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One6 and Chorals by Rob Haskins
In 1975, the violinist Paul Zukofsky learned that John Cage had returned to a more conventional notation with his Etudes Australes for piano and hoped that the composer would return to writing for the violin in a similar manner. As Zukofsky put it, the graphic indeterminacy in such works as 59 1/2" and 26'1.1499" (both for string players) doesn't “work perceptually,” while a notation with “sufficient specification.... allows a performer maximum interpretive possibilities.”1 Through the urging of Earle Brown, Zukofsky contacted Cage with this request and the two met early in 1976 to discuss a series of new works for violin.
The main work resulting from this collaboration was Cage's Freeman Etudes (recorded by Irvine Arditti on mode 32 and 37). But before Cage could begin on that imposing project, he needed to understand better the violin's capabilities. This he did with two smaller works, an arrangement of Cheap Imitation in 1977 (recording by Arditti forthcoming on Mode) and the Chorals (1978). As so often is the case, Cage described his activity in terms of wonder and discovery: “I study under Zukofsky's patient tutelage, not how to play the violin, but how to become even more baffled by its almost unlimited flexibility.”2
Both Cheap Imitation and the Chorals have their origins in Erik Satie's music. In the former work, Cage used chance operations to alter the pitches of Socrate, leaving the rhythms intact. The source for Chorals came from the Douze petits chorals, pieces dating from Satie's years of study at the Schola Cantorum (1905ñ8) published posthumously in 1968 in an edition by Robert Caby. Cage had first used the chorales in 1970 for his Song Books, but the method by which he altered the music differs from the one he used in Cheap Imitation. As he explained to Daniel Charles:
Mme Salabert recently sent me the posthumous works of Satie that she published. I was crazy about them. Besides, around the time I wrote Cheap Imitation, I was composing other imitations of Satie. These became part of the Song Books. Each time I finished one, I forced myself by means of chance operations to write the next one differently....I finally found one, based on his posthumous chorales, that pleased me. The piece I ended up with amazes me as much as if it were by Satie. You're wondering how I did it....I just took the chorale and placed directly over the printed score a transparency with staves giving each half-tone the same amount of space. The staff Satie used was obviously conventional and consequently any major third was written as close together as the minor third adjoining it. This obscures the space between the two on the paper. With my new staff, just by tracing Satie's melodic contour onto it - at no matter what angle, even randomly - I was able to obtain a new melody - a microtonal melody. It's not an imitation, i'tís a rubbing! Yet, it's rigorously something else entirely....a discovery.3
The first instance of this technique appeared in Song Books as Solo for Voice 85 - alterations of all but the fourth, fifth, and sixth of Satie's chorales. The notes are stemless black noteheads. If they are accompanied by accidentals, they are to be sung conventionally. If not, they are microtones, with their placement on the staff roughly indicating to the performer which microtone to sing (the spaces of the staff are much larger than the noteheads themselves).
For the violin version, Cage did not indicate time signatures or barlines, but he notated the rhythmic values precisely, making the relationship between the original chorales easier to see. The notation for the microtonality is more precise, too, and allows for a two-fold alteration of conventional sharps and flats (flat flat, flat, sharp flat; flat sharp, sharp, sharp sharp). In addition, the music demonstrated Zukofsky's suggestion “to make a continuous music of disparate elements, single tones, unisons, and beatings” [a slightly detuned unison].4 Once again, Cage employed chance operations in order to determine which notes would be single tones, which unisons, and which beatings.
None of this description adequately prepares listeners for the actual experience of hearing these pieces for the first time. In the first number of the set, the music undulates in a restricted range of a little more than a major second, the changes resembling a kaleidoscope whose patterns are formed from shadows. Our ears become so attuned to these tiny interval differences that anything larger, for instance a slightly flat E followed by a slightly sharp F in the second piece, comes as a shock. Notable, too, are the subtle changes in register between each chorale, which reach their height in the fourth and fifth pieces.
One6, from 1990, belongs among the forty-odd compositions in the series known as the Number Pieces. In all of these works, performers play or sing single notes or short series of notes (more often than not, single notes) within flexible measures called time brackets that provide a range of choices for the beginning, ending, and duration for the notes. The flexibility that the time brackets produce makes it possible for no two performances of one of the Number Pieces to be the same, but, at the same time, ensures that the total performance time for any one of the pieces remains constant. In this sense Cage acknowledged that the time brackets brought his music away from the process-oriented orientation of his more radical indeterminate music back towards the idea of of an object.5
One6 helped to bring about a companion piece, One10, through yet another collaboration between composer and performer, in this case Janos Negyesy, a violinist and computer artist who teaches at the University of California at San Diego. Negyesy had approached Cage with an idea to perform the Freeman Etudes in conjunction with a sound sculpture by the artist Mineko Grimmer. Pebbles frozen in inverted pyramid of ice are freed as the ice melts; they strike wires during their descent and finally land in a pool of water. Cage thought that it would be “silly” to use the Freeman Etudes for such a work, and instead proposed a work already written, One6 (also written for Paul Zukofsky), composed entirely of “very, very long held tones, very long”. In the following year, he wrote another similar work for Negyesy – again to be used with the Grimmer sculpture in a different configuration – One6 a work composed entirely of harmonics (recorded by Irvine Arditti on Mode 100).
I was fortunate enough to attend a performance of both works with the sculpture at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland, where the concert formed part of a number of events in a three-day festival celebrating the 25th anniversary of the electronic and computer music studios of the Peabody Conservatory of Music. (The event marked the premiere of One10).
That experience for me, exemplifies the singular impression of the Number Pieces in performance. I had not heard any of these works before and was completely unprepared for the experience. As I sat listening, I heard the first note of One6, a single F, sustained for what seemed to me to be an unbearably long duration. This note was followed, after a short silence, by another F, and then another! Other notes, appeared eventually, but not very many, and I lost all sense of relating one to another. All this took place as I watched the sculpture, the pebbles striking the wires, making a plangent buzzing sound, falling into the pool of water. I was not asleep, but neither was I entirely conscious, it seems to me now. I was perhaps in a kind of trance, but not the kind of trance of ecstasy I experienced listening to, say, Philip Glass. I had no way of describing it. Nor do I have a much clearer understanding of it years later.
Some time afterward, when I read Cage's Norton Lectures, I was struck by his comment to an exasperated audience member who had found it difficult to pay attention to the lectures:
Very often people don't pay attention. They don't know the kinds of things to which they could pay attention, and many people don't see anything until they're struck over the head. You have the opportunity with these lectures to discover how to pay attention to something that isn't interesting, I mean that doesn't hit you over the head.7
There's a self-effacing quality in much of Cage's work for which I can find no parallel in the music of another composer. It's ironic, in a way, that this quality has provoked so much mayhem, violence, even anger in his performances. When, for example, he performed Part IV of Empty Words at the Naropa Institute on August 8, 1974, some members of the audience filled in the silences of the reading with screams, cat calls, and other derisive noises. In a dialoge that followed, he was asked if he was glad that he got an honest response to which he replied:
If we are talking about the interruptions, that's not to be classified under honest, that's to be classified under the complete absence of self-control and openness to boredom – and boredom comes not from without, but from within.8
It's clear from this remark that Cage hoped the response to his self-effacing austerity would be neither boredom nor anger. Instead, I think he wanted us to be aware of his music's manifold possibilities, attending to it without expectation, without issuing an aesthetic judgment, without irritation, but also without certainty. In so doing, we come as close as I can imagine to that famous Cagean description of one purpose for music: to sober and quiet the mind, rendering it susceptible to divine influences.
Notes:
1 Paul Zukofsky, “John Cage's Recent Violin Music,” in A John Cage Reader: In Celebration of His 70th Birthday, edited and compiled by Peter Gena and Jonathan Brent with supplementary editing by Don Gillespie (New York: C. F. Peters, 1982), 101.
2 John Cage, preface to Cheap Imitation [arrangement for solo violin] (New York: Henmar Press [C. F. Peters], 1977), n.p.
3 John Cage and Daniel Charles, For the Birds (Boston and London: Marion Boyars, 1981; reprint, 1995), 184-85.
4 From Cage's notes accompanying Zukofsky's 1991 recording of it for Musical Observations (label number: CP2103).
5 John Cage, Composition in Retrospect (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1993), 34-35.
6 Joan Retallack, ed., Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music. John Cage in Conversation with
Joan Retallack (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 277.
7 John Cage, I-VI (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 316ñ17 (punctuation and capitalization added).
8 Anne Waldman and Marilyn Webb, eds., Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute: Annals of the Jack
Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Boulder and London: Shambhala, 1978), 1:220.
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