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.