MUSIC : Wall-to-Wall Cage : As assessments of John Cage’s impact continue, an exhaustive German tribute to the composer offers fresh insights about his work

When John Cage died unexpectedly of a stroke last month, less than a month before what would have been his 80th birthday on Sept. 5, he left what seemed to many American and to some British observers a confusing legacy. Critical assessments after his death dutifully trumpeted the impact of a lifetime spent freeing art from just about every convention it had ever known. That the art world would be a very different place today without the example of Cage’s famous open-mindedness everyone agrees.

But what about the actual music?

In London, Andrew Porter, the former music critic of the New Yorker, wrote in the Observer what a number of other British and American music critics implied in their tributes to Cage: “He said a lot of silly things, and wrote a lot of silly music. But everyone was fond of him.”

Tell that to the Germans.

Throughout most of Europe, but especially in the German-speaking countries, Cage was considered an extraordinarily important American composer. Last year, Zurich devoted its annual June festival and untold Swiss francs from the city’s bountiful treasury to a monthlong celebration of just two artists: James Joyce and John Cage. Joyce, because he had lived for a time in Zurich and was buried there; Cage, just because he was the only living musical figure with the significance of a Joyce for the presenters.

Munich last summer held an important exhibition and festival of Cage’s work in its State Art Gallery. This birthday year, there are festivals, colloquia, symposiums and premieres of Cage commissions in Cologne, Dresden, Leipzig and Karlsruhe in Germany and Vienna and Graz in Austria.

But nothing compares to “John Cage: Anarchic Harmony,” which began Aug. 28, as part of the Frankfurt Feste ‘92, sponsored by the astonishingly wealthy Alte Oper, the city’s old opera house, which was destroyed in 1944 and converted in 1981 into an elegant, modernized concert complex. The extensive festival, consisting of 25 concerts devoted exclusively to Cage’s music and surveying nearly 100 works, is almost unheard of in modern music.

Two years in planning, the festival had been intended as a huge international birthday party for Cage. It attracted performers from Europe, America and Asia. Its concerts were conceived and have been prepared with a meticulousness unlike anything found in the American new-music concert life, and just as astonishing are both the size and the utter seriousness of the audience. This is Cage taken with absolutely no silliness.

Such Teutonic devotion can, of course, lead to the occasional cultural confusion and even absurdity. For instance, at a performance of Cage’s famous silent piece “4’33,” the Frankfurt audience attended the score’s four minutes, 33 seconds of silence in its own worshipful, utter silence--not a cough, not a shuffle, not an audible breath. There were, in this instance, none of the intended ambient sounds, nothing to listen for.

Another instance of the typically German seriousness has been the ultimately hopeless attempt to categorize Cage’s vast output. Cage wrote a tremendous amount of music during six decades, and the festival has devoted each of the past four weekends to a sort of theme.

The first looked at Cage’s love of experimentation with different sorts of media, particularly in his early pieces for percussion, in which instruments could be fashioned from almost any sound-making material, including radios and phonograph cartridges. The second weekend surveyed Cage’s use of the keyboard--the prepared piano, the straight piano, the organ--as well as his relationship to historical music, particularly early American hymns.

Then came the weekend for the more theatrical works (like “Europera 5,” with its random collisions of opera arias sung, played on old-fashioned Victrolas, played in piano arrangements and heard on tape collage). And this final weekend is devoted to some more abstract uses of instrumental sound (such as the “Freeman Etudes,” some of the most difficult violin music ever written) and sounds in space (such as “Imaginary Landscapes No. 4,” for 12 radios and 24 players).

On weeknights, concerts have featured Cage’s more recent “number pieces.” During the last five years of his life, he wrote more than 60 pieces named for the number of players performing, and containing mostly quiet, isolated sounds to be played within indicated time brackets.

The categories are failures, and the festival has found itself unable to keep to them. Cage’s music simply doesn’t break down that easily. But that has led to, perhaps, the most important, if most obvious, revelation of the festival. It has never been easy to know Cage’s music well, and few realize just how extensive the range of it is. The reliance on randomness does not mean that Cage repeated himself or gave up his role as creator.

The real misunderstanding about Cage came from his conversion in the early ‘50s, when he began to seriously embrace chance and chaos, to advocate the inclusion of all sounds and silences as useful for music, and to employ the “I Ching” as a device for removing his own ego and tastes from his composition.

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Before that, Cage’s music--most of it for piano, prepared piano (with objects, such as wood screws, inserted between the piano strings to turn it into a one-man percussion orchestra) and percussion ensembles--had relied upon rhythmic patterns. But chance became for Cage a system with its rules and procedures just the way that tonal harmony or serialism are for other composers.

By becoming expert at manipulating the techniques of chance operations, by finding interesting questions to ask and interesting premises upon which to build compositions, Cage created as varied an oeuvre as most composers. However much he may have removed the appearance of ego from the music, his compositional stamp was always upon it.

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On the night before Cage’s birthday, for instance, the remarkable local Ensemble Moderne played two seminal works, written just as Cage was converting from his free style to his chance style in 1951--the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra and Sixteen Dances for mixed ensemble. The works were performed with such precision of intonation and rhythmic accuracy that the notes, not related in melodies or harmonies and always changing in colors, felt as if they were floating in space connected anyway by a mysterious invisible thread.

In the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, which concluded the concert, Cage gave a far greater degree of freedom to the players, and challenged them not to be silly. Here a violinist snaps rubber bands; a wind player squawks on his mouthpiece; a saxophonist sets loose some windup ducks that circle the conductor, who acts as a human clock.

All the while the soloist, in this case David Tudor (a longtime Cage colleague for whom the piece was written), seemed to hit everything in sight, including some suspended Slinkies, often amplifying the sounds.

At the premiere in 1958 in New York’s dowdy Town Hall, the work caused a near audience riot. In the elegant Alte Oper, it received a full 10-minute ovation, even though the piece came at the end of a long evening of concerts that lasted until nearly 1 in the morning. Although certainly amusing, the Frankfurt performance maintained the kind of discipline throughout that turned these antics into something sonically arresting, even transcendent.

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Not everything reached such Cagean heights, however. At a special Cage birthday concert, conductor Hans Zender and the Saarbrucken Radio Orchestra premiered three new compositions that Cage had finished last spring, “Twenty Eight,” “Twenty Six” and “Twenty Nine.” These are works of a few soft, long held notes, and each has to be made to sound special, to resonate in space, and that also requires a surprisingly intense discipline. But the performance was flat, the instructions in the scores not scrupulously followed by all the players.

The celebratory “Renga With Apartment House 1776” that concluded the concert was also lacking in vibrancy. Some Angelenos may remember the Los Angeles Philharmonic performance of it in January, 1977. Many in the audience jeered and some of the players sabotaged it.

On the other hand, the Saarbrucken forces took it far too seriously. This is a multicultural music, and the soloists include American Indian, black, Sephardic and Protestant singers. The orchestra plays a riot of early Americana along with some more abstract music.

For this performance the singers were amplified, but someone forgot to turn on the mikes. The Indian part, written for the flamboyant Chief Swift Eagle, who is no longer living, was taken over by his two children, Matoaka Little Eagle and Powhatan Swift Eagle, who came dangerously close to shtick. And Zender conducted with a Kapellmeister’s rigidity. But even so, the sheer effort that went into the performance shames American orchestras. The audience, moreover, was large and wildly enthusiastic.

Our money may not be worth much in Germany anymore, but one final lesson from Frankfurt is that our culture still has tremendous value. And maybe it is now time for us to reclaim John Cage from the Germans.

Cage on Film

“Cage/Cunningham,” a film documentary about the nearly half-century collaboration between John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, runs Monday through Thursday at the Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles. The film by Elliot Caplan features interviews, archival dance footage and music from the various projects the two artists created.