Next Saturday, the ensemble I lead at KM College of Music and Technology - Hundredfoot Road -will put on our first performance of the year. This week, I'll be writing a blog post every day reflected on one of the pieces that we're performing:
Today, I'll start with Cage's Music for Radios (1956)
The piece is for between 1 and 8 radios (we're using 8). It lasts 6 minutes, and consists in 4 "sections" with or without intervening pauses. Within each section, the performers are given divergent lists of radio frequencies between 55 and 156 kHz, to which they will tune their radios during the course of the performance.
It's one of my favorite pieces by Cage. I like it for the same reason I like the work of the visual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Outwardly, it lacks crucial marks of what we commonly think of as a legitimate work of art (difficulty, fixity, repeatability, the responsibility of the composer for the particular content of the work - the sense in which what you hear was made by the composer, and so on). However, just beneath the surface of our immediate experience - at the cost only of our generosity toward Cage, our trust in his sincerity - there is always much more than meets the ear.
There is nothing new in the idea that the particular way a work of art is embodied in a medium (i.e., through painting, sculpture, sound, words, etc.) is there in the service of deeper, more fundamental claims. Not many people are dense enough to think that the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes are just there to demonstrate how well Michelangelo could paint a picture perfect representation of God or Adam. Leave aside the fact that the experience of viewing the chapel - of standing underneath the iconic centerpiece, and hearing the hushed chatter build to a climax just before the attendant fills the marbled space with the gently echoing "shhhhh..." - is also part of what the painting means, to anyone who has had the privilege of seeing it in person.
Similarly, behind Music for Radios, there lies a further set of meanings. They become available to us when we first make the decision to accept that a concept in itself might be beautiful enough (or interesting enough) to indulge in what might immediately seem to be an exercise in pretension.
Cage's original intention (...ha...) behind works like Music for Radios was to attempt to remove taste and intention from the creative process, an attempt to "let sounds be themselves." Perhaps we can think of it as an act of radical acceptance of the world of sound (and the sound of the world) as it is, rather than an attempt to force it into a pattern of aestheticized "sense-making." Put more romantically, maybe it's an invitation to hear the world with a child-like sense of delight in the accidental, a purposeful re-entering into the child's ignorance of aesthetic history (with its techniques, skills, masteries, masterpieces), and its tendency to acculturate us all into a host of prejudices that rob us of the chance to access the beauty in these accidents, always hidden just beyond that move of generosity.
Like the Sistine chapel, Music for Radios is an expression of time and place. This meaning is mine, though I don't think it is a particularly original thought. We are surrounded by radio signals that we can't hear (until we switch on a radio). Right now, a Justin Bieber song is likely flying through your lower intestines (...and a weather report, and a lot of static, and a right-wing talk show, and a symphony by Carl Nielsen, and, and, and...). The radios of Cage's piece then become a sort of microscope (a stethoscope, a telescope, a decoder ring, a pair of sonic night-vision goggles) that allow us to hear the invisible noise that we've perpetually been bathed in our entire lives.
To notice what is there: an act of mindfulness.
There is another crucial sense in which Music for Radios is about time and place: Imagine performances of music for radios occurring simultaneously in San Francisco, Rio de Janero, Kiev, Beijing, Johannesburg, and Chennai. The radio plays us back to ourselves. It reflects something about our time and culture (more appropriately, our "culture industry").
The character of Yambo in Umberto Eco's novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana considers this fact. In the course of the novel, Yambo is trying to recover his lost memories by combing through the literature, music, and memorabilia of his youth, preserved in his family home "Solara." In trying to re-create the musical culture in which he grew up, he very quickly realized that switching on the ancient family radio of his youth (were it even functioning), would of course not speak to him of his past, but only his present. The radio is not, in this way, a conduit for nostalgia (or for memory). It's always remorselessly burying the past. Only by "staging" the radio of his youth - with the help of a stack of records, and some dusty magazines - can he revisit lost days.
With Music for Radios - unlike say, Salvatore Sciarrino's Efebo con radio, which bears a similarity to Yambo's "radio" - we are not staging simulacral radios, we are exhibiting real ones. At the same time, we're subverting their use as objects of entertainment, and perhaps especially objects of commerce by transforming their sounds into material for a new work, rather than allowing them to stand as finished products.
There really is too much to talk about!
If I don't want this post to become an unmanageable epic, I'll have to leave most of it unsaid:
* The fact that the piece has form, and features composerly strategies for dealing with things like texture and ~ material rhythm.
* The fact that the piece is hard to perform.
* The fact that it is hard, and weird to rehearse (involving a lot of trust between composer, "conductor," performer, and audience).
* The fact that it demands the performer's integrity (including the self-control to not exert a preference for stations over static / silence, and the attempt to make choices in the spirit of the composer when Cage's exact intentions are difficult or impossible to attain...)
Come hear us play it at KMMC. Next Saturday (details forthcoming, sorry). It may very well be the Indian premiere of the work, though it's hard to know such things.
Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
Harshal Shukla: Loveliness Extreme
John Cage: Music for Radios
Viva Rao: Juxtapositions
Asim Halwarvi: Between the Notes
James Bunch: Short Stories
John Cage: Aria
Arvo Pärt: Variationen zur Gesundung Von Arinuschka
Phillip Glass: Music in Fifths
Today, I'll start with Cage's Music for Radios (1956)
The piece is for between 1 and 8 radios (we're using 8). It lasts 6 minutes, and consists in 4 "sections" with or without intervening pauses. Within each section, the performers are given divergent lists of radio frequencies between 55 and 156 kHz, to which they will tune their radios during the course of the performance.
It's one of my favorite pieces by Cage. I like it for the same reason I like the work of the visual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Outwardly, it lacks crucial marks of what we commonly think of as a legitimate work of art (difficulty, fixity, repeatability, the responsibility of the composer for the particular content of the work - the sense in which what you hear was made by the composer, and so on). However, just beneath the surface of our immediate experience - at the cost only of our generosity toward Cage, our trust in his sincerity - there is always much more than meets the ear.
There is nothing new in the idea that the particular way a work of art is embodied in a medium (i.e., through painting, sculpture, sound, words, etc.) is there in the service of deeper, more fundamental claims. Not many people are dense enough to think that the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes are just there to demonstrate how well Michelangelo could paint a picture perfect representation of God or Adam. Leave aside the fact that the experience of viewing the chapel - of standing underneath the iconic centerpiece, and hearing the hushed chatter build to a climax just before the attendant fills the marbled space with the gently echoing "shhhhh..." - is also part of what the painting means, to anyone who has had the privilege of seeing it in person.
Similarly, behind Music for Radios, there lies a further set of meanings. They become available to us when we first make the decision to accept that a concept in itself might be beautiful enough (or interesting enough) to indulge in what might immediately seem to be an exercise in pretension.
Cage's original intention (...ha...) behind works like Music for Radios was to attempt to remove taste and intention from the creative process, an attempt to "let sounds be themselves." Perhaps we can think of it as an act of radical acceptance of the world of sound (and the sound of the world) as it is, rather than an attempt to force it into a pattern of aestheticized "sense-making." Put more romantically, maybe it's an invitation to hear the world with a child-like sense of delight in the accidental, a purposeful re-entering into the child's ignorance of aesthetic history (with its techniques, skills, masteries, masterpieces), and its tendency to acculturate us all into a host of prejudices that rob us of the chance to access the beauty in these accidents, always hidden just beyond that move of generosity.
Like the Sistine chapel, Music for Radios is an expression of time and place. This meaning is mine, though I don't think it is a particularly original thought. We are surrounded by radio signals that we can't hear (until we switch on a radio). Right now, a Justin Bieber song is likely flying through your lower intestines (...and a weather report, and a lot of static, and a right-wing talk show, and a symphony by Carl Nielsen, and, and, and...). The radios of Cage's piece then become a sort of microscope (a stethoscope, a telescope, a decoder ring, a pair of sonic night-vision goggles) that allow us to hear the invisible noise that we've perpetually been bathed in our entire lives.
To notice what is there: an act of mindfulness.
There is another crucial sense in which Music for Radios is about time and place: Imagine performances of music for radios occurring simultaneously in San Francisco, Rio de Janero, Kiev, Beijing, Johannesburg, and Chennai. The radio plays us back to ourselves. It reflects something about our time and culture (more appropriately, our "culture industry").
The character of Yambo in Umberto Eco's novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana considers this fact. In the course of the novel, Yambo is trying to recover his lost memories by combing through the literature, music, and memorabilia of his youth, preserved in his family home "Solara." In trying to re-create the musical culture in which he grew up, he very quickly realized that switching on the ancient family radio of his youth (were it even functioning), would of course not speak to him of his past, but only his present. The radio is not, in this way, a conduit for nostalgia (or for memory). It's always remorselessly burying the past. Only by "staging" the radio of his youth - with the help of a stack of records, and some dusty magazines - can he revisit lost days.
With Music for Radios - unlike say, Salvatore Sciarrino's Efebo con radio, which bears a similarity to Yambo's "radio" - we are not staging simulacral radios, we are exhibiting real ones. At the same time, we're subverting their use as objects of entertainment, and perhaps especially objects of commerce by transforming their sounds into material for a new work, rather than allowing them to stand as finished products.
There really is too much to talk about!
If I don't want this post to become an unmanageable epic, I'll have to leave most of it unsaid:
* The fact that the piece has form, and features composerly strategies for dealing with things like texture and ~ material rhythm.
* The fact that the piece is hard to perform.
* The fact that it is hard, and weird to rehearse (involving a lot of trust between composer, "conductor," performer, and audience).
* The fact that it demands the performer's integrity (including the self-control to not exert a preference for stations over static / silence, and the attempt to make choices in the spirit of the composer when Cage's exact intentions are difficult or impossible to attain...)
Come hear us play it at KMMC. Next Saturday (details forthcoming, sorry). It may very well be the Indian premiere of the work, though it's hard to know such things.
Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
