The Freeman Etudes for solo violin is one of Cage's most notorious compositions: a contender for his most devilishly difficult to perform, and this from a composer notable for his many devilishly difficult pieces. The dates he wrote it tell part of the story. Cage originally began this in the late 70s for Paul Zukofsky. As far as I understand it, Cage's basic method was that after writing a note, he would ask Zukofsky what notes (and with what playing styles) it would be possible to perform right away after it, then used chance operations to determine which of those notes would be next. The piece is written with extreme precision. For each note, Cage determines exactly the duration, the amplitude, the position of the bow on the string, the style of bowing (or fingering); slight microtonal variations in pitch, etc; and since all of these are determined for each note, all of these properties can change from note to note. Worse, it is to be played extremely fast.
Cage completed books 1 and 2, comprising etudes I-XVI, in 1980. But even Paul Zukofsky, an extremely skilled violinist, was complaining that the pieces were in some cases simply impossible to perform. Rather than compromise his vision for the composition and find a way to make it a little easier, Cage simply gave up the project.
Until, that is, he met Irvine Arditti, who not only could perform the first two books, but played them even faster than Cage had directed. This inspired Cage to return to the Etudes, completing books 3 and 4, etudes XVII-XXXII, in 1990. So thankfully we have a full set, but that hiatus is certainly telling. As far as I know, there is no other case of Cage writing a composition that even he concedes is too difficult to perform (and as I noted, he has plenty of very difficult compositions).
Anyway, I'm listening to the recordings by mode records, with Arditti on violin. There's probably nobody else in the world who can play this as well as Arditti. It's not that we lack skilled violinists, but there aren't many of them who are willing to spend years obsessively practising a composition that sounds more like a squeaky door than violin music. This point also brings me to the difficulties that confront any potential listeners. I'm not joking about this sounding like a squeaky door; and even with with Arditti's speedy playing, we still have about 100 minutes of this stuff.
Listening to it carefully, what immediately struck me was, unsurprisingly, its extreme complexity. This stands out from Cage's other impossible compositions in being so obviously impossible. For example, take the Etudes Australes for piano, which I reviewed in my first review on this blog. As I mentioned in that review, just listening to the Etudes Australes, it doesn't sound particularly difficult. Of course, I'm no pianist, so what would I know about that? But with the Freeman Etudes, though I'm no violinist either, it's immediately obvious that this must be an absolute bastard to play. And this, of course, was Cage's point. The Freeman Etudes, for Cage, has an important political message: in the face of an apparently impossible world situation, this composition demonstrates the possibility of the apparently impossible.
Fair enough, but that idea is communicated as well in twenty seconds as in 100 minutes. The impression I have listening to the whole thing is not so much an inspiring political message; it's more like watching an Olympic event. And the mere fact that it requires so much virtuosity is a novelty that sustains interest only for so long.
It doesn't help that really, once you've heard one etude, you've heard them all. Despite the complexity of these pieces, they end up seeming very uniform. None of them develop or go anywhere, and there's no variation in arrangement; it's just an onslaught of completely unrelated notes. The wonderful free improv guitarist Derek Bailey once described his style as "playing without a memory". What Bailey meant was "playing without a memory of previous musical traditions*. But we could interpret that phrase to mean "playing without a memory of the other notes I have just played". This is the impression conveyed by the Freeman Etudes. Each sound connects to no past, and points to no future. Eventually, it all just becomes a fuzzy mass of scrapes and squeaks (there's not even any variation in length of the etudes, all being about three minutes). Consider changing patterns of static on a television screen: there is little to differentiate one from another.
What's sad, given the difficulty of performing this, is that I'm guessing that the response 99% of people would have to it is simply: look disgusted and say "my 3-year-old kid could play better than that!" Of course, that's a really stupid criticism. But it does hint at something important. This piece could be far easier, and the experience for the listener would not be much different. (That's not to say, of course, that you can't tell how difficult this is. Just that similar overall sounds and similar complexity could be produced far more easily.)
The above comments probably make me come across as much more negative about this piece than I actually feel. Don't get me wrong; I just wonder about Cage's intentions for the piece. In fact, I absolutely love the Freeman Etudes. Bear in mind, however, that if you gave your 3-year-old kid a violin and recorded whatever sounds they bashed out, I'd probably love that too.
No comments:
Post a Comment