Diary: How to Read John Cage – Part III

Posted on November 12, 2015 by maestrobeats

This post is part of a series on John Cage’s “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse).” For earlier installments of the series, please visit: Introduction, Part I, & Part II

John Cage Part III

Imagine yourself listening to the radio.

Nothing too out of the ordinary, just you by yourself in a room, the radio dial tuned to your favorite station. Maybe you’re grooving to some jazz tunes, gettin’ down to James Brown, rocking out to the Top 40, or maybe even tuning in to talk radio (you know, if you’re into that).

Now imagine yourself listening to 12 radios. All at once—and all tuned to different channels.

Yes, that’s right. Now you are simultaneously listening to jazz and James Brown, Top 40 and weather forecasts, talk radio and even (Heaven help us) the country channel.

That was precisely the premise behind John Cage’s 1951 piece “Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” scored for 24 performers at 12 radios. It is organized chaos. Of course, the piece doesn’t describe a physical landscape but rather, a landscape of the future—a landscape exploring the possibilities of what were, at the time, new and unknown technologies.

“It’s as though you used technology to take you off the ground and go like Alice through the looking glass,” Cage said of his inspiration for the piece.

Reading through Cage’s “Diary” is a bit like falling through the looking glass, as well. His reflections can be silly and nonsensical, curious and contrary, fragmented and, at times, even frightening. There is no topic left untouched: art, music, philosophy, culture, culinary arts, and even politics.

In fact, it’s a bit like listening to 12 radios at once. It’s a random mix of the everyday along with the breaking news; a thousand stories told all at once. One moment, he’s discussing political summit meetings and the next, he’s comparing the musical philosophies of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. (Cage was, in fact, a student of the latter.)

But it is not until Part III of his eight-part diary that he actually digs into the more social and political aspects of the work—the actual “How to Improve the World” part, so to speak—and he does this in a myriad of ways.

Some remarks are just petty observations about everyday inconveniences:

“Something needs to be done about the postal services,” he says dryly. “Either that or we should stop assuming just because we mailed something it will get where we sent it.”

While others have much more serious implications:

“Bertrand Russell asks American citizens: Can you justify your government’s use in Vietnam of poison chemicals and gas, the saturation bombing of the entire country with jelly-gasoline and phosphorus?” he asks gravely. “Napalm and phosphorus burn until the victim is reduced to a bubbling mass.”

Truth be told, I was caught a bit off guard by his abrupt (and clearly weighted) mention of the war in Vietnam—I had to remind myself that as otherworldly as some of Cage’s music may be, he did not, in fact, exist in a vacuum. He was an idealist, yes, but he was also a socially- and politically-conscious artist—he was a thinker and a citizen of the world, and his art was constantly being shaped and influenced by his surroundings.

“In music it was hopeless to think in terms of the old structure (tonality), to do things following old methods (counterpoint, harmony), to use the old materials (orchestral instruments),” he says. “We started from scratch: sound, silence, time, activity.”

In other words, he started from what was around him. He created music scored for 12 radios because he was growing up during the rise of radio and broadcasting, the rise of music being transmitted electronically rather than performed live, in-person.

In fact, “Imaginary Landscape No. 4” was a reaction against radio, more than anything. Cage didn’t like the radio, so he began using it in a new way—as a musical instrument itself, rather than as a transmitter of music. He wrote a number of pieces featuring radio, and by the 1980s it was one of his favorite instruments:

“Almost as favored by me as the sounds of traffic,” he said in a 1986 interview with artist Richard Kostelanetz.

For Cage, sound is music, regardless of the context or the intention.

“I love sounds, just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are,” he says. “I don’t want them to be psychological. I don’t want a sound to pretend that it’s a bucket, or that it’s a president, or that it’s in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound.”

Indeterminacy was a way of creating sound without meaning—crafting unpredictable and arbitrary music that could exist only in that moment. No narrative, no love story, no tragedy, no flowing melodies, and no meaning—just the simple experience of sound.

“Sounds everywhere,” he says in his diary. “Our concerts celebrate the fact concerts’re no longer necessary.”

Our world is saturated with music and art—it exists everywhere around us if we bother to look at and listen to it. Cage’s work reminds us to stop recreating the classics of the past and to start opening ourselves up to the music of the present.

“We have everything we used to have,” he says in his typical deadpan manner. “The Mona Lisa’s still with us for instance. On top of which we have the Mona Lisa with a mustache. We have, so to speak, more than we need.”

I’m pretty sure I can hear him smiling as he says it, but he doesn’t betray even a hint of laughter. He’s right—we do have more than we need. We have plenty of masterpieces from throughout the centuries, but if we simply continue regurgitating the same ideas over and over, then we are just making a mockery of the originals.

Perhaps the real art is in shifting our understanding of art itself, abandoning our expectations, and opening our minds, hearts, eyes, and ears to the present. Perhaps the real art is in listening to 12 radios at once and hearing the beauty of the sounds themselves—no meaning, just music.

“Art instead of being an object made by one person is a process set in motion by a group of people,” he says. “Art’s socialized. It isn’t someone saying something, but people doing things, giving everyone (including those involved) the opportunity to have experiences they would not otherwise have had.”

Go to the next installment: Diary: How to Read John Cage – Part IV

Diary: How to Read John Cage – Part II

Posted on November 5, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

This post is part of a series on John Cage’s “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse).” For earlier installments of the series, please visit: Introduction & Part I

“There’s a temptation to do nothing simply because there’s so much to do that one doesn’t know where to begin,” John Cage whispers into my ear blandly. “Begin anywhere.”

After nearly 30 minutes of staring off into space wondering how in the world to process Part II of his massive, eight-part sound art masterpiece “Diary,” I figured that was pretty sound advice. After all, each section of John Cage’s “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” begins anywhere, ends anywhere, and travels to any number of places in between.

“We’re getting rid of the habit we had of explaining everything,” he says—which I suppose explains why the entire “Diary” is so fragmented. Cage drastically changes topic nearly every sentence, leaving the listener (and in this case, the reader) to create their own contexts and connections within or between the jumbled phrases.

And trust me, the jumbled phrases truly span the gamut: from politics to philosophy, environmentalism to electronics. His writings discuss music, art, love, war, chess, and surprisingly frequently, mushrooms. (Cage was, in fact, an avid amateur mycologist and took great interest in the study of fungi). But what interested me most as I flipped through the bold, red-orange edition published last month by Siglio Press, were Cage’s musings on the state of contemporary art.

“To know whether or not art is contemporary, we no longer use aesthetic criteria (if it’s destroyed by shadows, spoiled by ambient sounds); (assuming these) we use social criteria: can include action on the part of others,” Cage says in his typical matter-of-fact manner. “We’ll take the mad ones with us, and we know where we’re going. Even now, he told me, they sit at the crossroads in African villages regenerating society. Mental hospitals: localization of a resource we’ve yet to exploit.”

While Cage is certainly not the first composer to take an interest in the social criteria of music (Ives was influenced by American popular and church music traditions, Bartók was inspired by Eastern European folk music, and so on), he’s certainly among the first to give so much creative control to his performers and to his audience. As for the mental hospitals: madness is really just unpredictability—and for Cage, so is music. Chance operations and indeterminacy allowed his pieces to be living, breathing works.

“My favorite music is the music I haven’t yet heard,” Cage wrote in his 1990 autobiographical statement. “I don’t hear the music I write. I write in order to hear the music I haven’t yet heard.”

Which would perhaps explain Cage’s keen interest in percussion. After all, percussion is really just the sounds you hear between stretches of silence—whether you are in the concert hall, on the street, in the countryside, or by the sea. Percussion is the simplest, most primordial, and likewise most universal music.

“I remember clams from the Sound exhibited years ago in a Seattle aquarium (near the Farmer’s Market, admission ten cents): their movement, their timing of it,” Cage recalls in his diary. “They were a bed, immobile, one on top of the other, two feet deep in a tank of water, sand on the bottom of the tank. We were told to wait.”

In other words: silence.

Cage all but changes the subject entirely before returning to this anecdote later on in his diary entry. He talks about the weather, the rain, education, devotion, and a game of chess before he meanders back to his Seattle aquarium story:

“Suddenly a clam rose to the surface directly, remained there a moment, then descended slowly, leaf-like, tipping one way, then the other, arriving at the bottom to produce a disturbance, such that clam after clam did likewise, sometimes several, sometimes many, sometimes not one at all, producing a dance that completely involved us.”

Cage does not describe the actual sound of this dance, but he is clearly describing the music of it. The sporadic rhythm of movement, the dancing, the descent—what else could it be? Perhaps the anecdote is meant to illustrate the universality of music, its existence all around us, and the ways in which we might experience music without necessarily hearing it.

After all, it was in 1952 that Cage created the first “happening”: a bold and unusual performance art event that took audiences out of the concert hall and into, well, the outside world. Like many of Cage’s works, his happenings are difficult to describe; by nature each is a completely unique performance event occurring in the present, enabling the audience to forget the past and future and instead become fully immersed in the music of the present—the music of the world around them.

Much of the specifics of these happenings were left entirely up to chance. Depending on the piece, the actual orchestration of his happenings range from television sets to toy pianos, “any number of people performing any actions” to no music or recordings at all. In fact, several of these wide-ranging happenings were part of an eight-part series he cheekily titled “Variations.”

Toy Piano

As for duration of the happenings, that was typically left up to chance, too. Although according to Cage’s philosophy, the music continues infinitely all around us, even once the specific piece has ended.

“(Music’s made it perfectly clear: we have all the time in the world,” he says dryly. “What used timidly to take eight minutes to play we now extend to an hour. People thinking we’re not occupied converse with us while we’re performing.)”

Go to the next installment: Diary: How to Read John Cage – Part III

Diary: How to Read John Cage

Posted on October 20, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

This post is the first installment of a series on John Cage’s “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse).” For future installments of the series, please visit: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, and Part VII.

On my first day of college, I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed freshman scurrying to my first real collegiate music class: music composition. Smiling from ear to ear, I sat down between two friendly and amicable singer-songwriter types and took out my staff paper, ready to write beautiful melodies and heartfelt harmonies bursting with the truth and glory of a richly-crafted Western classical music tradition.

So imagine my surprise when I was greeted not with talk of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, or even Berlioz—but with a two-hour introduction to the music and philosophical musings of a certain avant-garde iconoclast named John Cage.

There, on the first day of class, my composition professor performed Cage’s 40-minute utterly radical and unapologetically subversive “Lecture on Nothing.”

If you’ve never heard the piece, the title says it all: it is, quite literally, a lecture about nothing. The score is simply lines of words separated by seemingly arbitrary spaces, conveying vaguely Zen-like aphorisms and obsessive, repetitive observations.

And while it’s difficult to find communicative meaning amidst the tangled sentences (at least in any standard sense of the phrase “communicative meaning”), Cage did truly intend the work as a piece of music. Composed using a complex time length scheme and organized into 48 units of 12 lines and 48 measures each, Cage was deliberate and meticulous in the compositional process of this work.

And while—four years later—I still have no idea what the lecture actually means, I will never forget that performance. It made me feel a lot of things: puzzled, perplexed, vaguely annoyed—but also utterly engrossed and, surprisingly, inspired.

In retrospect, I’m sure the professor’s goal in showing us that work was to quickly and immediately dispel any preconceived notions we may have had about what is and what is not music; to jolt us out of the comfortable conviction that we, as aspiring composers, might fall back on the tried-and-true rules and forms of a historical musical tradition.

But regardless of his motives, that lecture has found its way into my subconscious, surfacing and resurfacing over the years in discussions of art, music, philosophy, and all things meta.

And it was precisely that lecture that piqued my interest in Cage’s other works—most notably, his monstrous five-hour art piece, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse).” The piece is a long-winded, slowly meandering poetic diary recorded by Cage himself a year before his death; a five-hour narration of fragmented thoughts, memories, quotes, convictions, and abstract philosophical insights.

So this fall, I decided to embark upon the strange and unusual journey that is listening to Cage’s revolutionary ramblings for five hours—but before I could dive into this ambitious endeavor, I needed a musical score to guide me. I picked up the iconoclastic bible from Siglio Press, a trusted publisher dedicated to uncommon books that are best filed somewhere between art and literature—the books filled with knowledge and insight that transcends all possibilities of categorical book shelving.

Armed with high-quality headphones and book in hand, over the course of the next eight weeks I will listen through each of the eight parts of Cage’s “Diary” and create my own personal diary tracking the experience.

So join me as I stumble through the zigzagging maze that is Cage’s musical mind—together, maybe we can make sense of it.

Go to the next installment: Diary: How to Read John Cage – Part I

ALBUM REVIEW: Nostalgic Synchronic by Dan Trueman

Posted on October 12, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

The avant-garde and always-iconoclastic composer John Cage shocked and intrigued audiences around the world when he invented the prepared piano in 1940. Presented with the challenge of writing dance music for a small stage with no room for a percussion group, Cage discovered it was possible to create an entire percussion orchestra with just a single instrument: a grand piano.

His creation was the prepared piano: a piano that has had its sound altered by placing everyday objects such as screws, bolts, and pieces of rubber on or between the strings.

“With just one just one musician, you can really do an unlimited number of things on the inside of the piano if you have at your disposal an exploded keyboard,” he famously stated.

And it was precisely this notion of an exploded keyboard that inspired composer, fiddler, and electronic musician Dan Trueman to create a 21^st century version of the instrument: the prepared digital piano.

“Like the prepared piano, the prepared digital piano feels like a piano under the hands and often sounds like one,” Trueman said. “But it is full of surprises; instead of bolts and screws stuck between the piano strings, virtual machines of various sorts adorn the virtual strings, transforming this new piano into an instrument that pushes back, sometimes like a metronome, other times like a recording played backwards. The virtual strings also tighten and loosen on the fly, dynamically tuning in response to what is played.”

His new album, “Nostalgic Synchronic,” explores the vast possibilities of the instrument through a series of eight etudes performed by percussionist and pianist Adam Sliwinski of Sō Percussion.

“My set of etudes, called ‘Nostalgic Synchronic,’ are inspired by the tradition of etudes by composers like Ligeti, Bach, Chopin,” Trueman said, “In that they’re meant to demonstrate the technical range of the instrument and the player, but also to stand on their own as compositions.” download5

The etudes make use of three major types of preparations designed by Trueman: synchronic, nostalgic, and tuning. And in true 21^st-century fashion, Trueman has made these preparations available as an app (or as standalone software) for listeners to download and use on their own digital keyboards at home.

download (13)

In the synchronic preparations, any notes struck within a given chord are gathered and automatically struck on every tick of the keyboard’s digital metronome—until the player strikes a new chord, then the keyboard resets its metronome to that new time and new chord. The entire keyboard can function this way, or particular keys may be selected to be “synchronic,” allowing for an infinite number of accent patterns, melodies, beats, and chord combinations.

The nostalgic preparation is a reverse delay that is shaped and constrained by the prevailing metronome pulse: essentially, when a pitch is struck and released, the keyboard samples the note and plays it backwards so that it reaches its mirrored attack in sync with the next click of the metronome.

Last is the tuning preparation, which allows the player to switch freely between three different types of tunings during performance: standard equal temperament, just-intonation temperament, and what Trueman calls “partial tuning,” which is based in part on intervals drawn from the overtone series.

Sound complicated? Here’s a video with some simple examples:

Dan Trueman – The Prepared Digital Piano from Troy Herion on Vimeo.

As you can imagine, these preparations allow for infinite musical possibilities—many of which are demonstrated in Trueman’s collection of etudes. From the persistent rhythm and the spacey, sliding sonic structures of “Prelude” to the repetitive melodic figures and jagged chord clusters of “Song,” each piece explores the breadth of textural and timbral possibilities on the instrument.

In fact, “Undertow” sounds almost as though the pianist is exploring the instrument for the first time—with fingers curious and gentle, listening intently to each note as the tunings echo and shift. By contrast, “Marbles” is a glitchy, jittery little jig that sounds almost like a toy piano or a vintage video game—that is, until the growling bass rolls in.

“Wallumrød” mixes jazzy riffs with the sonic sway and reverse fade-attack of the nostalgic preparations, while “Systerslått” takes its mysterious tunings, wobbly groove, and folky ornamentation from a Norwegian fiddle tune. The album ends with “It is Enough!” a slow and gentle tune that twinkles like a music box—you know, if that music box was filled with echoes of electronically-manipulated melodic fragments.

So forget what you know about classical harmonic progressions—you’ll find no reassuring V-I on “Nostalgic Synchronic.” But what you will find is someone willing to start all over, to rediscover a tried-and-true instrument and create something entirely new. After all, who says piano keys have to be just black and white?

CONCERT SPOTLIGHT: June 11-13

Posted on June 9, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

This week’s concert calendar spans the musical gamut from viola da gamba to Morton Feldman!

Morton Feldman’s “For John Cage”

In true New York fashion, composer Morton Feldman first met John Cage at a New York Philharmonic performance of Anton Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21. Disturbed by the audience’s disrespectful reaction to Webern’s work, the two had each individually stepped out into the lobby, where they began talking.

Both composers went on to become pioneers of indeterminate music—and perhaps more importantly, close friends. The two influenced each other over the course of their careers, and in 1997 Feldman wrote “For John Cage,” a 75-minute piece for violin and piano.

This week the University of Washington’s contemporary music ensemble, Inverted Space, is concluding its Long Piece Fest with a performance of this epic (and lengthy) work. Violinist Luke Fitzpatrick and pianist Brooks Tran will breathe life into this unique piece, which is meant to be performed at a barely audible volume. The piece combines Feldman’s expansive harmonies with Cage’s interest in silence and stasis, thus delicately exploring poetic dissonance in a state of prolonged stillness.

The performance is this Thursday, June 11 at 7:30 p.m. at the Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford.

Joshua Roman Performs Gregg Kallor’s Chamber Music

Cellist Joshua Roman is well-known in the Seattle classical music community—after all, he became the youngest principal player in Seattle Symphony history at just 22 years old. But his reputation as a gifted and innovative musician expands far beyond just his Seattle achievements. He has performed as a soloist around the world, and this week we have unique opportunity to hear him perform in one of the major classical music centers of America: New York City.

Roman will be performing a dazzlingly lyrical piece titled “Undercurrent” by composer and pianist Gregg Kallor, the inaugural composer-in-residence at SubCulture in NYC. The performance also features world premieres of two new pieces written by Kallor, performed by violinist Miranda Cuckson, mezzo-soprano Adriana Zabala, and baritone Matthew Worth.

Kallor’s works blend classical and jazz traditions with a distinctly New York flavor. But since it’s a long flight to NYC, we thought we’d bring the music to you: Second Inversion is going to record the live performance and broadcast it later on our website for your listening pleasure.

The performance is this Thursday, June 11 at 7:30 p.m. at SubCulture in New York. We’ll keep you updated on the details for our Second Inversion broadcast!

Colleen and Hanna Benn

Violas da gamba may have been popular instruments during the Baroque period, but for the past several centuries the violin family has dominated the classical music scene—which is why one French musician is giving the age-old viola da gamba a new-age makeover.

Colleen is the alias of Cécile Schott, a French musician who reimagines the possibilities of acoustic instruments by taking them out of their usual contexts and pushing them into new musical territory. Over the course of her five albums, she has created a wide-ranging repertoire of compositions spanning from meditative and mysterious to playful and percussive. This weekend, she’s coming to Seattle to present a performance which merges old and new music traditions: viola da gamba with live electronic processing and singing.

Seattle composer and vocalist Hanna Benn will open the show with a rare solo set.

The performance is this Saturday, June 13 at 8 p.m. at the Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford. UPDATE: This concert is sold out! Please refer to Colleen‘s website and Hanna‘s SoundCloud for future performance info.