| |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
Note: The following article is the text of a lecture presented by Johanne Rivest at the University of Illinois on April 22, 1999.
Part 1
The paper I present here is a partial realization of the research I've been doing here through the facilities of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (abbreviated as UIUC). I would like to thank the School of Music and its Director James Scott for making my stay here a possibility, and especially David Patterson for his support of my research project at UIUC.
The piece HPSCHD, spelled with 6 consonants only, H-P-S-C-H-D, was a collaboration between John Cage and Lejaren Hiller in 1967-69. This multimedia work was elaborated during Cage's appointment as an Associate Member of the Center for Advanced Study and Visiting Professor of Music of the University of Illinois, first from September 1967 to June 1968, then for a second year, from September 1968 to June 1969. Before this two-year appointment, John Cage came to the University of Illinois several times since 1952. My talk will focus on these visits, the context in which they occur and the particular works involved, specifically the collaborative piece HPSCHD.
·
From 1948 to 1971, the University of Illinois used to host a Festival of Contemporary Arts. This Festival was an important cultural activity sponsored by the College of Fine and Applied Arts at UIUC. It was open to different art forms, music, dance, visual arts, film and literature; first as an annual event, then, from 1953 on, as a biennial event, in March. Numerous artists from all fields and countries came to the campus to present their latest works. The purpose of the Festival was "to show current developments in the various fields of art, and the relationship of the contemporary art forms to each other and to our times." There was a music committee, and among the chairmen were John Garvey, from 1949 to 1961, then Ben Johnston, in 1963 and 1965, followed by Jack McKenzie in 1967.
It is because of this Festival of Contemporary Arts at the University of Illinois that Cage came for the first time to the campus, in March 1952. He was then invited as a replacement for the critic and composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks. In the official program, her name is still advertised. She was scheduled for two manifestations, first as a lecturer on March 2, then as a panel moderator on March 4, titled "The Layman Looks at Contemporary Music". There is no official statement about Cage's lecture on March 2, but the composer Ben Johnston, then a part-time faculty member and an attendant to the event, recalls that it was the lecture on composing with chance, probably the one titled "To Describe the process of composition used in Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscape No. 4". In this lecture, Cage describes very technically his method of composing with charts and chance operations, ending the talk by this comment, which would soon become a life-long credo of his work:
| |
It is thus possible to make a musical composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and "traditions" of the art ... Value judgments are not in the nature of this work as regards either composition, performance, or listening. The idea of relation (the idea: 2) being absent, anything (the idea: 1) may happen. A "mistake" is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is.
|
|
This, of course, has several implications which I will leave aside for the moment. But I want to emphasize that the idea of letting chance play a role in decision making in the field of composition was an extremely shocking one to most of the audience, shaking the ground of compositional attitudes.
During the panel in which Cage acted as a moderator, he played his Two Pastorales for solo prepared piano of 1951, a work full of silences, similar to but simpler and shorter than Music of Changes of the same year. The journalist Helen Farlow mockingly wrote the following statement in the News Gazette the next day, as a sort of premonition:
| |
Feeling of most of the ordinary music-loving laymen in the group was that the silence was fine, and that the number could have been improved by extending that factor to the absolute.
|
|
In 1952, then, Cage was at the beginning of his long association with the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of oracles that he used as a tool to compose with chance procedures. He had done at that time almost all his prepared piano pieces and percussion pieces and was just fresh from taking a new turn in his compositional activities. The year 1952 marks the realization of his famous 4'33", but also of his first tape music pieces, Imaginary Landscape No. 5 (1951-52) and Williams Mix.
Williams Mix received its first performance the second time Cage was invited again to the Festival of Contemporary Arts of the University of Illinois, on March 22, 1953. Other works of his were played during the Festival, like Imaginary Landscape No. 3 by the Percussion ensemble of UIUC, conducted by Paul Price (March 5), Music of Changes by the pianist David Tudor (March 22) and Sixteen Dances, for a Merce Cunningham Dance performance (March 21) .
On that occasion, Cage offered another lecture, titled "Music for Magnetic Tape", along with one of the first electronic music concerts in the United States. This concert was presented, according to Ben Johnston, in collaboration with Lejaren Hiller, then a chemist professor at UIUC, who gave a brief introduction to the pieces. It was the very first collaboration Cage had with Hiller, with whom he did the piece HPSCHD at the end of the period I am presenting today. Hiller, not yet very well-known as a composer in 1953, had at that time already studied with Milton Babbitt (1941-42) and Roger Sessions (1942-45) in the early forties. Together with John Cage, they presented a program of several works of musique concrète and of tape music by international composers, such as the French Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen, as well as the Americans Otto Luening, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Louis & Bebe Barron, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown and Cage himself. Although there was no Experimental Music Studio at UIUC in 1953, there were some private facilities elsewhere, like Louis & Bebe Barron's Studio in New York City, where Cage, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff collaborated on their Project of Music for Magnetic Tape between 1951 and 1953. The lecture was not so well received, but people were surprised to attend a more formal presentation that they had the year before. Cage said, about this second lecture at the University of Illinois, that:
| |
I took that [presentation] so seriously that instead of giving an "interesting" lecture, as I had the previous year, I gave a "serious-explanatory" lecture, and that was a great disappointment to the public.
|
|
·
Before Cage's next visit at the Festival of Contemporary Arts of the University of Illinois, which would not occur until the spring of 1965, twelve years after his second one of 1953, there were some performances of his music at other Festivals, namely on March 9, 1963, when the Solo for Voice 2 with Cartridge Music, two distinct superimposed pieces, were performed by 3 singers and 4 phonograph cartridge players from the University of Illinois. It is also possible that David Tudor, the pianist and close colleague of Cage, had played some of Cage's scores during his Lecture-Demonstration in April 1961, titled "The Realization of Graphic Music Material".
Cage was again invited to lecture at the 1965 Festival. Ben Johnston, who had studied with Cage in 1959 during a sabbatical leave from UIUC, and who became a close friend, was then chairman of the music committee of the Festival of Contemporary Arts. He invited John Cage for a lecture, but some of Cage's works were played as well by different performers on that occasion. Max Neuhaus, then an Artist-in-Residence at the University of Chicago, gave an electronic live version of 27'10.554" for a Percussionist on March 5. Then, on March 19, there was a very sensational performance of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, conducted by Charles Hamm, at that time a faculty member in musicology, and with Ellsworth Snyder at the piano, author of the first thesis on John Cage in 1970. The instrumentalists were students members of the Chamber Ensemble of UIUC. Because of a strong opposition to Cage's work among some of the faculty members (in the fields of musicology and performance especially), some players decided to add several theatrical elements to their parts, as Charles Hamm reported to me. I will quote his description of what happened:
| |
At one point [Ellsworth Snyder] crawled under the piano, made a show of carefully marking a precise point on the underbody of the instrument with a tape measure, then hit that spot with a mallet. Even more provocative for that particular audience, he had planted a loose piano string in the instrument, and after striking an unusually percussive chord he slowly pulled the ostensibly broken string out of the piano. By this time the audience was screaming and throwing objects at the stage. I had my back to them, of course, so I couldn't see everything that was going on, but the sound was amazing and some of the objects (balled up programs, etc.) hit me. Then one of the performers, a violinist who had purchased a totally worthless instrument at a second-hand shop, stood up and smashed her instrument over her music stand, and the audience went even crazier. I have no idea what the other players were doing by this point, but I'm sure some of them had abandoned their worked-out parts and were just joining what had become a general melee.
|
|
The Concert for Piano and Orchestra is an indeterminate piece where a lot of the sound parameters are determined, but where a lot of the arrangements, such as choice of noise elements, are made by the performers themselves, making what Cage called a piece "indeterminate of its performance".
The next day, Cage presented 45' for a Speaker, a 1954 lecture based on a temporal arrangement, where one line takes two seconds to read. Since 1951, Cage had become more and more interested in dealing with time directly in his scores, that is, without using metric time, but instead employing stop-watch indications. Even in the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, the conductor is not giving beats, but moves his arms in a clock-motion in front of the musicians. However, his motion is variable, and his part indicates when to increase or decrease the speed of this rotary movement. 45' for a Speaker is a collection of unrelated statements, mainly about Cage's compositional attitudes, along with chance determined noises and gestures for the lecturer, like "cough, blow nose, lean on elbow, brush hair," etc., actions indicated probably to add a theatrical aspect to the reading. Theater was, for Cage, closer to nature than music or poetry alone and the recourse to nature serves to demonstrate that life is an integral part of art, which is a major concern in the work of John Cage.
Immediately after 45' for a Speaker, Cage delivered a second lecture, actually a piece of music as well, in the extended meaning that can be given to music. In the published score, the title 0'00" is followed by 4'33" No. 2. The difference between 4'33" No. 1 and 0'00" is that in the case of the former, there are 3 distinct movements notated in the score as TACET, with time-durations for each movement. However, Cage, in the published score of 4'33" by Henmar Press in 1960, adds that the performers may interpret these durations as they wish. In 0'00", Cage extends this interruption of activities to instructions to amplify an activity. The score states:
| |
In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.
With any interruptions. Fulfilling in whole or part an obligation to others. No two performances to be of the same action, nor may that action be the performance of a "musical" composition.
|
|
In this performance of 0'00", Cage prepared himself a vegetable juice, chopped vegetables, mixed them, swallowed and drank, with contact microphones attached to his throat and probably to his utensils.
Cage's shift toward nature and life is paradoxically accompanied by a love for technology. There is a belief in Cage's thinking, and in a lot of other people at that time, namely Buckminster Fuller, that technology, used properly, can be a world savior. For Fuller, automation would reduce repetitive tasks, would increase leisure time. Wealth and goods could also then be better distributed, removing social boundaries. In 1965, Cage started the writing of a Diary, subtitled "How to improve the world (you will only make matters worse)", consisting of a mosaic of statements, ideas and stories.
·
After this 1965 visit of Cage on the campus of UIUC, there was, more than ever, a clash in the music faculty members. The pro-Cage faction tried to obtain a George A. Miller Professorship in order to have John Cage on the faculty for the next year; a project that wasn't realized. In March 1966, Lejaren Hiller, then the director of the Experimental Music Studio of UIUC, wrote to John Cage that he was trying another way to invite him at UIUC. During the academic year of 1965-66, Hiller was an Associate Member of the Center for Advanced Study, which enabled him to be free of professorial duties for the full academic year. This is exactly what he was able to get for Cage for 1967-68, in addition to a status of Visiting Professor of Music by the Graduate College of the University of Illinois. According to diverse sources, Cage wanted to work with Hiller and use the Experimental Music Studio. However, Cage himself claimed that Hiller had invited him to go to UIUC. Actually, it might have been a combination of both, made possible by a specific occasion, the Centennial Celebration, that was honored by the Graduate College.
The year 1967 was then marked by Centennial Celebrations at UIUC. The Graduate College and the Center for Advanced Study organized a "Centennial Year Series", with a Creative and Performing Arts Symposia, called "University in Motion: Matrix for the Arts", from November 15 to 19. Among the events that took place were a dance performance on the 16th by the Merce Cunningham Dance Co., where Cage was involved in reciting his lecture, "How to pass, kick, fall and run", a collection of stories. This took place in the huge Assembly Hall, the multipurpose building, at that time only a few years old.
The next day, on November 17, 1967, Cage organized a kind of happening that he named "Musicircus," a contraction of Musical Circus, in the Stock Pavilion, a campus building used for showing cattle. This location had been found by Jack McKenzie, former dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts, but at that time a School of Music faculty member. This was an evening with many things going on at once, diverse groups of musicians, dancers, mimes, visual artists, an even the light switch-board which was amplified with contact microphones and continuously turned on and off by Cage to produce sounds he was fond of. Not everything was amplified, but a certain amount of sounds from the hall was electronically altered live by David Tudor. The event "consisted simply in inviting those who were willing to perform at once (in the same place and time)." The audience was invited to participate; there was a blackboard that was lit by a black light and a lot of graffiti done by people with white chalk. People could also strike the sculpture made by pieces of metal hanging from a scaffolding in the center of the Pavilion. There were balloons blown up to about 18 feet diameter and slides or movies were projected on them. At one end of the rectangular hall, they had cider, donuts and a stand of popcorn. In a newspaper article, Cage is quoted describing the situation as: "A stand-up, eat-in, music-out, freak-down." After this premiere of Musicircus at UIUC, there were several other performances of it elsewhere in the world.
The next morning, on November 18, 1967, there was a panel discussion, titled "Music and the University: What Kind, What Aim?". Gilbert Chase was the moderator and the speakers were Gunther Schuller, Charles Wuorinen, and John Cage. Cage, who had the most provocative ideas of the three, suggested rewording the title of the panel as follows: "The arts as revolution, the university as a way of life". Cage's views were very much in accord with R. Buckminster Fuller's, for whom utopia was "physically possible of human attainment."
To come back to Musicircus, Fuller might have influenced Cage in his views about the notion of circus, linked with that of flexibility. To quote Fuller:
| |
I would counsel you in your deliberation regarding getting campuses ready now to get general comprehensive environment controls that are suitable to all-purposes like a circus. A circus is a transformable environment.
|
|
[Part 2]
|||
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
