MUSIC REVIEW : In ‘Rolywholyover,’ Cage Moves in Mysterious Ways

It wasn’t long at all after the opening of MOCA’s ambitious John Cage-related exhibition “Rolywholyover A Circus” on Sunday that the extra-delicate strains of Cage’s most famous and infamous piece, “4’33,” filled the air. In a courtyard performance, the Repercussion Unit did the honors, laying down their mallets and “playing” the 1952 work, in which Cage instructs musicians to play nothing at all for the specified duration of the title.

Of course, the point of Cage’s radical compositional gesture is to celebrate ambience, forcing listeners to consider what is there. Thus, you could say that the real ensemble consisted of the gentle rush of Sunday traffic along Grand Avenue and the fountain in California Plaza.

Too often, “4’33” is presented as a kind of theme song in Cage’s canon, as a grand idea to which notes are not invited. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, the spirit of John Cage moves in mysterious, chameleonic ways. Unfortunately, it moves all too little in musical ways.

Although more musical material from Cage can be heard around the city this fall, the MOCA show in its basic form illustrates a basic problem relative to Cage’s place in cultural history: For all his legendary status and universal name recognition, Cage’s music is some of the least heard by any prominent American composer, especially in this, his hometown.

The underlying curatorial notion of this Cage circus is to examine his role in the fabric of the arts, generally, and not just in the musical cosmos. From the beginning, Cage sought to expand music’s boundaries and sphere of influence, to rattle the cherished conventions of Western music and to integrate music with art with life.

The Repercussion Unit, for whom Cage wrote a number of pieces, is ideally suited to the instincts of the late composer, who was drawn early on to writing for percussion. Sunday, the players manned a wide range of instruments, from bona fide Western concert instruments to non-Western drums and percussion, and to transformed objects from the “found instrument” world. Overturned trash cans became deep, clangorous tom-toms, lengths of pipe became tuned tines.

The main musical event on Sunday was a performance, the first of three at MOCA during the show’s run (which ends Nov. 28), by members of the CalArts New Century Players. In “Theater Piece” (1960), 10 players are instructed to perform a variety of antics--here including playing a cello with a carrot, striking plastic water bottles and dancing in ritualistic loops. Oddly, the assorted repetitious gestures in sound and motion created an intriguing weave, a sense of accidental continuity amid discontinuity.

But then, one person’s irrational dream soundtrack may be another’s worst nightmare.

In one corner of the otherwise all-too-quiet main gallery is David Rosenboom’s interactive computer piece “It Is About to Sound,” available only through sets of headphones. The piece randomly shuffles discrete units of music by Cage and other composers, creating collages from the scraps while various quotations dot the screen. Ultimately, the piece acts more like a clever Dadaist catalogue of music than an artwork unto itself.

In the library-like setting as the visitor enters are cabinets in which Cage’s distinctive scores are tucked away--from the sweeps and disjointed splotches of notation for the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1960) to the logical yet unorthodox blueprints, produced through mathematical process and chance operation, of his later, numbered pieces.

What the MOCA show succeeds in conveying is that Cage was a sly dog of modernism who issued a wake-up call to anyone who cared to listen. In a world increasingly deluged by blaring trivialities passed off as cultural stimuli, his gentle, highbrow mischief seems more timely than ever.

One of the quotes used in “It Is About to Sound” gets at the heart of this definitively elusive and dizzying show: “Perhaps when you go out into the world, it won’t seem as chaotic anymore.” Sure enough, the traffic on Grand never sounded so eloquent.