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.