Here's what I mean...

This morning, I was privileged to talk at Northwestern University about John Cage.  The 30 minutes of the talk was just enough time to scratch the surface of what his work means to me and to my group.  The over-arching point of my talk was that to many, Cage is still an outlier, a kind of prophet in the wilderness who we all agree was singular and important.  But to us as percussionists, he is foundational. He actually created the artistic world that I now inhabit.  

While preparing for this talk, I experimented with writing a lecture in Cage's style, using chance operations to cut up material.  I hoped it might reveal connections and new ideas that I hadn't thought of.  It certainly did that.  

In the end, I thought it would be more interesting for the group at the conference to hear about how So Percussion uses Cage's music to stimulate creative programming and recording.  But I wanted to put the text down on e-paper, as I've been doing with other writings recently.  

During the effort to emulate Cage, my text became very personal.  For as much as I proselytize for him, I actually have a very complicated aesthetic relationship to his work.  I suppose I take him seriously enough to be troubled and provoked by some of his conclusions and directions.  

Those who dismiss(ed) Cage as a joker or clown are avoiding these issues entirely.  When you become intimately acquainted with his work, he is impossible to dismiss in this way.   

I may turn this text into some sort of performance piece, measured out in time and accompanied by tasks and percussion sounds.  But I'm going to leave it for awhile, and see if the unintended juxtapositions spark other ideas.  

Here's a video of my talk at NU:

Here’s what I mean…

If we take time and duration to mean structure as Cage thought,

Where do we place our emotions? 

I am not interested in Zen, although obviously I am interested in it. 

Duration contains both silence and sound,

Though silence does not exist here…

So duration actually contains the sounds

Intended or not intended

But the sounds “intended”

Are genus or species

And not the sounds themselves

For only the sounds themselves

Can be the sounds.

The intention of a sound

Is the intention of a generality.

And the question of emotion is trite,

As we all know. 

Placing emotion is manipulative

It is the bullwhip of corporations

Detachment is honest, trustworthy

But I have my emotions

And I like some of them

And I feel them when I play

John Cage’s music.

To speak of Cage’s originality

It is vast

But Art is social

And nobody creates in a vacuum

I found out that Marcel Duchamp made chance music

Decades before Cage.

It takes nothing away from him

Actually it enhances everything.

I plan to use chance in this talk

Because it is about Cage. 

But I will change it

If I don’t like the outcome. 

I am not yet at peace with the world

I do not accept everything as it is. 

I believe Art is freedom.

We percussionists had nothing to lose. 

We don’t tear down power structures

We brush them aside

And embrace freedom 

Melodies are sounds in sequence

I’m not tired of Schubert

Not at all

To speak of a melody

As pleasing or not

Is fine

But you can’t disqualify…

We hear sound on a line:

growing

shrinking

withholding

connecting

scattering

expanding

contracting

But if we say it is not “music”

We are caught defining music

For others

I simply think that chance may be better

At combining things

Than I am

And I tire of my own train of thought

Imagine if I subjected you to it as well! 

I desire urgently to communicate with you…

This discussion makes me uncomfortable.

Back to duration:

We feel experientially that we can measure it

Control it, quantize it

It is a hammer

Leveling the great arc

Beethoven died, after all

Trying so hard to make something different

It’s a worthy impulse

But why shouldn’t we be connected? 

Taste

The limits of our view

Sentimentality

All of a sudden our thoughts form

As objects

Weapons from the past

Cage penetrates the bubble.

To speak of theater…

I know nothing of theater

To speak of music

Is to speak of sound

And silence.

But to speak of silence

Is to be un-silent

And to be silent is merely

To move towards the sounds

You haven’t yet considered. 

Walk into a crowded room

Look intently at somebody else

Who doesn’t know you’re listening

As they speak. 

Their words come into radiant focus

In your mind.

So it is with the wall clock

The radiator hum

The birds

But to speak of Beethoven

As Cage did

Makes very little sense now

So I will speak of Cage. 

Back, tentatively 

Again to emotion

The theater is a box,

Just like the Silent Piece

What we call theater

I am totally unable to do

In terms of craft.     

As a box for examining life

I am enthralled. 

We all have different tools.

The urge to ritualize

And frame life

Is all that’s needed.

Catharsis is obviously temporary

And I suppose that’s the point

But I can’t abandon my emotions

Because life…

But arrival at stasis…

I’m going to keep using this word “freedom”

Because I hope I can make it taste different in my mouth

After the 2000’s 

We are not supposed to worship the man

We are not supposed to do anything

That’s the point. 

I’ve heard some music dismissed as “derivative.”

I know I’m supposed to understand what that means

But nobody ever tells me exactly what it’s derived from

Or why they dismiss the source

Which was itself inevitably a complex derivation

Of something else

Modernism was a cleansing

In many ways healthy

But locked and trapped in the past it resisted.   

It must not have been original. 

It seems to me that the only original act

was the creation itself.

Everything else is a derivation

I only run into trouble

When I try to be somebody else.

But as myself

I create theater in community

I suspend the tiresome

But necessary rules

I am still myself.

This brings me back to freedom

Not lonely freedom from the community

But freedom together

We can all change the rules. 

Stasis need not be boring

It can be commitment

A small powerful thought

Penetrated

If my thought is powerful

Why leave it quickly?

What contrast do you require? 

Are you listening,

Or are you apprehending? 

I don’t mind either

But apprehending from a book makes sense

Because, temporally speaking

It is malleable.

Give yourself license

To hear the world as it is

Now to speak of pitch

Or really frequency

How slow or fast things vibrate

I still believe that sounding these vibrations at the same time

Can be divine

Mozart

Schubert

Chopin

You will build better connections than I

Or at least, I’d like to allow for it. 

I haven’t composed a piece of music until 33 years of age

Because of this thought. 

The question is not “this” or “that.”

When things vibrate at the same time

We are alive.

Cage wanted us to see it larger

And more clearly.

Every noise has frequencies

Sometimes many simultaneously

Cage said something new

Because of who, where, when, why…

And because he was courageous. 

He turned our ears. 

This is supremely social. 

My talk is derived from Cage’s methods

It is highly unoriginal.

I can’t believe that he meant for us to set him aside

With extreme permission

And just continue on as we were.

We don’t need to swing the pendulum

This way and that.

But I don’t know what that implies

Because it was fun. 

My emotions

Are overwhelmed

But Cage lets it be. 

I don’t reject the past.

In fact, I embrace it so well that I’m left inert.

I suspect it’s the same for some of you. 

I’m not overcoming anything

Because Cage doesn’t require me to defeat him

If I use chance, I simply use chance. 

If you consider me unoriginal

I enthusiastically agree

But I want to make sound.

And I want to speak with you. 

The consequences are not what you think…

I can’t proclaim revolution against him

Even if I wanted to

Which I certainly don’t

I am unworthy of this style

Of this voice

Of this courage

But “the only rule is work.” 

He stands, in a sense

For everything.

To be honest, I can

Understand those who think (and thought)

That it’s a little bit ridiculous to stand for everything

Duration is an illusion, to be sure

But it’s concrete enough for us

And I have no time for mysticism

I recently read

“Once the point (of 4’33”) is grasped

Do I really need to sit and listen to it?”

But then the point is surely not grasped

Back to freedom

It is of course another paradox

It can only be experienced within strict limitations

Such as duration. 

The “Freedom” of endless decision points

Endless duration

Endless spinning out

Is a tyranny. 

Pitches are rhythms…

My emotions are touched by pitches

Which is to say rhythms

My emotions are attachments

I am attached to the world.

I’m not fighting against anything…

But it needed to be done. 

There is nothing wrong with the keyboard per se

The keyboard is just a pattern

Any pattern becomes oppressive

When it’s enforced.

And so it is with new patterns

Built to replace the old. 

I won’t tell you what John Cage stood for

Because of John Cage

A cactus or a branch is a newfound instrument each time

And you paid, and I’m dressed up. 

What I urgently want you to understand

Is that this is not a joke

But it can be funny. 

I don’t want you to “get it.”

I want you to try it on. 

You may find yourself a little lighter.

Where (we) Live - Finally

Over the past two years, I’ve written a few essays on “Where (we) Live,” So’s latest collaborative project. 

The project has surprised and impressed me in so many ways.  All we really had to go on from the beginning was a process:  to trust that we could bring many voices into the room, more than we ever have before. 

We premiered the piece last night in Minneapolis.  Here’s what I think I’ve learned:

Within a home, family, or community, it is possible to create a discreet world, to radically re-define the rules.  It is the sum of its parts, and any thought otherwise is our own illusion. 

This takes an enormous amount of effort.    

Understanding Cage better:

“Where do we go from here?  Towards theatre.  That art more than music resembles nature.  We have eyes as well as ears, and it is our business while we are alive to use them.” 

To create space for others is necessary.  

Understanding my friend Bobby Previte better:

“Our purpose is not to make things ‘work.’  We’re not making chairs: human beings aren’t supposed to work.” 

If you always remember that we’re barely capable of understanding each other, it’s easier. 

Your ability to perceive the world is hopelessly limited.  When asked to step outside the boundaries of your understanding by someone you trust, commit fearlessly. 

Find people to trust.  Make sure they are capable of showing you things you don’t already see.  This process is life-long.  Be grateful if you have the extraordinary luxury to pursue it in a school, but don’t compartmentalize the periods of your life into utility functions.   

As far as I can see it: the purpose of performance is to build and enact a ritual for exploring life. 

Notes on a Collaboration: Mackey Part II

Creative Collaboration:  The Making of Steve Mackey’s It Is Time Part II Time sits Time stands Time is time… from Isaac Maliya’s, Time is Time

Several years ago So Percussion had the honor of commissioning Steven Mackey for a new percussion quartet.  Steve – Professor of Composition and Chair of the Music Department at Princeton University – is one of the most omnivorous and brilliant composers in America today. 

            During the course of a year and a half, we worked closely with Steve to craft a new piece that highlights each of us as performers and interpreters.  We found the end result to be astonishing in its innovation and conceptual power. 

            Over this series of four articles, we’ll dissect each movement through the eyes of the individual members of the group: Eric, Josh, Adam, and Jason.  We’ll also talk about working with Steve to unlock the potential in each of these instruments. 

            Here is a link to watch the video of the piece.  

            This article focuses on Josh Quillen and several different ways of looking at the steel drums:    

It is Time:  New Ground for the Steel Drum

Our collaboration with Steve Mackey on the 2^nd movement (Steel Drums) of “It is Time” began with BBQ.  This is fitting, given that most things in the steel drum world happen over some sort of communal food experience in Trinidad and Tobago.  What struck me the most about Steve’s way of learning the instrument was his desire to hear me play the way I naturally wanted to play.  He was curious about my idiosyncrasies as a player because this was an instrument he had never written for.  I often wonder: if he had written this for another steel drummer, would it have turned out completely differently?  Maybe it wouldn’t be different at all, but once the music starting arriving via email bit by bit, I found that it challenged me like no other music written for the steel drum, while at the same time, somehow, showing obviously how I should make it my own.  Steve strove to push me as a player to interpret his music the way I would Calypso music, and it meant a lot to me that he was being so thoughtful about tradition while writing incredibly difficult music. 

It’s not to say that I didn’t have to practice or could just sight-read it all--quite the contrary!  His writing for double seconds, for the most part, kept to some version of a whole-tone scale, which allowed me to keep one hand inside each steel drum almost the entire time.  There were exceptions of course, but it allowed for easy flow while playing. 

The most difficult part of the double-second music is a passage that I really feel is a duet for drums and steel drums that alternates between running 16ths and dotted 16ths. The passage often has the feeling of going “over the bar,” even though the entire thing is basically in 5/8 time.  On steel drums, it’s incredibly difficult to play due to running lines passing rapidly from low to high in the range punctuated by high accented “melodic” notes.  Steve described to me that this music was his way of notating out the method of harmonic/melodic “comping” that I employ when playing solo steel drums. (I played an arrangement of “What a Wonderful World” for him early on in the collaboration that uses this technique of arpeggiating chords and plucking out the melody at the same time). 

Along the way, I expected to have to tell Steve that things needed to be re-written so they would flow better, but his thoughtful obsession about what he was writing kept me from having to do that.  He had diagrams of my instruments at home so he could slowly “play” every note he was writing.  If he could play it slow, then in his mind, I could play it fast.  Well, it worked!   It kicked me in the pants, but it worked.

Writing for the steel drums is a difficult beast to tackle, but the two of us broke new ground together, coming across something that I am sure doesn’t exist yet elsewhere in the steel drum world.  I have a new “Invader-style” lead pan that I had been using to extend the high range of my double seconds.  Steve started asking me if I could re-tune metal bowls to have a few of the higher lead pan pitches “detuned” a bit by a quarter tone (ie. microtonally detuned).   I did mess around with a few of the bowls, but the setup started to get a little unwieldy to deal with, and they just didn’t sound as good as the steel drum.  It occurred to me that I had an older “Invader” style lead pan made by Cliff Alexis that was given to me by my high school steel drum teacher, Joan Wenzel.  It was really out of tune and beat up, but on a whim I called the tuner I was using, Darren Dyke, to ask him if he could tune the entire pan back into shape, but just leave the whole thing a quarter tone sharp of A440.  His response was, “well, I’ll just set the strobe tuner a quarter tone sharp and roll with it.”  When I got the pan back, it sounded in tune with itself, but as soon as I put it with the newer lead pan (tuned to A440), a whole new world opened up.  It doubled the amount of notes Steve could write for between middle C and the F above the treble clef staff.

After talking with Steve and playing it a bit for him, he decided to treat the two lead pans in a similar fashion as the double seconds.  Since the layouts of the leads were exactly the same, I could play them with one hand in each drum and linear scalar passages would be a mirror image of each other.  Steve described the microtonal section of the piece as needing to sound “nasally.”  It’s a completely unique sound in the steel drum world that I’m sure will take time to catch on, but not because it’s a bad sound:  It’s a beautiful sound, but once you tune a lead pan a quarter-tone sharp, you can’t use it with any other piece! (Unless the players on the gig you are playing for someone’s cocktail party at a wedding are cool with microtonal stylings on calypso tunes!)

As a player, collaborating with Steve Mackey on “It is Time” pushed me to augment my already existing skills as a steel drummer in ways I would have never dreamed.  He is an endless reservoir of wild ideas that seem to have no filter at first glance, but on second look are masterfully crafted innovations and a thoughtful flushing out of brilliant ideas.

I hope other groups play this piece a million more times than we do.  Every time I open it up, I find new things.  Thanks Steve!

--Josh Quillen

Where (we) Live - now

A year and a half ago, I posted a blog entry about our project Where (we) Live. At that time, it was in its earliest gestation. We knew very little about what we wanted to achieve, except that we were going to challenge ourselves to reach outside a collective comfort zone.

So Percussion was founded in the midst of a rigorous chamber music program at Yale. In order to focus on the skill of playing other people's music at a very high level -which is difficult enough to master on its own - we were laser-focused on what it takes to become an accomplished, cohesive group. We've never abandoned this core purpose, and those "10,000 hours" come in handy while making music.

The impulse to break away from the familiar and engage with other artists is inspired in part by two of our creative heroes: John Cage and Steve Reich. These famous composers are pillars of the American experimental tradition, but they achieved that status partially by having a social component to their work. Each of them did two things that we admire and emulate: start groups to play their music, and cast a wide net in their artistic community. Both worked with dancers, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, writers, etc.

Although our group was not originally founded to play our music, it has since become such an outlet, starting with Jason's amid the noise project. We arrived at the same place as Cage and Reich, but slightly backwards.

We began to feel that our net could be cast much wider. Of course, there's always an organic element to expanding your community: chance or arranged meetings lead to new projects, membership in a larger community sparks a common interest, etc. We thought it would be interesting to formalize this process a bit, by explicitly inviting people to contribute something unique and personal to our creative process.

Where (we) Live is that formalized process. We have invited a small group of core collaborators (music, video, performance art), and a larger group of short-term collaborators to work with us on a new show.

The challenges are kind of obvious: how to bring so many voices into a room without creating an incoherent mess? I can't say for sure whether we have solved the problem yet, but one thing was absolutely crucial in tackling it: a development process, where we can try our ideas out in front of audiences.

For the performing arts, this is important, but scary. No matter how many times you try something in your studio, there is no way to tell whether it is working until people see it. Perhaps one of the appealing things about classical music is that the music itself has long since been "workshopped" - over countless performances and critical evaluations - and "all" we have to do (ha ha) is play it well. Of course, that task itself requires a lifetime of dedication and problem solving, especially as the performance level expected of the same music goes up over successive generations.

Vermont Performance Lab enters the picture just at the moment an artist needs it the most: when ideas have formed into material, but time, resources, and an engaged community are needed to pull it across the finish line.

So Percussion first worked with VPL in the summer of 2008, on the Music for Trains project: a gloriously sprawling journey of site-specific performances around the train stations of southern Vermont. It was a pivotal moment in our development as a creative group: far more ambitious and daring than anything we might have come up with on our own, with a force of vision and organization behind it (Sara Coffey).

That experience put us on a new path, which eventually lead to our first show at BAM, Imaginary City.

So VPL seemed to be the perfect place for another ambitious, untested idea. Sara helped us craft a ten day residency which we're currently in the midst of. First, 3 days at Guilford Sound's recording studio to assemble the core of the music, then a week of workshopping the live show. For each show, a different artist from Southern Vermont would be curated by Sara to appear as our "special guest," the final piece of the puzzle that will change at each venue.

Our time in the recording studio was incredible. The new studio at Guilford Sound is simply one of the best recording studios we've ever been in.

We've now completed two of three works-in-progress shows. Monday night we performed with Michelle Holzapfel, a wood artist and master seamstress. She brought her sewing machine, which we amplified and lit. Tuesday night the poet Verandah Porche joined us. On friday the potter Steve Procter will be our guest.

The process of recording and performing the show has lead to surprising results, but not even in the way we imagined. What started out as possibly the most experimental project we've ever embarked upon has slowly and surely become one of the most personal. The formalized process that I mentioned above gradually gave way to the real relationships of the collaboration. As we began to show it to people, they would tell us what it meant to them, and one theme kept coming up over and over again: home.

Below is our latest description of the project.  Enjoy!

Many thanks to Ain Gordon (director of the project), for this description.

-Adam Sliwinski


Where do we live?

For eight years, So Percussion has made our home in Brooklyn amid two million five hundred thousand others. In our city, each of the group’s four members has constructed a personal ecosystem we call home. These homes are bound by space, time, sound and image. Equally, these spaces house rewarding, frustrating, supporting, damaging, tangible and never understood relationships.

When we leave those homes, our four members unite to create another artistic home, with its own unspoken rules and expectations; its own rhythm of interaction, its own banalities and mystery.

Where (we) Live questions all these homes by purposefully inviting the unknown to “come on over.” We’ve asked video artists, songwriters, painters, choreographers, directors and others to substantively alter our process. The resulting performance contains a society of possibilities: composed pieces, chance elements, visual associations, and theatrical interactions.

Our collaborators:

Grey McMurray is a songwriter/guitarist. He has written a series of songs about our homes. So has worked extensively with Grey to on these compositions which will be featured on an upcoming Cantaloupe Music release. He will be performing with us onstage at each show.

Martin Schmidt is a video artist. His videos heighten our focus on ordinary elements, bringing us into different homes framing the un-noticed. These videos are projected throughout on rough found surfaces, scaled to a modest life size.

Emily Johnson is a choreographer. She will dictate secret instructions to the performers via an onstage assistant. These instructions will differ at every performance generated in response to the moment with the power to alter.

Ain Gordon is a writer/director. He functions as a dramaturg and director, a fifth voice in Sō Percussion’s decision-making process, threading the project’s purposefully diverse elements and desired resulting chaos into a portrait of something that cannot actually be “seen,” home.

A guest artist in each town will collaborate with us in a short residency. We are looking for people who are good at what they do -be it a musician, writer, visual artist, or some other kind of performer - discovered with the help of the presenter in each location. We welcome the unusual dialogue of the unexpected in these more immediate interactions, giving ourselves only one day in person to rehearse with and get to know this individual. Our hope is to harness the power of new friendships and impending performance to spawn a different type of creativity.


















.

Notes on a Collaboration - Steve Mackey's "It Is Time"

Notes on a Collaboration:  The Making of Steve Mackey’s It Is Time This article originally appeared in Avue Magazine, a new publication of Adams Percussion Instruments.  They asked us to write about an artistically gratifying and interesting experience.  I have been wanting for some time to document the creation of Steve Mackey's fantastic percussion quartet It Is Time, one of the most satisfying artistic collaborations we've ever had.   The series will run in four parts, where each member of So details the process of developing the unique sound world and techniques of this piece: first Eric, then Josh, Adam, and Jason.   Here is a link to the full video of It Is Time online, if you want to see what we're talking about in action.   Part I   Time sits Time stands Time is time… from Isaac Maliya’s, Time is Time

Several years ago So Percussion had the honor of commissioning Steven Mackey for a new percussion quartet.  Steve – Professor of Composition and Chair of the Music Department at Princeton University – is one of the most omnivorous and brilliant composers in America today. 

            At our first meeting about the project, Steve explained over barbecue chicken that he wanted to try something different for Sō.  He told us that although he admires works that demand uniformity of timbre and interpretation like Reich’s Drumming, Xenakis’ Pleiades, or Lang’s the so-called laws of nature, he was interested in doing something different for us. 

His first question to each of us was “what instrument do you want to play?”  It only makes sense to ask this of a percussionist, because if you are a violinist or a pianist, you’ve already answered it.  But the world of a percussionist – even four percussionists who studied in the same program – is diverse, and we each provided our own answer:  “drum set, steel drums, marimba, multiple percussion.” 

            During the course of the next year and a half, we worked closely with Steve to craft a new piece that highlights each of us as performers and interpreters.  We found the end result to be astonishing in its innovation and conceptual power. 

            Over this series of four articles, we’ll dissect each movement through the eyes of the individual members of the group: Eric, Josh, Adam, and Jason.  We’ll also talk about working with Steve to unlock the potential in each of these instruments. 

            This article focuses on Eric Beach and his one-man-band of sounds and timbres. 

First, Steve’s own description of It Is Time: 

“It Is Time marshals the virtuosity of the individual members of So ̄ Percussion to speed, slow, warp, celebrate and mourn our perceptions of time. Each of the four sections of the piece is a mini-concerto for one of the players. First Eric Beach leads the music in a multi-percussion set up composed of metronome with delay, pump organ, bells, china cymbal on hi-hat stand and a few other assorted toys. Josh Quillen follows on steel drums, Adam Sliwinski on marimba, and Jason Treuting on drumset.

It Is Time was inspired by my young son Jasper (now 30 months old). As an older father (now 664 months old) I felt, for the first time in my life, saddened by the immutability of time and the finite limits to how much of It I will be able to spend with my young family. It Is Time fantasizes that we might have agency with respect to time.”

Now Eric describes his process of working with Mackey: 

Working with Steve on It Is Time was a big challenge for me, and it was really helpful that Steve was so cool about being collaborative.  I really didn’t have a strong idea going into the project about what specific instrument(s) I wanted to play, and I was worried that he wouldn’t be inspired to do something wonderful if I didn’t already have an idea for him.  But the discussion with Steve about what exactly to write for turned into an incredible conversation, and I think it inspired Steve in a different way than would have been possible otherwise.

.

I still have the list of instruments that I suggested to Steve.  For each one I wrote a little description and recorded myself playing it for about a minute.  He used almost all of them:  glass bottle, china cymbal/hi hat, Estey child’s organ, frame drum, metronome, noah bells, and small bells.  I also recorded a little concertina, some other drums, and a stack of poker chips – those three things were the only instruments I sent him that didn’t end up in the piece.

I was really excited about the way that Steve latched on to the metronome as a building block for creating elements of the piece.  I had already bought one of those little analog metronomes – tick, tock -  for a piece I wrote, because I liked the way it looked, and that it could be started by the performer carefully pushing the weight at just the right moment.  When I first got it and took it out of the box, I was amazed at how cool the metronome sounded.  I actually wound it up and just let it click for an hour while cooking dinner.  The sound was fascinating, so I recorded it and sent it to Steve.  I also told him about a Mauricio Kagel piece where the pianist places a metronome on a little stand that can turn on its side so that the metronome ticks unevenly.  I had never actually heard the piece at the time (I found out later that it was a piece called ‘MM.51’), but it seemed like an interesting idea.  I don’t know whether Steve had already been thinking specifically about ‘warping’ time before that conversation, but something about placing the metronome on its side seemed to strike a nerve.  He even bought me an extra metronome so that I could take it apart and dissect the way that the sound was being created.  Two big sections of the piece ended up grappling with this idea of defying the inevitability of the metronome.

Another great part of the collaboration was the China Cymbal/Hi-Hat.  I came up with the idea for this instrument while I was studying in Freiburg, Germany and my professor assigned me to write a piece for only two metallic instruments.  At the time I wanted to figure out a way to get the greatest number of different sounds from a single instrument, and I came up with the idea to put a china cymbal on a hi-hat stand with a mute underneath in place of a bottom cymbal.  I wrote a long, slow “process” piece for this china cymbal and large almglocken.  When I was recording the new cymbal-contraption for Steve, I realized that the proximity of the microphone to the cymbal made a huge difference in the sound –  the bass frequencies were only audible if the microphone was right next to the cymbal.  I imagined that it could be a functional instrument for big gong-type notes in the piece.  I had no idea that Steve would take that instrument and utilize it for one of the fastest and most virtuosic sections!  It was one of the best examples of how something new came out of the collaboration at every step, something we never would have achieved independently. 

Other instruments yielded interesting moments, too:  The frame drum sound turned out radically different with microphone placement, so using close microphones became an important part of the piece.  Steve was fascinated by the way that the foot pedals of the Estey organ made the volume swell and fade in a rhythmic way, and that inspired a section of the piece where the organ pumps rhythmically while alternating with the china cymbal.  The tuned wine bottle sound I sent him turned into a short gesture based on the Doppler effect - the acoustic phenomenon where a sound changes based on the perspective of the listener, such as the way a siren lowers in pitch as a fire truck goes by on the street.

The “musical saw” was the one complete instrument that Steve asked me to learn how to play from scratch.  He toyed with the idea of a Theremin as well, but his first inspiration was the saw and I agreed to learn how to play it.  I had never played saw before at all, and when I looked into getting some lessons they were a lot more expensive than I could afford.  So I bought a cheap instrument and committed myself to practicing at least 10-15 minutes every day.  At first I just tried to get any sound at all, then I started to find pitches, and then I tried playing along with whatever music I was listening to.  I distinctly remember that one day I could suddenly play along with a bunch of Beatles songs. That’s when I realized that I was starting to get it.  In fact I only had to learn a short melody for the piece, and I’m still far from qualifying as a professional musical saw player.  But it was a great experience, and since then I’ve incorporated the instrument into several other projects.

A brief description of the instruments used in my setup:

Estey Organ: This is a bellows reed organ that used to be made by the Estey Organ company in Brattleboro, Vermont.  The one I play in It Is Time is actually a children’s version – it’s a miniature that is only three octaves.  Before electric keyboards, middle class families in the United States used to buy these organs to teach children music if they couldn’t afford a piano at home.  When Sō got one through a project we did in Vermont, we became obsessed with the sound and have included it in all kinds of projects.

China Cymbal / Hi-Hat: This is a simple setup of a hi-hat made up of a china cymbal on top and a mute on the bottom – in this case, the mute is actually a smaller cymbal that I’ve wrapped in a few towels.  When the pedal is down, the outer edge of the china cymbal still vibrates and the only way to completely dampen it is with your hand, so there are three playing positions: open, closed, and closed with hand dampening.  Steve also asked me to tape a small coin to my pinky finger so that when I dampen the cymbal with my hand it provides an extra click.  The cymbal is amplified with a microphone that is placed as close to the cymbal as possible.

Frame Drum: This is a standard frame drum mounted on a snare drum stand so that I can play it with one hand.  It is also amplified with a microphone as close as possible to the drumhead, which brings out the huge range of overtones coming off of the head.  We experimented with different frame drum skins and found that natural hide had a much richer sound.  I play on the head and the rim, and also bend the pitch by pressing on the head.

Metronome: This is an analog Wittner metronome that I amplify with a contact microphone and run through a digital delay pedal.  Steve figured out the exact delay setting to get a specific rhythm that much of the opening of the piece is based on.  Also, later in the piece I put the metronome on a piece of wood that is set at a specific angle such that when the metronome swings back and forth it clicks in two uneven beats with a 2:3 relationship.  So the meter that results is close to 5/16.

Noah Bells: These are simple copper bells that traditionally come from India or Pakistan.  I found out about them for the first time while playing Toru Takemitsu’s beautiful piece From Me Flows What You Call Time.  I only had two of them, and Steve wrote for them in a way that was very different from what I imagined.

Wine Bottle: This is a wine bottle filled with an amount of water that tunes the bottle to a specific pitch.  One of the interesting things I discovered through this process is that the pitch created by the water in the bottle is different depending on whether the bottle is standing upright or turned on its side.

Small Bells: These are traditional celebration bells from India.  They come on a string that includes many different sized bells, and I simply lay them out on a table so that they can be played from low to high.

Percussion: The Future of Music: Credo

As this is really not a blog - more of a forum for putting my thoughts down whenever I feel like it - and I'm super busy with touring season right now, I thought it would be nice to copy this terrific essay by percussionist and Cage scholar Paul Cox.  It uses all of the Cage music appearing on our "Cage 100 Bootleg Series" to tell the story of Cage's life and work.  Enjoy!

-Adam 

Percussion: The Future of Music: Credo 

By Paul Cox, Ph.D.

“Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of 19th century music.” John Cage’s words, written in a 1939 Dance Observer article, carry a special Mosaic resonance for percussionists stuck sitting in the back of the orchestra, where they stare at the word “tacet” or count hundreds of measures of rests before playing a cymbal crash at the climax of a Mahler symphony. Restless, unloved, bored and underemployed, percussionists were long ready for liberation in the 1930s, though they desperately needed a repertoire of their own beyond Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation (1931). Of course, Cage did not set out to liberate percussionists per se, but rather the sounds (and noises) they are responsible for playing.

In many ways, Cage was building on the goals of his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, by extending Schonberg’s notion of the emancipation dissonance to all sounds, even those considered “unmusical.”

Cage’s sound liberation movement fueled the expansion of the percussion repertoire between 1935 and 1942. After Cage’s studies with Schoenberg in Los Angeles, he moved up to Seattle where he began composing works and collecting instruments and new scores for his own “West Coast” percussion ensemble. In these recordings, Sō Percussion, a liberated group of drummers who fully comprehend the importance of Cage’s legacy on their own existence, present a cross-section of Cage’s percussion works composed between 1939 and 1985.

Cage’s three works using the title “Constructions” make up the core canon of his percussion output. These works delicately blend mathematically calculated structure with timbral nuance and instrumental variety. Using instruments found in junkyards, railway depots and the dance studio at the Cornish School in Seattle where Cage worked as a composer and dance accompanist, the “Constructions” were originally performed by a group of talented amateurs that included Cage’s wife Xenia and Merce Cunningham--then a dance student at Cornish. To buy additional instruments, Cage solicited funds from family and friends; the author John Steinbeck donated $25.00 (a $400.00 gift in today’s dollars). Cage quickly amassed a multicultural mélange of over 150 instruments ranging from Chinese tom toms, gongs and tam tams to Native American rattles, Turkish cymbals, Japanese temple gongs, as well as claves and maracas from South America—not to mention the discarded brake drums, coffee cans, anvils and various pieces of sheet metal (a.k.a. “thundersheets”).

Cage’s First Construction (In Metal) first performed in Seattle opens with an explosive Joycean thunderclap of four “thundersheets” struck in unison. To organize the sextet, Cage used his “micro-macrocosmic” rhythmic structure, a form he invented to insure that the smallest parts (phrases) of a work were proportionally related to the largest (sections) by using a single governing number. Sixteen sub-divided into the series 4/3/2/3/4 determines the lengths of phrases, phrase structure, and the First Construction’s overall length (16 x 16 measures long = 256 bars; though Cage adds a nine-bar coda). Sixteen also governs the material and instrumentation: there are sixteen rhythmic motives and sixteen sounds available for each player in the “orchestra.” For example, player four’s sixteen sounds include a thundersheet, four brake drums, eight cowbells, and three Japanese temple gongs.

While Cage’s detailed mathematical design is notable, it is the way he uses texture and timbre to articulate the work’s structure that captures our attention. In the opening we hear a “string” piano (a piano in which the strings inside are muted with the hand) play four motives accompanied by four thundersheets for four measures. This is followed by a duet for oxen bells and string piano playing three motives for three measures. The next phrase features a dramatic change in texture with the glockenspiel, brake drums, and Turkish cymbals softly playing four successive half notes in unison over two bars. Cage’s motives are static and repeated in different combinations like carefully crafted building blocks of sonic material. As such, the work exemplifies its title as a construction—a work of architecture in sound—to riff on Schelling’s observation of architecture as “music in space.”

Audiences may notice a rather peculiar siren-like sound emanating from the piano. They may also notice a person inside the piano doing rather mysterious things to the string in order to achieve those sounds. This special “assistant” used in the First Construction often is tasked with rubbing a metal bar on the strings while the pianist trills on the keyboard with the sustain pedal depressed in order to produce the eerie siren sounds. The assistant is also responsible for creating a wide-rage of sound effects by muting, strumming and rubbing the strings with fingers, mallets and other metallic objects. Cage learned these “string” piano techniques from his teacher Henry Cowell. A year later, he would greatly expanded on the piano’s sonic possibilities with the invention of the prepared piano in 1940 with Bacchanale, a dance score composed for Sylvia Fort at Cornish. Cage found that placing various screws, screws + bolts, weather stripping, erasers and other material between the strings of the piano produced a seemingly infinite array of percussive sounds ranging from gong-like low tones to high-pitched rattles.

The percussion quartet Third Construction (1941) debuted on a concert produced jointly by Cage and Lou Harrison at the California Club in San Francisco. Some of the more unusual instruments used include the teponaxtle, a small two-toned log drum from Mexico and the quijades, the lower jawbone of a donkey or horse, which, when struck, makes a rattle-like sound as the dried teeth vibrate in bony sockets. Cage’s instrumentation is also more multicultural than any of his other percussion works, requiring Native American rattles from the Pacific Northwest, a Polynesian conch shell, Chinese tom toms, Turkish cymbals, a sistrum (an ancient rattle depicted in ancient Babylonian bas reliefs) and claves from South America, along with a lion’s roar (a friction instrument that sounds like its name), woodblocks, cowbells, tin cans, ratchet, and a cricket caller (sticks made of split bamboo). The work is highly virtuosic and frequently includes periods where multiple cross-rhythms are played simultaneously. Structurally more complex than the previous “constructions,” the Third is based on the number 24 (24 phrase groups x 24 measures each=576 measures). Also, rather than applying the phrase series (8-2-4-5-3-2) to each part, each player is assigned a different permutation of the series (e.g. player two is 5-3-2-8-2-4 while player three follows 3-2-8-2-4-5, etc.). As a result, while all the players still end the phrases together after twenty-four measures, in the midst of each phrase unit there is an increased density and variety of rhythmic activity. Finally, the Third has another quality that stands out. When the conch shell enters in the final section, the work takes on a distinctly ritual quality, perhaps recalling a dance on a remote Polynesian island. While Cage’s never associated his music deliberately with non-Western cultures, the tenor at the end of the Third may have been inspired by his time as Cowell’s teaching assistant for the ethnomusicology course titled “Primitive and Folk Origins of Music” at the New School in 1934.

Cage makes two points about his compositional process in his early writings: First, composing for dance influenced how he structured his music and provided a valuable source of commissions for his early percussion, prepared piano and electro-acoustic works. Second, he regarded percussion as a gateway to a larger sonic universe of electronic sounds. He declared his interest in such electronic sounds in his 1940 manifesto, “The Future of Music: Credo,” in which he called for the creation of musical laboratories to promote the discovery of new sounds. Cage found an ideal incubator for his interest in such sounds at the Cornish School in Seattle, where he had access to a small radio studio.

The radio studio served as de facto music laboratory where Cage created and broadcast the Imaginary Landscape No. 1, considered one of the first electro-acoustic works composed in America. Cage’s score calls for muted piano, a large Chinese cymbal and two variable-speed turntables playing Victor frequency records, one of sliding tones and the other of single pitch tones.

Imaginary Landscape No. 1 was composed for a dance by Bonnie Bird and debuted on Cornish’s "Hilarious Dance Concert" in March 1939. What is striking about the first performance is that the music was performed in the Cornish radio studio, then broadcast to the theatre next door, where it was used to accompany a rather curious dance on the theme of dismembered body parts. The nineteen-year-old Merce Cunningham was part of the troupe of dancers that moved among and hid behind large, mobile black shapes set against a black backdrop to, in part, create the illusion of floating body parts. Bird explained: “I discovered I could do things like create a body that covered the whole stage. . . . You would see a head, Merce’s head, way up, and then sliding down the side while two sets of legs walked down the stage. It was fascinating. And I would have the rectangle interrupt the two, and they'd skitter away. Or you'd see only hands moving in space.”

Cage’s electro-acoustic score served as an ideal backdrop for Bird’s experiment in movement. By broadcasting his mix of electronic and acoustic sounds, Cage created his own disembodied soundscape replete with unconventional piano sounds made by muting and stroking the strings inside the piano to create knocking sounds and ethereal glissandi effects. These were juxtaposed with recorded sliding tones and eerie cymbal drones—perfect for the macabre (yet humorous) theme of the dance.

Cunningham and Cage’s first professional collaboration came in 1942 with Credo in Us, a score composed for a dance made by both Cunningham and Jean Erdman (then members of the Martha Graham Dance Company). Credo was premiered on a program of works by young choreographers at the Bennington School of Dance in August 1942, and subsequently performed in New York City and Chicago. As a dance-drama, a genre popularized by Graham during the 1930s that combined narration with dance, Credo departed from Graham’s tidy narratives based on myths and patriotic themes. Inspired instead by James Joyce, Dada, surrealism, and popular radio dramas, their work explored the nuances and shadowy recesses of everyday life.

The drama’s setting is “Westward Ho!” and takes place over “three generations.” It is a satire on the sterile conventions of American middle-class life told through the perspective of a feuding married couple, the doubly named “Wife/Ghoul’s Rage” and “Husband/Shadow.” Erdman recalled that the names served as a point of departure for the dance and signified the characters’ public and psychological personas. This duality is also present in the title, which Cage described in an interview meaning both (“Credo”) I believe in the U.S. (United States) and I believe in us (you and me). For all three collaborators, Credo was meant as a serious critique of bourgeois prudishness and, more broadly, the American myths of manifest destiny and dependence on European models of culture (e.g. Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, etc.).

Cunningham’s scenario and script are full of puns and faux-French constructions. He claimed that the script was drawn from the Surrealist journal Minotaure, though Erdman later revealed that Cunningham himself was the author. The final line of the script, handwritten into Cage’s manuscript score, captures the satiric tone, “But Credo in US was Ghoul’s Rage Motto And la vie bid them well to use it.”

Cage’s score for piano (sometimes muted), tin cans, buzzer, muted gongs, radio and phonograph juxtaposes diverse musical genres, including a cowboy song, an “Indian” tom-tom rhythm, and a boogie-woogie for piano, as well as an ostinato figure drawn from sacrificial dance section of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. In addition, random radio sounds and samples of “classical” recordings, “Dvorak, Beethoven, Sibelius or Shostakovich,” played on a phonograph add to the work’s satiric tone.

Credo comes at the beginning of what Cage would later refer to as his “expressive” phase. Several works from the early-1940s are inflected with a mood of loneliness and angst caused in part by World War Two, as he described in his “Lecture on Nothing:” “Half-intellectually and half sentimentally, when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society. But quiet sounds were like loneliness, or love or friendship.” Compounding Cage’s mood was the fact that his marriage to Xenia was coming to an end.

It is in this context that Cage composed the meditative first movement of She is Asleep for twelve-tom toms. A still and monochromatic work, the dynamics waver between p and ppp. Gradations in texture result from Cage’s stipulation that the drums are to be struck on the very edge or center of the head with fingers, brushes or soft mallets.

In both Credo and She is Asleep we note a change in Cage’s compositional process away from the mathematical procedures used in the three “Constructions” and Imaginary Landscape No. 1. Instead, the collage-textures of Credo with its inclusion of sounds drawn from everyday life (e.g. doorbell and radio) and the nuanced treatment of quiet sounds in She is Asleep signal a transition toward the development of an open process that allowed for a greater range of sonic possibilities and outcomes determined using chance procedures. While these open processes were not yet used in the composition of Credo, Cage does cede a level of compositional control by allowing the performer to select random radio and record samples, a process that effectively guarantees that the work can never be heard the same way twice in live performance. By the early-1950s, Cage had developed a chance-based system using the I Ching that allowed for randomness to enter the compositional process. Cage had another motivation for adopting such chance procedures. After his study of Zen Buddhism with D.T. Suzuki, he embraced the goal of removing his own ego and personal expression from the work.

The remaining works on the program were created using such chance or indeterminate procedures—indeterminate meaning that Cage’s score is not intended to control the outcome of the performance. In fact, the performer is given ultimate authority for realizing Cage’s score. In the case of Cartridge Music, a work using contact mics (from phonograph cartridges) attached to various instruments or objects, the score looks like a work of abstract art. It is made up twenty transparencies each containing from one to twenty irregular shapes (each shape corresponding to a specific contract mic). In addition, Cage includes a transparency of solid points, transparency of circles, a transparency with a stopwatch, and a transparency of a snake-like dotted line with a circle at one end to be overlayed with each other to create a set of patterns to be deciphered as a score. What do these patterns mean? Solid points signify sound events and circles reflect changes in volume or change in material. The undulating line determines the sequence of events and the stopwatch the length of each event. Cage specifies that “undesirable” sounds like feedback and humming amplifiers are acceptable and that speakers may be set up around or within the audience. The Duet for Cymbal uses the same “score” as Cartridge Music. In this version, when the graphic score indicates a change of material, Cage stipulates that the amplified cymbal may be slowly submerged in water or placed on piano strings or on a soft mat to alter the sound.

0’0” (1962) consists of a single instruction: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action."

Child of Tree (Improvisation II) is a solo percussion piece. Cage’s indeterminate score consists of directions to aid the performer’s realization, including notes on how to select the ten instruments made from plant material (e.g. cacti, a pod rattle from a Mexican Poinciana tree, branches, leaves, bark, etc.) and determine the sequence and duration of the various sonic events. The performer then improvises the work using a stopwatch to remain within the designated time frame. Child of Tree was first used to accompany Merce Cunningham’s Solo (1975)--a dance infused with undulating animal-like movements. Though Cage and Cunningham professed to keep the creation of score and choreography separate until the dress rehearsal, the correspondences between the pointillistic cacti sounds and Cunningham’s slithering movements make for an uncanny and visceral link between dance and sound.

45’ for a speaker was made for a lecture at the Composers’ Concourse in London in October 1954. Cage created a collage text using his own writings along with various sound effects and music drawn from 34’46.776” for Two Pianists, which Cage and David Tudor were performing at the time. For the London lecture, Cage replaced his part of the piano duet with the lecture. Unfortunately, his lecture turned out to be impossible to speak within the piano part’s specified duration of 39’. After further experimentation, Cage settled on 45’, or roughly two-minutes per line of text, as an acceptable amount of time for the work, however you may notice that certain portions of the text are read at near super-human speeds.

Cage recounted in Silence that he planned to assemble the lecture while crossing the Atlantic on his way to Europe. Unfortunately his ocean liner was involved in a collision and had to turn back to New York. Cage and Tudor then flew on to Amsterdam. Over the course of the tour, Cage wrote the lecture on trains and in restaurants and hotels. Cage used detailed chance techniques to make the work. These techniques were used to answer specific questions related to content and mode of delivery. Questions included: “1. Is there speech or silence? 2. And for how long? 3. New material or old material?” For old material, Cage used chance techniques to make a selection of material from a preexisting lecture or article; for new material, chance was used to choose a specific topic drawn from a list of 32 subjects, ranging from “Listening as ignorance” to “Theatre (music work of life)” “Psychology” and “Activity of performance.” The text is laid out within a timeline format, with duration running along the left hand margin, and volume indicated by typography: italics = soft; bold = loud; roman = normal. Cage’s inclusion of other sound effects like coughing, drinking water and hissing add humorous tone, though often humor by happenstance:

“The best thing to do about counterpoint is what Schoenberg did. Teach it.” (Hold up hand, gargle).”

Cage required four players for Inlets (1977): one to play long tones on a conch shell and light various pinecones on fire; and three performers to manipulate amplified conch shells filled with water to create gurgling sounds. Cunningham used the score for two dances, Inlets (1977) and Inlets 2 (1983). Dance and score, though created separately, drew on Cage and Cunningham’s mutual interest in the coastline of the Pacific Northwest. Morris Graves created the costume and set design for Inlets, which was premiered in Seattle in September 1977. Inlets represented a kind of homecoming for Cunningham and Cage. In the late-1930s, they had met at the Cornish School where Cunningham was studying drama and dance and Cage was accompanying dance classes and composing scores for his percussion ensemble. It was also in Seattle where Cage met the painter Morris Graves, who famously attended one of Cage’s percussion concerts and yelled “Jesus in the Everywhere!” Even though Graves was kicked out of Cage’s concert, they soon became friends and collaborators. It was Graves in fact who introduced Cage to an idyllic island nestled in Puget Sound from which expansive views of several inlets and waterways could be seen--no doubt an early inspiration for the Inlets project.

But what about the noise of crumpling paper which he used to do in order to paint the series of 'Papiers froisses' or tearing up paper to make 'Papiers dechires?' Arp was stimulated by water (sea, lake, and flowing waters like rivers), forests (1985) is for 3-10 performers, each following their own pulse, which is not coordinated with the others. A series of symbols on a typewriter (+, -, O) indicate when sound is to be made.

Paul Cox currently teaches European and American music history and percussion at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he is a Visiting Assistant Professor. He earned a PhD in musicology from CWRU in 2011 after the completion of his dissertation, Collaged Codes: John Cage’s Credo in Us, a study of Cage and Merce Cunningham’s first dance collaboration in 1942. He has presented academic papers at the University of Pennsylvania, Notre Dame University and McGill University and the 2010 American Musicological Society National Conference in Indianapolis and the Society of American Music Conference in Ottawa and his writings appear in American Music, Cleveland Art and the upcoming edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music. He is currently working on a book project exploring Cage and Cunningham’s early collaborations in the 1940s.

An active composer, Cox’s works have been performed in the U.S. and abroad and include commissioned works for film, dance, theater and the concert hall. CityMusic Cleveland commissioned his most recent work, Just.Are.Same for string quartet, oboe and tape, which weaves together an electronic soundscape of spoken words drawn from victims of genocide with acoustic and electronic music.

Cox’s first career was a decade-long stint as the Assistant Curator of Music (1995-2004) and Associate Director of Performing Arts (2005) at the Cleveland Museum of Art. During his tenure there, he was also the co-director of the internationally acclaimed Aki Festival of New Music (three-time winner of the CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming). He continues to curate large-scale projects. This summer, he will serve as artistic advisor to the “Sitka Festival of Arts and Culture.”

Born and raised in Sitka, Alaska, Cox studied music at the Sitka Fine Arts Camp and the Interlochen National Music Camp. Thereafter he attended the Oberlin Conservatory--where he studied percussion with Michael Rosen—the Royal College of Music in London, the Aspen Music Festival, Yale’s Norfolk Festival and Rice University.