Saturday, September 8, 2012

Updated 28 June 2013

 


JOHN CAGE CENTENNIAL PERCUSSION WORKSHOP

American University, Katzen Arts Center, Abramson Family Recital Hall

4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW,
Washington, DC 20016


9 AM - 1:00 PM
Free
[Registration
9 AM – 10 AM]

Percussion Masterclass With Steven Schick and Allen Otte, Percussion Group Cincinnati, and red fish blue fish


American University will host a very special workshop for composers, percussionists, and music enthusiasts on the topic of John Cage's percussion repertoire and interpretation. Percussion Group Cincinnati, who worked closely with Cage for many years, will guide the participants through an anecdotal history of Cage's special sounds and techniques. Steven Schick will discuss John Cage's influence on American percussion and experimentalism. red fish blue fish will lead participatory group interpretations of open form pieces such as "Six," "But what about the noise of crumpling paper," and "Variations IV." The event is free. Parking is free. Registration will take place outside of the Katzen Arts Center Abramson Family Recital Hall from 9 AM - 10 AM. Lectures, demos, and performances will occur from 10 AM - 1 PM in the Abramson Family Recital Hall.
Optional RSVP and Updates on Facebook.


   
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ILLUMINATIONs 4, Lecture

"Choice, Chance, and Circumstance in John Cage's Watercolors"

The Kreeger Museum 
Grand Hall
2401 Foxhall Road NW
Washington, DC 20007

12:30-1:30PM
Free

 

Speaker

Ray Kass

 

Abstract

CHOICE, CHANCE, AND CIRCUMSTANCE IN JOHN CAGE'S WATERCOLORS


Ray Kass

Although it is generally known that John Cage’s work in performance and experimental music exerted a profound influence in the development of American and European art after W.W. II, it is less known that he also produced nearly 1000 individual visual art works that reflect the innovative influence of his music and writings.
           My presentation will discuss Cage’s remarkable watercolors; a unique body of paintings that Cage made at the Mountain Lake Workshop in the Appalachian region of Southwestern Virginia in the 1980s. I will discuss Cage’s involvement with visual art and its relationship to his early artistic development, and will present an illustrated Powerpoint that presents examples of Cage’s paintings, etchings, and drawings, and discussing them in relation to his writing, music notation, and the strategy of his compositions for music and theatre.
           My discussion will include photographic images documenting Cage at work on his watercolours at the Mountain Lake Workshop. A twelve-minute video documentary of John Cage discussing his watercolour paintings in 1988 will also be presented.



Reception

Followed by a light reception at 1:30 in the Monet Gallery

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PIANO RECITAL


The Kreeger Museum

Grand Hall 
2401 Foxhall Road NW
Washington, DC 20007

2:00 PM
Cost: $35, $30 members,
tickets include admission to ILLUMINATIONs 4
by Ray Kass.
Tickets: Purchase Tickets
Tickets may also be purchased by calling 202-338-3553 or emailing
vistorservices@kreegermuseum.org

 

Performers

Stephen Drury, Guest Pianist


 

Program

Prelude for Meditation (1944)
Music for Piano (1952)
Variations II (1961)
4'33" (1952)

       Movements I, II, III
In a Landscape (1948)

Intermission

Modern Love Waltz, 2012
       Tribute Commission
Etudes Australes (1974-1975)
        (Book III - Eight Etudes)

John Cage
John Cage
John Cage (David Tudor realization with electronics)

John Cage

John Cage

Philip Glass


John Cage



Program Notes

The array of piano works on tonight’s program—representing over thirty years of Cage’s compositional output, with an added tribute by Philip Glass—comprises music from the strictly notated to the wildly indeterminate, from the harmonically conventional to the timbrally unorthodox, from the massively dense to the almost imperceptibly sparse.
           Though its breadth demonstrates the variety of compositional approaches represented in Cage’s vast piano oeuvre, there are a number of commonalities to the over fifty works he wrote for the medium. Foremost among these is his longtime collaborator, David Tudor, for whom many of Cage’s piano works (including several on tonight’s program) were written. Introduced to Cage by Morton Feldman in 1950, this virtuosic pianist and meticulous interpreter of contemporary music would go on to shape much of Cage’s music and career in the following years. When Tudor began translating the constantly changing tempi of Cage’s early music into precise values measured in seconds for performative accuracy, Cage began using clock time to notate duration in all of his scores. Tudor also was important in taking Cage’s music to Europe, through performances of Concert for Piano and Orchestra and Fontana Mix for an audience including composers Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen at Darmstadt in 1958. In fact, one could say that much of Cage’s success came as a direct result of Tudor’s ambassadorship of his music in the 1950s and 1960s.
           Stephen Drury’s program, however, begins with music from an earlier period that was influenced not by a wealth of interpretive resources, but rather an absence of them. Written in 1944, Prelude for a Meditation serves as a one-minute introduction to Cage’s music for prepared piano, one of his earliest and best-known innovations. Always the consummate entrepreneur, the young Cage was often employed as an accompanist for dance classes and recitals. His initial desire was to compose music influenced by the African cultures he had been introduced to in his studies at the New School with Henry Cowell. This proved difficult, though, due to Cage’s lack of access to exotic instruments and the amount of stage space they would require. Having observed Cowell strum on the piano strings to imitate the Aoelian harp, Cage embarked on a number of experiments using unorthodox playing techniques and alterations (“preparations”) of the piano’s physical structure. First explored in Bacchanale (1940) and perfected in the Sonatas and Interludes (1948), Cage’s most common preparations involved inserting into the strings all manner of objects: bolts, foam wedges, rubber stoppers, paper. These alterations allowed Cage to maximize timbral variety while minimizing the performance resources required, as demonstrated in Prelude for a Meditation by the use of only four white keys.
           Following nearly a decade later, Music for Piano represents an intermediary position between Cage’s earlier works for prepared piano and his following period of chance-based composition. Composed during a four-year span beginning in 1952, Music for Piano consists of eighty-four separate pieces, of which Drury has chosen “a selection of eight or nine which can be combined and sequenced in any way.” Many of the timbres found in the earlier Sonatas and Interludes are present here, though their occurrence is both less frequent and less melodious. Two important additions, however, begin to emerge in Cage’s work during this period: chance and indeterminacy. The former refers to the randomization of fixed compositional decisions and comes almost directly out of Music for Changes, Cage’s first work written using divination tables found in the I Ching. The latter refers to notation that allows interpretive freedom, and continues trends established in works like Water Music or 26'1.1499" for a String Player where certain aspects of sound are left unspecified. In Music for Piano, chance and indeterminacy are manifest in Cage’s decision to select certain musical parameters (pitch and timbre) by flipping coins or reading imperfections in the paper, while leaving other parameters (rhythm and dynamics) open to the performer.
           One of the most striking examples of Cage’s experiments with indeterminacy in his entire catalog, Variations II (1961) presents the performer with an almost entirely open graphic score, to be performed on any instrument. The work was written for David Tudor on his thirty-fifth birthday, and bears many of the notational hallmarks of its 1958 predecessor Variations I—transparent sheets containing dots and lines that are measured in relation to one another to determine frequency, amplitude, timbre, duration, and occurrence within a given time period—the only significant difference being the size of the dots and number of lines per transparency. However, Tudor’s realization of Variations II for amplified piano departs significantly from his interpretation of Cage’s earlier graphic scores. Rather than use precise measurements to derive discrete measurements for every musical parameter as specified in the score’s preface, Tudor simply uses the relationships between the dots and lines to determine whether any given variable will be interpreted as “simple” or “complex.” Though his method required him to completely re-notate Cage’s score, the outcome was both more personal and more suited to the electronic sounds of the amplified piano. Therefore, according to Drury (whose first exposure to Cage’s music was Tudor’s recording of Variations II) this interpretation “bears Tudor's mark more strongly than any other performance in the way it builds a kind of hybrid piano/electric instrument.”

           4'33" presents another case in which Tudor’s influence has significantly affected performance practice. Now immortalized among musicians and audiences alike, the work has come to be regarded as radical in the way Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring may have been in 1913. The inaction of its performers has elicited listener reactions ranging from the angry whispers of the 1952 premiere in Woodstock, New York, to the intentional sabotage of a North Carolina School for the Arts performance in 1970, to a hushed crowd and standing ovation at a live televised BBC broadcast in 2004. It has been the catalyst for a decades-long discussion about the role of silence in music and listening, and is often used as a wedge issue among avant-garde artists and their more traditional counterparts. Revivals, arrangements, and parodies have all been staged in the fifty years since its inception, and there has even been an attempt at reclaiming it for populist purposes through a number of recent “remixes” by several high profile studio producers and dance musicians in Australia and the UK.
           However, “the silent piece” (as Cage often called it) began not as a lofty statement about the nature of musical experience or artistic irreverence, but as the next logical step in Cage’s use of the I Ching. He had already used its tables of divination symbols a year earlier while writing Music of Changes to make decisions about things such as pitch, rhythm, and dynamics. Why not silence? As David Tudor recalled in an interview with William Duckworth, “Since the procedure for Music of Changes was that out of 64 possibilities 32 were silence, he simply arranged his chart so it only dealt with the 32 numbers that would produce silence.” The evidence for this connection—according to Tudor—is borne out in the original score, which was notated on a conventional grand piano staff in the same manner as Music of Changes with its four-beat measures and shifting tempi. Unfortunately, this version of the score for 4'33" was lost, to be replaced by later versions—several of which are currently on display in the Katzen Center—notated using textual directions and lasting a total of four minutes and thirty-three seconds (the duration Tudor had calculated from Cage’s original rhythmic notation). It was this version that was published by Peters Edition in 1960, bearing a title drawn from Tudor’s calculation.
           Though written only four years earlier, In a Landscape is free from the type of polemics aroused by 4’33”. Instead, it takes a much more measured and traditionally “musical” approach. Composed in 1948 to accompany a dance by Merce Cunningham, it was written at a time when Cage had become fascinated with the music of Erik Satie. Of particular interest was Satie’s concept of “furniture music” (musique d’ameublement), music for the listener “to take no notice of…to behave as if it did not exist.” This, along with Satie’s use of what Cage called “time lengths,” led Cage and Cunningham to work in isolation from one another so that the only thing “common between music and dance was time.”
           In its likeness to Satie’s music, Philip Glass’s Modern Love Waltz, 2012 has much in common with In a Landscape. Both works are in a metrically ambivalent 3/4, both use repeated metric structures (2+2 and 5+7+3 respectively) similar to those of Satie, and both feature arpeggiated ostinati. Although the inclusion of Glass may seem out of place in the context of an otherwise all-Cage program, Modern Love Song originally served as music for Constance DeJong’s 1972 radio performance of her novel Modern Love—not unlike Cage and Cunningham’s collaborations, or David Tudor’s musical participation in the recording of Cage’s lecture Indeterminacy.
           While In a Landscape and Indeterminacy found Cage and his comrades working in relative detachment, Etudes Australes grew out of a much more intimate collaboration. One of Cage’s last and most ambitious works for solo piano, the etudes were written over the course of two years in consultation with pianist Grete Sultan and are dedicated to her. Tudor had introduced Sultan to Cage after hearing her perform some of the earlier prepared piano works, as well as improvisations in which she played inside the piano with percussion mallets. Cage agreed to write for her, but decided to leave the piano unprepared, because it seemed strange to him “that an older woman should busy herself with sticks and strike the piano.” Rather than coin flips or paper inconsistencies, this time Cage chose the star charts contained in the Atlas Australes—also the source of the title—as a means of selecting pitches and durations. Over its numerous multicolored pages, Cage laid transparencies which he used to mark the locations of particular star formations. These transparencies were then copied onto staff paper using a table of all chords of one to five pitches that each of Sultan’s hands could play. Each of the thirty-two etudes uses a different subset of the chart, with the higher-numbered etudes using chords with more notes in denser configurations (Drury’s performance includes etudes seventeen through twenty-four). Due to Sultan’s unique physical characteristics and singular ability to perform dissociated hand motions, the resulting “duets for two independent hands” contain some of the most virtuosic passages ever written by Cage—if not for any instrument, then certainly for the piano. The music itself of the Etudes Australes consists of three different types of tones: those released as quickly as possible after being played, those sustained for as long as possible, and those that are held down and allowed to vibrate sympathetically throughout the duration of each etude by inserting rubber wedges into the piano keyboard. The resonance of the strings creates a quiet harmonic wash that lasts throughout each etude, and is often related to Cage’s interest in the transcendent aspects of Indian Carnatic music that had been an important influence on his music since the late 1940s. It is this aspect of Cage’s music (transcendent consciousness), according to Drury, that unites the disparate elements within his work for piano and indeed his entire catalog:

For me, all of Cage’s music is about using sound to transform our consciousness. More than any other composer he was aware of how sound alters consciousness and was able to set it free to do its work. This is true of the early prepared piano music (with its unrecognizable sounds coming from an instrument we thought we knew), through the long silent stretches which isolate the single sounds of Music for Piano, to the unpredictable resonances of the Etudes Australes.

During an interview in his later years, Cage remarked that “a New York Times critic recently said if the Etudes Australes were to last beyond my life that it would not be because of me but because of the stars from which it is derived.” Clearly, the New York Times had it dead wrong.

—Aaron Helgeson




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Pre-concert Talk


"PHANTOM CONVERSATION—
A Virtual Discussion Between Daisetz T. Suzuki and John Cage"

Freer Gallery of Art, gallery 5
1200 Independence Ave. SW
Washington, DC 20013



6:45 PM
Free

Tickets: Free Tickets Required

  Speaker

Roger Reynolds


 

Abstract

PHANTOM CONVERSATION

A Virtual Discussion Between Daisetz T. Suzuki and John Cage


Roger Reynolds


During the early 1950s, Suzuki gave a series of lectures at Columbia University, and his ideas, his ways made deep impressions on John Cage. Later, Cage referred frequently to Suzuki, and wrote in the forward to his first book, Silence: “What I do, I do not wish blamed on Zen, though without my engagement with Zen … I doubt whether I would have done what I have done.” Phantom Conversation sequences eleven statements by Suzuki, largely taken from his landmark book, Zen and Japanese Culture. Between them, I have placed ten quotations from Cage so as to create a juxtaposition that will make a useful exchange. As some of Cage’s statements derive from interviews and conversations I had with him, my words occasionally lead into what he has to say.




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MARGARET LENG TAN, piano and voice

 


Freer Gallery of Art, Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Auditorium
1200 Independence Ave. SW
Washington, DC 20013


7:30 PM
Free

Tickets: Free Tickets Required

  Performers

Margaret Leng Tan

 

Program

Four Walls (1944)
Music for Piano, No. 2 (1953)
with 10 Stones video


John Cage
John Cage

(video realization by Rob Dietz)
 

Program Notes

In 1951 Cage turned definitively to chance operations and away from the principles of self-expressive art. However, in the early 1940s Cage was far from rejecting musical expressivity, which, indeed, was the central feature and motivation of many of his works. The vehement noise and rhythmic dissonances of his Imaginary Landscape #3 (1942), for example, were meant as an image of the war; Amores (1943) and The Perilous Night (1944) were representations of the delights and agonies of Cage’s personal life, as his marriage to Xenia Cage was ending and his lifelong relationship with Merce Cunningham was beginning. Of The Perilous Night Cage said that it was about “the loneliness and terror that comes to one when love becomes unhappy;” and a similarly troubled psychological intensity may be recognized in Four Walls (1944).
           Four Walls, in fact, was a collaboration with Cunningham of a very special kind. The two men had been working together on small accompanied dances over the preceding year or two; now, however, they were ready to make something on a newly ambitious scale, conceiving a “dance-drama” in two acts of nearly an hour’s duration, with text and dance both authored by Cunningham. The subject of the drama, perhaps less personal than that of The Perilous Night but consistent with its exploration of “the disturbed mind,” was the tensions within and eventual descent into madness of an American family.
           As was usual for Cage in this period, he began composing by building the work’s rhythmic structure, an objective framework which could focus and contain the more spontaneous composition of its local details and continuity. In this case, the structure was also coordinated with Cunningham’s drama, and included large silences to accommodate independent language and action. Further, ever practical, Cage wanted to make the piece relatively simple technically, designing it to be performable by someone unknown to him, as he knew he would not be able to take part in rehearsals. However, this was not the only reason he so drastically limited his palette: the score’s starkness is beautifully matched to his expressive intentions. Much of the music is in the dark low register; much is percussive (although no preparations are made to the piano) and extremely repetitive, both the long ostinati and the recurring panels of material suggesting obsession and entrapment. Also disconcerting are the work’s unprecedentedly long and exposed silences: in the drama these might have been less assertive, but in the concert hall they remain startling, demonstrating the seriousness with which Cage had come to view the complementarity of silence and sound, and giving a foretaste, however contrary in affect, to the silences that would open in Cage’s “non-intentional” work. The entire score is played entirely on the white keys of the piano, often tending toward a somber A minor, maintaining a monochromatic austerity until the end. Or almost: only once does Cage disrupt this uniformity. In Scene VII of the work’s fourteen, a solo voice makes its only appearance, singing this one explicit vestige of the drama, a text by Cunningham: “Sweet love, my throat is gurgling, the mystic mouth, leads me so defted, and the black nightingale, turned willowly by love’s tossed treatment, berefted.”
           The integral work was performed one time only, on August 22, 1944, in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, in a production that included not only Cunningham but also a young Julie Harris, among other dancers and actors. Then it was forgotten, until in the 1970s the pianist and prepared-piano-specialist Richard Bunger revived the music, albeit without the theatrical component. Initially Cage felt uncomfortable with its expressive style, but, after Margaret Leng Tan premiered it in New York, he allowed it, finally, to be published.
           Cage’s first applications of chance techniques, notably in his Music of Changes of 1951, were exceptionally arduous and time-consuming; and he felt the need to develop much simpler, more rapid methods. One possibility struck Cage unexpectedly: “I looked at my paper: suddenly I saw that the music, all the music, was already there.” Noticing imperfections in the paper on which he was writing, Cage decided he could transform these into pitches, determining through chance the number of sounds on a page, as well as specifications of clef and timbre. Other aspects of the sound, notably dynamics and duration, would be left to the performer. A principal result of this method was the series of Music for Piano #1-84, written between 1952 and 1956 (with a somewhat anomalous eighty-fifth added in 1962). These pieces are certainly simpler than Music of Changes had been, consisting solely of “single tones of the conventional grand piano, played at the keyboard, plucked or muted on the strings,” with noises on the interior and exterior piano construction also indicated from #4 onward. In Cage’s view, “The limited nature of this universe of possibilities makes the events themselves comparable to the first attempts at speech of a child or the fumblings about of a blind man.”
           Of her version of the score, Margaret Leng Tan writes that “in addition to the normal, plucked and muted tones of the original score I added the seven bowed tones with Cage’s permission. Notwithstanding its aleatoric origins, Music for Piano #2 ends on a perfect C major triad!” Music for Piano #2 was composed for the dancer Louise Lippold.
           Accompanying Music for Piano #2 is Rob Dietz’s video of 10 Stones, one of a series of eight aquatints that Cage made in 1989. In a number of visual and musical works from the 1980s, Cage took inspiration from the Ryoanji Zen garden in Kyoto, in which an expanse of sand surrounds fifteen irregularly placed rocks; often, Cage would find his visual forms, or the contours of musical lines, by tracing the shapes of rocks on the page. In this case, he brushed paint around stones. Each aquatint was produced in an edition of twenty to twenty-five, and every sheet was uniquely marked with smoke made by placing pieces of burning paper on the press before printing on dampened papers.
           10 Stones was printed by Marcia Bartholme at Crown Point Press in San Francisco in an edition of twenty. Dimensions: 18 x 23 in. (46 x 58 cm).

—Erik Ulman

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