The Cunningham Legacy Tour

Saturday night, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's Legacy Tour came through Tucson with an evening of three dances spanning nearly fifty Cunningham's creative choreography. Let me state at the outset that I don't follow contemporary dance with anywhere near the avidity with which I approach music, so I don't have the vocabulary or experience to say much technically about the dances. My primary interest was that Cunningham was Cage's life partner, and Cage was the company's first Musical Director, and remained a Musical Advisor to Cunningham's troupe from its inception until his death in 1992. Seeing the dance, however, opened up a whole side of Cage that I had never seen before. I was completely entranced and exhilirated by the three dances that the group performed last night, and I feel very fortunate to have attended this glorious performance.

The opener was 2007's XOVER (pronounced 'Crossover'), one of Cunningham's last creations, set to the only Cage music we heard all evening. From the orchestra pit, John King, Takehisa Kosugi, and Jesse Stiles each performed a version of Fontana Mix on electronics. From stage left, Aurora Josephson performed her realization of Aria. Unfortunately I couldn't see what the electronics performers were doing, but Josephson was amazing, snatches of recitation in English, French, and Italian, bird calls, gargling, and who knows what else. I thought I heard Kosugi's violin in the mix, and several times orchestral and other recordings emerged from what was generally the same types of electronic noise that we hear on old Cage and Tudor recordings from the period. Sometimes the percussive attacks were quite loud, and sometimes I thought I heard some kind of tuned percussion instrument with a contact mic. The dancers were all dressed in white, and the background was a huge painting by Robert Rauschenberg, sort of geometric red rectangles with some fairly detailed sections, largely on a white background and a brightly lit stage. The choreography centered around two couples, whose actions were sometimes nearly identical to each other, and sometimes wildly divergent. And they would break off into solos, or add several other dancers (there are a total of eleven dancers for this piece) into little set pieces. I was quite taken with the interplay between the music and the dance, which often were seemingly at odds with each other.

The second work was the earliest, Crises from 1960 with music from seven of Conlon Nancarrow's rhythm studies for player piano. Only five dancers here, dressed in red and orange against a black stage in another Rauschenberg design, and I continued to find the motions completely engrossing. Narrative dance pieces have never appealed to me, but these fluid movements seemed as little vignettes out of a continuous stream.

The sole work in the second half was BIPED, a 45-minute piece from 1999 with music by Gavin Bryars. The stage, like for Crises, is dark, but it looks like narrow beams of light ascend from floor to ceiling, not only in the back of the stage, but up front too. Then the ones in front fade in and out, and as the first few minutes pass by, the light on half the stage looks a little odd, then the columns in front start to move. It turns out there's a transparent screen at the front of the stage, and as the piece progresses, the projections become more elaborate. At first, the columns break off into lines, which in turn form colored geometric patterns. But then there are dancers, their bodies visible from outlines, like skeletons made from flames of light. Cunningham collaborated with Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar to create an animation technology that captured the dancers' movements, but not their physical appearance. And there are up to thirteen dancers on stage too, dressed in very strange shiny costumes that looked like some kind of plastic. At one point, some of the dancers donned opaque cloaks, which blurred their figures even more Bryars' music, for violin (Kosugi), cello (Loren Dempster) and electric guitar (King) was a full string sound, by far the most traditional music of the evening. I was surprised to see that there were only the three musicians for how orchestral they sounded. Bryars' description of the piece suggests that the other instruments I heard were pre-recorded.

The combination of the newest dance with 1960s-style electronic music which opened the concert may have disoriented my sense of chronology, but I could not detect any difference in Cunningham's choreography between the early and late works, the way Cage's music was completely different between the early live electronic music and the number pieces he composed in his last years. No doubt I was receptive to the dance because of Cunningham's place in contemporary music. There was certainly a spectacle quality, especially in BIPED with so much simultaneous activity. Perhaps I enjoyed it more than other modern dance companies because of the live performances of the music I enjoy. In any case, the performances touched the mysterious transcendance of the observer in mute wonder, a performance that I will always remember. The Cunningham Legacy Tour continues the rest of the year, in the US and abroad, and the group will disband after a New Year's Eve performance this year in New York. Complete details are available at the Merce Cunningham web site, and I cannot recommend it too highly.

Around and about

Stockhausen's intuitive pieces, From the Seven Days, are more than historical oddities; they continue to interest creative musicians and spur new perspectives. In February 2009, a group of five improvisers whom I've discussed before, including Werner Dafeldecker (of Polwechsel and Autistic Daughters) and Kai Fagaschinski (Magic I.D., among others) performed the most severe of the set, Gold Dust, at a conference on music and poverty, and a recording has been posted at the conference web site. Gold Dust asks the performers to fast and live in silence for four days, then play single sounds without thinking and without conversation beforehand, which the organizers related to the overall theme of the conference. There's been some discussion of this piece at IHM, and the recording is very well done.

Another of my ongoing topics, John Cage, has also been the subject of recent activity. Fellow blogger DaveX of Startling Moniker mostly performs in the radio booth, but he was persuaded to participate in a Cage festival at Southern Illinois University with premiere of Cage's piece Knobs, originally published in the liner notes of the Nonesuch LP of Cage and Lejaren Hiller's HPSCHD. He wrote up his experience here.

And finally, via the Silence mailing list, here's a recording of one of Cage's last works, Four 6, a recording from a concert in Greece devoted to Cage's work organized by Dionysis Boukouvalas. One of the number pieces that Cage composed toward the end of his life, this one leaves the choice of sounds completely open; each performer chooses twelve different sounds with fixed characteristics, which are played within flexible time brackets. Boulouvalas doesn't specify who performed what, but I hear various percussion sounds, an accordion, and a sax. There was a nice album this year that included four British improvisers performing Four 6, to which this recording is an interesting foil. Both Four 6 and Gold Dust demonstrate the dissolving boundaries of classical and improvisational music, and recordings like these ensure that the music stays alive.

Cage and the Dream Syndicate

For the last couple of months, I've been slowly working my way through Branden W. Joseph's recent book, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage. Inspired by the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, Joseph seeks to document the minor history starting from Conrad's work in the early 1960s with John Cale and La Monte Young in the Dream Syndicate, and concluding with his film and video work in the 1970s. With detours through Young, Henry Flynt, sculptor Robert Morris, and filmmaker Jack Smith, Joseph situates Conrad's work in response to the challenges that John Cage established in the 1950s, starting with a lack of any kind of transcendent meaning or intention on the part of the composer, which in turn leads to a more constructive attention and experimentation on the part of the listener. On a broader scale, Conrad et al. also responded to Cage's challenge to the power relations involved in music creation, as well as the dismantling of the boundaries between different artistic disciplines.

I've written before about how indeterminate pieces challenge the performer more than the listener, for whom the single auditory experience insufficiently demonstrates the open-ended nature of the compositions. Joseph's detailed discussion of the performance and reception history of the various conceptual pieces illuminates a word-score repertoire that exemplifies this perspective change. These included not only La Monte Young's famous efforts to feed hay to the piano, or to "draw a straight line and follow it", but word scores from Conrad and Flynt as well. It's hard to imagine that these pieces were actually performed, but the combination of sound and theatrics, as well as the ideas behind the works, made them relatively successful. The premiere (at Harvard) was followed by a performance in New York at Yoko Ono's loft, where Cage was in attendance. I can see Stockhausen's word pieces From the Seven Days and For Times To Come in the same vein, but more often I've seen word pieces that are fairly specific instructions (such as the Lucier work discussed in the post referenced above).

Because of Conrad's participation in the Theater of Eternal Music and his seminal recording with the German rock band Faust, I had always considered him primarily as a musician. But to my surprise, he appears to be more well known as a filmmaker; he is currently a professor at the University of Buffalo's Department of Media Study. A major part of his artistic journey was his work with visionary filmmaker Jack Smith. Although Smith was also a performance artist, connecting with the conceptual art movement, he provided the opportunity for Conrad's first film work, including the sound on Smith's most famous movie, Flaming Creatures (available online at UbuWeb Film — a truly astounding work, I can understand why it was banned). Smith's visionary films overflow with distorted images, and Josephs uses them as examples of Bataillian excess. I read a lot of Bataille back in the day, and often tried to find musical examples, stopping when I got to John Oswald's Plexure as the alpha and omega of musical excess. Avant-garde video and cinema are way outside my areas of interest or expertise — they alter my perception and not pleasantly — but Joseph's account made interesting reading. Unfortunately none of Conrad's film work is online, at least anywhere I can find it.

The book was slow going mostly because the detailed discussions involved artists for whom this book was my introduction. The only artist discussed here in any detail that I knew before was La Monte Young, and mostly through later compositions. I had read some of his conceptual pieces, but nothing about their performance and reception history. Morris, Flynt, and Smith I knew only by name. But the focus of the book wasn't biographical with respect to these artists, but more of what they found challenging in Cage's writings, and how they responded to him. Joseph's accomplishment is to have documented an Conrad's anxiety of influence, what led him to become the artist that he is. It shows a steady fractalization of the narrative, that the closer one looks, the more complex the story line. The Deleuzian model, with different striations and unexpected tendrils to parallel histories, is an apposite framework, and Joseph admirably confirms the original theories with Conrad's specific historical example.

The rhythms of the stars

Brian at Just Outside had a post a few weeks ago on the recent Mode re-release of John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis. He found the performance a bit dry, and one of his comments was that he could "easily imagine this being performed by creative improvisers and working exceedingly well." His remarks sent me to the Mode release, as well as one from 2000 on the Asphodel label.

Cage composed Atlas Eclipticalis in 1961, a commission from the Montreal Festival Society. At the time, it was the biggest piece that Cage had composed, both in terms of orchestral forces and sheer length, his earlier forays into orchestral writing being more for a chamber ensemble. He generated the notes by tracing them from a map of the heavens (whence the title) in combination with I-Ching operations. The piece consists of solo parts for 86 orchestral instruments, where each part is identical in length and format, and it is most often performed in short excerpts and with smaller groups. Each part has four pages with five systems per page, and each system should be played within a predetermined duration, specified by Cage to be no shorter than two minutes. Like the score for Winter Music, which may be performed simultaneously with Atlas Eclipticalis, each system contains a number of events, which may be single tones or aggregates. Even though the events have a clear musical notation, they are sufficiently unorthodox to require significant interpretation on the part of the performer. The conductor is merely a timekeeper, moving his or her arms around in a circle like the second hand on a clock.

The Mode and Asphodel releases are the only ones currently available that are complete both in respect to the number of players and the number of systems. The Mode set contains three recordings of the piece, of which the two complete ones date from 1983 and are conducted by Cage (the third is from 1988, is conducted by Melvin Strauss, and includes all parts but not all systems). The Asphodel release is conducted by Petr Kotik, and is from 1993, repeating a performance from a Cage memorial concert the previous year in Carnegie Hall. The 1983 and 1993 performances both include Winter Music (the latter performed by David Tudor). Both releases contain nice sets of liner notes. The Mode release has short essays by Cage, Matthew Kocmieroski, Don Gillespie (whom we've met in this blog before — he was the interviewer on Mode's DVD release of George Crumb's Makrokosmos), and pianist Stephen Drury. The Asphodel release has a longer essay by James Pritchett (author of an excellent monograph on Cage's music) and Petr Kotik.

One of the first aspects that a student of Atlas Eclipticalis confronts is its obscurity. Unlike other large symphonic works, there is no master score, only the individual parts and a conductor score. Each individual part is published separately. Edition Peters web site sells each individual part for $8.95, which means an investment of over $750 for the entire work. This precludes all but the most serious users and libraries from acquiring the complete score. The conductor score, which is what most libraries have, is one of the most arcane documents I've ever seen. It documents more of the compositional process than anything directly related to a performance. As Cage wryly notes, "these pages may not be useful."

The instrumental parts which have been widely reproduced raise a number of questions. The Mode release includes a reproduction of page 181, one of the Flute 1 parts, and Pritchett's book includes a reproduction of page 133, one of the pages for Cello 1. I've reproduced one of the cello events here. As with Cage's other notational experiments, his explanatory notes (reproduced in the Mode liner notes) don't quite explain everything. For example, the cello part in Pritchett has no clef -- should the performer use a tenor clef or a bass clef, and does this decision remain for the duration of the piece (the conductor's score helpfully mentioned that the part "may be read an octave higher ad lib")? Where the aggregates are numbered (one number for tones "as short as possible", the other for tones with "appreciable duration"), which notes get which duration? The individual notes from a chord can be performed in any order. Cage's instructions don't explicitly address stems that aren't straight -- is there any significance to curved stems? Cage specifies circumstances under which notes may be repeated -- how does the performer decide when to apply these rules?

So without having recourse to the score(s), we're left with the recordings. The ones from 1983 are very sparse. A lot of the subtleties are lost, buried in tape hiss and audience noise. There are few occasions where more than a couple of instruments are audible without close headphone listening. The 1993 recording, especially by contrast, is lush. It's a better recording, with less audience noise and more audible instruments. Kotik seems to have allowed for longer durations (his version is almost twice as long as Cage's), which create musical gestures that have both foreground and background aspects, where the tones with appreciable duration expand to fill the sonic horizon, leaving the short tones to pepper the sound and provide intimate details. Kotik's version sounds more like an group performance rather than 86 people making occasional sounds with their instruments. Cage commented that when he first composed Winter Music, each sound was widely separated in space, but after several performances, it almost seemed melodic. Perhaps I hear the same transition between the performances of Atlas Eclipticalis.

It is Cage's genius to have created such a rich foundation, allowing for so many different sonic realizations. Is it a coincidence that the longer orchestral realization sounds fuller? As the piece stretches out with longer and longer durations, at some point it nearly approaches the scale of the maps on which it was based. Does a connection between the star maps and the piece take place only in the mind of the listener? In some way, I hear the immensity of the cosmos in Kotik's rendition, points of sound corresponding to points of light, with constellations visible only because of the observer's perspective.

Even though Cage loathed improvisation at the time he composed Atlas Eclipticalis, Brian had an interesting idea about using today's creative improvisers to create a version. The Amplify festival in 2002 had a session where seven improvising guitarists created a realization of Cornelius Cardew's Treatise, a famous graphic score from the early 1960s. The German new music ensemble Zeitkratzer has performed pieces by composers as far afield as John Duncan, Keith Rowe, Lou Reed and Merzbow. Ulrich Kreiger, the ensemble's saxophonist, has recently released a solo (probably multi-tracked) version of Atlas Eclipticalis. Certainly classical musicians have a difficult time with Cage, whose music often demands a new kind of performer in order to bring to the surface the new kinds of sounds.

Indeterminate Tudor

For the composers in both the New York and Darmstadt schools in the 1950s and 1960s, David Tudor was the interpreter for all new music written for the piano, and we undoubtedly owe Tudor credit for the large amount of piano music from the hands of Cage, Feldman, Boulez, Stockhausen, and their contemporaries. In later years, Tudor turned his attention more to electronics, but he remained committed to Cage's music throughout his life. His last piano recording, made in 1992, was a recording of Cage's Concert for Piano, a work he had recorded several times previously, starting almost immediately after the work was written in 1958.

Because of Tudor's stature in Cage interpretation, I looked forward with some anticipation to a recent two-CD set on Editions RZ of Tudor piano recordings from the 1950s and 1960s culled from the archives of WDR and other radio archives. The Swiss label, Hat Hut, has released a number of David Tudor CDs from the same radio archive, but many of them are now out of print. The new Editions RZ set includes five recordings from Cage's Music for Piano series; three recordings of Christian Wolff's Duo for Pianists I; one recording each of Cage's Winter Music, a realization of a graphic score of Sylvano Bussotti, and Morton Feldman's Piece for Four Pianos; and a reissue of Tudor's recording of Variations II on amplified piano, originally released on the landmark Columbia Masterworks recording of New Electronic Music. All of the individual works recorded here require some degree of realization (in some cases, a high degree) because of the open nature of the scores.

Cage's Music for Piano series consists of 84 unnumbered sheets of music, published in eight different sets (1, 2, 3, 4-19, 20, 21-52, 53-68, and 69-84). Cage generated all the notes from imperfections in the manuscript paper in conjunction with I Ching operations, and the works were to some extent exercises in composing more quickly after the long composition time for Music of Changes, his first major piano work composed with chance operations. Cage eventually found that one of the drawbacks of these pieces was that the music paper imperfections produced only single notes. Here is an example, one system (of four) from one of the sheets. Even though he specified that some notes were to be muted or played pizzicato, single notes still makes for a very sparse texture. To circumvent this problem, Cage allowed for different pieces to be performed simultaneously, by one or multiple pianists. Presumably Tudor's realizations on this set are illustrations of the combinatorial possibilities, but they're all still very pointillistic. Winter Music applies similar techniques, but combines the points into chords, and includes some additional rules about how to disambiguate mapping notes in the chords to different clefs. Compared to the Music for Piano pieces, Winter Music (played here by two pianists, Tudor and Cage) sounds positively lush.

As a bizarre footnote, one of the Music for Piano pieces was previously released on one of the Hat releases with a different title (Music for Piano 21, 22, 26, 29, 34, 36 here is the same recording as Music for Piano 52-56 on the Hat album). It makes me wonder: if the compilers can't decide which pieces are actually being played, what's the difference between these pieces and random notes?

Cage and Tudor must have had a relatively fixed program when they made the rounds of German radio stations in 1960. One of the Hat releases contained two versions of Christian Wolff's Duo for Pianists I, recorded in 1960 for WDR. This album contains two different recordings of the same two realizations, also recorded in 1960 but for Radio Bremen. (Jazz buffs get upset when archival releases don't contain complete discographical information. One might have the same complaint here.) Wolff's piece uses time brackets and fixed pitch classes from which to choose, but leaves many details up to the performer. In this example from For Pianist that uses similar notation, Wolff specifies one sound from pitch class C for 1 and 1/5 seconds, followed by no sounds for 3/5 seconds, followed by three sounds from pitch class C, one of which is played pizzicato, and one of which is lowered by a semi-tone. The whole system should take 2 and 1/10 seconds. Wolff wrote Duo for Pianists I for his own concerts with Frederic Rzewski as an experiment in controlled improvisation. Tudor created fairly strict realizations of the various indeterminate pieces that he played (despite occasional heated objections from the composer), but it's interesting to hear the proof with the comparison of these two recordings. This release also includes a third recording of the same piece, done three years later. By 1963, Tudor was feeling constrained by notated pieces. As he states in an interview fragment included at the end of the second disc, he only felt alive "in every part of my consciousness" when he was called upon to make actions that were "undetermined as to what [sounds] they are going to produce," so it is likely that the later recording was performed more in the spirit of the original composition.

One of the reasons I was excited about this release was that I recently started making a realization of Winter Music. Without going into too many details of the mechanics, I endeavored to understand Cage's egoless musical activity through study of one of his most famous indeterminate pieces. But I find the nearly random nature of the piece almost too daunting. I have a few minutes of music prepared, which I currently play very softly, as if it were a Feldman piece (Tudor peppers his realizations with occasional very loud percussive attacks). But so far I remain unconvinced. I am more comfortable performing music that has patterns that develop or repeat. Cage's indeterminate music deliberately eschews any kind of pattern, so the performer must supply a musical thread that simply doesn't exist in the printed score. It presents a different set of challenges than more fully notated music, a half-way house between composition and interpretation. Cage's systems may have made it quicker for him to compose, but the resulting works put an unusual burden on the performer.

But the creation of a realization of Winter Music isn't really an egoless activity. One of Cage's primary goals once he started composing with chance operations was to make compositional decisions without his ego getting in the way. But compositional decisions are different from performance decisions. When it comes to a performance of these pieces, once the performer has made the requisite decisions to transform the score into an audible piece of music, the performance characteristics aren't that different than for any other fully notated work. Wolff's pieces at least provide a framework for a performer to create a different work at each performance (even if Cage and Tudor opted to fix the performance characteristics for their 1960 radio tour). In this respect, Duo for Pianists I is more like the piano compositions of Henri Pousseur. As Tudor realized in the 1963 interview, the indeterminate nature of the piece should translate to its performance as well, and not simply to the ability to prepare any number of static realizations.

David Tudor's Music for Piano on Editions RZ is available at Erstwhile Records and other fine record stores.

Realizations

One of the seminal new music albums back in the 1960s was Max Neuhaus' Columbia LP Electronics and Percussion — Five Realizations. The cover had a wild-looking bare-chested and hirsute Neuhaus surrounded by a huge percussion kit, promising a primitive and highly charged performance. The album contained five solo percussion pieces that had a substantial degree of aleatory composition, such that a performer did "realizations" rather than simply performances: Four Systems by Earle Brown; The King of Denmark by Morton Feldman; Coeur pour Batteur by Sylvano Bussotti; Zyklus by Karlheinz Stockhausen; and Fontana Mix by John Cage. The original album is available in 192kbps at Ubuweb, or as an expensive import from Sony Japan.

The Italian label Alga Marghen has recently released three Neuhaus albums that document other performances of the same repertoire. I picked up one that contains three performances each of Brown's Four Systems, Feldman's The King of Denmark, and Cage's 27'10.554", a percussion piece from his Ten Thousand Things series. The other two CDs in the series include one with four versions of Zyklus, and one with six realizations of Fontana Mix. All performances are different from the ones on the original Columbia LP. The first shocker is the straight-laced photos of Neuhaus matrixed on the cover, taken at his Carnegie Hall concert in December, 1966. A dark suit and tie? Fifties-style black plastic spectacles? Clean shaven!? Not exactly as I remembered, but perhaps it's another reminder that what was wild when I was a teenager is very old hat by now. The sixteen-page booklet has more pictures and a page for each piece, including details from the scores, plus a general statement by Neuhaus and two Neuhaus concert reviews from New York media from 1964.

The three works presented here all belong to a certain period in American music where a composition abstracted away so many details from the musical score that a performance became a "realization". One of the details left unspecified is pitch, and one of the consequences is that they sound to a high degree like random sounds, or at least it can be very difficult to say why they aren't random. They aren't the kinds of pieces where a listener can follow along with a performance with score in hand. And even with the score in hand, there are no melodic, harmonic or rhythmic patterns to give the listener any mileposts to use to organize the movement of the piece through time. There is, however, a definite relationship between the score and the sound, which is fairly easy to see for the work as a whole (conveniently, the booklet includes score samples). The key is that the changes in the music are timbral, a little-used parameter in pre-20th century music. Both Cage and Feldman deliberately specify different types of percussion (wood, gongs, skins), and Brown's piece only specifies overlapping durations. The creativity of the performer is entirely different from the creativity involved in a more completely notated piece (i.e., most "classical" music).

Given the album's track layout (grouped by composer), you could interpret the album as one long version of each piece as easily as three different versions. There is essentially no way to validate one performance against another. The ingenuity and identity of each work (and other works in this genre) is that a work has a clearly recognizable timbre and texture. Since each work has its own sound world, when I play the album in shuffle mode, I clearly recognize when the piece changes. The album works just as well either way.

I obtained the score of The King of Denmark from the university music library. It's one of Feldman's graph pieces, although it's not on any of the recent albums dedicated to these. There must be some oral tradition surrounding these scores, because although the score has a glossary of symbols, it uses symbols that aren't in the glossary. With the score in hand and headphones, I imagine that I can follow what Neuhaus does. But each of the realizations has different instrumentation, so even after close listening with the score, the specific sounds of the piece remain unpredictable. Some doctoral candidate should make an annotated edition of one of these pieces while performers who worked with the composers are still around, because I think it would be pretty easy to make incorrect choices.

At some level, the listener in me finds this kind of random-sounding music appealing. The performer finds more difficulty. For a long time, I appreciated Cage's philosophy without finding much to like in his music. The late number pieces finally turned me around, but I still haven't listened to much of his mid-period work (post-prepared piano) work. Although I've played some Feldman, I haven't been able to tackle much of Cage's music between the prepared piano period and the number pieces. A lot of the music from Cage's middle periods is extremely difficult technically, but the prerequisite perspective change is almost equally challenging.