John Cage's "How to Get Started" (1989-)

On August 20, 1989, John Cage finished up at the Telluride “Composer-to-Composer Festival” and headed for the Skywalker Ranch in Nicasio, California, where he would participate in “Sound Design: An Invitational Conference on the Uses of Sound for Radio Drama, Film, Video, Theater and Music” (Aug. 29-31), hosted by Bay Area Radio Drama. He planned to present a portion of his James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet (1982), a whimsical radio play he’d earlier created for Klaus Schöning and Cologne’s WDR. 

Cage left Telluride feeling slightly unsettled by an altercation he’d had with a fellow composer – Anthony Davis.  Each of the composers was given time to speak about their current work, addressing the group with particular problems they were encountering and eliciting advice. At his designated afternoon session, Davis wanted to talk about incorporating improvisation within the context of an otherwise fully notated score. Uncharacteristically, Cage dismissed this as an unimportant concern.

Most folks think that Cage was summarily against improvisation. From his vantage point, and as generally practiced, there were all manner of things to overcome: control, emotion, style, personality, hierarchy, intuition, celebrity, habit, intention. On the surface, then, Cage's dismissal of Davis's preoccupation seems entirely sensible.  If history is witness, however, it might be truer to say that Cage was interested in improvisation, but in a kind of improvisation whereby one's actions, indeed one's end result, couldn’t be entirely controlled or foreseen. This was certainly the case with his co-called “music of contingency,” exemplified by such compositions as his Child of Tree (Improvisation I) (1975) and Branches (1976). Both of these works make use of unruly plant matter as musical instruments, and Cage aptly described them as a kind of "improvisation in which there is a discontinuity between cause and effect."

And two of the so-called "number" pieces from 1992, the last year of his life – Four⁶ and One¹² – were described by Cage as "structural improvisations."

For the Bay Area Radio Drama conference, Cage abandoned his idea to present Alphabet, and instead devised a new work. Eliciting the collaboration of two on-site recording engineers, Dennis Leonard and Bob Schumacher, he made a proposition.  Having written ten topics of concern on ten index cards, Cage wanted to extemporize in turn on each one, their order determined by chance, while the engineers recorded and played back his performances. And so it went. For his performance, Cage extemporized on topic one, which was duly recorded.  While he extemporized on topic two, topic one was played back in the room, and both were recorded.  While he extemporized on topic three, topics one and two combined were played back in the room, and all three were recorded.  And so forth.  Cage's extemporizations along the way were inevitably altered by what he was hearing.  In one, he clearly loses his train of thought, laughs, then forges ahead. At the end, all ten were simultaneously played back, layered upon one another in a happy, McLuhanesque jumble. 

When Cage returned to New York, he went back to work on his Harvard lectures, making no mention of his time in Nicasio. Weeks later, a cassette arrived from Eva Soltes at Bay Area Radio Drama, marked simply “J. Cage, How to Get Started.”  Cage acknowledged this likely contained his Nicasio presentation, and without further conversation the cassette was shelved. 

Long after Cage’s death, I rediscovered the recording in the archives of the John Cage Trust and set to work transcribing it. Having both the tape and transcription in hand, I approached Aaron Levy at Slought Foundation in Philadelphia to explore the possibility of a collaboration between our two organizations that might somehow extend its life. What resulted is a permanent interactive installation at Slought that enables the public to create their own realizations, adding yet another layer of recordings to the historical mix. A dedicated website was quickly created, which serves as an evolving digital repository and archive for the recordings being ongoingly generated.  

The website also hosts Cage’s introduction to the work as well as audio portions of his one and only performance.  Cage’s topics ran the gamut between nearly life-long interests on the one hand – silence (60), harmony (10), time (8) – and, on the other, emerging ideas about new compositions (1, 3).  His experiences at “Composer-to-Composer” are brought to bear on several (1, 2, 6), while others emphasize specific extant compositions, considered in the present tense (2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9).  And more than two dozen individuals who were relevant to his thinking at the time are sprinkled throughout. Here's a little Wordle Cloud of all ten of Cage's extemporized texts:

To date, we’ve performed the work live, with the public, several times, most recently April 8-9, 2016, here at Bard College, in the Conservatory of Music’s Bito Auditorium. Participants were Roger Berkowitz, Olive Carrollhach, David Degge, Brian Dewan, John Kelly, Chris Mann, Pauline Oliveros, Jamie Parry, and Bobby Previte.  Our usual technical team -- Aaron Levy and myself, curators/producers, Peter Price, collaborating sound engineer, and Ken Saylor, staging and design -- was augmented by Emily Martin, photographer, and Seth Chrisman, a composer and resident sound engineer at Bard.

The realizations were stupendous and remarkably different!  While these are all available on our website, to whet your appetite I've included three here, randomly selected:

Chris Mann

John Kelly

Olive Carrollhach

And just for fun, 

Pauline Oliveros (who was present at Cage's performance in Nicasio and who garnered a standing ovation at Bard)

How to Get Started is an amazing work, both to hear and to perform.  Realizations are as distinct as snowflakes, and always disarmingly honest and complex.  Each reveals the performer's willingness to share, and to experiment with thinking out loud.  To arrange a visit to Slought, or to schedule your own realization, click here.

All photos ©Emily Martin

Laura Kuhn

Titles Somewhat Under the Radar

Three more books of note, each Cage-related, each flying somewhat under the radar:

This publication comes from the Slought Foundation, whose  editions are always treasures, their topics ranging from art and architecture to politics and social theory.  

William Anastasi, a native of Philadelphia, was one of the founders of both Conceptual and Minimal art.  In the last decade he has had significant exhibitions of his works in Modena (Galleria d'Arte Contemporanea), New York (Peter Blum Gallery), and Copenhagen (Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center).  

Anastasi was a great friend of Cage's, and the two played late afternoon games of chess on almost a daily basis throughout the 1980s at Cage's 18th Street loft. In 2010 he received the distinguished John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

  

This limited edition book is a labor of love project by the celebrated Chilean-born artist, architect, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar, an homage to John Cage on the occasion of his 2012 Centennial. "Other People Think" numbers among the earliest of Cage's extended writings.  It was presented in 1927 at the Hollywood Bowl, where Cage, representing Los Angeles High School, won the Southern California Oratorical Contest. He was 15 years old.

(Alfredo Jaar is also father to one of my all-time favorite musicians, Nicolas Jaar.)

"A single sound by itself is neither musical nor not musical. It is simply a sound. And no matter what kind of a sound it is, it can become musical by taking its place in a piece of music. This point of view requires some adjustment of the definition of music which was given by my Aunt Phoebe. She hadsaid that music was made up of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Music now seemed to me to be the organisation of sound, organisation by any means of any sounds. This definition has the advantage of being all-inclusive, even to the extent of including all that music which does not employ  harmony, which, doubtless, is the larger part of the music which has been made on this planet, since it includes all oriental music, all of the early and middle music of our culture, and a large and not inconsiderable part of our current production." (John Cage) 

From Editions Allia, who produce beautiful little bi-lingual editions that bring great voices and ideas to the world.

Laura Kuhn