So Begins the Hiatus (Organ2/ASLSP in Halberstadt)

I'm just back from Halberstadt (a 20+ hour journey), having attended the ceremonious 13th note change in the hyperdurational sounding of John Cage's Organ2/ASLSP. This is the last note change to occur for seven long years, so it was particularly well attended. The image above is my vantage point -- being among the last to enter the church, I was really only able to watch the proceedings via the many cell phones held above the heads of hundreds of compatriots. (The presence of so much technology in so hallowed a space is, well, jarring.)

For those almost impossibly not in the loop on this, this is the inspiration of a rarified group of musicologists, theologians, philosophers, and musicians in the Saxon town of Halberstadt in East Germany who founded the John Cage Organ Project (properly, the John Cage Orgel Kunst Projekt Halberstadt), a 639-year realization of Cage's composition in the town's historic St. Burchardi church. St. Burchardi was built in roughly 1050, and has served sequentially as a monastery, a barn, a distillery, an abandoned building, and a pigsty. It presently sits pretty much empty but for its modest Blockwerk organ (with 12-note claviature and grand, grand bellows) and the perpetual sound of Cage's piece.

Much has been written about the John Cage Organ Project, so I won't write much about it per se here. You can visit the dedicated website, which chronicles virtually everything that's transpired since its inception (Sept. 5, 2001), or you can check out the many, many blogs that have given it space over the years. There's fortyfps.com, theclassicalgirl.com, and basenow.net, just for starters. And, yes, of course, youtube.com. Click here for video of this year's gathering, which took place on Saturday, Oct. 5, 2013, at 4:00 p.m. You might also peruse a beautiful photo montage by Rönni Gottel, or see how the event was covered on not one but two different Russian television stations, First Russian TV and the National Russian Television Broadcasting Service.

It's interesting how the John Cage Organ Project has so captured the imagination of the world, giving birth to an incredible number of inspired responses taking the form of new films, writings, visual art works, sculptures, and musical compositions. For years now, one or more of these works has been brought in as an ancillary offering to those present for the much anticipated note change(s). This year there were three: a screening of Sabine Groschup's experimental documentary, (JC{639}), with camera work by Jerzy Palacz, photos by Barbara Klemm, and sound design by Eric Spitzer-Marlyn, which runs a mere 29'14" (the precise length of the work's world premiere performance by Gerd Zacher in Metz in 1987), a visual art exhibition curated by Georg Weckwerth complete with bell ringing fish, an amplified cactus, and a set of Plexigrams from Cage's own Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, and a new documentary film by the lovely Pierre Hébert, a Canadian experimental filmmaker whose Places and Monuments 5: John Cage - Halberstadt brings together in the most intriguing manner animation with live action shooting.

Groschup's film is, in a sense, a work in progress, in that while it was "completed" in 2006, its 89 scenes (corresponding to the composition's 89 tones) can and have been chance rearranged into what are in effect wholly new films by a variety of individuals - 18 to date, with another 71 to go (all 89, in time, to be sold in a limited edition boxed set). Jozef Cseres, co-curator with Weckwerth of 2012's Membra Disjecta for John Cage (seen in Vienna, Prague, and Ostrava), created the first on Jan. 9, 2012. The screening in Halberstadt, Cseres's #1, was seen on traditional wide screen, while all 18 completed to date were parsed out across an emergent forest of 18 mismatched television monitors arranged on numbered carpet squares, cordoned off from the public, reminiscent of a Nam June Paik.

One of the more surprising responses to the Halberstadt Project is the essay penned by science fiction grandmaster Robert Silverberg, entitled "Reflections", published in a 2012 issue of Asimov's. Now, Asimov's might seem an unlikely fit for a piece about John Cage, since Asimov, its founder, was the apotheosis of the rational, the intentional, and, in his way, the principle of utopian central planning. He was a biochemist by trade but best known for his voluminous science fiction works that championed scientists as social engineers. In short, Asimov, and thus Asimov's, presents a most un-Cagean world view.

But Silverberg's writing about Cage in the context of the world of science fiction is not entirely unfounded. Cage is known to have played poker with the science fiction crowd at the home of Horace Gold in Stuyvesant Town in the 1950s. In his 2004 autobiographical essay, science fiction icon Robert Sheckley remembered him as "...ever silent and smiling, a winner at poker as at so many other things." Cage was an enthusiastic game player -- chess, of course, and poker, but also Scrabble, bridge, solitaire, backgammon, and dominoes. A very large box of his well-used favorite games is held in the archives of the John Cage Trust.

In 2011, the Halberstadt event inspired Nicholas Riddle (seen at right) and his partner, Patrick Stutz, both key figures at Edition Peters and thus in music publishing worldwide, to co-author a diary of their visit. A beautiful encapsulation of the experience! We had traveled together to Halberstadt the year before, when I myself effected the note change, and they were so inspired by the proceedings (and the incredible hospitality of our hosts, Rainer Neugebauer and Martje Hansen) that they quickly arranged for the publication of a special limited edition of Cage's score to be sold at (and for the benefit of) the Organ Project. They've returned annually ever since, with Riddle, as you can see in his diary, effecting one of the note changes in 2011.

Among the frontrunners of divine responses to the Organ Project was, of course, Paul Depprich's as fast/slow as possible, an amazing 8 hour and 23 minute HD recording of a transatlantic flight from Berlin to New York (shot on Aug. 12, 2006, the 14th anniversary of Cage's death). I wrote about this film in an earlier blog ("Three Ends of the Cinematic Spectrum," 26 August 2010), but it bears a reprise here. You can visit my earlier blog to view the extended trailer (32'39"), but here's a Vimeo clip of the exciting 3+ minute take-off. Sadly, no U.S. venue to date has taken the leap of faith required to screen the whole. Happily, however, Depprich has recently released his work in its glorious entirety on Blue Ray, available on his lavish website, which is devoted entirely to this extraordinary work.

Yet another film, directed by the Canadian television and film director Scott Smith entitled As Slow as Possible, chronicles the 2006 pilgrimage to Halberstadt by Ryan Knighton, a Canadian author whose writings include his internationally acclaimed memoirs about going blind, Cockeyed (2006), as well as the more recent C'mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark (2010). The Long Now Foundation (understandably intrigued by the long nowness of the Halberstadt realization of Cage's work) featured a piece by Stuart Candy on Knighton's visit, viewable here.  Knighton himself authored a piece for The Walrus, entitled "Monumental Vibrations," viewable here.  The trailer of this film (which, incidentally, is a very good documentary) can be seen here.

The newest inspiration on the horizon is a film-in-progress by Castles Built in Sand, a young Manchester, U.K. collective that brings together the sound, music, video, and photographic work of Paddy Baxter, Insa Langhorst, Yasmin Samir-Shakir, Huw Wahl, and Simon Connor. Their film is entitled The Song, set in 2640, a time when societies have disintegrated, technology has become useless, and resources have been depleted. All that is left of the old world is a song that has been playing for hundreds of years in a small church in what used to be Germany -- a song that is being played, as its name suggests, As Slow as Possible (Organ2/ASLSP). John Cage, its composer, has reached divine status, and a religious order protecting his legacy has been put into place.

The Song follows three different characters who are hoping to find the church where Organ2/ASLSP is reaching its end (it's rumored that a dramatic revelation awaits the final note).  The protagonists struggle to cross different post-technological environments in far-flung regions of Europe: a ghost town in Italy, the barren outposts of frozen Scandinavia, and the bleak, endless moors of North England.

Comprised almost entirely of black and white analogue stills, The Song pays visual homage to Chris Marker's powerful 28' cinematic essay, La Jetée (interestingly, a 1962 science fiction treasure, the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel). Aurally, it credits John Cage's legacy by placing central emphasis on the equanimity of musical and environmental sounds. This results in a powerful sonic entity that in combination with the narrative becomes the driving force imbuing the images.

Castles Built in Sand is actively fundraising in support of this film.  Take a look at the trailer here, and see if it isn't a good fit for this year's Christmas list.

Laura Kuhn

Robert Ashley's "The Influence of John Cage" (2011)

I recently returned from Austria, where I attended the opening of a beautiful exhibition at Vienna's freiraum quartier21 International, MuseumsQuartier, curated by Jozef Cseres and Georg Weckwerth. MEMBRA DISJECTA FOR JOHN CAGE: Wanting to Say Something About John, one of the countless events taking place worldwide in celebration of Cage's Centennial Year, is an homage to the composer, featuring the work of some 60 diverse artists working in diverse media from around the world.

There were so many fantastic pieces comprising this show, it's impossible to do justice to them all. Happily, the website coverage via the link above is fairly comprehensive. But I want to give special mention here to a little-known Czech composer, Tomas Vtipil, whose latest work, Scattered Members (2012), was performed as part of the exhibition's opening events by Mr. Vtipil himself and Brno's celebrated Laska Opravdiva (a choir particularly renowned for its renditions of Janacek). The work is scored for ambulatory male choir and electronics, and is, in the end, an absolute celebration of the impossibility of singing in tune against a real-time remix of what's just been sung: three different anthems sung by three different groups of singers who walk amiably throughout the museum, captured all the while by Mr. Vtipil, sitting quietly at his computer. It was a beautiful, surprising, and heroic performance of a work that I think adds an interesting and vital dimension to any ongoing conversation about the nature (and viability) of harmony. I also think Cage himself would have enjoyed it immensely.

Mr. Vtipil has an extremely modest presence on the Web (and what's there is mostly in Czech), but you can view his profile on Facebook and you can order his latest recording (vinyl) here. Exciting stuff!

Another really memorable work in the exhibition is by one of New York's own: Robert Ashley. It's a letter really, parsed across eight double-spaced, typewritten pages, entitled simply The Influence of John Cage (2011). The curators elected to show this work in an unassuming, upstairs space, and had affixed its pages to a small glass wall, quite low to the ground. So that in order to view (and/or read) it, one had to sit on a small tufted pillow that had been placed squarely before it, on the floor.

I was very taken with this piece, for at least a dozen reasons, and thought about it often during my remaining days in Vienna. Upon my return to New York, I quickly wrote to Robert Ashley, asking if I might include it in a blog. He kindly agreed. What follows is his contribution to MEMBRA DISJECTA FOR JOHN CAGE: Wanting to Say Something About John, in its entirety. It appears here, as in the exhibition, entirely without frills.

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The Influence of John Cage

Robert Ashley, 2011

It is reasonable to ask any composer of my generation how much influence John Cage had on his/her music, because, with Silence, Cage wrote, arguably, the most intelligent and influential book on music theory in the second half of the twentieth century and because, on the basis of his ideas and his personality, he became such a celebrity.

He became a celebrity for many important and admirable reasons. He became a celebrity because contemporary music had a political power in the nineteen-sixties that it has lost now, and he was its best-known composer. I don't think anybody is a celebrity now or will be a celebrity in the near future on the scale that Cage was a celebrity in his time.

And he was a celebrity because he and David Tudor brought to America ideas from Europe that were not available in any other form -- scores, readings, first-hand experience or gossip -- particularly ideas about serialism and the many proponents of serialism among European composers: Stockhausen, Berio, Boulez, Pousseur, Nono, Maderna, Nilsson and many others. These ideas were especially important to those of us who were unable to go to Europe and learn for ourselves.

Cage and Tudor traveled extensively giving duo-concerts and as musicians with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. And it appears that wherever he went Cage gave interviews to answer questions about "chance operations" as they applied both to music and to dance. Many of those interviews have been published.

He and Tudor brought news about what other composers in America were up to. (Driving home from a post-concert party with Cage I got a clear and detailed explanation of Christian Wolff's music a year or so before I met Christian or was able to see one of his scores.)

And Cage was a celebrity because of his famous intelligence and light-heartedness. He was a wonderful person to be with -- except, I should add, when you were dealing with him about the production of his music and things weren't going the way he wanted them to go. (I should put in the record that on four occasions when I was producing a Cage work for the ONCE Festival or in some other situation and things weren't going his way, he could be tenacious to the point of being personally obnoxious. It was only many years later that I came to appreciate this quality in him and to admire him for it. It was a lesson, in a way, and I have tried, since, to be that staunch when things are not going right for me. I have found it curious that I have never read mention of this part of Cage's personality in any of the writings about him. Maybe the writers were not producing the music and working with Cage in that capacity.)

But the answer to Cage's influence is difficult, because he was such a huge presence and it was assumed, especially by journalists, that everybody was a Cage protoge. (A few years ago I was asked by Alvin Lucier to speak about Lucier's music at Wesleyan University. Lucier was receiving some sort of special recognition. Alvin said to me, "Do you think you could give this speech without mentioning John Cage?")

John Cage and I became and remained good friends, especially in his later years when Mimi Johnson was managing his concert affairs and we were together a lot.

To go back for a moment to celebrity, I find it curious that younger composers now seem to think of Cage as simply one part of "the past." For them the past is bigger and includes more people. I think many young composers and fans of new music are interested now in the nineteen-sixties, and I encourage every person I speak to about the nineteen-sixties to read Silence, because it is one of the great theory books and its presentation is so original and convincing. But Zen Buddhism and mushrooms have been replaced in America's continuing fascination with "the other" by something else -- probably, now, power and money making. So Cage seems not as important now as he was a few years ago.

As much as I liked much of Cage's music -- most of it -- and as much as I admired Cage, I don't think of myself as seriously "influenced" by Cage. I didn't think that his ideas applied to what I thought I wanted to do. For instance, I think he never understood or was not sympathetic to "timelessness" -- the hard-to-explain root of the almost-impossible-to-explain "drone" concept as it was coming into practice then.

In connection with the idea of the "drone," in the late nineteen-sixties Cage began working on a series of pieces, sometimes going under different names, that started, I believe, with a piece called MusiCircus. The idea of MusiCircus was to gather together all of the musical performers or performing groups in the locale and have them play all at the same time, arranged next to each other, in a large performance space. From a distance or outside of the room it was, of course, a kind of drone, but I don't think that is the way Cage thought of it. I believe he thought of it -- in a way that I probably could not explain to his credit -- as having something to do with "chaos," which was much in the intellectual news at that time.

The problem with the MusiCircus piece, for me, was that from any place in the room the listener was always near enough to one of the performances that the performance heard was simply an old-fashioned kind of thing -- a rock band, a person playing Mozart on a harpsichord, a drum and bugle corps, a choir -- clearly doing well-known music in the midst of chaos. I heard many performances in different places and I never liked the piece.

I thought of Cage's music, the best of it, the chance music, as the most extreme version of, an extension of, time-line, linear music. In his idea of time-line, linear music he was concerned to make events in music unpredictable. I was concerned with non-eventfulness or with eventfulness that was clearly secondary to some other formula. Unpredictability was not part of the equation. (As a matter of fact, I don't think John much liked my early music, although he was complimentary about the later music for the ONCE Group. He probably thought of the early music as another version of serial music, which he had denounced as being too much in control of eventfulness. I think he misunderstood what I was doing. In those early pieces I was interested in "original" kinds of sound. I was interested in "sonority." This idea is difficult to explain and is not relevant here.)

And he probably would not have liked my graphic notation -- if he saw any of it -- however it differed from his in principle. Clearly Cage was the pioneer and champion of graphic notation. He was interested in making other kinds of music that could come from graphic notation. But I don't think he got the idea of the "drone" -- which is possible to diagram only in a special kind of graphic notation.

And I thought he was more interested in the graphic "elegance" of the score than in the notion that the score could be some sort of "puzzle" that would set the performers on an unknown path.

He certainly understood "conceptual" music. He certainly understood the implications and applications of electronic music.

He did pioneering work with speech, but his speech did not lead to a song of words. Cage made numerous pieces in which he performed with his voice. I have not heard all of them, but in those I heard he used his voice as an "instrument" in which the words are barely understandable, if understandable at all. (You might imagine that this practice was influential in the idea of "extended vocal techniques" or was part of the practice in "extended vocal techniques," which was important in the 1970s.)

In his work such as Indeterminacy and in the solo readings of the "Mesostics," we heard (or could not hear) story telling, but at its root it was still concerned with unpredictability on the time scale -- speaking too fast, speaking too slowly, speech buried in noise.

When I studied Cage's graphic notation, I always found in it simply another way to write linear, time-line music. I am not an expert in Cage's music, but I think that I am not wrong. Complete non-eventfulness or music that was not based in eventfulness, but in some other kind of formula, was not something he inherited in its inception. He was strangely "out of touch."

In all of the books I have read by Cage and about Cage I have never come upon a specifically explained example of "chance operations." (When the interviewer is so bold, Cage gracefully changes the subject.)

Once, I suggested to a close friend of Cage the possibility that there might be somewhere in Cage's effects a master notebook of "chance operations," a huge list of numbers or orders of numbers that could be applied to any parameter. Because it seemed sort of silly to me that every time Cage began a new piece he would work the I Ching or throw the dice again. (After 1984 he started using computer programs, but as far as I know the programs still produced "chance operations.") I was only partly kidding, saying that such a "master plan" would in no way change the fact of the composition being based on chance. The response was indignant outrage. "Chance operations" was a masterpiece of public relations in addition to being a good way to compose music. Everybody thought they understood chance operations. So we got a lot of pieces based on chance operations.

Cage was an amazing composer. Atlas Eclipticalis, Etudes Australes, the music for prepared pianos, the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Winter Music, the Freeman Etudes and many others are giant music. Someday they will enter the general repertory. It is only too bad that they weren't done well or weren't done at all during Cage's life -- so that he could have heard them.

So, yes, I was influenced by Cage. We are all influenced by celebrity. It is like fashion: everybody does it and somebody gets the credit. The credit for new music in America in the nineteen-sixties goes to Cage. There is no denying that. His celebrity was enormous and powerful.

In 1968 I read a long and ugly interview with Stockhausen in a British music magazine in which Stockhausen accused Cage of "stealing" chance music from him. In Stockhausen's story he was working in his studio with Herr Dr. So-and-So on chance music; Cage visited the studio and got the idea and claimed it for his own. And that was followed by attacks on Cage in books by Boulez. This shows how celebrity is so envied and potentially hurtful. Stockhausen was nuts. Boulez is an opportunist. Cage must have been hurt by these attacks from his former friends, whom he had championed so much in the United States, when nobody had ever heard of them.

But no, I was not influenced by Cage in matters of musical composition, for reasons I have explained above. Nor were most of the composers whose work I admired -- for instance the composers who are represented in Music with Roots in the Aether. We were influenced by Cage as a composer who took his work "on the road," when nobody else would play it, and who submitted to countless interviews, in a good natured and humorous style, about his compositional technique. We were influenced by Cage as a courageous person and as a spokesperson for contemporary music.

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Alas, Robert Ashley was not at the Vienna opening, but his son, Sam Ashley, was, since he's been an artist-in-residence at the MuseumsQuartier since Jan. 1. His work, Freedom From Happiness, score with instructions and eight-channel sound, was presented in an outdoor installation in the MQ's TONSPUR Passage. Happily, Sam will be back on native soil in time to appear in the upcoming production of Robert Ashley's CONCRETE (THE NEXT GENERATION) at Roulette, on Wednesday, April 25, 8 pm.

MEMBRA DISJECTA FOR JOHN CAGE: Wanting to Say Something About John will be on view in Vienna until May 6, 2012. Click here for a slideshow of images captured at the February 17, 2012, opening. The show will travel on to the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague (June-August 2012) and to the Galerie vytvarneho umeni in Ostrava (December 2012-March 2013).

Photo of John Cage (Frankfurt, 1986) ©Andreas Pohlmann

Laura Kuhn