Memories of John Cage

I was but a beardless lad, well, alright, I was in my late thirties, when I found myself working for the Christian Science Monitor, helping to build a production facility for a later-failed cable TV channel, on their multimillion-dollar property smack dab in the middle of backbay Boston. Fine locale for a music lover: Symphony Hall was across the street (remind me to tell the story of seeing every program presented by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on the cheap one year. But later), and with the New England Conservatory one block down the intersecting street. Handily was my location close to the NEC, for that allowed me to hang out there for four days when John Cage blew into town and was guest–of-honor for a festival of his music.
The festival began Monday afternoon (4 March 1991 for the precise-minded) in NEC’s Brown Hall, a large, high-ceilinged and rather nondescript room with folding chairs. Brown Hall is intended for the lesser concerts, and ones that require unconventional setups. It is the room where they send the percussionists. There I met Cage for my first time. Yes, he was a mild-mannered, easy to smile man with that light singsong voice of his. Friendly, easy to talk to. Yes, he was the senior figure at the recital, but for him we were just a group of friends who had come to hear some interesting music. That afternoon, we heard his Two Pieces for Piano (1935, rev. 1974), A Valentine Out of Season, Root of an Unfocus (1944), Suite for Toy Piano (1948), For M.C. and D.T. (1952), Winter Music (1957), Music Walk (1958), Cheap Imitation, first movement (1969), Etude Australis VIII (1974-75) and One (1987). Principally a golden oldies show. He, and we, liked what we heard.
That night the festival moved to Jordan Hall, which is NEC’s main theatre, and is about the nicest room I’ve ever heard music in. No sightline obstructions, every seat sounds as good as every other, a touch of nineteenth-century ornate elegance, Jordan Hall is simply the finest room a musician could possibly hope to play in. They opened with a nasty John Zorn piece which this critic found entirely worthless. It involved some curious aleatory flashcard maneuvers, but it essentially amounted to the audience waiting around for the players to negotiate the next uninteresting chord to play. Then the Cage pieces were addressed, and things got interesting. First, we got to hear Cage’s 101 (1989), Three Pieces for Flute Duet (1935) and Variations III & Variations IV (1963). Then, for a touch of paternity, Henry Cowell’s The Banshee was performed. I believe I had seen this piece performed once before, but this is no ground for complaint. The concert continued with Cage’s Music for Wind Instruments (1938), Music for “The Marrying Maiden” (1960) and lastly, his Ryoanji (1983-85), this performance of which has been released on CD (Mode records). This I can applaud, for I found Ryoanji an especially intriguing work.
A night of sleep, and a day of work intervened, then it was time for Day Two. On Tuesday we were promised the one and only time for us to formally speak and in turn be spoken to by Mr. Cage, in a panel discussion format. This was in Williams Hall, a smaller, carpeted and balconied room, with a proscenium stage, but without character or charm. In order to report what transpired, I was forced to review the tape. Oh, did I forget to mention how I surreptitiously recorded the entire festival onto audiocassette? Well, silly me! I did so, making a stack of eight 100-minute cassettes, with every performed title written in tiny, light pencil, which is how I can relay all the titles of performances so many years later.
Anyway, as I said, I had to listen to the tape of the discussion, and found that the four other panellers were NEC grandees who asked moderately perceptive questions, and to which Cage gave generally respectful answers, regarding his questioners as having enough insight not to be talked down to. Cage was asked whether he preferred the previous night’s performance of 101 to that of the BSO a few days before (to the BSO show I was not in attendance). Cage replied “If I listen to a performance with another performance in mind, then I wasn’t truly listening.” Another amusing moment occurred when he mentioned yesterday’s rehearsal of one of his wind pieces. He complained that “soft meant soft, loud meant loud. What was happening with the musicians was that they were playing both at the same level. Something was wrong. But I've known ever since I wrote the piece that it is difficult to do. Winds don’t like to have changes in dynamics…” (audience laughter here.) One other comment that I pried off of the tape was his mention of coining the term “anarchic harmony” in Darmstadt, presumably in the early 1950s, “in contrast to what is taught, which is ‘legal’ harmony… and in anarchic harmony, no interval is any greater than another…they’re all good and you don’t have to write an alternative to it.”
On to Tuesday night’s show in Jordan Hall (heaven-on-earth to any acoustic musician). According to the tapes, several pieces were performed that night, the first half consisting of Williams Mix (1951), ear for EAR (Antiphonics) (1983), Four2 (n.d.) and Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra in Three Parts (1951). These works must have constituted the first half, for I have no memory of them (other than listening anew to the tapes). It is the second half that remains in the memory, because it was the night that the John Cage Three-Ring Circus cam to town. The music was putatively his Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58), simultaneously performed with his Songbook (1970). So was it? Well, there was a gentleman in tux ‘n tails at the piano, though he spent the performance rearranging, then tearing into strips the score before him. This did not concern the player that spent the duration lying under the piano, nor did it bother other performers, such as the homeless baglady with overstuffed shopping cart, or the trio that set up a card table on stage and played a hand or so of, I guess, Go Fish. I was especially fond of the Streisand figure, in golden lamee ball gown, that swooshed into the theatre, hit a B.S.ish pose, and in front of the stage opened her lovely throat. No, no sound came out, but the effect was riveting. All the other diverse and hilarious antics that were trotted out upon the stage now escape memory, but there a veritable mob of music students as clowns, jugglers, unibikers, singers, players and babblers. A favorite touch was a somewhat continual occurrence, even up in the balcony (gorgeous-sounding as a floor seat in Jordan Hall), wherein well through the performance a party, who until one point has been quietly sitting next to myself, watching and listening, suddenly stands up and begins to sing what I guess to be a sliver of Songbook loudly, then tears the part he is holding to pieces and tosses them over the side of the balcony. “Wha?” was the correct, and of course, only possible reaction to have to this. I went home that night in an ecstatic state, moved by the mixture of surrealism and humor that I had just witnessed.
I got up the next day and went to work, counting the minutes until I could go back and see more of John Cage. That afternoon we assembled in Brown Hall for a third day of musical amusement. That day I got Cage’s autograph on a copy of that old Columbia double LP of his piano music (the cover of which was destroyed fifteen years ago in an apartment fire. I saved the autograph and slipped it in with my replacement copy of the LP). I also had a bootleg LP of Cage’s music, actually produced some years before by an acquaintance of mine, complete with casually constructed cover, which I showed to Cage, remarking that he had joined the ranks of the Rolling Stones in being bootlegged. He seemed a little confused by that remark. The Brown Hall session was pleasant enough. We heard Imaginary Landscape no.4 (1951), First Construction (in Metal) (1939), Living Room Music (1940), Cartridge Music (1960), and lastly, Aria with Fontana Mix (1958), the last a pair of Cage’s biggest hits, performed here simultaneously. Aria was performed by a Japanese woman, and afterwards Cage expressed his delight at the performance, saying that she had applied an Asian interpretation to the piece which he found fascinating.
That night it was back to Jordan Hall, heaven-on-earth for any acoustic musician, for performances of Etcetera (1973), Double Music (a piece he had co-composed with Lou Harrison in 1991) and Apartment House 1776 (1976, for the bicentennial). The list seems admittedly a little short. Memory fails me, but until I review the tape again, I wonder whether I missed a portion of that concert in my semicriminal retention of same. The last piece does occupy an entire side of one 90 minute tape, but is that side truly full? Someday, I shall listen again, and then knowledge will come to me. That afternoon’s Brown Hall recital holds greater momento for me.
That leaves the fourth and final day, which proved to be an all-afternoon recital in Brown Hall. Somehow I managed to wriggle out of my job to see the whole affair. It was a grueling endurance contest to sit for the whole thing, and Cage, who that afternoon no longer seemed to be his legendarily affable self, left halfway through the recital, not to be seen again by that audience. Of my eight cassette tapes, The Thursday Brown Hall recital occupies almost three-and-a-half of them. The recital opened with a massive piece that was news at the time to me: Four Walls (1944). Team-played by a pair of students, one of whom wore this weirdly cool black-and-white shirt that almost looked like a stage direction, the work was a revelation to me in how tuneful early Cage could be. Then we got Nocturne for Violin and Piano (1947), Two2 (1989), Fourteen (1988) and Music for Six (1985). Sometimes the title refers simply to the number of players indicated. Later Cage pieces are notable for his tendency to title them after the number of players he envisioned for performance, the superscript (position mangled by blogger.com) presumably denoting the pieces number in a series of works for ensembles of that size. At that point we were treated to a curious work entitled, ahem, But What About the Noise of Crumpling Paper which He Used to Do in Order to Paint the Series of Papier Frisses or Tearing Up Paper to Make Papiers Dechires? Arp Was Stimulated by Water (Sea, Lake and Flowing Waters, Rivers), Forests (1985). A mouthful, no? This was a fascinating work, full of, yes, crumpling paper, as well as beans in bowls and other such tentative-sounding idiophones. At the work’s conclusion, I asked Cage whether it had been performed before, and he said yes, somewhat dismissively, presaging his imminent departure. Following …Arp… there occurred a trio of NEC student composer pieces for piano, trombone and vocal duet, the titles of which I failed to retain. Then, we were treated to Erik Satie’s Socrate, in an arrangement by Cage for two pianos. Now I love Satie, but I must confess that this was the first piece of the whole festival that I found somewhat boring (the student compositions notwithstanding). Perhaps without the color of Satie’s original arrangement, the work loses its appeal, but the Cage arrangement displayed, among other features, an absolute lack of dynamic or tempo variance, leading to monotony. Satie might have approved highly of this effect. The afternoon wore on, with performances of One9 (1990) and Sonata for Clarinet (1933). Then, according to the tape, another NEC student composer took over, with a piece entitled Etchings. At this point, the tape grows a little confusing, in that a performance of 4’33” follows, then there is yet more of Etchings, with a beginning missing from the recording indicated. The two hunks of Etchings and 4’33” fill up a tape side. Finally, the last fragment of that Thursday found in the tapes are performances of Two (1988) and A Collection of Rocks (1985), though given Cage’s fascination with mycology, I confess a little surprise that the last piece is not entitled A Collection of ‘Shrooms instead.
Thus does Jeffreydj remember excitement and honor, mixed with not a little confusion and hilarity, over his four days in the company of John Cage. Had I only a set of credentials at the time that might have allowed me some collaboration with Cage in production of some of his pieces, how delightful those memories would be. But for those four days I am happy. Meanwhile, back on the job, I was building some sort of structure, and had utilized some wooden planks, which, in order to facilitate their respective fit, labeled by letter A, B, C, etc. In the middle of that week I return to the jobsite to be remarked upon by a coworker that I had left four planks out in a stack that spelt C-A-G and E. They assumed deliberation, but myself, I was startled by the arrangement. Or was my subconscious in a celebratory mood that the ol’ forebrain had missed?
That is how I spent a week of March, 1991. Please don’t tell the boss. If he finds out that I was pissing away valuable work time with John Cage instead of attending to my duties, he’ll have my head.