages are excerpted from Erik Satie's Vexations of 1893, a work which is to be repeated 840 times and lasts about 19 hours. (Cage had organized the premiere of Vexations in 1963, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono said this performance was their inspiration for spending a week in bed to protest the Vietnam war).

— John Kennedy, Artistic Director, Santa Fe New Music