Week of 10.04.10:

John Cage (1912-1992) was in many was the Stockhausen of American electronic music. He was an innovator not only in the realm of electronic composition, but in performance, compositional philosophy, and the technology of music production. Cage was born into an Episcopalian family in Los Angeles. His father was an inventor who told him "that if someone says 'can't' that shows you what to do." [1] When his need to create was finally facilitated by composition, he began to take lessons in composition and arrangement. His lack of confidence in his traditional skills as a composer combined with his experimentations with prepared instruments eventually led him to thinking outwardly about the limitations of composition is, what performance is, and how art is really made.
Chance became the a central focus to his composition style. He could set up scenarios where certain elements of the composition were controlled, while others were left up to a designed element of chance. The element of chance separated the content of the music and the concepts of the composer. In this sense a composition is birthed from a production concept rather than in a finite, note for note, written composition. Through these experimentations Cage was able to place himself outside of conventional thought, and in line with many of the electronic composers at the time was opened up to the world of unconventional sounds and operations.
Of course tape was one of the first mediums Cage used for these experimentations. He worked with Louise (1920-1989) and Bebe (1927-) Barron who were exceptionally innovative inventors and composers of electronic music. The designed and modified gear so that it would do whatever was required of the compositional process. After Cage and the Barrons first collaborative tape effort, Imaginary Landscape No. 5 (1952) which used material from phonograph records, Cage became focused on the tape editing portion of the composition, and began to develop compositional tools that took advantage of these opportunities. For their next effort, Williams Mix (1953) was a huge undertaking of tracking and editing. Firth the Barrons collected hundreds of tape recorded sounds, which were then organized into a 192 page score, the systems of which were built on the eight tracks of the tape. Cage then developed change parameters that would determine where and how the tapes were spliced together, and the process was so laborious that it took nine months. Cage would invite all kinds of people to help with the edits, and their different interpretations and skills would be a component of the chance element of the composition.
In 1965-1966, a group of engineers and composers from Bell Labs put on the Variation Series in New York, which was a complex, multiple performance concert series in the Armory, what showcased electronic compositions. For this series, John Cage created Variation VII, which was performed in October 1966. This was a huge display of Cage’s chance operations in action. There was no tape involved, all the sounds used during the performance were being made right then and there. To begin with, the Armory is a ridiculously large, empty concrete venue that has six seconds of natural reverb. Normally this would deter any performer but Cage saw this as an extension of the performance, that sympathetic and tuned frequencies of the space were as much a part of the composition and performance and any other aspect. In the room there was a platform with tables full of the instruments that were being used, and there was a control room that was built for the performance. The tables held a plethora of appliances and noise making instruments such as blenders, radios (which had FM and could pick up non domestic signals), fans, juicers, oscillators, each with contact microphones and patch bay equivalents. In the performance notes, one of the tables was referred to as “David’s Own” and was designated for whatever tools, instruments and devices David Tudor wanted to incorporate. In addition to these sound sources, telephone lines were specially installed for this piece that led to phones all across the city, some hanging outside in public areas, one in the kitchen of a popular restaurant, one next to a turtle tank, an aviary, the Ney York Times press room, and the sanitation department. The signals from these phone where processed by photo-optic sensors. High output lights were set up underneath the tables on stage, and the shadows of the performers as they walked around the tables would change and affect these signals that were routed to the control room. One of the engineers, even had sensors on his head designed to pick up brainwave patters (borrowed from Alvin Lucier), which were then patched into the performance. The patch bay for this performance was so huge that at one point during preproduction everybody had to stop and make patch cables so that there would be enough. As the performance developed Cage was open to anything happening. At one point members of the audience began to walk up and stand next to the tables and watch what was happening. Cage got into the idea and invited the crowd up the next night. When an engineer had to run on stage to fix something Cage simply said “you are part of the performance” and was only excited when his pants started to catch on fire from the lights under the table.
What was his role in this performance? Like a god he created a world and an environment within which he let loose free agents that could do whatever they wanted with what they were given. He designed the parameters of the performance but not its content, and in his mind whatever happened happened and that was the performance. In many ways this can be seen as the embodiment of Cage’s chance operations concept, designing an event to transpire but not the content.
John Cage was successfully able to separate the composer from the music, and this changed the way a lot of people since then think about music. Both in his compositional style and in his technological innovations, Cage redefined what it meant to experiment with music. Experimentation was not limited to the notes played, but could be explored in every aspect of music from conception to performance.

[1] http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Cage_John.html