Valedictory Lecture

Valedictory Lecture

John Donald Robb Composers' Symposium

University of New Mexico

March 23, 2012

Intro to Part I

I am a creative person. And because of that everything I do is connected. There has never been, for me, any distinction between art and life. I live my life and living it is making art.

I want to thank Karola and Peter for inviting me to give this talk. They have organized the daytime activities of this year's symposium and in the past, when I was organizing them, UNM faculty never gave talks. Just guests. So now that I've retired and am a guest I give a talk. And I appreciate the opportunity.

I'll read this lecture as I usually do and have organized it in three parts. The first and last I wrote in Pennsylvania before I left, leaving the middle to write, through inspiration, here in New Mexico. This mirrors what happened when I wrote my first fully-notated piece, between 1995 and 2000, the outer two parts were written in Germany, the middle in New Mexico. That piece, "a little light, in great darkness" is on the CD (Devisadero, Navona Recordings) I gave you earlier.

Part I

After a long night, collapsing into bed at 8:30 PM ON A FRIDAY (which never happens even at my age) due to a week of constant frustration putting the final program together for this very symposium, I began to dream. Can't repeat all of them but there were two important ones: UNM German professor Katja Schroeter, with whom I studied German for many years, walking along with me, on the UNM campus, as I'm headed for my Korean class (which I actually take at the University of Pennsylvania International House), I ask her what she's doing at the moment, recommending instead that I just skip the Korean class and we go drink some beers and catch up. Naturally this is all happening in German.  And this is an example of nostalgia. Looking back. I'm not going to do that in this talk. In the second dream, I am waiting to give a talk, traveling constantly, don't even know where I am when asked: I say "Los Angeles," the person next to me corrects: "Denver." I'm rifling through my notes, there's not much paper and it's not empty, I'm writing over printed paper, thinking that my talk shouldn't be written anyway but that's just an excuse. I don't have much time, and all of a sudden I realize I don't need the paper, which has everything scribbled on it, completely disorganized, even as I write down the one thing I need to know. And doing that on one of those sheets of completely full paper, the pen writing not in black ink but in white shaving cream, can't even fit it on the bottom and thus writing around to the side (like I'm sure you've also done), the words: "cohesion and difference." Not separate but together: "cohesion and difference." As if that were the whole thing that matters. At this point, I awoke from my dream.

Well, cohesion and difference are important, in my opinion, when making art of any kind and today, at the beginning of a symposium for composers, it might seem that this is what I plan to talk about. But no, that too, is nostalgia. What I remember instead from when I woke up is that such dichotomies are necessary, for me at least, to make a path on which I can walk. And I've walked that path. But now, as a simple introduction to what I want to say, a discussion of my recent work, without nostalgia, all I can say is that I felt that a young composer in my time needed to find their own way by the usual method of killing the father, I'm still quite Freudian, and in the late 1980s, when I began composing, that father was not who everyone thought he was, be that Schoenberg or Stravinsky, neoclassicism or serialism, or the current (at that time) minimalism and complexity. For me that father was experimentalism and its "fathers" were Charles Ives and John Cage.  The results of that was a book (Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition, Northeastern University Press, 1998) that compared and contrasted the experimentalism of them both, using the terms control for Charles Ives and co-existence for John Cage.  John Cage had come to New Mexico for this very symposium in 1988, at my invitation, and I had prepared an evening-long performance of all periods of Cage's music. At that time, Cage was still quite famous, but he was not considered all that compositionally relevant anymore, especially not in the United States. In fact, when I prepared to write my dissertation on Cage in the early 1990s, only two people had written recent dissertations on Cage and both were in music theory.  The results of my study found that experimentalism (then a period of music in which I was an active participant and not a style like today) was not so together as everyone thought. In fact, when James Tenney heard about my dissertation, as we were driving back to Albuquerque from something we had both attended in Santa Fe, he said "why would you separate the tradition? Isn't it already isolated enough?" Well I separated it because it had divisions within it--that's all. But, and so this doesn't go on too long, it was through what Cage said, indirectly, about co-existence, which has a long history in Asian thought and is certainly how Cage learned about it and I through him, regarding intention and non-intention, that led me to that place: when one is intentional there is no room for non-intention, but non-intention is so open it even includes the intentional.  Cage himself, as my book proves, needed to be intentional to create something he regarded as fully non-intentional.  That was how I "killed the father." But of course the father, dead or not, remains within you doesn't he? For us physically it's in the DNA, and for us artistically it's in the memory.  And what I carry within me, and which will be part of my presentation to you today, is co-existence. In my creative work, I seek not to control my materials but co-exist with them, listen to them, let them (in many instances) tell me what to do, not vice-versa. And this is still a pretty radical way to work. It is also (I think) Cage's greatest legacy to composition, not chance and not indeterminacy--these are compositional tools anyone can use, regardless of personal orientation.  It is Cage's compositional attitude that I share and that is a desire to not completely control and instead co-exist with your compositional materials. And, for that matter, with the rest of the world!

Part II

At this point, I'm in the middle part of the talk, writing atop of a mesa (Tsankawi) in the Bandelier National Monument wilderness area.  Much of it was destroyed by a fire last summer. 

 Funny that the middle of the piece I earlier mentioned, "a little light," was also written in a fire devastated place, Lama, just north of Taos, where I was first inspired to write the kind of music that followed for eight years after, all written in the New Mexico wilderness.

Now I write in Pennsylvania woods and Korean mountains and that's the topic of what comes next: a piece I wrote for gayageums, a Korean instrument similar to a zither, close to a Japanese koto if you know that, now re-written for string quartet, and which will be premiered next Monday night in Keller Hall by the Del Sol string quartet. It's hard to imagine that piece sitting here with 360 degrees of space all around me and not a cloud in the sky. This piece Circlings is connected to feelings of enclosure not openness, not one circle (like the prayer circle I saw at Bandelier last weekend), but many circles. Where the text that accompanies my piece states "in the woods, all directions seem the right ones." Getting lost in other words. In the New Mexico wilderness you get lost too, I did rather frequently and sometimes on purpose. But in the mountains you still have up and down, the sun ever-present gives you north, south, east and west most of the time. In the woods these circles that inform my piece, moving forward--with time of course--what option is there? But in what direction? And how do you know? What is the natural road map when the sun is obscured and the trail goes around and around, a flat surface, where repetition is only noticeable if you've paid careful attention to your surroundings and even then, what if the distinctions themselves are repeated as they sometimes are?

The east coast seems so safe and civilized in wealthy parts of its cities and suburbs. But in the Pennsylvania wilderness, and those thick dark woods, getting lost is something you don't encourage, and when it happens there are different dangers than snakes, bears, mountain lions, elk, steep mountain climbs, dangerous winds: all those things you learn to accept in the New Mexico wilderness--all seem safer and more approachably open than the darkness of circling walks in the Pennsylvania woods. So that's one aspect of Circlings for me.

The other, more positive (thank goodness), is its overt influence: Korean culture and the natural landscape it is rooted within. As you probably know, Korea is an extraordinarily beautiful peninsula dotted with mountains just about everywhere you turn. And Koreans share a similar love of nature to what I experienced in Germany. One side effect being that in the wilderness you are almost never alone like I was when I wrote this in Tsankawi. So one noticeable thing that changes with Circlings is my intentional mingling of nature and culture in the electronic part of the piece. The source material of that is primarily made up of field recordings on long mountain walks in Korea. You hear insects, electronically altered and not, water altered and not, and the sound of two Buddhist chants, one male and one female, that I recorded in temples I found deep in the mountains of Seoraksan and the Gyeryong mountains near Daejeong.  Below are photos of those temples.

Seoraksan:

And Gyeryongsan:

The other sounds are Korean instruments, the gayageum itself, paired with a temple block I purchased at one of the temples similar to what they use while chanting.  As I say I recorded these sounds in Korea, in the summer of 2009, and then the following fall, with the help of my friend and fellow composer Thomas DeLio, we created the electronic parts interspersed with by "silences" I recorded at Pulpit Rock, on the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania, for an installation I made with my wife, the visual artist Hee Sook Kim, in 2007 titled Encounter. It was the installation piece for that year's composers' symposium. Here is a photo of me at Pulpit Rock around the time of those recordings:

The video for Circlings was filmed in the mountains of Korea, also by Hee Sook Kim, during the same walks where I recorded the sounds. So that's what's happening with the electronics. What about the instrumental writing? Well, first I knew nothing about the gayageum, a fantastic instrument that can do many, many things and with a long tradition in Korean musical history. I made contact, through my friend Hyo-shin Na, a Korean born American composer who I met through the Del Sol String Quartet who played her music at the same 2007 symposium I just mentioned. And it was her who asked me to write a piece for gayageum quartet which was later premiered at a festival of Korean art and music co-directed by Hyo-shin Na and Hee Sook Kim at Haverford College (October 2010) where Hee Sook teaches printmaking. Hyo-shin gave my name to the Cultural Ministry in the Korean government and they sent me hundreds of CDs and DVDs of Korean music--an extraordinary and overwhelming collection of which I've still barely scratched the surface. In the meantime I was a scholarship recipient for a workshop at the National Gugak Center in Seoul (Gugak is the Korean word for native folk music), where I studied gayageum, danso flute, folk singing and dancing, and Korean Changgo, the first drum I had played in more than a decade and the instrument that returned me to once again being a performing percussionist. So I'm very partial to this drum!

Anyway this was all after I'd written the piece, and in fact my having written the piece, as an indication of my interest in Korean music, is probably what got me the full scholarship to study there.  So what did I do then, while writing a piece for an instrument I didn't know, from a musical culture I knew very little about?  I returned to my experimental background and treated the gayageum, not as a cultural marker, which it so obviously is, and instead wrote for it as a sound generating instrument.  Finding my way to that place took a long time, but after that things moved more quickly, with the piece (so atypical for me) actually completed in time for its premiere in October 2010.  So quickly a sketch of the form of the electronic part of the piece. There are fourteen tracks, four which are silences of the same length, the rest sounds as described previously. 

And it is at this point that my long-term interest in pop music as a material generating source comes into play.  The CD I gave you has lots of pop music references--sounds that I love, isolated and recontextualized in ways that are not likely hearable but important to me as material. Content in other words. But form had always been another matter that had been more experimentally derived in a way better associated with modernist ways of thinking about form and structure.

But I already had a structure remember? The sounds and silences of the electronic part. So I could either choose to ignore that structure and have the two co-exist--that's what Hee Sook did with the video, in fact it is how we always work together, a kind of Cage/Cunningham relation of independent connection between sight and sound. Or I could use the form of the electronic part as a template and write short modules that correspond in time with the sections of the recorded sounds.  I chose the latter and here's one score example (Circlings, like all of my music, is published by American Composers Edition): 

Anyone that knows me knows that I love Brian Wilson's music and think he is one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. I know pretty much everything there is to know about his music and I've studied it like a scholar; taught it in class. Basically I have internalized it to the point that where the influence leaves off and my creativity begins would be difficult to say. Except I was definitely not thinking about him when I wrote Circlings! Instead I was thinking about this while trying to write my string quartet--writing short modules of sound like Wilson did when he wrote Good Vibrations and began working on Smile.

I was using texts from the Jefferson Airplane's Volunteers album, John Lennon's Revolution--political work from the late 60s influencing me in a time of alarmingly reactionary conservatism in this country. Thinking revolutionary thoughts.

But it wasn't working. A frustrating time and time was running out.

Then the original Smile sessions came out and it was possible to hear what Wilson was trying to do with his great lost unfinished masterpiece. Not only lost in terms of it not being finished. HE was lost. He COULDN'T finish. You can hear that all the way through the Smile sessions, especially now that we know from the 2004 completion of it, what he finally had in mind and what took him so long.  One of the best module-type pieces on Smile is Cabin Essence, which I'll play for you now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOAUroLJnRc

After studying the Smile session CDs I realized that I'd already written my "module" piece, I'd already written my string quartet. Except it was for Korean strings not European ones.

Thus began the process (a quite simple one actually) of translating from gayageum to violins, viola and cello. What I especially like about my new way of composing is that I can finish unfinished things. My Waldmusik--unfinished but one part (for two pianos) can be seen on YouTube (links below):

Here's the first movement:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8EnWXDegJE

Here's the second and third:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZACRgpx77X4&feature=relmfu

This video is a performance by Scott Ney and Tzu-feng Liu from last year's symposium; my concert length Preludes and Miniatures for solo piano, part of which can be heard on my website (Four Romantic Miniatures performed by Falko Steinbach):

http://music.unm.edu/faculty_staff/shultis_new/music_texts_four_romantic_miniatures.htm

Another part is Devisadero, the title track of my Navona recordings CD (you can find a live recording by Curt Cacioppo, for whom it was written, here):

http://music.unm.edu/media/cshultis/shultis_devisidero.mp3

And finally how I am now writing Circlings--also unfinished and being written in parallel, with instruments from my native cultural background and instruments from my wife's native cultural background--a collaboration that continues, for electronics (audio and video) and instruments, Asian and European, a never ending place of creativity which can be heard in part even as I continue to search for its completed whole. 

Here's a link to the completed string quartet (including a recording of its premiere by the Del Sol String Quartet) with video by Hee Sook Kim:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxqt8dTPARU

And now to conclude:

Part III

I said I wouldn’t be nostalgic, but as you can tell from my presentation, sometimes nostalgia can itself be material. I certainly feel that way about Brian Wilson’s final work Smile and how that can be useful in the present and that, in a sense, isn’t nostalgic at all. As my brother once said about his own art, pretty much at the beginning of his career, and it’s such a strong statement he continues to use it: 

“The realization that something has been is also the realization that something might be.”

That's a more idealistic statement than I would make, he's still an idealist after all, but I do think like Gertrude Stein did that although the materials themselves are constant, their composition, through the inventive activity of a creative artist can still be "made new."

And I'm intentionally using not just "old" material, but material that on the surface can be heard as anachronistic (if you want to make a valueless judgment) or even reactionary (if you want to connect the material to some ideological construct as so often happens nowadays) and, to be sure, my use, for example, of tonality in the music I wrote over the last fifteen years was not made in some naive place, walking around alone in the desert and listening to the Muses who then told me what to write. I knew what I was doing, began using tonality as material for a reason, and I am just as concerned now as I was then in trying to resist the placement of what I do stylistically which I think is the best way to find success and, at the same time, the surest way to be sure that success will be shortlived. When I started composing notated music in the mid-90s, I knew that Neue Musik and its progeny in the complexity composers and New Music with its successors in minimalism was dead. That's the only time Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf and I have ever agreed on anything. He heard that in Darmstadt in the early 90s and I heard that in, of all places, Akron Ohio at around the same time. New Music as a musical period is over and still being discovered in its fullness, at least I've noticed that to be true where I live now on the East Coast. Neue Musik still exists as a style with lots of practitioners, some of them interesting some not.  And I still like the music anyone writes in this style better than most of the possible alternatives available today.

Well in closing I want to be truly nostalgic, going way way back, to when I was in high school and thought I was going to be the next Jackson Browne. In fact, back then I knew I wasn’t good enough to another Paul Simon, but did think I was better than Jackson Browne. Oh the vanity of youth! Anyway, I didn’t write classical music as a kid, I listened to it a bit, I remember in particular listening to the 2^nd piano concerto of Brahms on my car’s 8 track stereo (that was a trip), but my goals were simple. I was going to go to college and learn how to write my songs down on paper so that, like Paul Simon, I could be my own publisher and not have to share my millions with some corporation like the Beatles did.  I always used to tell my students that I would have been a songwriter if I hadn’t in retrospect been such a bad one. But of course as a Distinguished Professor I could never actually demonstrate that, way too embarrassing, and besides I couldn’t have found those old sheets of paper with lyrics (all bad) and chord symbols written on top anyway, packed away as they were somewhere in my office, not even seen since I arrived at UNM as a 22 year old in 1980.

Well, when I moved from my office to where I live now, I found a battered yellow envelope with this written on it: “Bad Lyrics and Songs from H.S.” And now I’m going to prove to everyone, right here, how bad they really were.

Now why would I embarrass myself like that, sharing such a bad song, in front of all of you? To make a point that some of my former students may remember my telling them, but never demonstrating. Being in school is the best time to make as many mistakes as possible, and you never get another chance to be a student composer so make them all, take all the chances you want, what are you worried about--a bad grade? As a composer? What a ridiculous idea! Especially since we all know the best composers never went to school anyway so already we are at a disadvantage. So at least use that disadvantage to get all the crap out of the way as soon as possible. To be honest this is what I’m learning now that I’m finally out of school, having never left one from the time I was four until fifty four, is that school is the place where you take risks, find yourself, don’t worry about consequences (within reason, or maybe not even that) and if there is any proof I can offer it is that awful song, which I thought was so great when I was sixteen, and how crucial that time was for me, to make that music, to pour my soul into its awfulness, and get it out let it exist and then reflecting back to its existence realize that it has no reason to exist other than as an example of its awfulness—to me and maybe to you—as a way of showing that nostalgia and looking back really is what the Bible says it is, with Lot’s wife looking back and becoming a pillar of salt, and yet its lessons are necessary, that’s what school is about after all, looking back so you don’t make the same mistakes everyone else (even you) made, and so in closing I invite you to write all the awful music necessary in order to get it out of your system as soon as possible and maybe, with any luck, you’ll be able to leave school much sooner than I did, now finally and truly a college graduate at the age of fifty-four.

Shultis Composers' Symposium Lecture Sources

www.chrisshultis.com

chrisshultis.blogspot.com

www.heesookkim.com

www.navonarecords.com

Christopher Shultis.  Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition (1998)

Beach Boys: The Smile Sessions Box Set (2011)

Gertrude Stein. "Composition as Explanation" from Selected Writings.

Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf. "Die Neue Musik ist tot, schon lange ..." in "Komplexismus und der Paradigmenwechsel in der Musik. " MusikTexte 35 (1990) pp.20-28.

Christopher Shultis. Waldmusik (2009), part one and two:

www.youtube.com

Tsankawi, White Rock NM: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsankawi

The Process of Discovery: Interpreting Child of Tree

The Process of Discovery: Interpreting Child of Tree

November 1, 2012, 11:00 AM

Percussive Arts Society International Convention

Austin, Texas

The following lecture, (delivered while the University of New Mexico Percussion Ensemble, Scott Ney, director, performed Branches by John Cage), was preceded by my performance of John Cage's Child of Tree, and followed with a performance of my own composition 64 Statements re and not re Child of Tree.

"I am still obsessed with Cage and Chance (and chance: is it possible you underestimate this theme?"

Norman O. Brown, in correspondence with the author

1 February 1995

The answer to that question is "yes and no" and this lecture on Child of Tree is my belated response to a question from Norman O. Brown, one of the last century's most important intellectuals, who was also one of Cage's best critics, as well as being someone who corresponded (and was friends) with Cage for many years.  I'll return to this question at the end of my remarks.

For now I want to begin with the video that follows: a version of Child of Tree that I performed in 1988, first for Cage himself at a 75-year retrospective I organized at the University of New Mexico where he was the featured guest. Child of Tree in this version was then performed at the Percussive Arts Society Convention in San Antonio, also in 1988. One more note about Child of Tree before I play the video: Because Cage often performed Child of Tree as part of a solo dance by Merce Cunningham, his partner in art and life for many years, I decided to include dance and music into one person. The dance, as was often the case with Cunningham, was not improvised but the music, as required by the score, was. 

(Note, as you watch, the incorrect placement of the pod rattles, one of two mistakes in this version. The second will be discussed in what follows.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-zm42P-MN4 

If I had more time I would go through a detailed analysis of Child of Tree but for now I'll just concentrate on one aspect: the form of the piece and how it is made.

I had performed Child of Tree in Cage's presence twice, first in Albuquerque, as mentioned before, and second at a festival in Strathmore Maryland in 1989. And I'd been playing (and thinking about) Child of Tree for a long time. So much so that a friend of mine, the poet Joan Retallack who put together an excellent book of interviews with Cage toward the end of his life titled Musicage, even mentions the subject in an interview with Cage just before he died, conducted on July 30, 1992.  I'll read the passage, which begins with reference to the composer Thomas DeLio, by then a mutual friend of Joan and I. Joan says: "Tom DeLio also mentioned Chris Shultis and his experience with performing Child of Tree. I've talked with Chris about this too, how Child of Tree is a piece he's been living with for years and years. He's constantly thinking about new ways to do it and feeling that where he was with it the last time he performed it is not where he wants to be now, at any given 'now.' And that's not simply some form of programmatic principle, it's a very lively continual exploration of the piece, and I suspect in the development of his life in some way. So I think that's always possible, that the realizations of any piece might develop and evolve over time." (Retallack, Musicage, p. 305)  Cage responds about the performance aspect of this: "Well, it's the nature of performance, yes, to have a sense of imminence. Well, perhaps "imminence" is the wrong word, but"-- (then he continues, after a comment from Joan liking the word) "Danger! ... imminent danger. (laughs) It's so well expressed by the Zen monk who's holding up the cat in one hand and the knife in the other, who says, 'Quick! A word of truth or I slit the cat's throat!' That makes it very, very clear what happens to us at the point of performance. What is so marvelous about performance is that whatever happens is it!" (p. 306)

And that points to something important concerning what I think must have mattered most to Cage, the performance, but, as you'll see shortly, Cage would have known about my performances of Child of Tree (except for those two performances already mentioned) through my questions, not about performance, but instead about how to build a performance score.  

That's because I had begun a correspondence with Cage regarding Child of Tree. I was thinking about publishing something regarding it in Percussive Notes, a magazine associated with the Percussive Arts Society. I only have time here to touch on one part of that correspondence now, and this concerns the number of parts in a performance score of Child of Tree, and let me just say that the score itself is a mess, very hard to read, and requires a lot of work to understand what to do. That's partly because the score is a text meant to make it possible for the performer to build their own performance score and Cage, as we shall see, wanted it to be a difficult task.

  

In a phone conversation with Cage, that initiated our correspondence, Cage told me there could be no more than four parts.  Let's look at the original (as I say it's messy):

And then here is my transcription of it: 

 "Divide the eight minutes into parts by means of the coin oracle of the I-Ching. " He then, as you can see, divides the I-Ching into four. "If the first 2 or 3 parts total seven minutes, the last part, of course, will be one minute. If the addition of the 3rd or 4th part makes a length of 9, or 10, reduce it to a number making a total length of 8." This is what Cage has to say in the score of Child of Tree concerning parts.

Now let's take a look at my first realization of Cage's work from 1987. As you can see I came up with 5 parts, not 4. Why?

Well, when I first studied the piece and made this score (and maybe you can blame the coffee too as we, Dave Neale and I, were drinking a lot and EJ's was a great place to do that), I read the first direction "divide the eight minutes into parts" as using the table of four to determine the number of minutes in each part.  And that's true. It is what he means by that. So for part one, I rolled a 40 hexagram, which equals 3 minutes. Then I rolled an 8 hexagram that equals 1 minute, a 13 that equals 1 minute, a 1 hexagram for 1 minute and a 58 that equals 4 minutes which, adding up to more than 8 minutes altogether was reduced to 2.  This last operation was possible, according to Cage's instruction "if the addition of a 3rd or 4th part makes a length of 9 or 10, reduce it to a number making a total length of 8." So that's how I can up with 5 parts rather than the 4 parts Cage said were the most possible. In a moment I'll get to the obvious problem with my logic but first let's continue with the dialogue between me and Cage. Referring to that earlier phone call I wrote the following to Cage:

"This question concerns a clarification of page four. For me, what isn't clear in the instructions is the apparent need for two steps: the first step is the determination of sections, while the second step determines the length of each section."

Now before we go any further, let me just assure everyone that at this point I'm getting lost in the instructions, something that I think is very easy to do with Child of Tree.  Because as you saw in the previous slide that is not what I did at all. Instead I just rolled some low numbers that made it possible to end up with more than 4 parts. But I didn't do a two-step operation, deciding parts first and minutes second.  No, the point is, now that I'm in touch with the composer and going back and forth, I'm becoming more confused.  And, as you might imagine, I'm also a little intimidated and nervous, a young thirty year old writing to the great John Cage? Well, anyway that's how I excuse it now! Let's continue with my letter to Cage:

"If you divide the eight minutes into parts using the table of four" (which as I say I didn't ever do) it would entail the following (at least this is the way I've been doing it since we last spoke)" (and that of course was the problem):  "First you determine how many parts there are. So if you consult the I-Ching and get the 33rd hexagram there would be 3 parts." (Don't do this at home. It's wrong.) "The second step would be determining how many minutes for each: what I do is consult the table of four again, this time until the eight minutes have been used up. Example: if I have 3 parts and in consulting the I-Ching get the 49th hexagram, the first part would be 4 minutes long (and so on until the eight minutes are complete.)"

To be fair with myself this is a workable solution to the problem. But as Marcel Duchamp once said, "There is no solution because there is no problem." Here is Cage's response to my letter:

"If your first toss is 33, it would mean 3" for the first section; if then 49, 4" for the second ", leaving 1" for the 3rd and last section. I don't see it as a two-step operation."

Ok now here is how confused I had become at that point. And I think you'll see why in a minute.  This is how I responded to Cage on August 13 1990, and I need to read it in almost its entirety in order for you to understand my position fully: "I believe that possibilities continue to exist which are unanswerable by the instructions and require an interpretation by the performer not specifically contained within those instructions. Perhaps that is by design. Certainly many excellent performances have occurred without need for such clarification and I have no desire to bother you unnecessarily. Thus should you wish this instruction to continue as is, please disregard the remaining contents of this letter. However if you are interested in investigating this further I'd appreciate one more response. When we spoke on the phone you bet me a nickel that there could only be 4 parts. If the process described in question #1 is not a two step process and if the series of four number possibilities equals the number of minutes (as you suggest in your response to that question), then the possibility exists of more than four parts. I'll use an example to see if you owe me money: if I toss 8 I get one minute; if I toss 16 I get one minute again; if I then toss 17 I get two minutes; if I toss 7, I again get one minute, thus having four parts requiring at least a fifth to get the necessary eight minutes."

"My reason for suggesting a two-step process was to reconcile your statement that there be no more than four parts to the possibility of more than four if the process were in one step with the table of four used solely to determine minutes. The only other method I can envision would be one where the first toss determined both time and division of parts." (Watch what happens here because this is exactly what Cage intends with Child of Tree) "However that is problematic because if you tossed 7, the result would be one part" (because a 7 hexagram would equal one in Cage's division of the I-Ching) "with a duration of 1 minute. This could work if it were understood that the toss of one simply determined that the one part equaled eight minutes."  I go on to end the letter as follows: "My impression is that your answer to the first question can produce two possibilities: either the one step determines minutes allowing for more than four parts, or it determines minutes and number of parts (using the same toss to decide both). If I'm willing to wager double or nothing would you be willing to further clarify this point?" (Shultis letter to Cage 8/13/90)

Here is Cage's response, a response to the last letter I ever wrote Cage about Child of Tree and my last letter from him concerning Child of Tree:

His "check" (see below) is, of course, one of my most prized possessions and gives you some idea of Cage's great sense of humor.

So back to the problem that is no problem which maybe you figured out already but clearly at that time I hadn't although by 1991 when I gave a lecture on Child of Tree at the University of Michigan I had where I wrote the following: "The two instructions that clarify the existence of only four (possible) parts are as follows: 'If the first 2 or 3 parts total seven minutes, the last part, of course, will be one minute.'" We've seen this in the score page (page four of Child of Tree) I showed you earlier. And there's one more on page five that you haven't: "If three parts (in addition to the last)."  I then write in that lecture: "The inclusion of 'last' determines I believe that there may be only four parts." Or as I can more specifically add in this lecture, with a more scholarly precise use of words: there can be no more than four parts. Period.

So how did I miss this back then?  And I apologize if this seems so specific and particular to the point of boredom toward the end of this lecture but it points to why I think Child of Tree is so important in Cage's work. I had spent a long time studying Cage by then and was, unlike what I said at the beginning of the talk, particularly influenced, as many people then were, and probably are now, by Cage's use of chance. I couldn't for the life of me see the obvious tree in that forest. That Cage would just DECIDE to have no more than four parts. In other words, the system he created only ALLOWS for up to four parts. There can't be more, regardless of all the ways I mentioned that would make it possible, because the score simply says in those two places, that "the last part" can be less than four, but not more than four and must be more than one: "if the first two". The instructions are very clear once you realize that all the messiness of the score is hiding that clarity and Cage is including choice and chance in a way he was only beginning to do at this point. And it is important to know that Cage's intentions were very important. That's why I didn't give chance enough credit, returning to Brown's point, because studying Child of Tree had shown me that chance was a technique, but that Cage's use of intention and non-intention was, as I've said elsewhere, very INTENTIONAL.

The fascinating thing about Child of Tree is that it reintegrates choice into what is usually regarded as a highly indeterminate work. The question is, how does this choice manifest itself? In many cases the choices are the composer's predetermined wishes, which can only be discovered as one wades through the murky waters of this complex set of instructions. My confusion concerning the number of parts is a case in point. The "answer" is there if one is devoted to its discovery. But most important, it requires that devotion and is not meant to be clear. As Cage wrote me in a letter (July 8, 1990) that I included earlier :"If you or Allen Otte writes an article re: all of this please include a facsimile pg. showing how the score was made (so that it is not easy to understand). This doesn't mean that you shouldn't clarify it."

Child of Tree extends choice to the performer as well and this, although I can't really elaborate here, is also important. Realizing that choice was inevitable, Cage in Child of Tree allows the performer the opportunity in places to make the same choice he did, to relinquish control and co-exist within the work. The reintegration of choice in Child of Tree, on the part of the performer, is thus an opportunity allowing us to choose not to choose. To co-exist rather than control.

Works cited:

John Cage, in conversation with Joan Retallack. MUSICAGE: CAGE MUSES on Words Art Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.

Christopher Shultis. "Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the Intentionality of Nonintention" in The Musical Quarterly (1995) Vol. 79, No. 2, pp. 312-350.

Cage at 100: Who Changed, Him or Us?

Cage at 100: Who Changed, Him or Us?

My subject is "Cage at 100: Who Changed, Him or Us?" And the sub-category I will address today is the question of performance practice. For this is a subject where things have changed a lot during but mostly after Cage's lifetime. It also combines the practical and philosophical in a way that I hope will convince you that Cage the composer is the real subject of celebrations this year. Cage was an excellent communicator, wrote well about his own music and ideas, and in the end was justifiably well-known as a poet (especially) and visual artist (increasingly).  But his music is where I believe his genius was most fully expressed and, for the most part, in the traditional ways we have evaluated composers of so-called classical music throughout history.  The question I want to ask of the two pieces I'll discuss is this: how as performers and scholars can we interpret these works, faithful to the score first and foremost, as I say no differently than one would with any composer. This will happen in two parts.

Part one concerns Cage's early percussion music and the example I'll use is his greatest percussion composition: Third Construction.  In the late 90s, thanks to an invitation by David Patterson to include something in his book of essays about Cage from 1933-1950, I revisited my work with Cage when I was still an active percussionist.  I analyzed Third Construction when I was in graduate school at the University of Illinois in connection with a performance of it that semester. This would have been in 1979.  You may not know this but the University of Illinois is the place where these early pieces were first rediscovered. Cage himself performed them initially with his own ensemble when he worked at the Cornish School in Seattle. But it wasn't until the 1950s when the great Paul Price began to perform these pieces with the University of Illinois Percussion Ensemble that interest in the works returned. Even so, it was a small group who were interested. Composers, to be sure. And also a lot of percussionists who were lucky enough to study with either Price or his successors, Jack McKenzie and Thomas Siwe.

Anyway, when I was at Illinois I took for granted the use of original instruments (or close substitutes) when playing the music.  That meant, most prominently, Chinese tom-toms rather than the modern instruments most often used today. I could talk about the other instruments too but for the purposes of this discussion I'll stick with the obvious and easiest thing to hear. And also the thing that's changed the most, performance-practice wise since Cage passed away in 1992.  I later discovered over time that only percussionists who came from that Price background really paid attention to instrument choice. But there are other factors involved that concern the composer himself and what he had to say about the music. As I mention in my article for Patterson's book, Cage said "He didn't have an ear for music," and when he talked about his percussion pieces he usually talked about the form and how he wrote them. Instrument choice was not a concern, because as the composer Lou Harrison once told me, "We just used whatever we found around us." This was during a conversation about one of Harrison's great pieces, his Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra, which has a prominent part for brake drums. Brake drums as you may know are not the same today as they were then. Back then they could sound damped by playing them flat but hung they had a beautiful ringing sound. I had tried to get Michael Udow to lend me his (he had them at the University of Michigan where he taught for many years) but understandably that wasn't an option. So this prompted my conversation with Lou. He knew well what the problem was and just said "don't worry about it." Well, worry I did and when he came to our rehearsal of the work, by then a student of mine had found what I think is a fine substitute: automobile clutch plates.  So now here's the punch line and I'll move on: during the rehearsal when Dan Hilland started playing those clutch plates, Lou Harrison stopped the ensemble and exclaimed, "what was that?" Clutch plates I replied. "That's exactly the right sound!" Lou responded. So much for not 

caring ...

My point here is simple but typical of how a musicologist might look at this from a performance practice perspective. Composers are human beings and, like all of us, change over time. Their views on music they wrote at different stages of their lives often change too. Pierre Boulez famously is like this, revising his earlier pieces as he changes his mind regarding his intentions. However, what we have concerning Cage's percussion pieces, in this case his Third Construction, is a score with specific information in some cases (he specifies rattle types for example) and not so specific in others. Tom-toms are an example of that--he doesn't specify what kind he wants. But we must remember that when Cage wrote these pieces he was thinking of Chinese tom-toms because that's what was cheap and available.  And what they themselves used when performing the piece.  That being said, I want to emphasize something: if you play these pieces on modern instruments that's fine. Bach is played both on historical and modern instruments. Cage can be too. But back when I wrote the article in David's book, many percussionists didn't even know there was a choice.  In fact, I remember well when I gave a talk based on my article at a percussion convention with a historically accurate performance of Third Construction directed by my successor at the University of New Mexico, Professor Scott Ney. Right after that, an ensemble performed Harrison's great Labrynth No. 3 on modern instruments. It was a more effective argument for the use of original instruments than my talk could have ever been.

I'd like to think the reason we presently hear these pieces played on Chinese drums is because percussionists have all read my essay. But I think instead it is a combination of things: first, more and more recordings use the drums and, as I think you heard, they definitely sound the best. Also Chinese drums used to be very difficult to get (trade being what it was back then between us and a communist country). In fact, I had to substitute Native American drums in my first performance (that Cage himself heard and liked)--which is, by the way, an excellent substitute although nowadays those drums cost much more than Chinese. In any case, things have definitely changed in this regard--Cage himself changed during his lifetime concerning the interpretation of these pieces, and performance practice has evolved in the direction back to the younger Cage, composer and performer of these early pieces from the 30s and 40s.

I've recently been in touch with a high school classmate of my father's, the great Baroque music specialist Alan Curtis, and I was thinking about him as I prepared this. Handel operas are now part of the standard repertoire of most companies now but back when Curtis was doing his pioneering work that wasn't the case. And we hear those operas and love them I would argue because he so faithfully sought out the sounds the composer heard when he wrote those pieces. Curtis is always talking about being "faithful to the score." And that is the theme of this short essay. Regarding Cage's early percussion music, you can play any way you want and the composition is strong enough that it will sound good. But Third Construction  sure sounds better when you perform it using the instruments he wrote for when he composed. And, don't forget, he himself performed those pieces too!

Part two concerns the interpretation of Cage's indeterminate music, still the most daunting of his entire body of work, and the subject of my book Silencing the Sounded Self.  The roots of this study also began in performance, this time related to Cage's appearance at the University of New Mexico in 1988. I was asked to prepare a retrospective concert and the plan was to end it with Variations III, a piece Cage wrote in 1963. Discussing this with Cage my concern was, do these compositions from that period exist as part of that history or do they have a continued life in the present? It was obviously to me in preparing the concert that Cage's pre-chance works (before 1950) were finding their way into the repertoire, and his post-indeterminate work (after 1969) was, partly due to his increasing fame as he got older, getting performed frequently too. But those indeterminate works from the 60s, particularly his Variations series, were in the late 80s languishing in obscurity. I spent the whole year working with a collection of musicians, dancers, architecture students, theater students, all using the same score. 

We put together a ninety minute version and I still love to tell this fact: more people attended this concert (the concert hall was completely packed, front lobby and even the hallways were practically shoulder-to-shoulder) than ever attended any other recital in UNM's history. Meaning that Cage set THE attendance record for concerts at UNM--not Beethoven, not Mozart--no that honor goes to John Cage.

When you look at the instructions for Variations III, you see that you can prepare ahead of time, you can leave things up to the moment when the performance happens, and finally anything else happening at the same time becomes part of the piece. 

I end the detailed analysis I give in both my book and The Musical Quarterly article drawn from it (published in 1995 and available for download on the internet) with the following comment: "the openness of Variations III, where rational and irrational coexist without reconciliation, that allows the performance to enter into or go out of the piece at will," stays paradoxically, "within its notated structure. Thus intention and nonintention equally coexist, while due to the several layers of experiences going on at the same time, a multiplicity of intentions collectively produce an unintentional and indeterminate piece. In Variations III, borrowing from what Cage often said, something and nothing really do "need each other"; they coexist in a fabric of art and life completely interwoven one with another."

With a piece like this there are several interpretive concerns, too many to address  in a short essay. The one I will address concerns Cage's interpretive remarks related to the performance of these kinds of pieces.  Because this has to do with the difference between compositional intent and interpretive opinion. Cage's "Musicircus" for which there is no score provides us with a concise example. The last time I saw John Cage was at a conference at Stanford University that the great poetry scholar Marjorie Perloff organized and from which the proceedings were published as "John Cage: Composed in America." One of the events was a "musicircus." Here's an exchange with Cage at a lunch gathering, after the musicircus performance:  "I want to know what you thought of the Musicircus on Wednesday night" to which Cage responded: "Strictly speaking the Musicircus was not what I would call a Musicircus, but what I would call a House Full of Music. That is, there were many things in many different places, and they had a certain access to one another, but not complete, so that it was possible to pay attention to one thing at a time. So, that's not a Circus, that's a House Full of Music. Now, you could make a House Full of Music that was a Circus, in which it would be brought home to you that there were so many things and you had to hear them all at once rather than one at a time. But at the Music Center on Wednesday night they weren't compressed like that. The building didn't bring about such a situation."  This is one of two points, found in an article Charles Junkerman wrote for the proceedings, where Cage addresses his concerns about what a Musicircus is. And I think this one makes sense. A circus is typically many things under one tent so to speak.  But does that mean they have to happen at the same time? Well, Variations III using this definition was a "musicircus" using Cage's definition. And I accept that opinion because of prior knowledge of other works that could be regarded as predecessors and thus inform that opinion. But Variations III produces a musicircus using a score. And this score details what is specific, what isn't, and the relation or non-relation between the two. Musicircus has NO score. Thus all we have is opinion.

Here's the second point, and I myself was present during this discussion: "I noticed last night at the Musicircus, that the musicians listened to each other's playing, and often joined in, finding spontaneous harmony where it was least expected. For example, the hurdy-gurdy player, observing that the Sufi group was playing in the same key, brought his instrument over and started playing with them. The Sufis all said "This guy fits right in!" An accordion and banjo started playing together too. What do you think of this?" Cage responded: "I think instead of believing that they've reached something positive by "fitting in" with each other, that they should remain separate ... I always think that the center of each should remain where it is, in itself, and it should be nourished by the person who is doing it, through his paying so much attention to what he is doing that he can't mix with the neighbor and, say, adulterate the neighbor. " Well, now that's another matter. Cage the interpreter telling you how he would "interpret" a musicircus is entirely different from Cage the composer in Variations III creating the conditions through which a musicircus is possible. Furthermore, there is opposing evidence in the case of Variations III where the performer is asked to listen to others, he writes "some of all of one's obligation may be performed through ambient circumstances (environmental changes) by simply noticing or responding to them" (could be people or things couldn't it?) And one assumes this might indeed lead somewhere else than where the performer originally intended and that leaving that original intention, what Cage in the score calls leaving "room for the use of unforseen eventualities," seems to go exactly against what Cage has to say about the musicircus performance at Stanford.

So what do we make of this? You could decide to listen to Cage, consider him the ideal interpreter of his own work, and do what he says to do.  Or you could follow the score without listening to Cage, doing instead whatever the score allows, which in the case of Musicircus, where there isn't a score, leads to infinite possibilities, perhaps even to the point where the idea of Cage as composer is no longer even relevant. But this then treads on the kind of thin ice that too often confuses those who want to perform Cage's music from his indeterminate period.  What is the performer's role in all this? Is there a responsibility to be true to the composition? Certainly this has long been the case for most interpreters of notated classical music.  And Cage's music, with only a few exceptions (and only one exception to the degree Musicircus presents), is notated too. There are always clues that help if one carefully consults the score.  Another option, which seems most practical when dealing with such a prolific composer, both in terms of what he wrote and how often he talked about what he wrote, is to pay attention both to the score and what Cage had to say about it.  However, before closing I want to draw attention to the problem that has informed my remarks from the beginning. What about when there is not agreement between the score and what Cage has to say about it? Whether that be concerning choosing instruments in the percussion pieces, or following the score of Variations III even though Cage himself I believe contradicted this in his comments about the Musicircus, made not long before he passed away that following August. 

Like my father's old friend and my new-found friend Alan Curtis would put it, in those cases I follow the score. Because that's what Cage had in mind when he wrote it. And Cage being a Virgo, you can bet he put all the information and detail he thought a performer would need to make a performance. Especially since, as I say, Cage himself was very often a performer of his own works.  And finally, like those early music scholars who themselves often performed the music they discovered, applying all the knowledge they could find regarding the historical traditions surrounding how that music would have been played originally, I think there is a strong parallel for those who wish to perform the music of John Cage. Cage was one of the best interpreters of his music but now that he is gone, another thing has changed with Cage at 100: only we can be his best interpreters now.

Christopher Shultis

Ardmore PA, October 2012

Works cited:

David W. Patterson, ed. John Cage: Music, Philosophy and Intention, 1933-1950.  New York: Routledge, 2001. (Christopher Shultis, "No Ear for Music: Timbre in the Early Percussion Pieces of John Cage")

Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman, eds. John Cage: Made in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Christopher Shultis. Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998

Christopher Shultis. Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the Intentionality of Nonintention. The Musical Quarterly. Summer 1995. Vol. 79, No. 2, pp. 312-350.

After the Silence: John Cage, Chance and Change

After the Silence: John Cage, Chance and Change

Joan Retallack: "What would you substitute for the notion of politics?"

John Cage: "The uniqueness of the individual."

(Sept. 6-7, 1990)

Around the time of the above conversation I began a correspondence with John Cage concerning his solo percussion piece "Child of Tree" (1975) which I had been performing since 1987. In fact the book Joan eventually published after Cage's death in 1992 even includes a discussion of my performance of the piece. I had questions about the score--a messy set of hand-written instructions on how to build the form of the piece and where to place the instruments. When I stopped performing as a percussionist in the mid-90s I put everything, including Cage's letters, away. I didn't look at it again until this year, preparing for lectures I've been given around the world as part of the centennial of Cage's birth in 1912.

  Performing Child of Tree (Morse Recital Hall, Yale University, February 19, 2012

Revisiting that time, I realize, now from the perspective of a musicologist who specializes in experimental music generally and the work of John Cage specifically, that the music Cage was writing toward the end of his life, and "Child of Tree" is an early example, was meant to aspire to what Wittgenstein called, concerning language, a "form of life." An important difference, however, is that Cage was decidedly NOT interested in music as a language, with all the historical and cultural baggage so often attached when making such claims. The way Cage put it was as follows: "Performance of a piece of music can be a metaphor of society. We could make a piece of music in which we would be willing to live, a piece of music as a representation of a society in which you would be willing to live."

Thinking of John Cage now, and in this way, after having studied his work for more than thirty years, I can now see what Norman O. Brown meant, in a lecture he gave at Stanford University in 1992, and with his friend John Cage (who would die in August of that year) in attendance. Brown audaciously proclaimed, that one might consider, when thinking about what comes after the fall of the ideological centers that informed cold war mentalities, "the life's work of John Cage." This astonishing remark, coming from one of the last century's most gifted intellectuals, when placed in the context of Cage's remark at the beginning of my text, points to Brown's meaning: cultivating one's self as an individual which, in turn, can then influence the society in which we live, creating situations that not only "improve" society but actually change it by individually making something new.

In that same lecture, Brown, speaking of Cage and sounding almost exasperated, proclaimed: "he keeps changing his mind." Too often when musicians think of Cage they only consider his work in the 50s and 60s, with the predominant features of silence, chance and indeterminacy. But this is but one moment in a long life of constant change. And it is the attitude of change as something to desire rather than resist, that I think points to what makes Cage himself an exemplary figure worth paying attention to when considering what in the past might be worth emulating in the future.

In 1988, while walking with John Cage after a concert in New Mexico where he was the featured guest, I asked him a question related to a subject much discussed at the time: "What do you think about the 'death of the avant-garde?" To which he responded, after his typical momentary pause to reflect on a response: "There will always be an avant-garde because there will always be people who want to do something new." That's what I mean by attitude.

Because Cage was a composer, the best way to experience this of course is not by writing about it but instead by listening. And a performance of "Child of Tree" (which I'm now playing again in concerts) offers the possibility of experiencing aesthetically what it might mean to be "influenced" by Cage: to approach what one hears with an open mind, to listen without preconception, hearing what there is to hear, and enjoying the experience without the typical value judgments so often attached to all we experience. If you consider John Cage from this perspective, which is I think is his ultimate legacy, everything becomes new. And we can all be changed.

Christopher Shultis

Ardmore PA

29 April 2012