John Cage's Theatre Pieces

William Fetterman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136645648
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992) is best known for his works in percussion, prepared piano, and electronic music, but he is also acknowledged to be one of the most significant figures in 20th century theatre. In Cage's work in theatre composition there is a blurring of the distinctions between music, dance, literature, art and everyday life. Here, William Fetterman examines the majority of those compositions by Cage which are audial as well as visual in content, beginning with his first work in this genre in 1952, and continuing through 1992.
Much of the information in this study comes from previously undocumented material discovered among the unpublished scores and notes of Cage and his frequent collaborator David Tudor, as well as author's interviews with Cage and with individuals closely associated with his work, including David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Bonnie Bird, Mary Caroline Richards, and Ellsworth Snyder.

1

EARLY COMPOSITIONS AND DANCE ACCOMPANIMENTS

The first mature period of John Cage’s compositions dates from about 1936 to 1951. This period is marked by several works composed for percussion ensemble and prepared piano. It was also during this period that Cage became involved with modern dance, initially not from any conscious desire to be involved in theatre, but because he found modern dancers were more interested in modern music than classically trained musicians (Tomkins 1968, 83; 88).

Cage’s interest in percussion composition was influenced by his studies with Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and Oskar Fischinger from about 1934 through 1937. Cage is not the first Western percussion ensemble composer, but he was an early exponent of this genre. The first percussion work in the Western tradition is considered to be Amadeo Roldan’s Ritmicas (1930), followed by Edgard Varese’s lonisation (1931) (Sollberger 1974). From his studies with Henry Cowell in 1934, and from reading Cowell’s book New Musical Resources (1935), Cage became interested in using percussion as a practical alternative to tonal composition. Cage would also have known Cowell’s percussion ensemble works such as Ostinato Pianissimo (1934). Paul Griffiths notes that even in Cage’s earliest tonal composition attempts (previous to his first percussion compositions) that the music is based on manipulations of structure rather than melody or harmony (Griffiths 1981, 3-5).

Cage would later recall that many of Schoenberg’s classes were concerned with solving various problems and exercises in harmony:

Several times I tried to explain to Schoenberg that I had no feeling for harmony. He told me that without a feeling for harmony I would always encounter an obstacle, a wall through which I wouldn’t be able to pass. My reply was that in that case I would devote my life to beating my head against that wall — and maybe this is what I’ve been doing ever since. (Tomkins 1968, 85)

While Cage has not become known as a harmonic composer, he made several works that are harmonic as well as melodic throughout his career; and even in the percussion works made as formal reaction against Schoenberg’s teaching there is a delicate use of various timbres.

While studying with Schoenberg, Cage was also working as an assistant for Oskar Fischinger, a film animation artist. Many of Fischinger’s films were “visual music,” complex sequences of abstract moving forms set to the music of classical composers such as Bach or Brahms. Fischinger’s exploration of visualizing music through film technology also included experiments with synthetic sound tracks made by photographing geometric patterns or images directly onto the sound-track area of the film strip (Russett and Starr 1976, 57-65). Cage would later recall Fischinger’s influence:

He made a remark that impressed me: “Everything has a spirit, and that spirit can be released by setting whatever it is into vibration.” That started me off hitting things, striking them, rubbing them, working with percussion, and getting interested in noise. (Montague 1985, 209)

Cage’s first composition for percussion ensemble was Trio (1936), for three performers. Trio marks the first appearance of one of his most famous innovations, the water-gong. Cage had joined a modern dance group at U.C.L.A. as an accompanist and composer, and was asked to write a work for the swimming team’s annual water ballet. During rehearsals he discovered that the swimmers could not hear the music underwater. His solution was to lower a gong into the water which, when struck, could be heard by the swimmers (Tomkins 1968, 88).

In 1938 Cage moved to Seattle as a faculty member of the Cornish School. At Cornish he was accompanist and composer for Bonnie Bird’s dance company and also organized and conducted a percussion ensemble. It was also at the school that he first met Merce Cunningham, then a student with Bonnie Bird.

Cage first expressed his conceptual use of percussion in his 1937 lecture “The Future of Music: Credo.” In this early essay, Cage writes that music will continue to employ not only traditional tonality but also noise and the entire spectrum of possible sounds, including use of electronics. He also is concerned with the formal, structural implications of sound, rather than tonality, in composition:

The present methods of writing music, principally those which employ harmony and its reference to particular steps in the field of sound, will be inadequate for the composer, who will be faced with the entire field of sound. The composer (organizer of sound) will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time. The “frame” or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time. No rhythm will be beyond the composer’s reach.

New methods will be discovered, bearing a definite relation to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system… and present methods of writing percussion music… and any other methods which are free from the concept of a fundamental tone…. The principle of form will be our only constant connection with the past. (Cage 1961, 4-5)

Aesthetically, this lecture was a very avant-garde statement in 1937 America, however, Cage’s early adult essay was not an entirely new idea. It is still a “student piece,” influenced from his recent studies with Schoenberg and Fischinger. The basic ideas are an echo of Luigi Russolo’s 1913 Futurist manifesto “The Art of Noise” (in Kirby 1971, 166-174). Both Russolo and Cage stress the need for noise, including everyday sounds, as integral to music; the focus upon rhythm rather than tonality as a fundamental structuring principle; the employment of technology to create new sound sources; and the requirement to score these new musical elements with relative precision. While both essays are similar in content, Cage’s lecture does not have Russolo’s strident style and is more evocative of what such music might eventually become. Cage’s essay, in retrospect, has been termed “prophetic” of his later development in composition (Tan 1989b, 39). In practice, however, Cage’s later development into chance and indeterminacy can not be said to be an exact correspondence or alternative method to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system.

The new methods of noise composition that Cage initially explored through the percussion ensemble were basically practical considerations of performance. While the promise of film sound-tracks, wire recording, and electronic instruments such as the Theremin or Sonovox are alluded to in “The Future of Music: Credo,” such rare and expensive technology was unavailable to Cage. Percussion instruments were a much more practical and economically feasible way of composing for a field of possible sounds.

At the Cornish School, Cage organized a percussion ensemble, promoting his own work as well as the work of William Russell, Lou Harrison, Ray Green, and J. M. Beyer. This ensemble performed in Seattle and on the West Coast. In a program note to a performance at Reed College on February 14, 1940, Cage wrote:

Listening to the music of these composers is quite different from listening to the music, say, of Beethoven. In the latter case we are temporarily protected or transported from the noises of everyday life. In the case of percussion music, however, we find that we have mastered and subjugated noise. We become triumphant over it, and our ears become sensitive to its beauties. (Cage 1940c)

The percussion ensemble under Cage’s direction during the latter 1930s and early 1940s mostly gave instrumental concerts, rather than dance accompaniment, however, the theatrical connotations of purely instrumental percussion performance were not overlooked during this period. Jack Avsha-lomoff would review the February 14, 1940 concert at Reed College by writing:

Performances of this kind should, I am convinced, be heard and not seen (at least until afterwards if the curious are insistent). The distraction caused by what is going on prevents the clear reception of the mass of sound as a whole, and this is most important. (Avshalomoff 1940)

The unconventional instruments, and the performance of such compositions, were novel and thus created an added visual interest as well. Ironically, what Avshalomoff decried in these early percussion ensemble concerts — the interest in visual as well as aural aspects of musical performance — would later become a central component of Cage’s own definition of theatre in the early 1950s.

Cage’s own compositions for percussion ensemble during the latter 1930s and early 1940s were most influenced by the work of Henry Cowell and William Russell. Cowell’s influence, as in his Ostinato Pianissimo (1934) or Pulse (1939), may heard in Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) or First Construction (in Metal) (1939). In both the mentioned works by Cowell and Cage, there is a delicate use of percussion instruments that, while structured rhythmically, provide the listener with an unexpected tonal content as well.

The influence of Cage’s contemporary William Russell (1905-1992) is more subtle. Cage’s percussion ensemble performed several of Russell’s compositions, and it was largely with Russell’s compositions that the ensemble gained some national attention and notoriety. Russell would cease composition in 1940 to concentrate on studying and documenting hot jazz and its origins in New Orleans, but both Russell and Cage would collaborate on a short essay “Percussion Music and Its Relation To The Modern Dance” published in 1939 (Cage and Russell 1939, 266; 274), where both the artistic, avant-garde, as well as popular, folkloristic roots of percussion are outlined.

Currently Russell is a neglected composer, but by 1932 he was one of the premiere American percussion ensemble composers. A complete retrospective of his work, including revisions, a new piece, and several first performances, was performed on February 24, 1990, by Essential Music at Florence Gould Hall in New York City for Russell’s 85th birthday. A CD recording of his complete works was released in 1993.

Russell’s compositions are usually brief, lyrical works of sophisticated structure and playful charm. His Made in America (1936) is scored for automobile brake drums, tin cans, suitcase, washboard, lion’s roar, a drum kit made from found-objects, and a “Baetz’ Rhythm Rotor” (an early electronic instrument that produced rhythmic ticks, similar to the contemporary drum machine or beat box) (Kennedy and Wood 1990). Russell’s eclectic and innovative choice of instrumentation may also be seen in Cage’s percussion works such as Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) for muted piano, cymbal, and two variable-speed turntables playing frequency records; or Living Room Music (1940) for speech quartet and furniture. Cage, like Russell and Cowell, composed for percussion as a practical way of including a field of sound rather than accepted harmonic tones as the province of musical composition and performance.

The three major dance productions that Cage was involved with while at the Cornish School were The Marriage at the Eiffel Tower (1938-39), Imaginary Landscape (1939), and Bacchanale (1940). Bonnie Bird recalls their collaborative process:

It was mostly talking back and forth, but it wasn’t simultaneous. It was as though he sat at the piano and I was on the floor working with the dancers. He would watch what I was doing, frequently, and then he was no doubt making mental notes — maybe he even fiddled around at the piano at times — but usually we talked and he wrote something, and then we tried it out. (Bird 1991)

The first major dance production that Cage was involved with as a composer and percussion conductor was for Bonnie Bird’s production of Jean Cocteau’s Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (“The Marriage at the Eiffel Tower”), first written and produced in 1921 (in Benedikt and Wellwarth 1964, 101-115). Various sections of music were composed by Cage, Henry Cowell, and George McKay (a local Seattle composer). The score has not been published, but Cage’s manuscript is in the New York Public Library, and the sections by Cowell and McKay are in the music archive at Northwestern University. The music is scored for various toy whistles, sirens, and two pianos. In the surviving music one sees all three composers employing a purposefully comic and satiric mode of expression.

The choreography is not reconstructable, but the principal dancers were Syvilla Fort, Dorothy Herrman, and Merce Cunningham. Bonnie Bird and her husband Ralph Gundlach were the two narrators. An anonymous newspaper clipping reviews the production by noting that the set included mobiles and wooden caricatures of human beings (“Round About” ca. 1939). Bonnie Bird no longer recalls there being any mobiles, but describes the basic mise-en-scene:

There were two things that looked like phonographs at the side of the stage, and those were supposed to be the record players. I was behind one and my husband was behind the other, and the two of us did the reading of the script.

The set had a suggestion of the Eiffel Tower in that there were ropes that went from the side, up-stage way down in the corners, left and right, and they went up; and there were cross-bars that suggested the shape of the Eiffel Tower. And there was a ramp that went from up-stage right to about two-thirds of the way across the stage — it was probably about three feet deep, and pushed way up at the back of the stage. In addition, we had a table that was really a flat that was painted to look like it was a table set for a wedding breakfast, and it had a stand behind it so they [the dancers] could put their feet of it, appear as if they were behind, sitting at a table or standing, so that was a kind of life behind this flat, a life to their postures, really. We had a rather small stage, so we couldn’t do an awful lot with it, and that was really the essential set piece.

Then down-stage was the outline of a camera, a sort of old-fashioned tripod kind of thing, which also looks a little like the front of an engine of a train. So the cow-catcher at the bottom was really like the bottom of the camera itself, and the camera lens was like the headlight at the front of the train. You thought of it as a camera as long as it was right up against the proscenium arch, but when it began to open and slowly move across, it looked like a train because there was this black accordian stuff behind it with little windows that began to open up as the people took off from the train.

And then, I didn’t have enough men in the company at that time — these were all students, really — so I thought, well, I really don’t need men, the men are like coat-racks, so I created some hat-stands with circular bottoms, and I put on the stand a wire coat-hanger and a buttoneer and a collar and a tie, and a hat on the top of the stand, you know, a top hat for a wedding. And that was the partner for the dancers, so the women danced with these and rolled them around (laughs). It worked wonderfully! It was a substitute for having males that couldn’t dance very well anyway (laughs). (Bird 1991)

Imaginary Landscape(1939) was an even more innovative collabo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• List of Illustrations
• 1 Early Compositions and Dance Accompaniments
• 2 Water Music, Water Walk and Sounds of Venice: Early Variations on Chance Composed Theatre Pieces in Determinate Notation
• 3 Music Walk, and Cartridge Music: Variations in Complex Indeterminate Notation
• 4 4’33”, O’OO”, Solos in Song Books, WGBH-TV,and ONE3: Variations on a Disciplined Action
• 5 The Untitled Event at Black Mountain College, Theatre Piece, Solos in Song Books, and Dialogue: Variations on Small-Group Simultaneities
• 6 The Musicircus: Variations on Large-Group Simultaneities
• 7 Song Books: General Performances and Specific Solos
• 8 Europeras 1-5: The Final Theatre Pieces
• 9 John Cage as a Performer
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Appendix 4
• Appendix 5
• Appendix 6
• List of References
• Index of Cage’s Works
• General Index