Contact Is Made With John Cage’s Free Spirit

The 90th anniversary of John Cage’s birth, at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, is Sept. 5. August marks the 10th anniversary of his death in New York. It is, in other words, a John Cage year.

Cage’s influence on music and musical thought, on visual artists and poets and on critical thinking in general, has been incalculable; he was provocative during 60 years of active art-making, and his work provokes still. From Perth to Paris, in Bremen and Berlin and Montreal and Milwaukee, at the alternative space Sushi in San Diego and at Carnegie Hall in New York, Cage concerts and conferences and festivals are being mounted this year.

Germans in the town of Halberstadt have appropriated the largest Renaissance organ ever built, and come up with the cockamamie idea of taking the title of Cage’s “ASLSP,” which stands for “as slow as possible,” literally. The performance began on Cage’s birthday last September with a year-and-a-half rest; the first sound won’t be heard until next January; the piece will end in the year 2640.

The hometown Cage celebration is at California Institute of the Arts, and it is extensive--if not that extensive. Eight concerts that run through May began with a percussion evening Feb. 15. On Thursday and Friday, at Roy O. Disney Music Hall, there was a survey of mostly conventional early music from the ‘30s and ‘40s, as well as examples of electronic works from the next decade.

CalArts can be an agreeable place to encounter Cage (even though the school has provided too little institutional support for the festival and done an inadequate job in getting the word out). Anti-institutional though he was, Cage had a fondness for this one--it was the only school from which he was willing to accept an honorary degree. The composer and pianist James Tenney, who teaches at CalArts and who has mounted this festival, was a longtime Cage colleague. Many of the performers are his students, and he will play one of Cage’s most famous works, the “Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano,” on April 12.

The atmosphere at the Thursday and Friday concerts was bracing. The student performances were, if not always technically or interpretatively expert, fresh and serious. And the first half of Thursday’s program provided a rare opportunity to hear little-known early Cage works from the ‘30s, written in Los Angeles just before and after he studied with Schoenberg.

Cage’s earliest extant music, three songs to Gertrude Stein texts, was first sung in tremulous voice by the gay activist Harry Hay (for the ladies at Santa Monica Women’s Club in 1932), and so it was here by a young singer, Tany Ling. The Clarinet Sonata was declared unplayable in 1933 by the principal clarinetist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but it made a lively impact here in a stellar performance by Sam Torrisi.

Other early pieces demonstrated Cage’s explorations of raw sounds in a percussion Trio, as well as his more academic experiments with dissonant counterpoint meant to impress Schoenberg in the “Composition for Three Voices” and “Three Pieces for Flute Duet.”

“Music for Wind Instruments,” which needed a more percussive performance than it got, is Hindemith meets Varese.

In contrast, there were pleasing performances of some of Cage’s most accessible music from the ‘40s, especially Phala Tracy’s of the Satie-esque harp piece, “In a Landscape,” Debby Penberthy’s singing of the sweet, solemn “Experiences No. 2,” and Zachary Scott’s colorful playing of the “Suite for Toy Piano.”

Also on the program was “The Perilous Night” for prepared piano. The response to it in 1943 made Cage question music’s ability to express emotion.

Written in response to the loneliness and terror of his unhappy marriage, it was heard only as woodpeckers in a belfry. Today, pianists tend to emphasize the music’s agitation. Trevor Berens, however, was a cool Cage-ian.

Friday’s program included more vocal music from the ‘40s, securely sung by Nina Sun Eidsheim, who also performed “Sonnekus2,” monotone chanting of a deconstructed biblical text interrupted by Satie cabaret songs.

But the main feature was electronic work of a very different nature. These pieces require that performers creatively realize music out of graphic notation. In “Cartridge Music,” sound is produced by inserting various objects into amplified phonograph cartridges. “Variations II” is the most flexible music Cage wrote, with performers deciding upon their own instruments and sounds, then interpreting measurements taken from transparencies of lines and dots.

Modern electronics can make these works sound overly glitzy, and so they did here. For “Variations II,” several performers hovered around laptop computers, a glowing Apple logo the main visual stimulus. But nothing went on too long, and the sounds were generally interesting ones.

“Imaginary Landscape No. 5,” realized by Bob Bellerue, was more curious. It is a score for making a tape out of excerpts from any 42 phonograph records using chance operations. Cage’s own tape, created for a 1952 dance, used jazz recordings, and Bellerue did the same with recordings from the era. But his was not a handmade tape, rather the result of a modern computer’s resources.

Bellerue poses interpretative issues. To what extent are period instruments and period practice relevant to electronic music of the ‘50s? This “Imaginary Landscape” realization was schizophrenic. Period recordings turned it into something that sounded like a sparkling modern collage of old jazz. Still, at a quick two minutes, it cooked. And in the best Cage tradition, it left us with questions, not answers.