John Cage Meets Sun Ra (1986)

As the title suggests, this is a recording of a joint live performance given by John Cage and Sun Ra in 1986. At first glance this pairing might not seem too surprising to most people - after all, both Cage and Ra are big figures in the broad and vaguely-defined genre of experimental music, so why not put them together?

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.)

Water Walk (1959)

This was written specifically to be performed on television - it premiered on an Italian TV show, and then later was performed on the American show I've Got a Secret. There's a recording of the latter performance on youtube that's well worth checking out. As a recording of the composition, it's not great - it's fairly bad quality, and it isn't even a faithful performance since it should have involved radios, but Cage was unable to play these due to a union dispute. But as a piece of television, it's wonderfully bizarre, and there are couple of things about it that are notable. First, the interview before the performance contains one of my favourite Cage quotes. After the host points out that some people are going to laugh at his music, Cage responds, "I consider laughter preferable to tears." Second, more notably, people do laugh. But their laughter strikes me as perfectly good-natured. It really sounds like the audience is enjoying Cage's performance.

A lot of people are very dismissive of experimental music. Cage, unsurprisingly, tends to receive a great deal of criticism from these folks. I've long tried - thus far completely unsuccessfully - to persuade my girlfriend that he wasn't just a pretentious charlatan. He was a sincere composer, and some people genuinely enjoy his music. (No doubt that some people inspired by Cage are pretentious charlatans, but that's hardly his fault.) It's very difficult to shake the impression some people have that only "serious arty types" enjoy it, and really even they are only pretending to enjoy it. However, the reaction of the audience of I've Got a Secret suggests another way of approaching Cage's work: as something amusing, humorous, and fun. I don't think Cage ever encouraged people to see his work this way. But he didn't discourage this, either.

In fact, I think modern art in general would be far better received by the public if more people involved with it dropped the pretension, affectation, and dreariness and just embraced the fact that a lot of what they're doing is really very silly. One of my favourite contemporary artists is Jonathon Keats, largely because he clearly has a good sense of humour.

Anyway, I'm listening to a recording of Water Walk by a couple of fellas called "Duo Conradi-Gehlen". It's a really easy listen - only three minutes long, and much more active than usual for Cage: there's no silence, and loads of interesting sounds. Despite that this was composed to be both seen and heard, I think it works much better just hearing it. Aside from the fact that watching someone fill up a bathtub or turn on a radio is kinda boring, the sounds are bound to seem much more mundane if you can see them being produced. It removes the mystery and the sense of exploration.

Four Solos for Voice (93-96) (1988)

This one does exactly what it says on the tin: it's four solos for voice! In fact, each solo contains various different parts, which don't seem to have any relation to each other. We might veer from opera, to religious choral vocals, to spoken word, to weird experimental stuff. Similarly, none of the parts for one voice seem to have any relation to the parts for other voices; and since all the solos are played simultaneously, the result is rather a mess. A lovely mess, but a mess all the same. Some of the parts are actually fairly conventional - in fact, there were even a few times when I thought I heard snatches of tunes that I recognized, though these were possibly coincidences - but the bass might be doing some traditional religious thing, while the tenor is doing some kooky screaming, etc.

In a way, with all the different styles, and different things happening at the same time, this recalls the extreme multiplicity in Cage's work from the 60s - pieces like HPSCHD and 33 1/3 that play various unrelated things simultaneously. But where those pieces were chaotic walls of noise, this is notable for its simplicity. We have a bare-bones arrangement: only four voices, not manipulated in any way (aside from the basics like a bit of reverb). It's actually quite restful overall, even when the singers get more dramatic and energetic.

Just to place this in context: Solos for Voice 1 and 2 were composed in 1958 and 1960 respectively, to be performed with the Concert for Piano and Orchestra. Solos for Voice 3 to 92 were composed in 1970 as part of the Song Books. Then we have this final set of four solos in 1988, which comprise an independent piece.

Quartets I-VIII (1976)

Wait - what's going on? Have I selected the wrong track? Did they put the wrong CD in the "John Cage" case?

... well, no: this is John Cage. It's one of his "imitations", and it's possibly the most conventional of a surprisingly conventional bunch of compositions. Here, Cage worked with eight pieces by a few obscure 18th-century American composers, such as William Billings, Jacob French, and Andrew Law. Just what he did with those pieces, I'm not sure. One wonders at times: did he make any changes at all? The only hint that there actually is some Cage in this is that over its 37 minute running time, it doesn't really go anywhere; there's never any sense of building towards anything: it sets a pastoral, contemplative mood in the first few seconds and then just sticks with it till the end.

So I suppose this is somewhere between ambient, minimalism, and more standard classical - but make no mistake, it's far more standard classical than it is ambient or minimalism, and it retains a distinctive eighteenth-century American flavour. It conjures up images of open prairies, wagons crossing rolling hills, and dead Indians. Even the instrumentation is traditional, involving a standard orchestra, mostly strings. The one cool twist is that since this is written for an orchestra, and since each quartet contains (obviously) only four players, the players in each quartet are different, resulting in gradual, subtle timbral changes throughout the piece.

A very easy listen. Even including his earlier years, I don't think Cage ever wrote a composition quite as emotive and as traditionally melodic as this. It's John Cage for people who don't like John Cage. When I played two minutes of this to my girlfriend, she merely found it boring, rather than completely unlistenable, so a big improvement on the norm!

A Dip in the Lake (1978)

A large composition consisting of hundreds of recordings from a city, assembled together according to chance operations. A complete realization, recorded in various places in Chicago, is available for free on ubuweb: http://www.ubu.com/sound/cage_dip.html - 2 hours 20 minutes, so that's basically a double album of free Cage.

The city setting reminds me of a somewhat Cagean story. A few years ago, when I was out in a local city, I could hear what I thought was some sort of avant-garde noise/industrial band busking on a street nearby. I thought it sounded pretty good, but was surprised that a band like that would bother busking, as surely most people would hate it. Anyway, when I turned the corner, I saw that it wasn't a band at all, but construction workers doing some roadworks.

Anyway, unsurprisingly, we mostly hear some of the standard sounds of the city: a lot of traffic noise; snatches of music from car radios; trains chugging along; people talking; birds tweeting; construction work - etc etc. There are however a few surprises. There's the sound of what seemed like people playing golf at one point. In part 3 (Waltes 32-61), there's an odd buzzing noise, which is somewhat reminiscent of crickets chirping. One of my favourite noises occurs in part 4 (Marches 1-28): a beautiful, ethereal, high-pitched drone; it has a "glassy" timbre and seems to seep in from the distance. I have no idea what it is, but it's absolutely lovely. Occasionally some of the recordings are played backwards.

There's a lot of repetition. We might have, say, a two second clip of traffic noise, which is then repeated several times over a short space of time. It gives the impression of a record stuck on a loop (or several records stuck on a loop, since there's often more than one recording played at once), and creates an almost hypnotic rhythm. Similarly, many of the recordings start and stop, start and stop, start and stop.

So there's a fairly wide variety of sounds - mostly standard city sounds, but a few strange ones and a few more "organic" ones (birds and water), all intercut with each other in an often hypnotic way to build a rich soundscape.  It's all recognizably Earthly - but just with something slightly off. And actually, after listening to nearly 2 and half hours of this, even the more normal sounds become disconnected from their usual sources. I stop hearing the traffic drone as traffic and hear it instead hear it as just one interesting noise among many. All of these sounds are in their usual context - city sounds among city sounds - but the context is completely scrambled, so we hear even the most apparently mundane sounds in a new light.

Overall it evokes compositions like Rozart Mix, Variations IV, etc, but it's much calmer. Most of the sounds here are quiet and/or droney - traffic noise, wind, and so on - and there are long stretches of near-silence. A fairly easy listen, then, despite the mammoth length.

Two (1987)

This is a special one: it's the very first Number Piece! And with that in mind, it's... well, fairly inconsequential. 10 minutes long, for piano and flute. Actually, it might as well be One for piano, because at least on my recording, you can barely hear the flute - even when turning the volume up to the point that the piano becomes slightly uncomfortably loud (and this semms to be faithful to Cage's instructions, as he specified that the flute was to be played very quietly). It's a very quite wheeze in the distance, maybe like a soft wind. You might not even realize that it's playing until it stops.

The piano is surprisingly melodic, and unsurprisingly played slowly and softly. It brings to mind some of Cage's Satie-influened work. There's no indication here of the extreme, sustained dissonance that would become characteristic of later Number Pieces. It does however have the same mood of tranquility and stillness.

Nice enough I suppose, though it seems a bit like two instruments playing different pieces. Imagine the piano playing some Satie at a snail's pace tempo, with the flute playing some sort of extreme, minimal ambient.

Fifty-Eight (1992)

I mentioned in the last review that one of the problems with listening to Cage's music is that he often put a lot of emphasis on space - where the audience sits, where the performers are situated, the kind of place it's performed, etc - which, obviously, cannot be preserved in a recording. In few Cage compositions is the problem as acute as it is here, as this was designed for one specific courtyard! (The courtyard had fifty-eight arches; hence fifty-eight players: one for each arch.) Perhaps this explains why this is oddly neglected as far as Number Pieces go - my recording by Pannonisches Blasorchester is the only one that I'm aware of. Which is a pity, because this is a really wonderful piece of music. One of Cage's best, in my opinion.

Also, this particular recording is perhaps not ideal. There is a lot of audience noise. Mostly coughing, a few people shuffling around, and at one point I even heard what sounded like a baby crying out. That last one was probably just one of the instruments. But the audience certainly make themselves known. I suppose it's not very Cagean to complain about that. And I'm not really complaining; I wouldn't say it detracts from the music at all, but it would be interesting to hear a "pure" recording.

To be fair, the courtyard it was written for - Landhaushof in Graz - is, just going by the images on Google, very open and even appears to be right next to a road. It's to be expected, then, that a good deal of ambient sound will intrude into the piece. Indeed, it could be argued that this recording doesn't really go far enough on that end. Maybe during a normal performance of this, you could expect to hear a lot of people talking, and even cars driving by. Again, it would be interesting to hear that kind of recording, too.

Like most Number Pieces, it consists mostly of slow, long-held notes with a few short notes. However, it differs from most Number Pieces in that the dynamics are about the same for both long and short notes. So, don't be worried about drifting off to sleep to this one! (It's 45 minutes long, so falling asleep is a possibility.) You won't be jolted awake by a sudden, loud honk on a saxophone. Instead, this is pretty much ambient; and the music generally has a fairly soft timbre, being composed only for wind instruments. It drones away slowly and softly - gradually getting louder and quieter, as though it's breathing.

With so many instruments, it's often difficult to distinguish one from another, creating fuzzy mass of sound from which various specific sounds are brushed in and out. Overall it brings to mind rolling clouds, maybe a gathering storm. There are plenty of lovely low, deep notes. And it is, of course, unrelenting dissonant.  The stormy mood is emphasized somewhat about half-way through this recording, where people start shuffling about so much that they make a sound like rain pattering down (I'm not sure exactly how that sound arises - from clothes crinkling perhaps?). A fantastic piece!