MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2023
Approaching 60,000 reviews
and more.. and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             


Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger

REVIEW


Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing

 

 

alternatively
CD: MDT AmazonUK AmazonUS

John CAGE (1912-1992)
How to Get Out of the Cage - A film by Frank Scheffer [56:00]
Five Experimental films by Frank Scheffer [92:00]: Wagner’s Ring (1987); Stoperas I and II (1987); Nopera (1995); ChessFilmNoise (1988); Ryoanji (2011)
rec. various locations, 1987.
Picture format 4:3, NTSC; Sound format PCM stereo; Region Code 0 (Worldwide); Subtitles: DE, FR, JP.
EUROARTS 2059168 [148:00]

Experience Classicsonline

 
Around the time this film was shot, I met John Cage to interview him for a French journal Hexagrammes about the I Ching with which I was involved. He received me in his apartment on West 18th Street in New York City, when I was in New York over the Christmas holidays. While I didn’t know much about Cage’s music at the time, I met him to ask about his use of the I Ching, how he became interested in it and how it affected his compositions.
 
I’ve always felt that Cage was a combination of charlatan and genius. His ideas are unique, but his allowing of all his music - after a certain point, the time of his Music of Changes for piano - to be determined by chance operations seemed to me to be smoke and mirrors. During the interview, he demonstrated his compositional process to me, showing me how he had determined randomly the different characteristics for timing and notes. He had personally chosen the instruments he was writing for, perhaps because of a specific commission that asked for those instruments. The rest was up to chance.
 
Speaking with John Cage was a memorable experience. It was the year before this film was shot, and just six years before his death, and Cage had the patina of one who had seen much and who knew much. I would ask him a question, and he would pause for a second, then reply in a way that made me think that he had carefully thought out his response for a much longer time. His voice was also seductive, in the manner of a wizard/pixie. We spent about an hour together, and he invited me to attend the beginning of a reading of Finnegans Wake, scheduled for the next evening in a gallery in Soho. If anything, listening to John Cage read the beginning section of Finnegans Wake was far more interesting than his music.
 
This film shows Cage in five different locations during 1987: Cologne, London, Los Angeles, New York and Frankfurt, with filmmaker Frank Scheffer interviewing him about his music and his ideas. This was not a conscious project - to make a film of interviews - but is a collection of material that Scheffer had from his work with Cage in the composer’s later years. It doesn’t hang together very well, but it does show Cage in a variety of situations, discussing different aspects of his work. It is of essentially anecdotal interest, but since Cage was such an interesting person, any interview footage is worth watching.
 
In addition to this documentary, the DVD includes five “experimental” films by Frank Scheffer. Many of them are guided by chance operations, but offer little interest. For example, Wagner’s Ring uses single-frame shooting to reduce the entire Ring to three minutes and fifty seconds. Chance operations determined when each frame was shot. The longest and most interesting of these films is Ryoanji, which takes the 60-minute recording by Robert Black, Eberhard Blum, Iven Hausmann, Gudrun Reschke, John Patrick Thomas and Jan Williams on Hat Hut records, and illustrates it with black and white photos of the Japanese garden after which the piece is named. This is a slow, hypnotic work, and the still-photo approach adds much to it.
 
All in all, this is an interesting, if limited, set of films about John Cage.
 
Kirk McElhearn
 


 

 

 



 


EXPLORE MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL

Making a Donation to MusicWeb

Writing CD reviews for MWI

About MWI
Who we are, where we have come from and how we do it.

Site Map

How to find a review

How to find articles on MusicWeb
Listed in date order

Review Indexes
   By Label
      Select a label and all reviews are listed in Catalogue order
   By Masterwork
            Links from composer names (eg Sibelius) are to resource pages with links to the review indexes for the individual works as well as other resources.

Themed Review pages

Jazz reviews

 

Discographies
   Composer
      Composer surveys
   National
      Unique to MusicWeb -
a comprehensive listing of all LP and CD recordings of given works
.
Prepared by Michael Herman

The Collector’s Guide to Gramophone Company Record Labels 1898 - 1925
Howard Friedman

Book Reviews

Complete Books
We have a number of out of print complete books on-line

Interviews
With Composers, Conductors, Singers, Instumentalists and others
Includes those on the Seen and Heard site

Nostalgia

Nostalgia CD reviews

Records Of The Year
Each reviewer is given the opportunity to select the best of the releases

Monthly Best Buys
Recordings of the Month and Bargains of the Month

Comment
Arthur Butterworth Writes

An occasional column

Phil Scowcroft's Garlands
British Light Music articles

Classical blogs
A listing of Classical Music Blogs external to MusicWeb International

Reviewers Logs
What they have been listening to for pleasure

Announcements

 

Community
Bulletin Board

Give your opinions or seek answers

Reviewers
Past and present

Helpers invited!

Resources
How Did I Miss That?

Currently suspended but there are a lot there with sound clips


Composer Resources

British Composers

British Light Music Composers

Other composers

Film Music (Archive)
Film Music on the Web (Closed in December 2006)

Programme Notes
For concert organizers

External sites
British Music Society
The BBC Proms
Orchestra Sites
Recording Companies & Retailers
Online Music
Agents & Marketing
Publishers
Other links
Newsgroups
Web News sites etc

PotPourri
A pot-pourri of articles

MW Listening Room
MW Office

Advice to Windows Vista users  
Questionnaire    
Site History  
What they say about us
What we say about us!
Where to get help on the Internet
CD orders By Special Request
Graphics archive
Currency Converter
Dictionary
Magazines
Newsfeed  
Web Ring
Translation Service

Rules for potential reviewers :-)
Do Not Go Here!
April Fools






Error processing SSI file