aworks :: "new" american classical music

Chorals (1978). John Cage

After listening to one⁸ the other day and blogging about it, I feel like I have walked through the looking glass, thanks to Mr. Cage...

Yesterday, inspired by Devin Hurd's comment to my post that said, live anyway, one⁸ was "haunting," I made a quick trip to Amoeba/SF to see if I could find another recording of one⁸ just to see if maybe the recording I had was deficient. Allas, nothing in stock (although kudos to Mr. TSR for pointing out the 70s retro Everything Comes & Goes which I did buy). Today, after a fast lunch in downtown San Jose, I stopped at the San Jose State/City of San Jose library to look for a book on a particular subject. After not finding what I was looking for, I decided to make a quick pass through the SJS music library (which is surprisingly good). Of the 5000 or so available CDs, mostly classical, the third CD I happened to thumb through was the Irvine Arditti recording of one⁸. Eerie.

I also did a quick search on the shelves for James Pritchett's The Music of John Cage, a good overall text on the subject. That led me to Christopher Shultis' Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition, which I've started to read (and which is also available via Amazon for $427.10!).

Shultis posits that experimental tradition as revolving around two archetypes: the Emerson/Ives "controlling selves" and the Thoreau/Cage "co-existing selves". The author says he will try to place various poets and composers in the context of three criteria:

1. "a controlling or co-existing connection with nature"
2. "symbolism versus the thing itself"
3. "intention versus non-intention, manifested as either projection/observation or sound/silence"

In a comment to my prior post, Steve Layton points to the Rob Haskins website with some relevant notes on Cage's number music. Then today, I read, wait for it, Rob Haskins' liner notes to the Arditti recording on Mode I just checked out. He has a good quote from Cage about studying the violin's capabilities as he wrote Chorals and Cheap Imitation in preparation for his Freeman Etudes:

I study under [Paul] Zakofsky's patient tutelage, not how to play the violin, but how to become even more baffled by its almost unlimited flexibility.

There are aspects of both Ives and Cage I like and aspects I don't; I'm curious if a little study in this area results in any synthesis in my musical perspective. In any case, I like the little Cage-ian lesson about non-intentionality I've just had.

robert gable: aworks cage consciousness revolution era. del.icio.us: cage. wikipedia: cage 1978. google news: john cage black sabbath matmos. johncage.info. cd baby: steve layton.

One6 (1990). John Cage

Transcending the merely ugly, this work is difficult listening. First, it's for solo violin, which in Cage's case tends toward the grating and monotonous. Second, it's one of those "stunt" pieces; here's the description from john-cage.info:

With the melting of the ice the pebbles fall, strike wires, which sing, and fall into the pool of water.

Third, this is a download from emusic, which means I have no liner notes. While listening, I kept pondering how that sometimes harsh violin tone was generated. And if this performance incorporated melting ice, I had visions of someone in the studio being electrocuted around recording equipment. Fourth, the work is long, maybe three quarters of an hour, give or take. I'm all in favor of experimental music but enough was enough. Finally, and most importantly, there are long gaps of silence, sometimes a minute or more, interspersed throughout the piece. While for example, Tom Johnson has used empty space to good effect and while I can acknowledge silence can raise awareness of ambient sounds or even trigger contemplation, in this case, it caused me to be concerned during every silent segment that the music might already be over and I was in fact listening to nothing. So, instead of focusing on the artistic experience during these breaks, I felt I had to check the iPod (and one time, found the headphone cord slipped out). Egad. So, I have to conclude this piece is only recommended for those on a high plane of spiritual mindfulness.

I wonder if I'm mirroring Charles Rosen's experience, when as a youth, he had an intense aversion upon first hearing the music of Debussy:

The normal reaction to music we do not understand is moral outrage, and I was quite ready to have music that I did not yet understand proscribed and banned.

Will I eventually understand and get used to this work of Cage? (And no, I don't believe this experience applies to all his music; I can't get enough of, say, Dream or Souvenir).

robert gable: aworks cage culture wars era. del.icio.us: cage. wikipedia: cage 1990. johncage.info.

one8 (1991). John Cage

On Sequenza21, David Toub likes the recording of John Cage's one⁸:

The harmonic diversity is very rich, and the music, while not as rhythmically diverse or complex as Feldman's, is ephemerally beautiful, with sustained quiet chords that say a lot while saying very little.

I was listening mostly to John Cage over the weekend. Zeroing in on one composer at a time opens up one's receptivity -- the anti-iPod shuffle aesthetic.

Dr. B describes how composition is context-dependent:

Create in me an expectation. Society is not providing you with a context, so that means you have to create one. The context and the expectation are one. Help me anticipate where you are going, because it is my anticipation that creates the music.

And on I Love Music in a Milton Babbitt thread (of all things), Paul outta Santa Cruz says:

Also, I sort of think the best way to get into this music, if you're on the fence, is by immersing yourself in it, to the exclusion of any other music, for a week or so. This is dense, layered stuff that really does reward repeated hearings, and after a while you start to appreciate that Babbitt has his own conventionally "expressive" musical rhetoric in spite of himself.

With Cage, I might be willing to do this since I know there is music  that will merit the effort. Babbitt, on the other hand, would require a leap of faith...

Ophelia (1946). John Cage

Via film critic and Christian writer Peter Chattaway, MP3s of Michelle Chattaway performing Cage's Ophelia and Bacchanale. The former is one of Cage's more dramatic works for piano and is dedicated to dancer Jean Erdman. Peter Chattaway quotes from a Vancouver Victoria review that points out the music was written for "unprepared piano."

(). John Cage

I couldn't think of an obvious work to tie this post to, but since it's about John Cage, I'll leave it appropriately untitled...

Glenn Freeman, on the John Cage email list, points out, perhaps surprisingly, that John Cage is on AllMusic's Top 50 classical composers list.  Aaron Copland is the only other American composer (not including Schoenberg and Stravinsky). On the top 200 list, add in John Adams, Samuel Barber, Amy Beach, Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, Henry Cowell, Morton Feldman, George Gershwin, Philip Glass, Charles Ives, Gian Carlo Menotti, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, John Philip Sousa, Edgard Varese, and Kurt Weill. And, they list some composers I've never heard of including Gilles de Bins dit Binchois, Antoine Busnois, and John Dunstable. I don't know their criteria, but perusing my recent A to Z favorites list (I knew it would come in handy), other American composers of comparable stature, ignoring Zappa, the jazz guys etc., might include Lou Harrison, Harry Partch, and Virgil Thomson. I checked and in addition to those three, the top 500 list also includes Antheil, Bolcom, Ruth Crawford Seeger, the recently deceased David Diamond, and many more. Still, Cage as one of the top two composers is debatable.

I don't generally peruse All Music Guide  because it is not indexed by search engines, but for example, the La Monte Young work list looks comprehensive.

Williams Mix (1952). John Cage

Gary Lawrence Murphy blogs about the history of sampling and points out the importance of John Cage:

Williams Mix (1952) samples more than any of us (or any RIAA lawyers) will ever know.

And worth noting too, amidst all the furor a map like Jesse's is bound to generate, and because John noted it too, that Cage's reasons for using these "found art" fragments was identical to the reasons given by top mash-artists today: The creative re-purposing of our common cultural artifacts.

Cage created the work by cutting and splicing magnetic tape recordings. This is one of his more noisy but still interesting compositions. The live recording I have ends with both raucous clapping and booing, which I think captures some of the spirit of Cage's music.

Barnes and Nobles samples in Real Audio. And in the spirit of oratoriolieder who played three Steve Reich tracks at once, I happened to play the Real Audio sample of Williams Mix while I was playing the MP3. Not recommended for the faint of heart. Actually, this stuff sounds tame now, after hearing electronic artists like Autechre and noise artists like Merzbow. Presumably though, Williams Mix sounded outrageous in 1952...

Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano (1948). John Cage /polytheism/

Flashpoint suggests John Cage "intended to destroy music as we know it."  I can't say, although the more I listen to Cage's music, the less I listen to 19th-century classical music. Cause and effect is not clear. Flashpoint summarizes:

Thus, John Cage is the downfall of contemporary music; I feel that composers like Copland and Holsinger keep intact tonality that is necessary to the music world, and the belief that 20th century music is atonal or experimental discredits the chance of proper music's existence in this century.

I may be musically polytheistic, which allows me to listen to both Copland and Cage. In fact, I received an order from Berkshire Record Outlet today and it included Herbert Henck, on ECM, playing Cage's Sonatas and Interludes and it included Mark Anderson, on Nimbus, playing Copland and Gershwin. For good measure, I also bought CDs of Pete Seeger, Alvin Curran, William Billings (conducted by Paul Hillier), 2 CDs of American art song, and, wait for it, spurred on by Jacob's comment the other day, a CD by Ralph Shapey (although not a string quartet). Now I'll need to check out David Holsinger.

johncage.info on Sonatas and Interludes:

In the composition Cage expresses his interpretation of the permanent emotions of Indian tradition: The Herois, the Erotic, the Wondrous, the Comic (the four light moods), Sorrow, Fear, Anger, the Odious (the four dark moods) and their common tendency toward tranquility. It was Cage's first composition using Hindu philosophy and he composed the Sonatas and Interludes in a period of reading the works of the Indian art historian and critic Ananda K. Coomaraswamy.

Three Dances for Two Prepared Pianos (1945). John Cage

Top Ten Tracks of the Week:

1. "En Gallop." Joanna Newsom.
2. First Gamelan. Lou Harrison. Keith Jarrett.
3. Endangered Species. Alvin Curran. Bruce Brubaker.
4. Dirty Love. Frank Zappa.
5. 3 Dances for Prepared Piano. John Cage. Patrick Moraz.
6. Everywhen. Massive Attack.
7. Summerland. Paul Bailey Ensemble.
8. In Limbo. Radiohead.
9. Necessity. Rick Cox.
10. Nuclear War. Sun Ra.

I bought the Joanna Newsom CD last weekend at Amoeba/SF but I'm afraid to listen to it because I'll be disappointed if it is not as phenomenal as this track ... Hearing the Lou Harrison makes me want to join a gamelan orchestra similar to my twenties when I heard Little Walter and learned blues harmonica ... I only classify Frank Zappa songs as "classical music" if they have been played by a European music ensemble ... Patrick Moraz being a former keyboardist of the rock group Yes (and who also plays on a Yes tribute album). And I forgot John Cage's father was an inventor ... The Paul Bailey Ensemble track from the work Music from Summerland captures the sense of forward motion that mimimalism does so well ... Did I already blog about Sun Ra? If not, this is Sun Ra's humorous take on the entirely serious business of the devastation of nuclear weapons.

Dream (1948). John Cage

For a recent birthday, I received an Amazon 4-pack of CDs (Gorillaz as dub, Pete Seeger, a John Adams CD I didn't own, and John Cage performed on accordion). Conventional tastes, I know...

Oh, and I'll use my birthday as an excuse to spell using flickr.

via

Cheap Imitation (1969). John Cage

BH Lang, a young student and aspiring classical musician, has just started The Bayan Blog:

This Blog is intended to be a documentary of my efforts to reach my life's goal - founding the first Classical Accordion Department at the Juilliard School in NYC.
So in my spare time, I will be updating this blog with my work status, little steps I take down the big path to my goal. I am hoping that in the meantime, I can begin to inform America about the Classical Accordion.

OK, I'm one American who knows little or nothing about classical accordion. Actually, Google lists aworks for the search american classical accordion music because I posted last year about, among other things, an MP3 of John Cage's Souvenir played on accordion.  Still,  Accordionlinks.com (Accordionlinks.com?) reports more on classical accordion than I would have ever guessed. I expected accordion renditions of traditional classical music  and maybe a mention of Pauline Oliveros. But I also found Gershwin for the accordion, and surprisingly, this historical note:

Although Gershwin didn't actually write for the accordion, Doktorski said his music has always been popular with accordionists. In fact, the second recording ever made of "Rhapsody in Blue" was released in 1928 on Victor Records and featured the accordion stylings of Basil Fomeen and Nick Hope.

For music written for accordion, George Antheil wrote an orchestra piece Accordion Dance (instrumentation: 1+pic.222/4331/timp.perc/acn[=hmn]/str).  Charles Wuorinen wrote Buttons and Bows (or, Superparticular Variations), for cello and accordion, and original compositions for accordion were also written by Henry Cowell, Virgil Thomson, Alan Hovhaness, Otto Luening, and William Grant Still (and many more including Lutoslawski. Lutoslawski?).

William Schimmel has an essay What Constitutes a Classical Accordionist in America:

I like to think that my accordion work is about the accordion than around the accordion. It's not much about me anymore. My own compositions (realities) explore other works. My recent accordio-shinto work explores our American accordion ancestors such as Deiro, Frosini, Ettore, Contino, Palmer, Pino and yes, Lawrence Welk.

Here's a description of the bayan instrument (as opposed to the Welk-ian piano accordion as described in Wikipedia) and of an organization of interest-- The Classical Free-Reed, Inc.:

a nonprofit educational and cultural organization dedicated to the advancement of the free-reed instruments i.e. accordion & bayan, concertina & bandoneón, harmonium & reed organ, harmonica, shêng, sho, khaen, kobing, etc.

In film, Morgan Boatman's Princess Isabelle:

The lead character: the eccentric and artless Emery Ried (portrayed by Richard Rouse), an outdated relic from a bygone era, one of the last survivors from the golden age of the accordion (ca. 1920-1955). His wife, Rose (portrayed by Mary Kate Sawert): a jealous woman on the verge of filing for divorce because of her husband's all-consuming love affair with his mistress: an accordion which he affectionately calls Princess Isabelle.

Finally, on CD, I found more classical accordion than I would have ever imagined, including the soure of that Cage MP3 I blogged about -- Stefan Husson playing the music of John Cage and William Billings (William Billings?). Notably, I also found this CD by Teodoro Anzelotti on Amazon, an all-Cage accordion CD. It duplicates two works from the Husson CD (Dream and Souvenir) but also includes Cage's Cheap Imitation.  Even in three thirty-second Amazon samples, Cheap Imitation on the accordion sounds haunting and probably more resonant than on the violin (via emusic).

Good luck to BH Lang and thanks for revealing the vast world of the classical accordion.