But you only have to listen to this once to see what an odd couple these two really make. For one thing, there's barely any actual collaboration here. Ra and Cage take turns giving solo performances; they only perform together for a few minutes on side 2. Ra's solos are enormous fun - dissonant, clangy, utterly chaotic synthesizer freak-outs. They stand in complete contrast to Cage's solos, wherein he gives readings of his poem Empty Words. Specifically, he appears to be reading from the final part of the poem, which is one of the most impenetrable things ever written, containing not a single recognizable word but instead lines such as "rstsprea ce d ncuyth e ch hchsy" and "aici brnkr m ndthi n e llgr o". He's also reading it very, very slowly and in a monotone voice. So Cage's performance consists of dry utterances of meaningless syllables separated by long stretches of silence. And I mean long: the silences here sometimes last minutes (well, at least it feels like minutes... and I'm pretty sure that's because it really is literally minutes).
In fact, there was a deep ideological divide between Cage and Ra; what surprises me is not their very different performances here but the fact that they ever performed together at all. Most significantly, Cage was never a fan of improvisation or jazz. Indeed, for much of his career he actively rejected them. The reason is simple: the central feature of his mature aesthetic theory was a dogmatic rejection of self-expression. In literally every single artwork that he created from the late 40s onward, he sought to remove the voice of the composer and performer. This couldn't be more opposed to ideology of jazz and improvisation, particularly free jazz, the ultimate arena for unbridled expression in music.
Cage eventually softened to jazz and improvisation, but he never really accepted them. One of Cage's goals when composing Imaginary Landscape no. 5 was to overcome his distaste for jazz, and to this end he used 42 jazz records in the original version. But ultimately, Cage treated the records as mere raw material for his chance operations. You could substitute any other 42 records and you'd have just as legitimate a performance of the piece (it's explicitly composed for any 42 records). So I'm not sure in what sense this represents any kind of reconciliation with jazz.
Perhaps more significantly, he began to incorporate improvisation in his work in the mid-70s with the beautiful Child of Tree. Even here, however, Cage is only allowing on his own terms. Child of Tree is written for amplified plant materials, and as I explain in my review of this piece a notable problem with using a plant as an instrument that you can't really learn how to play it, since if you practice on it too much, it will simply disintegrate. This leaves room for improvisation without expression. An improvisation on a plant will have to be based more on exploration and discovery.
So, despite his appreciation for jazz and improvisation in specific circumstances, he never budged on his basic commitment to eliminating self-expression. I suspect that he always retained some resistance to the totally unrestrained, freeform freak-out brand of jazz that Ra exhibits here.
With that in mind, I can't help but hear a kind of passive-aggressive rivalry in this album. After all, for all his talk about removing the voice of composers, removing self-expression, etc, Cage can't give up his voice completely. He still has to choose what piece to play. I wonder: why did he choose to give a solo vocal performance of Empty Words? A performance that is stubbornly subdued and sterile, the polar opposite to Ra's work? Well, I think it's his way of digging in his heels against this unrestrained improviser. (Viewing it this way makes Cage's parts rather more entertaining, even somewhat amusing.) And it looks like Cage wins: on the short collaborative part, Cage obstinately continues his lifeless reading of Empty Words, while Ra pulls back, providing just a few sparse, quiet synthesizer noises.
My final verdict: Ra's parts are enormous fun. Cage's parts are frankly a bit boring. Empty Words is an absolutely beautiful poem - one of my favourite of Cage's written works - but much of its beauty derives from its visual elements, which obviously are lost here. Overall then, this joint performance is something of a disappointment. It would have been interesting to hear these two very distinct but both very radical musicians work together on something more seriously.
(This post is adapted from the short review I wrote here.)
No comments:
Post a Comment