The Program
JOHN CAGE
Song Books
To John Cage, music was simply the organization of sound. By recognizing valid
musical material in what others discarded as noise, by transforming the sounds
of instruments through physical or electronic means, and by leaving critical
aspects of his compositions open to the judgment of performers (or the vagaries
of chance), Cage freed his sounds from traditional requirements of composition
and interpretation.
Cage composed his Song Books in a spurt of creativity from August to October
1970, and the work was promptly published in three volumes. Michael Tilson
Thomas has described these as “basically a kind of kit from which you, the
performer, can come up with songs, speeches, actions, performances on other
instruments, which all add up together to create a musical event.”
As a general directive, Cage indicates: “Each solo belongs to one of four
categories: 1) song; 2) song using electronics; 3) theatre; 4) theatre using electronics.” A footnote clarifies what he had in
mind for electronics: “Wireless throat microphones permit the amplification and transformation of
vocal sounds. Contact microphones amplify non-vocal sounds, e.g.
activities on a table or typewriter, etc.”
Cage allows interpreters complete freedom in the choice of material they will
perform on a given occasion. Nor does he consider the music contained in Song Books to be necessarily
self-contained: “The solos may be sung with or without other indeterminate
music.” In these performances, other music by Cage is interlaced or superimposed:
his Concert for Piano and Orchestra
(from 1958), Winter Music (1957), and
Fontana Mix (1959, a tape work
composed in Milan and named after Cage’s landlady there, Signora Fontana). The
score may be taken to provide basic material
(ideas, music, actions, suggestions) that the performers can offer in a straightforward manner or superimpose in an
infinite number of ways. Cage offers
this all-embracing guidance: “To prepare for a performance, the actor will make
a numbered list of verbs (actions) and/or nouns (things) not to exceed 64 with
which he or she is willing to be involved and which are theatrically feasible
(those may include stage properties, clothes, etc.; actions may be ‘real’ or
mimed, etc.).”
This evening we explore three worlds that John Cage creates in his Song Books: Cage’s own world, as
represented in theater/action numbers; a world populated by eccentric and
avant-garde French composer Erik Satie (1866–1925) and Dada icon Marcel Duchamp
(1887–1968); and the world of Cage idol Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862).
Cage’s
World: A Strange Theater
Some numbers are mini-dramas. For example, No. 36. Cage’s directions: “Number
given is number of things eaten or drunk.” Assume the “number given” is 3. The
song text: “I can drink without eating, but I certainly can’t eat without
drinking.”
No. 54 includes only this direction: “Leave the stage by going up (flying) or
by going down through a trap door. Return in the same way wearing an animal’s
head.”
No. 79 instructs the soloist to “breathe as though you had lost your voice”;
the score consists of squiggles that rise and fall, along with indications of
where the soloist is to inhale and exhale as she follows the pattern.
No. 88 directs the singer: “Leave the stage through the audience returning to
the stage without leaving the theatre. Do this very slowly.”
No. 89 asks the singer to locate an audience member by dropping a transparency
with two intersecting lines on a seating chart. The person seated where the
lines intersect is to receive a gift—an apple or some cranberries. “If no one
is seated there, simply place gift on empty seat.”
Satie/Duchamp
No. 25 applies electronics to a song of Erik Satie’s.
No. 91 pays homage to Marcel Duchamp. In his text, Cage uses large uppercase letters to spell Marcel and Duchamp.
This, he emphasizes, has “no musical significance.” These are the first lines:
a utility aMong swAllows is
theiR musiC.
thEy produce it midair to avoid coLliding.
aDvanced stUdy: suitCases.
Home’ll be Africa.
crèMe fraiche followed by three
kinds of Potatoes.
Walden
Revisited: The World of Thoreau
No. 27 is homage to Thoreau: “Lusty growth of oaks and pines, Phoebe came to
find its nest radiant as gems on weeds.
Trees are losing their leaves. Sparkles in clear cool air. The cowslip in blossom. March, November fifty-three,
how could patient pine have known? Birds’ nests, tracks of animals outside the
wall, indication of water.”
No. 30 sets a fractured passage from Thoreau’s Journal. It opens like this:
“Wasps are building summer squashes, saw a fish hawk, when I hear this both
bushes and trees are thinly leaved, few ripe ones on sandy banks, rose right up
high into the air, like trick of some pleasant demon to entertain me.”
No. 35 sets text from Thoreau’s essay “On Civil Disobedience”: “The best form
of government is no government at all, and that will be what we will have when
we are ready for it.”
—James M. Keller and Larry Rothe
HENRY COWELL
Synchrony
Henry
Cowell grew up free of the assumption that all worthwhile culture came from the
other side
of the Atlantic. Nearby San Francisco was full of Asian music, and Cowell’s
fantasy was drawn to sounds from across the Pacific. He explored the piano,
absorbed whatever was in the air in San Francisco’s Chinese and Japanese
neighborhoods, developed a love of Irish folk music, and came to include in his
concept of “music” virtually all sounds natural and human.
This composer of about 1,000 pieces was more than just a composer. In Berlin he
studied comparative musicology; during World War II he was the Office of War
Information’s resident expert on Asian music. He edited the symposium American Composers on American Music,
and with his wife, Sidney Robertson Cowell, he wrote Charles Ives and His Music, the first book on that great pioneer.
He founded and edited the quarterly New
Music. He found time to teach at schools across the country, and among
those who learned from him were John Cage, Lou Harrison, George Gershwin, and
Burt Bacharach.
Synchrony was intended for Martha
Graham, whose striking presence had already been noted in the dance world, but
the hoped-for collaboration did not materialize. Cowell begins with about a
minute of music for trumpet alone. It is not so much music as flight and
soaring translated into music. What the trumpet plays is source material for
everything else. Its intervals and melodic
shapes are redeployed in new rhythms, and the latent harmonic potential
of the long melody is realized. From time to time we are reminded that Cowell
had heard Debussy and Stravinsky, but the overwhelming impression is of a new
voice. There is even some suggestion of the tone cluster—the simultaneous
sounding of a bunch of adjacent or close-together notes on a keyboard—a device
for which Cowell became famous. Here, half a minute after the trumpet solo,
three piccolos play more or less the same tune, one beginning on D, the second
on C, and the third on B; but with sustained tones taking the place of the
piano’s percussive attack-and-diminuendo, the acoustic effect is quite
different than clusters sounded on a keyboard. The clusters fan out into true
harmony, so to speak. The orchestral texture is varied, the pace even more so.
Solo instruments remind us of the trumpet’s solo flight, but Synchrony ends with a vigorous tutti, crescendo e accelerando to the last
offbeat crash of timpani, cymbals, and gong.
—Michael Steinberg
JOHN ADAMS
Absolute Jest
In
Absolute Jest, Adams explores how his
affinity for Beethoven leads down surprising new creative paths. “I frequently
have these powerful, archetypal experiences with Beethoven,” says Adams, “but
with the piano sonatas and the quartets, which for me are the most vivid, rather
than with the symphonies and the public music that gets heard all the time.”
Comprising a large, widely spanning single movement, Absolute Jest incorporates more than a half-dozen Beethoven
fragments, mostly from the late string quartets. These fragments, however, are
not simply rearranged “quotations,” but provide the raw material for a score
that could be by none other than John Adams.
The unifying factor here is the composer’s
attraction to what he calls “the ecstatic energy of Beethoven, who was the
master of taking the minimal amount of information and turning it into
fantastic, expressive, and energized structures.” Adams, however, restricts
himself in Absolute Jest to using
brief, isolated, and originally unrelated fragments. These he uses as building
blocks to construct a single movement of large proportions, recombining and
transferring Beethovenian musical DNA to create something with distinctively
new properties.
Several of the Beethoven fragments in Absolute Jest originate from scherzos from the composer’s late period: in particular, those of the Op. 131 and
Op. 135 quartets. Indeed, Beethoven’s genius for unleashing unsuspected
power from “minimal information” is especially pronounced in his scherzos. Here
he uses elementary musical impulses as the seeds of immensely inventive
movements. By the same token, Beethoven’s
own label for these movements—scherzo,
or joke—suggests the irony of such
rough magic, by which the trivial is transformed into something cosmic and
profound. Adams juxtaposes these scherzo fragments (including a winking
reference to Beethoven’s “public” music in the scherzo of the Ninth) with a
fragment from the opening fugal movement of Op. 131 as well as a brief bit of
the imposing Grosse Fuge. Indeed, a
newfound fascination with age-old countrapuntal techniques is a hallmark of Absolute Jest.
A striking feature of Absolute Jest’s scoring is the presence of a solo string quartet that weaves in and out of the orchestral fabric. In addition, Adams
includes a sonority altogether foreign to Beethoven: the piquant
“tintinnabulation” (as the composer terms it) of cowbells, harp, and piano
tuned in non-Western mean temperament. Throughout, the composer notes, this
trio of alternatively tuned instruments functions as a “consort in the medieval
sense.”
In terms of its form, Adams suggests that Absolute Jest is “the closest thing I’ve written to
variations—although in this case there is no single tune as in a classic set of
variations like Bach’s ‘Goldberg’ Variations.” The first section percolates
with fragments from the scherzos of the Ninth Symphony and the Op. 131 quartet.
Unpredictable shifts in tempo and texture lead to a gloss on material from the
Op. 135 scherzo, while Adams crafts an entirely new fugal passage from fragments
of the opening of Op. 131, as well as from the quasi-atonal strain and pull of
the Grosse Fuge.
Yet another fragment comes from middle-period Beethoven: the “Waldstein”
Sonata, Op. 53. Absolute Jest’s
highly dramatic coda “rides upon the harmonic changes” of the sonata’s
opening measures, as a rousing, restless surge of energy reminiscent of Adams’s early Shaker
Loops gathers power. No sooner does it gravitate to a powerfully anchored
tonal goal of B-flat than the music
dissolves for a final, enigmatic comment from the “detuned” percussion consort.
—Thomas May
EDGARD
VARÈSE
Amériques
Varèse’s influence was not widely felt until long after his pieces were
written. “An artist,” he observed, “is never ahead of his time, but most people are behind their own time.”
Varèse’s musical training reads like a resume for a properly schooled French
musician at the turn of the 20th century. When he sailed for New York in
December 1915, his catalogue included a couple of Strauss-sized symphonic poems
and an incomplete opera. He had left most of his manuscripts in Berlin, where
they disappeared in a fire. Apart from one early song, Varèse’s output
comprises 13 works, all dating from his maturity. Amériques marks his rupture from mainstream European tradition and
the beginning of his idiosyncratic modernism.
Amériques requires such gigantic
forces that its airings still remain rare. But the 125 performers required in
the revised version represent a considerable reduction from the original
score’s 142 instrumentalists. In 1926, after 16 rehearsals, Leopold Stokowski
introduced Amériques at a matinee
performance by The Philadelphia Orchestra
to one of the most conservative audiences on the East Coast. “It is
indeed a powerful piece of music which can cause a Friday afternoon audience to
indulge in hisses and catcalls,” reported one critic. A few days later, the
forces reinstalled themselves at Carnegie Hall for a performance that left
audience and critics divided.
Some listeners and commentators latched on to the sound of the siren and
decided that Amériques depicted the
bustling city of the new America. Indeed, the work’s original title was Amériques: Americas, New Worlds, but
Varèse objected to any such interpretation, protesting that the name was to be
understood as “symbolic of discoveries—new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in
the minds of men.”
The piece is massively complicated. The
instrumentation of the opening is as shocking as anything: In the midst of such
a gigantic assemblage, a languorous theme is announced, mezzo-forte, by an alto flute. After a measure on its own, the alto
flute is joined by two harps and little interjections from a bassoon—a texture
that sounds like one of Debussy’s gentler moments. But Varèse soon shows
his own colors when larger instrumental groups, sometimes operating as if
unaware of each other’s existence, juxtapose their own material over the flute
theme. Sonorities are often brash, and instruments play at the extremes of
their registers and dynamics. Amériques
proceeds with a generally sectional, almost arbitrary, flavor; it displays
little of the traditional structure that listeners of 1926 would have expected.
At the end, everything comes together into a single body of sound to yield one
of the most exciting, Dionysian, and potentially deafening spans in the
orchestral literature.
—James M. Keller