[Photo of Cage and Tudor in Japan]
John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58) (hereafter the Concert) is unique among his output in its association not only with Cage the composer, but also with David Tudor’s extensive role in realizing and performing the Concert’s “Solo for Piano” part. What, might we ask, is so unusual and unprecedented about the Concert’s Solo for Piano, and how do we understand its great appeal for Tudor? To begin, the Solo for Piano represented, at the time, Cage’s most elaborate and complex use of indeterminacy in performance. As he put it in his “Indeterminacy” lecture, the second of three delivered under the title “Composition as Process” (Darmstadt, Germany, September 1958):
A performance of a composition which is indeterminate of its performance is necessarily unique. It cannot be repeated. When performed a second time, the outcome is other than it was. Nothing is accomplished by such a performance, since that performance cannot be grasped as an object in time.[1]
To make compositions that reflected these ideals, Cage developed complex and visually striking notations that distanced performers from the intention-driven principles that had heretofore guided Western music. As James Pritchett has argued, the crucial principles of indeterminacy were experimental—involving actions with an unforeseen outcomes such that a performance “cannot be repeated” or “grasped as an object”; purposeless—as in a “purposeless process” that gives rise to “no matter what eventuality” in which “nothing is accomplished”; and unknowing—“by employing some operation exterior to [the performer’s] mind.”[2] All were central to Cage’s work after 1950: experimental procedures that resulted in unique and unpredictable events, a commitment to the “purposeless” quality of a music divorced from the aims of individual expression, and a Zen-infused philosophy that grounded Cage’s compositional technique in the impersonal forces of nature.[3]
If Cage’s above philosophical principles are well known, it is less often remarked what a crucial role Tudor played in the development of Cage’s turn to indeterminacy. As it was for Tudor and Feldman, the meeting of Tudor and Cage was auspicious. On December 17, 1950 in New York, Tudor had given the American premiere of Pierre Boulez’s Second Sonata, a technically demanding piece that extended the dissonant atonality associated with composers like Schoenberg and Webern into a highly aggressive, large-scale composition. As a result of this premiere, Tudor began to develop a reputation as an exceptionally talented performer of difficult modern music, a reputation that would prove significant to the notoriety of the post-war musical avant-garde. Cage, who turned pages for Tudor at the premiere, was himself electrified by the performance. The following year, Cage, feeling inspired, embarked on a monumental solo piano work for Tudor entitled Music of Changes.[4] Recalling their early collaboration, Cage noted:
In all my works since 1952, I have tried to achieve what would seem interesting and vibrant to David Tudor. Whatever succeeds in the works I have done has been determined in relationship to him. . . Tudor was present in everything I was doing. . . At that time [i.e. 1951], he was the Music of Changes.[5]
Tudor learned each section of Music of Changes as soon as Cage completed it, thus confirming that the notation was playable. The correspondence between the two offers a vivid chronicle of their collaboration. A letter from Tudor to Cage in late July 1951 questions and seeks to verify numerous technical details with respect to pedaling:
A few things I would like to check. . . what are the exact functions you had in mind for the pedals; what about the inclusion in the pedals of the graces D + A p. 5 4s. [4th system]; are the 4 16ths top p. 6 correct (I hope so!); to which group does the 2nd ½ pedal belong p.7 3s. 1m. ffff or ppp-pppp… I have revised the pedaling considerably, we’ll see how you like it…
Cage’s reply on August 5, 1951 shows not only the depth of Cage’s personal attachment (“Your letter has given me much pleasure, how much exactly I cannot say as I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve reread it.”), but also Cage’s technical vigilance in addressing every detailed question Tudor had posed. [Image of Cage’s letter, one page] In Tudor’s intimate but assertive queries, one gets a sense of a mind that is attuned to detail, one who is capable of serving not merely as an interpreter, but as someone keen on making significant musical choices on his own. In his published “Preface” to Music of Changes, Cage concluded that such a bond of trust had become necessary to decipher the complex score he had devised: “It will be found in many places that the notation is irrational; in such instances the performer is to employ his own discretion.”
At the end of his letter to Tudor, Cage writes that a performance of Music of Changes should be guided by a principle of radical discontinuity: “… the guiding principle for performance should be to act so that each action is itself (that means infinitely different and incomparable, single, never before or later to occur, so that each moment makes history).”[6] Cage’s statement is emblematic of his famous turn during this same year—1951—to chance operations. In preparing Music of Changes for Tudor, Cage created a chart of various sounds (single notes, two pitches, chords, larger constellations of pitches, or silences), a set of possible durations, and a chart of different dynamic values. A toss of coins obtained numbers corresponding to hexagrams in the I Ching, or Chinese Book of Changes. Such hexagrams in turn pointed to different combinations of sounds, durations, and dynamics that Cage would sequence together in the score.
While the compositional process was chance-based, Music of Changes is a fully notated score that remains relatively fixed from one performance to the next.[7] As his chance-derived compositions developed in the 1950s, Cage expanded upon his aesthetic of non-intentionality by inventing a wealth of more or less indeterminate musical notations. For the Solo for Piano, he devised visually complex “graphs” (as he called them) that gave Tudor room to interpret imaginative hand drawn diagrams, navigate ambiguous and often convoluted instructions, make choices about which graphs to play and when, and in some instances, determine what to play by using secondary calculations or realizations. Some of the Solo for Piano’s graphs were entirely new; others Cage reworked from scores from the 1950s, including the Music for Piano series (1952–56), Winter Music (1957), and the graphic notation for Variations I (1958), all of which were written for Tudor.
This sheet of the score shows several of Cage’s graphs for the Solo for Piano, each identified by a letter in the alphabet [Image of Cage’s Solo for Piano]. In all, the Solo for Piano contains 84 graphs distributed across 63 pages. Cage deliberately chose this multiplicity and this maximal information to diffuse his own compositional agency and to produce a highly abstract and esoteric composition, devoid of traditionally expressive, audible patterns and repetitions. The resultant stack of pages is also a complex physical object—something like a thick deck of 11x17 cards, with Cage’s lettered graphs scattered across the page, often stretching over two and three pages. [Image of the score as a stack of sheets]. For this reason, the sheets are nearly impossible to view as a totality. Physically handling the score—shuffling it, recombining it, marveling at its many intricacies—these actions mirror, from a visual and tactile perspective, the indeterminacy of the work.
This indeterminacy is reflected outside the solo part, as well. A traditional score reads from left to right like a book. But Cage’s Concert has no full orchestral score, only separate parts—the 63 pages of the Solo for Piano, thirteen instrumental parts, and a separate part for the conductor. The instrumental parts are twelve pages in length and feature isolated note heads that indicate individual attacks, many of which are subject to extended techniques (playing with open spit valves, disconnecting tuning slides, slapping keys, singing or gurgling through an instrument, and so on). Cage left timing open and subjected his graphs to the rule of something like—play any, all, or none. Meanwhile, the conductor’s part calls for circling one’s arms in order to keep clock time for an agreed upon performance length, a role first performed by Merce Cunningham who, as seen in the photograph below, served as conductor for the Town Hall premiere on May 15, 1958. [Insert photograph of Town Hall premiere.]
In a manner that mirrors his realizations for Feldman’s graph-paper scores of the early 1950s, Tudor devised detailed realizations of the graphs in Solo for Piano for the 1958 premiere, and invented a visual notation that mixed traditional musical notation with his own customized system [link to the annotations overlay to the “Scores” tab]. In preparing his realizations, Tudor began by making sketches of individual graphs in pencil, and then copied them into polished performance scores on small card stock manuscript paper. Finally, he assembled sequences of the graphs that would conform to agreed-upon lengths of time for a given performance. The result was a relatively conventional performance score with a determined length.
In the [playback section] of Cage’s Concert, readers will find a variety of items that correspond to Tudor’s realization. First, one will find a curated selection of Cage’s graphs for the Solo for Piano—J, K, T, AY, and CE. In each of these items, we have inserted Cage’s original graph along with its instructions, and paired it with Tudor’s corresponding realization for the 1958 premiere. Red boxes, as part of Tudor’s devised notation, indicate what he is realizing and playing in each of Cage’s graphs. The sounds one hears during playback, which include various extended techniques invented by Tudor on the piano, are excerpts from the recording of the Town Hall premiere recording. By way of a simple animation, our aim was to make the esoteric notations accessible to users who may have only a limited familiarity with traditional Western musical notation. Tudor’s realization for the 1958 premiere is notable for its almost theatrical foregrounding of his pianism; with this in mind in the section below we chose those five graphs because they exemplified both Tudor’s pianistic virtuosity and Cage’s compositional and notational intricacy. In addition to these five curated graphs, we have included a flipbook in the playback tab that features the entire performance of Tudor’s first realization. In real time, the flipbook simultaneously opens the graph from Cage’s Solo for Piano and Tudor’s corresponding realization as Tudor is performing it.
Following the first performances of the Concert, Tudor produced a second and far sparser realization of the Solo for Piano in 1959.[8] [Link to Second realization flipbook.] Tudor’s process for creating this second realization was probably the most labor intensive of any of Tudor’s realizations of Cage’s scores. Tudor culled all the single attacks from his first realization and, using a second run of chance procedures, spread them out into a vast, deserted, nearly silent, and impersonal landscape of 90 minutes. He fastidiously transcribed these various attacks into a performance score in proportional notation in which each page took one minute, and each consisted of two 30-second systems of music. The result is far less virtuosic than the first realizations. Cage and Tudor used this second realization for their landmark recording Indeterminacy (1959), which featured stories read by Cage at varying speed alongside Tudor’s performance of the solo.
Two entirely different realizations of the same work—two among, no doubt many others? It is the kind of open-endedness that could easily cause philosophers to puzzle over the fundamental questions of a work’s ontology. In his landmark book, Languages of Art (1968), Nelson Goodman picks out the most indeterminate of Cage’s graphs in the Solo for Piano to question the limits of one’s compliance to the symbolic capacities of the musical score.[9] Goodman’s prescriptions for notation are exacting. His analysis of graph BB states that Cage’s instructions for measuring the distances of the five perpendiculars lack a precise unit, and are thus too ambiguous to be properly notational. But philosophers were not the only ones to debate the work’s porous and ambiguous ontology. In newspaper reviews of the Concert, one can find middlebrow critics trying their own hand at grappling with the oddity of such a work. Reviewers, not always interested in the esotericism of chance procedures, often focused on the sensory impact of Cage’s works from the 1950s, associating it with violence, wrestling matches, psychosis, child-like outbursts, or even the advent of a nihilistic age.
Far from being instances of controversial reviews, such reception of Cage’s works (among others featured in The Scores Project) could be read as a reflection of the powerful influence of Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty on both Tudor and Cage during the 1950s—an aesthetic exemplified by the non-normative, violent, and destructive carnality of life. Artaud’s influence on their collaboration was significant—it came first through Tudor, via his preparation for the American premiere of Boulez’s Second Sonata (a work that was itself inspired by Artaud), and was further developed by Cage in the dissonant landscape of Music of Changes, as well as through the multisensory disorder of the famous “happening” at Black Mountain College, Theater Piece No. 1.[10] With this in mind, we invite users to contemplate these reviews not as controversial reception history, but as part of an extended ontology of a multifaceted work that is as often legislated and decided by critics, audiences, and various compliant or disobedient collaborators, as it would be by a philosopher. In other words, the fact that people disagreed about the music’s significance is, in our view, essential to the identity of the indeterminate work; what makes it striking and successful is that Cage’s work continued to serve as a magnet for audiences, artists, dancers, and many others alike. [Link to newspaper reviews.]
Beyond the newspaper reviews, we’ve included a variety of materials pertinent to Cage’s Concert. This includes Tudor’s sketches for his realizations of each of the curated graphs, various sequences of the graphs for his versions of the first realization for performances of different lengths, many of which were designed to mesh structural clock time with dances by Merce Cunningham (in particular, the Concert was thrice performed with Cunningham’s vaudevillian work, Antic Meet from 1958–60). For these various performances, Tudor, like Cage, re-sequenced his existing realizations of individual graphs to meet the agreed upon time-length for Cunningham’s dance. [Link to Tudor’s sequencing charts in the Archive.] We’ve also included a selection of pertinent correspondence from Tudor, Cage, and M.C. Richards, Tudor’s spouse during the period, and the translator of Artaud’s writings into English [Link to Tudor’s correspondence with Richards.] Indeed, this reminds us that given the variegated audiences of Cage’s seminal works from mid-century, the Concert should be read not simply towards a pious view of what constitutes a correct performance of Cage’s work, but in the full richness of its provocative multiplicity, and in a way that crosses the boundaries of different media.
Co-Authored By:
Michael Gallope, Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota
and
Nancy Perloff, Curator, Modern & Contemporary Collections, Getty Research Institute
John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 39. ↩︎
Cage, “Indeterminacy,” from “Composition as Process,” Silence, 39; 38. For Pritchett’s account see Pritchett, 76–8. ↩︎
For a critical view of Cage’s claims to have channeled the forces of nature, see Benjamin Piekut, “Chance and Certainty: John Cage’s Politics of Nature” Cultural Critique Number 84, Spring 2013, pp. 134-16. ↩︎
See, for example, Cage’s letter to Boulez on the day following the premiere of Boulez’s Second Sonata in The Selected Letters of John Cage, ed. Laura Kuhn (Wesleyan University Press, 2016), 139–141. ↩︎
Daniel Charles, For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles (Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 2000), p. 178. ↩︎
Martin Iddon, John Cage and David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 21. ↩︎
See James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 108. ↩︎
Holzapfel; whoever else said that the second realization was necessary. ↩︎
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, 187–90. ↩︎
While preparing Boulez’s Second Sonata, Tudor taught himself French in order to read Artaud’s Theater and its Double. During the formative years of the Cage–Tudor collaboration during the 1950s, Tudor’s partner of the time, M. C. Richards., prepared a translation of Artaud’s book, which she presented at Black Mountain College in 1957. ↩︎