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Liner Notes for John Cage, Two3; Inlets; Two4 (OgreOgress, 2004)

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The role (or non-role) of emotion in John Cage’s music seems to me a particularly crucial question in the ongoing critical reception of the singular American composer, and indeed of much American music after 1945. Cage’s own remarks on this subject were characteristically ambivalent. He discovered early on that listeners did not always understand the emotions he was trying to express in his composition and gradually decided to avoid expressing them altogether: he felt that this decision allowed sounds to be themselves and left any emotions to be felt where they properly belonged, within the listeners themselves.

Some of Cage’s performers and critical admirers have understood this decision as a rejection of emotion altogether. There is some evidence that they are correct. Too often, however, they make their conclusion into a prescription for listening. But Cage never allowed his own convictions to devolve into a draconian manifesto that obligated listeners to hear his music in a certain way.

Still, it is evident that the experimental impulse to suppress emotion was widely felt by composers both within and without the Cage circle. Philip Glass hoped that audiences would experience his Music in Twelve Parts (1971–74) as a “‘presence,’ freed of dramatic structure, a pure medium of sound.[1]” His recent work has retreated quite far from that pronouncement and indeed has made it possible for listeners to savor the drama and emotional excitement of his earlier works as well.

Glass’s notion of a pure medium of sound without dramatic structure applies more readily to Cage’s work; it is particularly applicable to the series of late works which James Pritchett dubbed the Number Pieces. These works bear titles that consist only of the number of performers involved, often including a superscript number to distinguish, say, one duet in the series from another. Cage likened the titles to the simple clothes that he wore each day. But Cage took care to introduce subtle variation in the individual compositions so that each one retained some individuality even as they displayed similarities to other works in the series.

The instrumentation of Two3 (1991)—shō and conch shells—recalls two rather different groups of pieces from Cage’s career. Conch shells appeared most prominently in Inlets (1977), one of several improvisational pieces (another is Branches [1976] including amplified cactus) in which the performers play “instruments” that are unfamiliar and unpredictable. In an interview from 1980, Cage described the experience of performing these works:

In the case of the plant materials, you don’t know them; you’re discovering them. So the instrument is unfamiliar. If you become very familiar with a piece of cactus, it very shortly disintegrates, and you have to replace it with another one which you don’t know. . . . In the case of Inlets, you have no control whatsoever over the conch shell when it’s filled with water. You tip it and you get a gurgle, sometimes; not always. So the rhythm belongs to the instruments, and not to you.[2]

Both works are examples of what Cage called “music of contingency,” an approach to improvisation with unpredictable results that concerned the composer during this period.[3]

The full impact of these works has yet to be felt. That is because most musicians and music-lovers expect each of the instruments and voice types to possess a fundamental identity, a predictable idiom and technique. Some performers, such as Joan LaBarbara and Robert Dick, have pioneered extended techniques (for voice and flute, respectively). But even they have done so through the application of their own personalities and ingenuity. Inlets, on the other hand, represents a quite different proposition, one in which the performers cannot control their instruments fully. As a result, they continually discover the potential of their instruments and remain continually fascinated by its identity. From this example, it is easy for me to imagine a future musician who discovers a traditional instrument in the same manner and remains, in effect, marvelously ignorant of its characteristic technique.

On the other hand, Cage’s choice of the shō, a mouth organ with bamboo pipes that acts as one of the harmony-producing instruments in Japanese gagaku, represented a more recent interest. Mayumi Miyata had pioneered the shō as a contemporary concert instrument. Cage first met her during his historic return to the 1990 Darmstadt summer course; he was attracted to her artistry and to the sound of her instrument. Four Number Pieces from 1991 include her instrument: One9 is identical to the shō part for Two3 and can also be performed with the orchestral work 108; Two4 combines the shō with solo violin.

Cage approached composition by determining a number of possibilities for an instrument and then using chance to select which of these possibilities would appear and at what point during the composition. Among his musical sketches archived at the New York Public Library are copious notes indicating all of the single tones and clusters (aitake) that the shō could play, both familiar and unfamiliar. Audiences and performers of his music who are intimate with the shō would surely recognize some of the combinations, but the unusual ones would defamiliarize the familiar ones and allow them to be experienced as fresh and novel sounds on their own.

Throughout the Number Piece series, Cage repeatedly considered the perennial tension between process and object that had characterized his entire compositional output. His earlier compositions (up to the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra of 1950–51) resembled, more or less, musical works with their unchanging disposition of movements and completely notated musical material. With his work on the Music for Piano series (1952–1956), Cage began to envision another kind of music in which performers could choose the order and quantity of material to be played, the speed for performance, and many other aspects that give music a certain sonic and gestural profile. Even later works, such as those in the Variations series of the 1960s and ’70s, extend this idea still further, by obligating performers to create the piece they are to play by using tools and measuring devices that Cage created.

These and other works led Cage to think more in terms of process rather than in terms of an object, or a final rarefied artistic product. He sometimes disliked the polish of a finished art object, and on more than one occasion bemoaned dada works that had become simply beautiful art objects to be enshrined in museums. By embracing process, Cage felt he created through art a situation that was more like everyday life with its unpredictable qualities and its unabashed triviality.

However, Cage’s work after 1969 took a most unexpected turn back toward the musical object in a number of compositions using chance operations that resembled the more traditional musical works of his earlier years. Cheap Imitation (1969), Hymns and Variations (1979), the Freeman Etudes (1977–1980/1989–1990), Chorals (1978), and several others all have definite endings and beginnings, definite indications for tempo, articulation, and dynamics—in short, performers learn them as they might a Beethoven sonata. Cage continued to write more indeterminate music, of course, but seemed aware of this shift in his thinking. By the time he commenced work on the Number Pieces, Cage elevated this awareness into a guiding principle for the entire series. A program note for the first one, Two, describes the work as follows:

There are two parts which have no fixed relation, no score. They are written in a series of time-brackets (the same for each part), nine of which are flexible with respect to their beginnings and endings, one of which is shorter and fixed. This is the first of a series of works that bring aspects of process (weather) together with aspects of structure (object). Each piece will have as its title the written-out number of players.[4]

Although the reconciliation of process and object represented in the Number Pieces was the most elegant Cage achieved, he probably did not intend it as his final solution to the ongoing problem. Other works he was contemplating at the time of his death have nothing whatever to do with the premises of the Number Pieces. For example, in July 1992 he referred briefly to an unrealized new work for radios and television. His more extensive descriptions of a “Noh-opera” from the same time suggest something quite different: a major music-theater piece involving an extensive set whose construction would form much of the work’s sound.[5]

In Two3 and Two4, Cage addressed the tension between process and object in an interesting way, by creating suites of separate pieces. The shō part for Two3 consists of ten separate movements from which the performer makes choices when it is performed with 108; in addition, as mentioned above, it can be performed separately (as One9) or with a separate group of pieces for conch shells that constitutes the second part of Two3. The violin part for Two4 is divided into four connected movements, one for each of the violin’s strings. The shō part is divided into three movements: the division may address the need for the shō player to change instruments every ten to fifteen minutes and thus prevent moisture from collecting on the reeds, but Miyata has recalled that Cage determined the divisions into movements by using chance operations.[6]

With these two compositions, Cage crosses the boundaries between process and object in a number of ways. The three works—One9, 108, Two3—were all conceived separately but can be performed as if they are single works. In addition, the modular design of One9 guarantees a kind of indeterminacy when it is performed, for instance, with 108, since the soloist can choose which modules she plays and when she plays them. And the different dispositions of movements between violin and shō help the performers to maintain their own individuality in the work even though they perform at the same time.

All this background information scarcely prepares the listener for actually experience these pieces. Hearing them, I come as close as I think I can to becoming Glass’s ideal listener for Music in Twelve Parts, one who experiences the music as a presence freed of dramatic structure. Nevertheless, I don’t believe this music lacks expressive impact. The vast history of the shō or violin, the rich evocations of nature through the sight and the sound of conch shells—these things alone carry associations that have accumulated for the lifetimes of some listeners, and they cannot be ignored. Even those listeners who have never heard a shō before will, I imagine, quickly grow spellbound with the delicate, treble-only sounds of the instrument and its dependence on the human breath for its life and its phrasing. The stillness of Cage’s Number Pieces can always evoke a sense of tranquility and serenity to receptive listeners.

But there is something else. Cage’s music depends on a slow unfolding and a leisurely approach to time in order to make its full impact. That slow unfolding introduces a graininess or raggedness to the beauty of the sounds. There is no contrast, no epiphany, no drama, no point. The music simply continues with almost annoying steadfastness until its end. That steadfastness, stretched out to extraordinary lengths (seventy minutes or more), allows the music to avoid the trap of merely sounding beautiful. More and more I find the music taking equal precedence with the other events around me, gently enveloping me until I see and hear minute details of everyday life with a fresh, uncluttered clarity. Perhaps this experience transcends any emotional reaction I could have. Yet I do not feel it shares much with another musical tradition after 1945, an ultra-rational music that also viewed emotion askance. Cage’s music represents something altogether different, and I still find all my words absolutely ineffectual to describe it.

Rob Haskins
Durham, New Hampshire
October 2004

Notes

[1] Philip Glass, “Liner Notes, Music in 12 Parts: Parts 1 and 2” (London: Virgin Records, CA2010, 1977), n.p.

[2] Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras, Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1981), 76–77.

[3] See “John Cage and Roger Reynolds: A Conversation.” Musical Quarterly 65 (1979): 580–84 (the interview took place in 1977); and Stuart Saunders Smith, “Having Words with John Cage,” Percussive Notes 30, no. 3 (February 1992): 52.

[4] Typescript in the Cage Correspondence Files at Northwestern University (C417–2.17). The description does not appear in the published version of the work, but might have been used as a program note at its first performance.

[5] See John Cage and Joan Retallack, Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music. John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack, ed. Joan Retallack (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England [Wesleyan University Press], 1996), 227–34 and 341.

[6] See Stephen Drury, “Variation Pitch Structure Time: Two4 for Violin or Piano and Shō,” at <http://www.stephendrury.com/Writings/texts/two4layers.htm> (accessed 12 October 2004).

The Great Cage Recordings: Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1)

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It makes sense for me to begin with Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes; I’m a keyboard player and most of the music I review is for one kind of keyboard or another. It’s one of the first Cage pieces I actually encountered—I must have heard them as early as high school, or certainly no later than my undergraduate years, and like almost everyone else, found the timbre of the prepared piano enchanting. My later difficulties with Cage—which extended through the rest of my undergraduate and graduate years up to 1992—resulted from bad information, shortsightedness on my part, and terrible recordings, all of which made me unwilling to grapple with most of his music for a long time. Even so, one of my last Master’s papers at Peabody was an analysis of The Perilous Night (in Margaret Leng Tan’s superb performance, still available on New Albion), which my professor thought showed promise.

When I began reviewing recordings for American Record Guide in 1993, I got some Cage recordings and became friendly with Brian Brandt, the owner of Mode Records; he gave me a number of the recordings. The fine Sibley Library at the Eastman School of Music, where I was completing my doctorates in harpsichord performance and musicology, had many others. Sometime during those years I rediscovered the Sonatas and Interludes and they became important to me as a music-lover and as someone who wanted to talk about the pitches in Cage’s music. They are for me Cage’s most important composition before 1950, and one whose greatness he usually only matched in all of the best music he made afterward. There’s that great line in the “Lecture on Nothing” on his deliberately choosing quiet sounds in the advent of World War II; this fact, plus Cage’s own acknowledgment that the work responded to the seven permanent emotions in Indian aesthetics—including the erotic, mirth, the odious, all of which tend toward the final one, tranquility—makes the Sonatas a kind of expressive line drawn in the sand: an eloquent statement in the face of other works from the time aiming for a much grander (and sometimes frankly patriotic statements) on both sides of the Atlantic: Americanist symphonists like Harris, Schuman, and Copland, Messiaen’s Turangalîla, Britten’s Peter Grimes. It poses the possibility of an avant-garde serenity, a possibility hardly considered in the 1940s. No wonder Cage won a citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim on the basis of this piece.

There are a number of fine recordings of the work. I’ll consider only one here; later entries will discuss others along with shorter critiques of ones that aren’t as successful.

My friend and colleague Louis Goldstein recorded the work on December 20, 1994; it was released as Greenseye Music 4794 in 1996, along with a concert performance of Dream from December 11, 1995. Louie can do anything, but his readings of Cage and Feldman are striking for their expansive but vital character.

In the Sonatas and Interludes, he plays a large piano, which results in deeper sounds and, at least to my mind, more heterogenous ones, too. He has a grand conception of the piece: the tempos are usually broad (but not overly so) and the gestures measured but also somehow noble. When the damper pedal is engaged the sounds can reverberate for a long time.

The performances are full of small details that lend to the piece the grandeur I noted above. In the first sonata he uses very subtle rubato: first a noticeable (but nonetheless slight) pause after the first unexpected thudding sound. Then, near the end, he speeds up a bit to make the sudden appearance of mostly unprepared A-minor triads more dramatic.

Sonata 2 contrasts with the first: it requires a more rhythmically incisive manner, and once more Goldstein responds brilliantly. The variety of sounds adds to the appeal. Rubato is present here, but much more moderated (It appears, for instance, midway through the second half after one of the most metronomic passages in the performance). The different sounds also have an effect on the ending of the sonata, which sounds more abrupt than it does in other recordings.

Another highlight is the First Interlude. The preparations give a microtonal flavor to many of the notes that suggest a definite pitch. Still, the overtones are rich and very complex, another reason to favor a larger instrument. Later in the piece, the music gives way to several groovy, asymmetric ostinatos. He doesn’t play these as mercilessly as others have: they sound more mysterious, somehow. This particular movement is one I find it very difficult to stop listening to (Always a sign of a good performance.)

As the cycle unfolds, Goldstein projects a very clear and compelling structure for the whole, which for me culminates in the dramatic arc for the pieces beginning with the Third Interlude. This he plays more aggressively than most of the other performances I know. Thereafter, Cage seems to become increasingly preoccupied with the interaction between prepared tones and unprepared ones: these pieces remind me of Schoenberg’s famous remark that Cage would come to a wall because he had no sense of harmony, to which Cage responded that he would spend the rest of his life beating his head against that wall. By juxtaposing prepared and unprepared tones, Cage poses (perhaps in spite of himself) a new possibility for harmony.

I described the final Sonata XVI as “a music box quietly playing in some distant reality” (John Cage, 51). No performance I know suggests that effect better than Goldstein’s. It begins in a Gouldian tempo with a Fürtwängleresque expression in the first half; but in the second, everything becomes otherworldly, motionless, and serene—all the more so because of his choices for the first half.

Checking today online, I don’t see any evidence that the recording is still available, but in the meantime, a 1982 performance gives a sense of his great artistry.

What Makes New Classical Music Classical?

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In my review of Scott Pender’s release for Navona, 88 + 12, I closed by remarking that he “is inventive, expressively rich, and gimmick-free: his music is what I imagine when I dream of a future for classical music.” Not long afterward, a post by Greg Sandow on Facebook commented on his own blog post “It Can Be Done,” which reported on The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Wordless Music festival and their success attracting younger audiences. I was particularly interested in the Wordless Music model of combining various styles within a single concert: Sandow mentioned indie rock, noise improvisation, Shostakovich, the Bach B-flat-Major Partita, and more. It wasn’t clear to me how much variety there was within a single concert, but I got the impression that most of the concerts had a healthy mix of things. I’m certainly in favor of that: it seems more and more the case that the young composers and performers I know are interested in all kinds of music and very good practitioners of many styles. A similar, wider cross-pollination in concerts might increasingly appeal to younger audiences, too.

What most caught my attention, though, was Sandow’s overly optimistic observation that he sees no sign of classical music being dumbed down through attempts to reinvent its milieu and its programming. I disagreed and was immediately called upon to explain myself: I think people were concerned that I considered minimalism and other kinds of tonal-sounding music an example of dumbing down. I assured them that this was not the case, and promised to explain myself at greater length in a subsequent blog post. This is the result, which interleaves a number of related topics. First, some new classical music is dumbed down, and that comes from its failure to live up to the standards of what I would call new classical music—I need to explain what I mean by that. At the same time, new classical music should be distinguished from a great many other kinds of concert music (yes, yes, a vague term, I know) by composers who sometimes have very different expectations from a composer of new classical music. I conclude with some speculation concerning what these differing expectations might mean to the wider community of contemporary concert music composers and their prospective audiences.

§

In order to set up properly the context for my thoughts on the subject, I need to cite some passages from one of my American Record Guide reviews published in the November/December 2013 issue. The disc in question was called Bach Re-Invented (Sony 94168) with the pianist Simone Dinnerstein and the Absolute Ensemble led by Kristian Järvi, who performed music by Gene Pritsker, Daniel Schnyder, and Tom Trapp. The album’s premise was to take some Bach Inventions and commission three younger composers to create new music in their own manner related to the models. I dubbed this “the musical equivalent of making a great Hollandaise—one miscalculation and the sauce breaks.”

I thoroughly disliked Pritsker’s Reinventions (Piano Concerto). The first two movements are based on the C-major and A-minor inventions, passages of which are mercilessly repeated with the finesse of a jackhammer. Bach is also mostly unrelated to the other music in the piece, which, as I wrote, “runs a gamut of popular styles that would sound perfectly at home in a Las Vegas megaclub.” I liked the third movement, which introduced a beautiful bandoneon (played by Hector Del Curto) and was effectively based on Bach’s D-minor Invention: the mixture of styles here seemed more plausible and each contributed to the other. Nevertheless, the whole effort seems wrong-headed from the start because Bach seems more of a pretext for the album than a font of inspiration facilitating a meaningful dialogue between the old and new. These composers, it seemed to me at the time, weren’t writing new classical music, and the presence of Bach’s work reasonably led me to expect them to.

Classical music is a tradition with a history and certain generic expectations—both formal and social—that come along with it. For instance, even though the exact meaning of the word sonata has shifted over the years (it originally meant music that’s played by an instrument rather than music that’s sung), composers who write a sonata probably expect their listeners to know other pieces by that title (maybe a great many of them) and probably also expect their listeners actively to consider their prior knowledge when they hear a new one. Scott Pender’s Cello Sonata is such a piece; it interests me as much for whatever merits it has on its own as it does for the way it makes me rehear other cello sonatas (Beethoven’s and Brahms’s, for example). Of course, a composer can strike out on her own, can write a piece so far against the grain of the generic tradition of the sonata that the result might productively engage with the tradition—but even then I’m inclined to think that the composer must be deeply aware of the tradition before such a work could succeed. Marc Chan’s music might be the best example of this I can think of: his pieces J’s Box and My Wounded Head 3 (the latter dedicated to and premiered by me, I should add) are remarkable pieces that treat pre-existing music (Bach’s first prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier and the passion chorale settings from the St. Matthew Passion) as reservoirs of material for a highly nuanced intertextual dialogue. His later works involving the music of Schumann continue this trend and demand, I think, an even greater awareness of their compositional subject.

There are a number of different streams of concert musical composition now that have very little to do with the classical tradition but that, nevertheless, don’t fit comfortably in non-classical traditions. They include minimalism, chance and indeterminacy, and sound art; one might stretch and add twelve-tone array composition into the mix, but it’s possible to argue that it refers to Schoenberg, which in turn refers very strongly to the Austro-German tradition. Insofar as some fundamental aspects of twelve-tone array composition work against many of Schoenberg’s conceptions of composition (especially the formal ones), I would see it as essentially a different tradition altogether. To the extent that the composers imagine, hope, or expect their music to remain performed in years to come, however, that music subscribes to the same sensibility as classical music, even if has almost nothing to do with the tradition. Like classical music, it demands our attention and thought through multiple hearings; one performance is usually insufficient.

§

Popular music, however, is different—it is predicated on a constant influx of new, relatively short and catchy items that stay in the mind’s ear for a few months and are eventually replaced by other offerings with equal staying power. That’s why I liked Tom Trapp’s Headless Snowman on the Sony disc. I wrote that it “clocks in at 4 minutes, makes its au courant musical points quickly and effectively—just as popular music does—and ends before it exhausts itself.”

I think that many people believe the solution to the “problem of classical music audiences” involves embracing the world of popular music more fully. This approach won’t do any damage when it’s well thought out and executed with honesty and imagination; and sometimes it leads to amazing results. I am by no means a purist when it comes to the updating of classical music performance, but I’m willing to be critical and call attention to when it works and when it doesn’t: the Kronos Quartet doing Jimi Hendrix worked; they’ve continued to have a strong career and presence. But Michael Torke singing the praises of Chaka Khan’s bass lines and thinking he was current for appropriating them (in one of his early releases) didn’t work: Khan was by then already a marginal figure in pop music, and Torke’s hitching his wagon to her star had no effect on his career whatever.

Torke is by no means alone in his misstep. I cringe when I recall Susan McClary gushing over Earth, Wind and Fire in her famous article “Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition.” She attempted to argue that the technology of recording was just as sophisticated as Milton Babbitt’s approach to array composition, that the band’s maintaining a groove was just as difficult to achieve as executing Babbitt’s complex rhythms. These are naïve, apple-and-orange comparisons, made still less tenable because Earth, Wind and Fire weren’t particularly sophisticated then and are now quaintly outdated except as the object of ’80s nostalgia. To be clear: I love McClary and think she’s one of the most important living musicologists. But even though there’s still a lot of useful material in her essay—above all her call for critics who can engage with the subjective aspects of twelve-tone and other post-tonal music in addition to (or even in absence of) the current tendency to offer little more than a technical description of its design—some of it has dated as surely as Earth, Wind and Fire’s “System of Survival.” And to the degree the ideas are outmoded, they cease to be intellectually or even culturally vital.

§

I do think there’s a good deal of very sophisticated music outside of universities and concert halls, though some of it may inevitably date as inexorably as Earth, Wind and Fire. My own tastes are almost insanely eclectic: Satoshi Tomiie, Tristan Perich, John Cage, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Milton Babbitt, J Dilla, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich (to say nothing of Machaut, Bach, Liszt, Haydn, Wagner) are on my mind and my playlist, and I’m always looking for new material.

Some of the above individuals may or may not represent a trend I am increasingly noticing where I encounter a number of composers who are both clearly uninterested in the classical tradition (which, I emphasize again, is fine) and, perhaps, more open to the idea of a product that, like popular music, speaks vividly to a certain, finite present, can be easily grasped with one or two hearings, and is readily or even eagerly discarded when a new work in the same vein appears. The songs of Corey Dargel and Matt Marks have very little to do with classical music, even though their work can hardly be called pop music. They have a certain sophistication that several hearings reveal, but it’s not particularly necessary to grasp that sophistication in order to enjoy their music. Part of it is a question of scale: the shorter such a composition is, the more easily it can be digested (and either forgotten or not—how many of us are listening to Philip Glass’s Songs from Liquid Days now?). Even so, I might find myself returning to their work because their expressive or compositional merits still offer something that I want to experience again. In other words, Dargel’s and Marks’s chosen medium of song would no more assign their work to oblivion than Schubert’s.

At the same time, I can’t help but feel more than a little angst about the present tendency in new music, especially new American music, one that Milton Babbitt memorably resisted in 1975 when he said, “I dare to aspire to make music as much as it can be, rather than as little as one can obviously get away with music’s being, under the current egalitarian dispensation.” I like options. I like pieces that I want and need to hear again and again: Steve Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians (or WTC 9/11, lest I be accused of liking only Reich’s earlier music), Cage’s Etudes Australes, Robert Morris’s MA. I need pieces that can stretch my capacity for hearing, challenge my assumptions of what a piece of music can be. (Two more recent examples: Enno Poppe’s Salz and Michał Dobrzyński’s Magnus Dominus.) But I also like somewhat less durable pieces—charming, maybe a bit profound, and more instantly understood—like Dargel’s Last Words from Texas, which I may well continue to explore, or Sage the Gemini’s “Red Nose,” which I probably won’t.

But the question remains as to whether this cornucopia of options will remain in play or whether, as another, younger generation holds increasing sway over taste-making, the options will become more limited. I mentioned Milton Babbitt’s lament above, and the recent near-canonization of Steve Reich as America’s greatest living composer suggests that he is right—as I recall, the pronouncement was made while composers like Elliott Carter were still alive, not to mention John Luther Adams or Alvin Lucier. Then, too, there is the question of the changing environments for music performance, rightly hailed by Sandow (and which occasioned this essay). These new venues might condition changing listening habits as much as the kind of music heard there.

Classical music (and whatever you want to call the other kinds of music I don’t see as classical) needs new, younger audiences to be sure. But the new audience might come at a cost. The Dinnerstein debacle suggests that today’s composers are more open to the popular music model, which is not designed, in the main, to reward hundreds of hearings, let alone initiate or sustain a canonical literature. And this is by no means a new phenomenon. Think of the 70-some operas Donizetti wrote because his audiences needed a constant supply of new fare. Same with the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart. But I nevertheless worry that this more disposable concert music will lead to more superficial listening and a more fleeting sense of long-term musical memory.

I expressed more or less the same fear in the closing of my Dinnerstein review: “Classical music can wonderfully embrace the popular musical world around it—as in the work of Mason Bates or, in particular, Michael Gordon—but it cannot hope to offer momentary diversions in the same manner as pop music. That seems to be what this disc aspires to. And if this is all the future that classical music has, then classical music has no future.” I still believe this and hope new classical music will find a way to continue.

The Great Cage Recordings: Introduction

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Having written an essay on Cage discography, included a list of recommended recordings in my book on Cage and reviewed a number of Cage CDs for the American Record Guide, I thought it might be useful to include on my blog a number of posts on some indispensable Cage recordings. My choices would not only identify what I think are his finest works, but also comment on which performances are better than others.

For those who haven’t read my Cage reviews, you might wonder how one could speak about superior (or inferior) Cage performances. What could possibly make for a bad performance of 4′33″, for instance? Visual shenanigans aside—as in this ridiculous video by the Music Group of EBU Radio—how could I possibly fault the sounds of any performance or recording?

4′33″—a piece whose sounds consist entirely of whatever sounds occur in or near the space where a performance occurs—is an extreme case, of course, but even when I get to that piece I think you’ll agree that not all performances are uniformly good. To introduce this series of posts, I thought I’d begin by discussing the aspects I consider when I review recordings of his music. Since Cage’s music was so diverse, some of the considerations below will not apply to every single piece, but many of them will. As I went about writing this list, I came to see that Cage’s music is, in many ways, not much different from the music of other composers.

  1. Fidelity to the text. Obviously this applies more to the works that are strictly notated, like the Sonatas and Interludes or the Freeman Etudes. In these works, while one make certain choices about tempo or phrasing, about shading of dynamics, the score carries the expectation that the music will unfold in the given order with the given pitches (sometimes sounding differently than they look because of preparations) and more or less at the speed that the notation suggests. The notation of the Sonatas is very conventional and fairly easy to understand; the notation in the Etudes, by contrast, is proportional (events at the left-hand side of the staff occur before the ones further right, and the closer the events are to each other, the faster they will occur). In the works with conventional notation, I’d expect the player to do more than simply play the notes with metronomically correct rhythms; I’d want the rhythms inflected, the phrases shaped, as with most music. In the proportional notation ones, I’ve found that quite literal performances can be quite effective but are by no means necessary or even preferable.
  2. Where the notation allows for a greater degree of choice, the performer should make novel choices. A colleague who shall remain nameless once introduced a burp in his or her performance of one of the solos from the Concert for Piano and Orchestra. That choice was deliberate. I observed that, in reading Cage, it seemed one of his interests concerned introducing sounds that had never been heard before; a burp seemed, somehow, too obvious. There might have been a time when a burp was a novel sound (or, to employ Cage’s term, a useful sound) and hence served an important purpose, for instance to remind us that any sound we make is music and that no one sound is better (or worse) than another. But just as Cage lamented, in performances of Winter Music, that everything became a melody—sounds formerly giving the impression of self-sufficiency seemed more connected to other sounds as the performer and audience heard the piece again and again—certain sounds become clichéd through overuse. Bodily sounds fall into this category, at least for me.
  3. Glenn Gould famously observed that the only reason to record a work is to record it differently. I’ve always thought that practice is more likely to lead to a worthwhile result, if for no other reason that it reveals the limits of what a composition can sustain interpretatively. Many Cage pieces invite radically different approaches. Even so, a radically different approach that violates the instructions of the score can often end up merely sounding stupid—this is particularly the case when performers know very little of Cage’s music or haven’t bothered to acquaint themselves fully with his ideas.
  4. This one has more to do with performances than recordings, but I think it’s appropriate to mention it here. Does the performance allow you to pay attention to other sounds in your environment as you listen? Another way of saying the same thing: do the ambient sounds around you seem, after a while, to contribute to what you’re hearing on the recording, even seem as important? If so, this is a performance of Cage that is in keeping with his post-1950 aesthetics. Naturally this applies only to the music composed after around 1952; the music of the ’30s and ’40s were not intended to point out the importance of all sounds within earshot, but rather to be enjoyed as most music was: by giving it our attention. At the same time, the principle applies in different ways to different pieces: think, say, of Sixteen Dances, one of the Number Pieces, and Europera 3.
  5. Cage’s music often suggests devotion more than emotion. But that doesn’t mean that the music must be played coldly or without expression. I’ll go farther: that doesn’t mean it should be played that way. The trick is to find an emotional approach that isn’t too overtly manipulative; that’s probably why so many people default to a senza espressione approach; it works, but it’s not very imaginative, especially in 2014.
  6. The music seems to demand an approach in which one does not become too wedded to habits. This is easier to gauge, perhaps, in a performance than a recording. Take a piece like Cheap Imitation, the content of which derives from Satie’s Socrate—when I played this piece a couple of years ago, I tried to shape the phrases in as many different ways as I could imagine; I think all of his music benefits from a variety of approaches applied, insofar as possible, without too much advance planning (and without falling back on habits).
  7. The performance should not be an excuse for the exploration of a concept or a gimmick, but at all times should aim for a simple, straightforward connection between musicians and an audience. (This observation applies, in particular, to performances of 4′33″ and several of the extreme indeterminate works of the 1960s.)
  8. If the work has been recorded before, do I want to hear the older recording instead of the one I’m currently listening to? And a corollary: am I too attached to an older favorite recording and not giving the newer one the attention it needs?
  9. Once I’ve heard the recording for the first time, I should want to listen to it again—sometimes as soon as it’s over. Once heard again, the recording should continue to surprise, move, give pleasure, etc.

One More (perhaps Superfluous) Webpage on 4´33˝

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An old friend shared on Facebook a link showing four performances of Cage’s 4´33˝ (and one philosophy lecture about it) the other day, remarking that he couldn’t understand why it was that this piece was still being talked about. He thought that its point could have been made in less time and is astonished that it remains noteworthy.

Unsurprisingly, one of his friends soon echoed the same sentiments with a lot more invective for Cage, which prompted me to write the following. It’s amazing to me how riled up this little piece gets people. Anyway, it got me thinking that 4´33˝ is one of the most celebrated pieces of Cage, maybe the most celebrated one; it’s also overly celebrated and grossly misunderstood. I posted this thought on Facebook.

Why do I say the piece is overly celebrated? Because even to its advocates, it has eclipsed almost every piece he’s written since. And Cage made many pieces after 1952. Add those pieces to all the ones that he wrote before 1952 and you have an output of roughly 300 works. And there are more if you take into account certain pieces like the various parts from the Concert for Piano and Orchestra and the Music for _____ series, which can be played by themselves or in combination with any of the others, or pieces like Song Books and Variations III, which can be realized in countless ways. Poorly informed critics who like to argue that Cage was more of a philosopher than a composer point without exception to 4´33˝; very few have listened carefully to any other works. That situation has begun to change as performers and have programmed more of his music and record labels have released new and usually better recordings.

Shortly after I made my brief Facebook remark, Emil Israel Chudnovsky, the aforementioned friend, took the bait:

We all understand the concept: the sounds of silence, the impossibility of absolute silence, the meditative space of collective silence/non-silence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yada yada yada.

Nice concept, might make for a legitimate essay or the occasional illustrative performance. Thus far, legitimate albeit a little too patently self-impressed; full of the pride of the pothead who’s come up with an intriguing question.

But then the son-of-a-mother has the cojones to publish and sell the “sheet music”. And then I know him to be a self-aware fraud. And know him to have the utmost contempt for the public as for the flock of trusting, neurotic sheep they prove themselves to be as they BUY said sheet music.

I offered to continue the discussion over e-mail because I know from experience that Facebook isn’t really a very productive medium for discussion. The following transcribes that exchange. (Thanks to Emil for allowing me to quote him.)

Me:

The significance of 4’33” has to do with a fundamental tenet of Buddhism, that everything in the world is important and valid, but only if one remains unattached to it. The question of this detachment is hard to describe—it doesn’t mean to be emotionally unmoved, but rather not to hold on to any feeling that the phenomena engender. It’s something really far past the notion of “any sound we make is music.” Cage mentioned in a 1980s interview that every day he turns his attention to it: a key to his devotion to the ideas of it.

As to the copyrighting of it, that was a condition that C.F. Peters made when it entered into its contractual relationship with Cage in 1960.  It’s too easy to make fun of the piece, I think—to oversimplify it, but also to overemphasize it, to hypostatize it. But one can choose to ignore that aspect of the piece. That’s what I would encourage people to do.

Emil:

So how exactly is

a) calling it a piece of music

b) making its “performance” a public event

c) allowing it to become a synecdoche for all things musical and avant-garde

Buddhist or unattached? What exactly does 4’33” encourage us to disattach from? I do understand the idea that attachment brings suffering, but it seems to me George Lucas’ Jedi knights did more to examine the idea, even with inane dialogue and epic special effects, than any number of Cage performances or debates ever did.

Me:

Calling it a piece of music was probably too simplistic on Cage’s part. But as he was a composer, and as it involved sounds, I’m not sure what else he would have called it.

Cage’s aim was for people to change their Mind in accordance with the tenets of Zen Buddhism. A performance is, I think you’ll agree, an extraordinarily potent way of making that point.

I am not sure 4’33” ever became a synecdoche for all things musical and avant-garde. To the extent that it did sort of speaks to my remark about it being grossly overvalued and misunderstood.

4’33” invites unattachment from all phenomena. I’m not sure I can make the concept of unattachment more clear. But it doesn’t have to do with forswearing all stimulus, but rather not becoming too overwrought by experiencing the stimulus.

George Lucas helped a lot too, but he made it more mystical than it needs to be.

Emil:

As for unattachment from all phenomena being in any way expressed by 4’33”, there is where I still disagree with you but need to formulate my thoughts a bit better to be coherent about why. As for the CONCEPT of unattachment, and how it means letting the world flow through and past you without necessarily altering you, I completely agree and hope to understand it fully one day, at the visceral level. Right now it’s just an intellectual construct. But 4’33” has certainly never done anything about moving the concept into the viscera. Indeed, the very fact that you had to point out the intention underlying the “piece” seems to argue for its being an ineffectual exercise in the alteration of Mind.

Cage was explicit about the connection, though? Between 4’33” specifically and Zen?

Oh, as for Peters, I’d still argue that true consistency would have made for a conversation of a separate contract, if need be. The act of publishing the work seems to argue against unattachment and to merely invite the kind of indictments that I – and millions of others – have leveled against Cage for many decades.

Me:

Buddhism is, ironically, an intellectual construct. So is every religion. (I can’t think of one thing that a person absorbs innately; can you?) One needs a little literature to introduce any spiritual idea, I think. But one soon realizes that words lose their effectiveness and meaning quickly.

I don’t think phenomena can pass through you without altering you. What I argue is that it doesn’t alter you permanently. 🙂

Cage famously avoided talking about these things because he was so terrified of imposing his ideas on others. But the interview with William Duckworth contains the ideas that I’ve used in my e-mails to you. (Talking Music; also published in the John Cage at 75 festschrift published by Bucknell Univ. Press.)

As for indicting Cage for 4’33”, I would say it’s sad that people do this when there are some 300-odd other pieces of his that are worthy of attention and don’t carry the same kind of baggage.

So there you have it. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this.

Finding the Emotion in “Left-Brain Music”: A Response to Robert Baksa (Part 2)

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When I hear any music in an unfamiliar style for the first time I’m often (maybe always) unable to judge or understand it deeply, and I’m certainly not able to respond with any deep feeling to it. Never mind whether the music has triads in it or not. For example: the first time I heard Monteverdi (it was Wendy Carlos’s realization of excerpts from L’Orfeo) I was baffled—I thought it was awful and boring. But once I got used to how it went, I found that I could respond intellectually and emotionally.

I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of our twentieth-century music has a much sharper learning curve. But I learn, with time. After many listenings, I find Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra beautiful; the variety of melodies and rhythm, and above all the sense of timing move me just as I’m moved when I hear Brahms’s Haydn Variations. And I’m excited and thrilled by the psychological drama Elliott Carter creates in his second string quartet. After spending some time listening with the score in hand, I find I can hear the dialogue Carter tries so hard to create in the music and perceive the very different personalities of the four instruments. And all this is in addition to what I intellectually understand about the compositional techniques in the music.

And surely some popular twentieth-century music can be very dissonant indeed. Think of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which speaks clearly and easily even to the most uninitiated audiences. Now for me, the Rite is one of the most overrated pieces of our time. Still, I can’t deny the emotional power it has over me and over its audiences. There’s a lesson to be learned here. What if I had convinced people to believe, as I do, that The Rite of Spring should be retired from the repertoire? I wouldn’t have all the wonderful music written by men and women who have been inspired by it. And I have no doubt that it will inspire others to compose other music that I might love in the future. So will I discourage people from loving it, from learning more about it, from listening to it? No, of course not. I believe that we have no way of knowing what positive effects music can have, so why not allow it in? Why lock the door? This is, rightly or wrongly, what I think Mr. Baksa asks us to do—and all because he can’t respond emotionally to some twentieth-century and contemporary music and can’t accept the possibility that some of us do.

As a Cage enthusiast I couldn’t help but be irritated by Mr. Baksa’s facile and completely ad hoc dismissal of his music. Already I think there’s a wide appeal for some of Cage’s early work; the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano has been recorded over a dozen times and many people think it is a masterpiece, for instance. And now that we have a wide variety of Cage’s music available in wonderful recordings (the ones on Mode are the best for my money), I imagine other pieces will begin to make their mark, too. I will suggest two that I loved on the very first hearing: First, Roaratorio, that ebullient and richly textured glossing of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake on Mode 28–29 and Wergo 6303 (American Record Guide, Nov/Dec 1994). The world of sounds and music that Cage assembles evokes so many emotions in me, from a concert-hall reverence (the operatic aria) to wonder and joy. And of course Cage’s voice, reading his unfathomable mesostics on Joyce’s name, always moves and reassures me. A second work, of a much different sensibility, is Fourteen, a kind of concerto for bowed grand piano and thirteen instruments on Mode 57 (ARG, May/June 1998). The bowed piano has a stunning, gorgeous, lyrical sound; the other instruments, playing so simply and so unobtrusively, make me tranquil and attentive. In that piece I experience time in a way I never have before, and I’m certain others can respond positively if the music is here for them to experience.

In 1967, the great American scholar Leonard B. Meyer (in Music, the Arts, and Ideas) predicted a pluralistic musical culture in which diametrically opposing musical styles would co-exist: he advised listeners to stop attempting to judge which style was better and, instead, judge each according to its own standards of excellence and elegance. Now, more than ever, we must heed Meyers’s advice. We must build bridges to other styles, other generations—let alone other cultures.  For if we continue to fight over who is right and who is wrong, what is emotional and what is intellectual, what we should cherish and what we should discard, we may find ourselves with no classical music at all.

Welcome to my new blog

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When my friend Raúl Santaella undertook a major redesign of my website, he suggested I include a blog with regular entries. I know he’s right: fresh content keeps people coming back.

However, as someone who’s had the good fortune to be published in a number of places and wants to continue to do so, I have a dilemma: what kind of content is suitable for a blog—that is, worth reading and worth writing—and yet is content that I wouldn’t want to try to publish elsewhere?

I haven’t thought very long and hard about this question, but my instincts tell me the best hope I have to maintain the required number of entries (one entry weekly or, at most, every two weeks) is to concentrate on the kind of quick writing I already do—principally, music journalism, reviewing, and the occasional program or CD liner notes—but choose topics that, for one reason or another, won’t easily appear in The American Record Guide, where I write many reviews on John Cage, harpsichord music, Philip Glass, and some piano music.

Though I regularly review new John Cage recordings, there are many older ones that I’ve never written about: especially many of the earlier Cage recordings on Mode Records, many of the volumes of Steffen Schleiermacher’s collection of the complete piano works, other classic Cage recordings that I’ve acquired over the years, and newer recordings that never made it to ARG. As I move forward with this project, it’ll be possible, eventually, to write a longer piece that serves as an introduction of Cage’s music for music lovers, students, and maybe even a few professionals—a kind of music-appreciation-style essay that complements the discographical essay I wrote for the Music Library Association’s journal Notes in 2010.

I’d also like to write some more about so-called minimalist composers both familiar and less-familiar: a short list would include not only Philip Glass and Steve Reich, but also Michael Nyman, Wim Mertens, David Borden, Simeon ten Holt, Scott Pender, and a few others. Some of these writings would be reviews of recordings (and possibly of some concerts), but I hope others will be shortish, more critical essays that, I hope, will contribute something toward the continuing reception of this music.

My great interest and affection for minimalism doesn’t mean, of course, that I see this music and others like it as the great new hope for new music. I’ve been exploring the music of serial composers for several years now, and hope one day to write a book that discusses this music in more ways than the technical ones that have dominated the literature on it thus far—appreciation, again. If I can, I want to explore some of the ideas for that book-to-be here.

I also continue to be interested in emerging composers and sound artists, and I want to write about their work here. One composer I’m very fond of is Tristan Perich, whose art background brings him an unusual but useful perspective to today’s new-music composition, and I would expect to devote a few posts to his work. But there are many, many others, many of whom I’ve discovered through social media. I would like these posts to serve as a forum for discussion with and about these artists; to that end, I would be grateful for these artists or people who love them to send me information and samples of new works. I hope to review some recordings of new music, especially the kind of music that lies in the interstices between styles and audiences and who might otherwise be overlooked. The easiest way to contact me is to follow me on Twitter or send a friend request on Facebook; you could also contact me through this website.

In short, I hope I can fulfill my hopes for this blog and that it will bring to those interested in music—especially new music—a forum for discussion and exploration.

Photograph by Michael Clayville