Over a period of three
years from December 2003, I have spent
a lot of time in the company of Harry
Partch – not literally, of course, as
he died in 1974, but working my way
though an article and some eight reviews
that can all be found on MusicWeb. Then,
at the MusicWeb annual lunch (January
2007), the name of John Cage caught
my ear. For reasons that my subconscious
was not prepared to divulge, my curiosity
was tickled. Partch and Cage have on
occasion been paired off, as a sort
of American "Debussy and Ravel"
– was there any real connection between
them?
This may come as a
bit of an anticlimax but, other than
them both being American originals with
"far-out" ideas, I can’t really
think of one. In fact, they are more
on the lines of diametric opposites:
with my tongue ever-so-slightly in my
cheek, I could say that Partch was a
seminal genius who got branded as a
crackpot, and Cage was a crackpot who
got branded as a seminal genius.
John Cage (1912-92)
was nothing if not controversial. With
his rise to prominence, an obliging
World split into two opposing camps.
His supporters saw him as a prime mover
in the fields of experimental and electronic
music, with abiding interests in "chance
music", new ways of using traditional
instruments, and practical application
of his Zen Buddhist beliefs.
His detractors, the
more radical of whom would have preferred
the "nothing" option, complained
that he just made a lot of silly noise,
did unspeakable things to the private
parts of otherwise perfectly respectable
musical instruments, and came up with
a load of airy-fairy claptrap to justify
his bizarre buffoonery.
Partch, who was renowned
for his considered and candid conclusions,
didn’t have too high an opinion of Cage:
"When he was younger, I found him
rather charming, albeit shallow. Then
later, when he was famed for the opening
of doors to musical insight, I found
myself obliged to use the word ‘charlatan’
. . . Pretty sounds do not necessarily
make significant music, and serious
words frequently cloak hokum . . . I’m
all for common sounds as valid materials
[but] one has to have control,
so that his common sounds will mean
something. . . I feel that anyone who
brackets me with Cage is bracketing
actual music with metaphysical theories,
and what I think is a serious effort
with exhibitionism." [Letter to
Ben Johnston, 1952, reproduced in Innova
Enclosure 3]
Who is right – the
"pro" camp or the "anti"?
You tell me. The only opinions I can
voice with any certainty are that Cage
was not really a crackpot – even if
he did give that impression to his detractors
– and in all probability he caused the
expenditure of as much hot air as all
the other Twentieth Century composers
put together.
For instance, during
the late 1960s, when I was a university
student, Cage was a hot topic for many
an informal debate over a pint or six
of a Saturday night in the pub. It’s
true, I swear! Granted, we also
debated rather coarser matters, interspersed
with lots of "rugby songs",
but there was no two ways about it –
in those heady days, Cage was about
as "right on" and as "far
out, man" as you could get.
It was even possible
– but only just – for intense arguments
over Four Minutes and Thirty-Three
Seconds to distract our juvenile
minds from contemplating the aesthetics
of passing bits of mini-skirt! Yet,
no matter how much the said work of
art – if that’s how you choose to define
it – resonated with the mood of the
Sixties, it’s as well to remember that
it was written quite a while earlier,
in 1952, while the hippy generation
was just learning to manage without
nappies!
4’33",
as much as anything, fuelled the long-running
furore over the definition of "music",
a lot of the argument being similar
to a much earlier debate amongst mathematicians,
over whether "0", being "nothing",
could be counted as a number. For those
odd few who don’t already know, 4’33"
is the work where the pianist lifts
the keyboard lid, sits perfectly still
for a while, then shuts the lid – the
cue, I presume, for a storm of applause.
Apparently, the idea
for the piece resulted from a visit
to an anechoic chamber. Cage, never
particularly conventional in his approach
to music, explained that he wanted to
hear what silence "sounded"
like. Really? And here am I, expecting
that he was at the very least hoping
to establish conclusively, "What
is the sound of one hand clapping?"
Mind you, that’s always struck me a
daft question – shouldn’t you first
ask, "Is it possible for
one hand to clap?"
Anyway, Cage was surprised
to find that he didn’t hear "nothing".
Instead he heard the real sound of his
blood pumping and the virtual sounds
generated by his own auditory system.
Thus, having realised the impossibility
of complete silence, at least in the
ears of the perceiver, he fashioned
4’33" supposedly to demonstrate
that fact to the rest of us. Presumably,
he wasn’t aware that Smetana, to the
ultimate cost of his sanity, had already
answered that one.
What surprises me is
that he found this surprising. What
doesn’t surprise me, not one
bit, is that in 2002 Cage’s publishers
sued composer Mike Batt – he of "Wombles
of Wimbledon Common" fame – for
plagiarism! Batt, you see, had included
in his album Classical Graffiti
a silent track. It wasn’t, as you might
expect, Batt’s "One Minute Silence"
that got their danders up, but the fact
that he’d credited the track to "Cage/Batt".
Unbelievable? Well, it was reported
by the BBC, so it must be true, mustn’t
it?
Another surprise, to
me anyway, is that 4’33"
exists in at least two versions. The
one most commonly played – and I use
that term reservedly – is the "Tacet"
version. This had three movements, which
are usually played attacca, so
as to save time messing about with the
keyboard lid, and each is marked simply
tacet but is of course otherwise
blank.
However, Cage insisted
that he originally composed a much more
complex piece in "small units of
silent rhythmic durations which, when
summed, equal the duration of the title".
He also thought that he might have made
a mistake in the summation. I harbour
doubts about this, because originally
the work had no specified duration –
the first performance happened to take
4’33", and that stuck. I also doubt
whether it matters – would all this
"complexity" have had any
significant effect on the work as perceived
by its audience?
There is also a somewhat
apocryphal theory that the title refers
to the "absolute zero" of
temperature, -273° C, on the grounds
that 4’33’’ = 273 seconds. This is,
at best, a specious connection, particularly
as it conveniently sweeps under the
carpet both the minus sign, a small
matter of 0.15 C°, and the fact
that the duration of 4’33" was
completely accidental.
Nevertheless, it persists
in attracting certain people – presumably
those who, for reasons best known to
themselves, not only insist on ignoring
the fact but also perceive a relationship
between 1 second of time and -1 degree
of the Celsius temperature scale. I
have a feeling that these same folk
would look at you daft – and completely
miss your point – if you asked them
how many furlongs equal one apple pi
plus 3.1418 nutty fruitcakes.
Nonsensical as this
"theory" is, ironically it
does suggest a connection between
4’33" and another piano
work of Cage’s, ASLSP (1985).
The title stands for "As SLow aS
Possible" – I’ll leave you to ponder
on why ASLSP was preferred over the
straightforward acronym ASAP, and why
it camouflages an otherwise obvious
grammatical error. I gather that a typical
performance takes about 20 minutes and,
because it’s very slow, the piano
notes have plenty of time to die away
completely.
If you stretch your
fancy a bit, you could imagine a decaying
note being akin to the decline of thermal
activity as absolute zero is approached.
So, when the note reaches its "absolute
zero", what do you hear? Simple
– an "excerpt" from 4’33"!
Neat, eh? Personally, I find myself
torn between smug satisfaction at the
plausibility of what I’ve just said,
and embarrassment at how easy it was
to pull philosophical wool over my own
eyes, never mind yours.
To get back to the
tale: in 1987, Cage adapted ASLSP for
the organ, to bestow upon the World
his Organē/ASLSP (As
SLow aS Possible). Whilst this
improved the continuity of what must
have seemed a fairly disjointed piece,
it substantially undermined the entire
"absolute zero" argument (boo!).
Life is full of surprises, for I have
so far found no mention of any subsequent
storms in academic teacups over whether
an indefinitely-sustained, constant
sound is really a sound at all, or merely
a recalibration of "zero".
As inevitably as day
follows night, these works – or rather
their tempo marking – provoked profound
musicological cerebration. At rock bottom,
it boiled down to this: no matter how
long the performer takes, he cannot
help but fail to observe the most important
marking in the entire score – that of
the basic tempo. With time stretching
from Now to Plus Infinity, 20 minutes
has got to be way too fast. I wonder,
why do people always have to rush
everything these days? Well, it turns
out that they don’t, not always. Read
on.
Unbelievably, five
years after Cage’s death, it got really
"heavy, man". In 1997 a conference
of musicologists and philosophers was
convened, almost exclusively to indulge
in an orgy of in-depth discussion of
the implications of this tempo marking,
particularly in view of the fact that
an organ theoretically imposes no time
limits.
Broadly speaking,
the conference concluded that ASLSP
could actually be quite a lot slower
than that 20 minutes. Having cracked
this singularly knotty philosophical
nut, the wielders of the weighty sledgehammer
moved on – to address, with commensurate
delicacy, a burden of proof lying beaten
and bruised amongst the shattered shards.
I’ll bet that Cage
– by all accounts a genial, charming
and fun-loving chap who regarded his
life’s work as "purposeful play"
– would have been laughing his socks
off in his grave when the conference
solemnly decided to establish a "practical"
project. To prove how much more slowly
the piece could be played, they planned
a performance of Organē/ASLSP
that would last for, not an hour, not
a day, not even a week, but 639 years.
No, that is not a typographical
error. Roll it around your brain: six
hundred and thirty-nine years. [Health
and Safety warning: if you feel your
brain starting to melt, stop thinking
immediately, flush the inside of your
head with plenty of cold water, and
seek immediate medical advice]
At this juncture, I
start to wish that Cage had scored the
work for a phial containing a radioactive
isotope, which could then have been
buried in a time-capsule to mark the
commencement of the performance. This
would have had the added advantage that
nobody would have had to listen to any
of it. Sadly, he didn’t, because if
he had it would have saved an awful
lot of bother.
The choice of playing
time is easily explained, as it is intended
to reflect the age of the instrument
on which it is performed. Hence, subtract
the year in which the first church organ
seems to have been built, 1361, from
the year that the "performance"
was scheduled to start, 2000. From this
simple bit of arithmetic the planners
extrapolated a mystical arch, stretching
from the time that the organ was invented,
and symmetrically straddling what –
you may recall – we used to call "the
Millennium".
Obviously, planning
a performance of such gargantuan span
required a fair bit of time and effort.
For starters, someone had to calculate
a timetable, detailing the dates on
which the notes are started and stopped.
This isn’t as simple as it sounds because,
for example, leap years and double-leap
years have to be taken into account.
Then, they needed somewhere to play
it. The location chosen was St. Burchardi’s
Church in Halberstadt, Germany. This
was a nice, even sentimental touch,
because St. Burchardi’s is where the
very first proper church organ was installed.
Here we get another
connection, albeit tenuous, to Harry
Partch. One of the reasons that this
organ was "proper" was that
its keyboard was the first with twelve
keys to the octave. Partch famously
called the inauguration of this organ
"the fatal day of Halberstadt"
because – as far as he was concerned
– it marked the start of Man’s slide
down the slippery slope into the Desolation
of Twelve-tone Equal Temperament.
The sentimental touch
was also an expensive touch because,
over the last 190 years, the said church
had been variously used as "a barn,
a hovel, a distillery and a sty".
Disused and dilapidated, it first needed
extensive restoration – and a new organ!
However, because it would be fully booked
for the first 639 years of its life,
this new organ was designed and built
specifically for this performance. Actually,
that’s not quite correct: rather, it
is being built. Taking advantage
of the very broad basic tempo, the planners
have gained a certain "efficiency"
by phasing the building work to proceed
in parallel with the performance.
The performance itself
is a bit of a cheat, because at any
given time the notes currently sounding
are held down mechanically by
the "autonomous" organ. So,
unless a key is scheduled for depression
or release, there’s nobody actually
playing the music. Alright, maybe
I’m being a bit unrealistic but I’m
no more picky here, about the definition
of "performance", than many
members of the Cage camp are about the
definition of "music" or "composition".
I’ll leave you to wonder
about "routine" matters such
as arrangements for the "heredity"
of performing personnel, or securing
the "performance" against
mechanical or electrical failures, acts
of God, war or insurrection, or any
of the other myriad contingencies under
which your house insurer refuses to
shell out. Instead, let’s look briefly
at the progress of the music.
Kick-off was on 5 September
2001, Cage’s 90th. birthday.
This was a year late, but in the long
run I don’t suppose it’ll make much
difference, except to astrologers and
sundry other mystics. In the 17 months
required to "play" the first
bar’s opening rest, the organ of course
emitted no sound. In other words, we
started with 163,938 consecutive complete
performances of 4’33", give
or take the odd one or two.
The first sound, which
emerged on 5 February 2003, continued
unchanged – apart from the addition
of the octave doubling of one note on
5 July 2004 – for fully two years and
five months. And so it dragged on. Currently
(April 2007), the chord A3-C4-F sharp4
is sounding, and will continue so to
do until it completes its six-and-a-half
year run on 5 July 2012. Thereafter,
though, things start to get really exciting,
so watch this space.
Lest the anti-Cage
camp be inspired to seize their quill
pens and write letters of complaint
to the Times, or even the Radio Times,
we must get one thing absolutely clear.
John Cage had no part whatsoever
in this project. For one thing,
the planning and management of the project,
which must meticulously detail every
last jot and tittle, would have run
contrary to his aleatoric principles.
For another, I doubt that this lovable
and fun-loving man would have found
much fun in the wall-to-wall deadly
seriousness of it all. The discussions
of his tempo marking, and the project
spawned by them, all arose only after
his death – so please don’t go blaming
Cage for any of it.
Even so, it almost
goes without saying that Cage would
have hugely enjoyed all the controversy.
More than anything in the history of
music this – what Cage would have called
a "happening" if it had been
played for laughs – has polarised opinion,
if not quite to the extent of "pistols
at dawn", then not far short of
that. It is either an awe-inspiring
enterprise or a preposterous waste of
time and effort. There is no middle
ground, so if you’re still sitting on
the fence, get off it at once.
I’ve weighed many of
the arguments pro and con. However,
the reason that I’ve come down on the
"anti" side of the fence has
nothing to do with any of these. In
my opinion, and to the best of my current
knowledge, the entire exercise is based
on a seriously flawed premise.
I suspect that the
deliberations of that learned conference
were blinkered by the mechanics
of going "as slowly as possible".
Yet, Cage wrote a piece of music.
It is pretty well axiomatic that the
entire raison d’être of
music is to be performed. Regardless
of whether the performers are people
or machines, the sole purpose of performance
is to create an object of human perception.
Indeed, Cage’s Zen beliefs might well
have prompted him to ask, "Does
music really exist if there’s no-one
there to hear it?" Certainly, unless
you’re a follower of Descartes, sound
exists independently of any observer,
but for music to exist there must
be an observer – a listener – who implicitly
understands that it is music.
In the science of mechanics,
the motion of an object can be arbitrarily
slow. However, because music is an object
of human perception, it can be said
to be "moving" only if its
observers can perceive its motion. Even
the mandarins of the BBC in the 1950s
understood this – it was the principle
underlying Music and Movement,
a sort of primer of ballet and mime
which in those days was broadcast to
schools, thereby inflicting eternal,
squirming embarrassment on hapless real
"small boys" such as myself.
Although there can
be an accidental "logic" in
mechanical sounds, logic is one of the
defining characteristics of music. You
could even say that perception of this
logic is the key to the door on all
the wonderful things music does to our
minds and hearts. In particular, the
speed of music is not "the number
of notes per unit time", but the
rate of progression of the logic – a
distinction that Ligeti, for one, explored
to stunning effect.
We’ve one more step
to take. If we progressively slow down
a piece of music, the events that define
the music’s logic get further apart.
Is there a point beyond which we can
no longer sense the logical flow? This
depends on memory. As long as we can
remember "the story so far"
– or at the very least the previous
logical step – then we stand a chance
of making sense of the current one.
This limiting interval between logical
events is, I suspect, shorter than we
might imagine – taking an educated guess,
I’d say it lies somewhere in the region
of the listener’s attention span.
Go much beyond that with nothing new
coming in, and the average mind, bored
out of its skull, will conclude that
nothing is happening and turn its attention
elsewhere.
For similar reasons,
there is a corresponding limitation
on performers: if they go too slowly,
they will lose track of the measure
of the music. Hence, Cage’s title-cum-tempo-marking
ought to read something like "As
Slow(ly) as is Humanly Possible".
We may argue over exactly how slow this
might be, but I doubt that anyone could
come up with a convincing argument that
the tempo chosen for the ASLSP Project
is anywhere near the right ball-park.
I suspect that even Treebeard would
fail to find it "hasty".
If I were to be blunt,
I’d say that a piece of music that takes
going on for ten standard lifetimes
to perform is about as useful to us
as a chocolate fireguard. The whole
thing could have been achieved with
much less hassle and a sight more cheaply,
but with every bit as much "meaning",
if 4’33" had been stretched to
fill 639 years. All it needed was a
large "egg-timer" stopwatch
– powered, of course, by thoroughly
"green" solar panels – and
situated in (say) Tibet. As far as I’m
concerned, this is all just a wee bit
over the top, just to get an entry in
the 2641 edition of The Guinness
Book of Records.
Still, for better or
for worse, the project’s up and running,
at least until such time as the last
person who is interested in keeping
it going gets bored with it. To quench
your thirst for excitement, you can
go to the web-site and eavesdrop on
the "current sound". If you
doubt the validity of my arguments,
I can almost guarantee that 20 seconds
of this will change your mind. However,
if you gamely persist for a further
10 seconds or so, you may get a bit
of a surprise. I did.
Diligently pursuing
my duty as a reviewer, I girded my loins,
gritted my teeth, and soldiered on through
the pain barrier. After a while I noticed
some "noises off". My mind
gratefully clutched at these straws,
which would have seemed meagre had I
not been so desperate. Could I make
sense of them? Might I catch a snatch
of conversation (such as, "Where’s
the bloody ‘off’ switch?")? A little
while later – though it seemed like
an eternity – I heard a "catch"
in the sound, rather like the glitches
you get in streamed audio, quickly followed
by what seemed to be the same
"noises off".
My attention now riveted,
my pain put on hold, I listened on.
Guess what? That’s right; after about
the same interval, it happened all over
again. This wasn’t "the
current sound", but a sample of
the current sound played in a loop.
I felt a bit cheated, not of the experience
of a lifetime but mostly of five minutes
in which I could have been doing something
much more interesting, like watching
paint drying, or grass growing, or a
DVD of a teenager waking up on a Monday
morning. Heck, even the sound quality
isn’t up to much. Take a tip from me:
if you want to experience a fair reflection
of the "current sound", in
decent-quality audio, induce some mains
hum in your amplifier and listen to
that.
There will, of course,
be a major celebration to mark the conclusion
of the project. However, as planning
is still in the very early stages, as
yet no details are available. Nevertheless,
it is generally expected that the occasion
will be marked by the release of a complete
recording in a special, de-luxe commemorative
edition.
For practical reasons,
it is unlikely that this will take the
form of a 4,201,107-CD boxed
set. Even shoe-horning it into a low-grade
MP3 "song" would require a
file size of somewhere in the region
of 200 terabytes. Obviously, this would
make even the fanciest of today’s MP3
players gip, but there is every reason
to be confident that technological advances
during the project’s course will result
in much more efficient and compact storage
systems.
In the meantime, for
those cats whose curiosity is already
getting the better of them there is
this CD, warmly recorded in 24-bit,
high-definition sound. This compresses
the entire work into a time-frame of
around 72 minutes, which is some 4,667,895
times faster than the projected performance.
Yet, even at this comparatively breakneck
speed, it still manages to prove my
point.
After a few minutes
of my undivided attention, and in spite
of my best efforts at due diligence,
I found those images of wet paint, short
grass and somnolescent teenager starting
to beckon seductively. My mind slowly
drifted into dreamy contemplation of
the word "somnolescent", becoming
lulled by its lazy liquidity . . . I
awoke with a start, and re-joined the
performance. It seemed very quiet. Shortly
thereafter, I noticed the CD player,
displaying an admonishing "stopped."
But don’t let me put you off – if your
attention span is more robust than mine,
you may well find it a deeply affecting
experience.
Performances of the
original piano version gallop by in
typically just over a quarter of the
time. Regardless of any help from things
like sophisticated – and silent – electronic
metronomes, that says much for the intense
concentration and immaculate control
exhibited by the organists, Bossert
and Ericsson. I wish I had their stamina.
Paul Serotsky
