Fontana Mix (1958)

As you know, my goal with this blog is to listen to and comment on all of John Cage's indeterminate music. But what exactly do I mean by "indeterminate music"? It may be worth saying something about how this is defined. Broadly, there are two basic types of indeterminacy: (1) music in which chance operations are used to write the composition, and (2) music in which relevant parts of the composition are left in some ways vague. In the case of (1), two performances of the same composition should sound pretty much the same: the composer might use chance to generate e.g. the pitches, but once the composition is written, the performers will play the same pitches every time it's performed. In the case of (2), however, two performances of the same composition might sound radically different, because e.g. exactly which pitches to play is simply left unspecified.

I mention this here because Fontana Mix is a wonderful example of indeterminacy in the second sense (and in the first, actually, but of course Cage had been using chance operations for years by this point). Part of this indeterminacy arises from its use of graphic notation: its score consists wholly of transparent sheets of grids, dots, and lines that are placed on top of each other. Ignoring the music for a moment, the score, like many Cage scores, is just a beautiful piece of visual art in itself:

A tangent: when Cage was younger he studied under Arnold Schoenberg, who supposedly agreed to teach him on the condition that he devote himself entirely to music. However, Cage had always been interested in visual art - perhaps he saw graphic notation as giving him a way to explore this interest while keeping his promise? (Of course, Cage would eventually flagrantly break the promise anyway, producing pure visual art at places like Crown Point Press (and I'm very thankful this, since much of his visual art is stunningly beautiful).)

Anyway, Fontana Mix pushes indeterminacy of type (2) to an extreme. First, the way that all the sheets are put together is determined by chance operations before each performance, so in fact no two performers of Fontana Mix will use the same score. Nor need they use the same sound sources, since it's for any number of performers using any kinds of instruments. Further, Cage says nothing about how the grids, dots, or lines are to be interpreted, so all of the elements are left undefined. The same dot might represent a one-second long violin note in one performance, and a ten-second sound of tearing paper in another. A line might represent a note rising in pitch in one performance; in another, it might be taken as a visual guide for how the performers are to be placed on the stage. Etc. All of this is to be determined by the performers.

It should go without saying that different performances of this may sound radically different. Indeed, literally none of the sounds you hear in a performance of Fontana Mix have been specified by Cage. With compositions like this, indeterminacy is so great that it calls into question the very nature of composition. What, exactly, has Cage composed here? I read a lovely comment on a youtube video of Fontana Mix (I don't have the link, but I'm pretty sure this is verbatim): "The realization of the score is itself a new composition. In a way, Cage did not compose this - he composed the opportunity for it to exist."

The recording that I'm listening to is, I think, the original version created by Cage himself on magnetic tape. It's very reminiscent of Cage's earlier Williams Mix: it consists mostly of a lot of static noise that seems to have been electronically processed in various ways. There's harsh white noise, soft radio static, and some of the static stops and start quickly, giving it a kind of staccato rhythm. Throughout the piece, there are also quick snatches of music, voices, electronic beeps and tones, and found sounds. Imagine somebody rapidly flipping through radio channels, landing mostly on static, and then processing the result. It is wonderfully chaotic!

It's definitely worthwhile to check out other versions of the piece - there's a few on youtube, last time I looked.