Making the Right Choices

Official Program Book

Includes an introductory essay by MTT, a reprint of John Cage’s famous lecture “A Composer’s Confession,” a John Cage biography, and full program notes

The Seasons (1947)

New World Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor
Stefan DeWilde, lighting designer

The Seasons, according to Cage, “is an attempt to express the traditional Indian view of the seasons as quiescence (winter), creation (spring), preservation (summer), and destruction (fall).” Each season has a movement preceded a prelude and the prelude to Winter closes the ballet, suggesting the cyclical nature of the seasons. A commission from The Ballet Society (which later became New York City Ballet), the choreography was by Merce Cunningham and the design by Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi. This was the first piece in years in which Cage wrote for pitched instruments, and he used the work as a way to experiment with new ways of handling harmony. He limited himself to a narrow range of harmonies, which lends a flatness and impersonality to the music that suggests the focus on the eternal that Cage sought at this time.

Dance 4/Orchestras (1982)

New World Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor
Reuben Blundell, Michael Linville, Daniel Stewart, conductors
Clyde Scott, Bruce Pinchbeck, J.T. Rooney, video designers (using artwork by John Cage)

In Cage’s music, sometimes only one thing would happen at a time, but mostly he piled them up on top of each other: individual sounds, layers of sounds, worlds of sounds, each one independent of the others but inhabiting the same space. In works for multiple performers, Cage would compose the different parts in complete independence from one another, their only connection being that they occupy the same performance space and time. Cage’s theme in Dance 4/Orchestras (1982) is exactly this sense of space and simultaneity. The four orchestral groups proceed completely independently of one another, each having its own conductor.

Credo in Us (1942)

Alex Wadner, Michael Truesdell, percussion
Marnie Hauschildt, piano

Credo in Us marks both the end of Cage’s energetic percussion period and the beginning of his work with Merce Cunningham. The music was written to accompany a duet choreographed by Cunningham and Jean Erdman. Cunningham archivist David Vaughn explains that the dance was “a satire on contemporary American mores.” In this context, the use of radio and phonograph as instruments was perhaps a satirical reference of Cage’s own to American popular culture.

The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942)

Jessye Norman, soprano
Michael Tilson Thomas, piano

In this unusual song with piano accompaniment, the writing is spare, monochromatic, understated. The text is taken from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and is sung on only three pitches. The piano accompaniment is surprising and inventive: the pianist slaps and raps on the closed keyboard lid. Here, percussion music is brought down to the most intimate scale, barely audible.

She is Asleep (1943)

Part I: Quartet for Twelve Tom-Toms
Marc Damoulakis, Jay Ganser, Erick Wood, Christopher Riggs, tom-toms

Part II: Duet for Voice and Prepared Piano
Joan La Barbara, vocalist
Marc-André Hamelin, prepared piano

She is Asleep (1943) is part of a large, unfinished suite of pieces. The quartet, while rhythmically similar to Credo in Us, could not be more different in mood and effect. Instead of a noisy palette of muted piano, gongs, cans, buzzers and radio, She is Asleep is a monochrome, nothing but tom-toms. Where Credo comes on like gangbusters, She is Asleep only momentarily gets above mezzo-forte.

Sixteen Dances (1950-51)

No. 4: Interlude
No. 12: Interlude
No. 9: The Odious
No. 10: Interlude
No. 8: Interlude
Joshua Gersen, conductor
Henrik Heide, flute; Dylan Girard, trumpet; Derek Powell, violin; Grace An, cello
Samuel Budish, Alex Wadner, Michael Truesdell, Rajesh Prasad, percussion
Marnie Hauschildt, piano
Performed with a Merce Cunningham MinEvent
Dancers from New World School of the Arts:
Leon Cobb, Katelynn Draper, Angela Fegers, Christine Flores, Claudia Lezcano
Melanie Martel, Marcus McCray, Annellyse Monroe, Johan Rivera
Patricia Lent, choreographic stager
Joe Levasseur, lighting designer
K. Blair Brown, costume designer

After 1948, after “A Composer’s Confessions,” Cage experimented with various systematic ways of composing in an effort to “forget himself,” to get beyond the need to project his personality through his music. In Sixteen Dances (1950-51), Cage created a large chart of musical events—single notes, chords, gestures—and then made moves on the chart to string these events together into musical sequences. As with The Seasons, the dance was by Cunningham and again took an Indian theme: the nine rasas or “permanent emotions” of Hindu aesthetics: anger, sorrow, the odious, fear, humor, the heroic, the wondrous, the erotic and tranquility, the common tendency of the other eight. Some of the music was clearly expressive of one or the other of the emotions, but some movements come from a place that is enigmatic and imperturbable, beyond any usual sense of expressivity.

Water Walk (1959)

Anthony Parce, performer
Patricia Birch, director

While in Italy, Cage appeared on a television quiz show, Lascia o raddoppia (“Double or Nothing”), the Italian version of The $64,000 Question. It required Cage to answer a series of increasingly difficult questions on a subject of his choosing (in his case, mushrooms, about which he had become quite an expert). Cage was asked to perform some of his music for the show and he composed Water Walk (1959) especially for this purpose. Also composed using the Fontana Mix score, the piece was deliberately humorous and theatrical, tailor-made for television. It called for a wild array of props and actions, all tied together by the theme of water in its various states: solid (ice), liquid, gas (steam). It opens by putting a mechanical fish on the strings of the piano and ends with releasing the steam valve of a pressure cooker; in between, among other things, the performer prepares and drinks a Campari and soda. The score includes the instruction that, since the performance makes quite a mess on the floor, “an assistant should be provided who mops up.” Cage had a blast with this performance and yet, at the same time, it was controlled chaos. The score includes a map of how the props should be laid out on stage and the timings of all the actions are down to the exact second. It actually is quite a challenge to perform. With this work Cage became a choreographer himself, dancing to his own music, smiling all the while.

The Perilous Night (1944)

Marc-André Hamelin, prepared piano

In The Perilous Night (1943-44), Cage brought together everything he had discovered about the prepared piano and showed it off in a suite of six brief movements. We encounter a wealth of musical options: there are minimal monochromes, delicately shifting lines of color, a moto perpetuo with complex rhythms created by the interplay of timbres and an obsessive and propulsive finale. The whole work has a darkness about it, an underlying sense of unease and violence. Cage himself described the piece as being about “the loneliness and terror that comes to one when love becomes unhappy.”

Cheap Imitation (1969)

I (orchestral version)
II (piano solo version performed by John Cage)
III (orchestral version)
Performed with Merce Cunningham’s Second Hand and Enter
Brandon Collwes, dancer
Andrea Weber, dancer
Raushan Mitchell, choreographic stager
Joe Levasseur, lighting designer (based on the design by Christine Shallenberg)
Adam Larsen, video designer (using archival recordings by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company)
Jasper Johns, costume designer

Cheap Imitation (1969) was the first work that Cage composed via transformation of other music. As the story goes, it was the result of circumstances, an expedient solution to an annoying problem. It all started in 1947 with Merce Cunningham’s desire to use the first part of Erik Satie’s dramatic masterwork Socrate as the music for a solo dance. Socrate is scored for full orchestra and voices, resources well beyond Cunningham’s means at that time. Cage’s solution was to make a transcription of Socrate for two pianos, and it was this transcription that served as the score for Cunningham’s solo Idyllic Song. In 1968, Cage went on to complete his transcription of the other two movements of Socrate and encouraged Cunningham to extend his dance, as well, which he did. However, Cage had never received permission from Satie’s publisher to make the transcription. In 1947, Cage and Cunningham were relatively unknown, and their small performance was able to fly under the radar of publishers; by 1970 they were very famous artists, and so their plan was permanently grounded. The publisher refused to allow the transcription, and so Cage and Cunningham were faced with the problem of a scheduled dance premiere with no music that could be legally performed.

Cage’s inventive solution was to compose a new piece that exactly matched the phrase structure of Satie’s music and hence of Cunningham’s dance. His technique was a simple one: he took only the vocal line of Socrate (or occasionally the prominent orchestral melody) and systematically transposed it up or down and into different modes. The result is a work that has the phrasing, rhythms and even some of the general contours of Satie’s music, but that is otherwise completely different. This solved Cage’s copyright problem, and he named the work Cheap Imitation; Cunningham responded by calling his new dance Second Hand. Cunningham made a duet for the second movement and a larger ensemble piece for the closing movement.

His delight in the result of his clever evasion of intellectual property law led him to transcribe it for orchestra in 1972. The orchestra plays the same unadorned solo line of the piano piece, with each phrase orchestrated using chance operations. The color of the line changes constantly, as does the number of instruments playing in any phrase, so at some times the full orchestra plays and at others, Cheap Imitation returns to being a solo.

Living Room Music (1940)

To Begin
Story
Melody
End
Jay Ganser, Rajesh Prasad, Christopher Riggs, Erick Wood, percussion
Patricia Birch, director

The picture Cage paints of himself in the 1930s is of a cocky, self-assured young man (on modern painting and music: “I decided that if others could make such things, I could too”), one interested in asking, about everything: “Why not?” Why not make music entirely from sounds considered to be unmusical noise? This idea starts modestly, with works like his Living Room Music (1940), designed to be performed by amateur musicians on whatever “household objects or architectural elements” are available. Living Room Music is in four brief parts, including a rhythmic reading of the opening line of a children’s book by Gertrude Stein and a melody (played on any pitched instrument) with percussion accompaniment.

Festival Photo Gallery

Conceived for stage and video by Michael Tilson Thomas

Presented by the New World Symphony and the Knight Foundation

Program notes by James Pritchett

The New World Symphony expresses its deep gratitude to the John Cage Trust; the Merce Cunningham Trust; and New World School of the Arts for their kind cooperation and support in the organization of this festival.