cartwright/oppenheim
la faute de la musique: songs of john cage
ARTIST PERSPECTIVES
cartwright/oppenheim
la faute de la musique: songs
of john cage
ARTIST PERSPECTIVES
What kinds of Cages had
we gotten ourselves into?
“Et tout cela m’est advenu par la faute de la musique,”
wrote Erik Satie. (Why did all that stuff happen? Music is the culprit.) In
La Faute de la Musique, Cage’s music, in particular, was the culprit.
As improvisers, we--like other jazz musicians before us--naturally found his
idea of “indeterminacy” (leaving certain compositional features
to choices borne of the moment) attractive. Cage himself wasn’t a big
jazz fan, but why should we mind? His compositions are flexible enough to accommodate
us. To say that Cage’s work permits difference is misleading; it invites
it. La Faute de la Musique is our response to the invitation.
Cage wrote hundreds of open (indeterminate) forms, using the many and varied
compositional tools in his unique kit. Each structure asks something slightly
different of the performer; this is what we found so appealing. The pieces we
chose (mainly from his Song Books [1970]) give the performer tons of creative
freedom, represent lots of different styles and techniques, and allow for adaptations
of all sorts. Cage wrote the songs for solo voice, but with “General Directions”
stating that everything may be performed “with or without other indeterminate
music,” “in any order and any superimposition,” by “one
or more singers.” I followed his general (generous) guidelines in arranging
the songs for jazz quintet, but decided to include Cameron, Bill, James, and
Richard as singers in some instances. (They sing with their instruments, don’t
they?) Cage was an inventor of musical notation par excellence, and the Song
Books are chock-full of these inventions. He developed a huge repertoire of
new graphic forms and found some very original ways to reform traditional symbols
to suit his own aesthetic purposes. These are all wonderful to look at, and
we found them inspiring to play with.
La Faute de la Musique opens with one of his best-known
and most beloved works: the "Aria" for solo voice (1958). The composer
asks the singer to make up a set of ten “voices” to correspond with
his color palette (the score is gorgeous to look at). Each voice/color has an
identifiable timbre, a specific melodic idiom, a particular style. On La Faute
de la Musique, I used real characters for some of the voices (Mae West, Jerry
Lewis, Marilyn Monroe) and made up others. Each phrase is a color and a contour
in a blank field (the lines include snippets of text from several languages),
with pitch represented vertically and time horizontally. Keep in mind that when
Cage says “time” he means real time, so stopwatches are de rigueur
(we had five of them in the studio on January 12, 2000). Oddly, Cage complained
about the “tyranny of the beat” in jazz. Who says that the clock
is less tyrannical? Cameron and I performed the “Aria” as a duet;
I sang while he improvised freely, adding lots of extra-rich “Brown”
to the mix. Did I mention that we had fun with this?
Like the “Aria,” “Solo #43” (“la
faute de la musique”) asks the performer to work with a variety of styles,
but takes her/him one step closer to total freedom. Pitch, contour, and melodic
rhythm are left entirely up to the improviser. The text is that single phrase,
quoted from Eric Satie: “Et tout cela m’est advenu par la faute
de la musique.” The score is four pages, each containing a complete statement
of this text, printed using a variety of fonts, sizes, and styles of lettering.
The performer creates correspondences between font style and musical style.
In recording the piece with the quintet, I asked the instrumentalists to “sing”
the words with their instruments, using the sound of the phrase (its intonation
and rhythmic patterns, etc.) to suggest melodic content, rhythmic patterns,
and phrase structure in their improvisations. (Remember how John Coltrane did
this so brilliantly in his "Psalm" in Part IV of A Love Supreme? [Coltrane
1964, see Porter 1998:231-249]). Each instrumentalist came up with his own very
personal and specific interpretations. Cameron Brown's reading on the bass,
for example, was highly melismatic, while Richard Oppenheim's, on the saxophone,
was generally more syllabic. We performed the piece as a canon at 17 seconds,
the length of the first page of score. We liked the interesting tangle of textures
that this created.
“Apartment House” is one
of Cage’s “circuses.” He reveled in unexpected musical coincidences,
and this is a prime example. Given a repertoire and a program length, each performer
puts together his own set, deciding where each piece fits in the program. The
unusual thing is that nobody divulges the contents or timing of his set. In
performance, everybody plays together, but without regard to what anybody else
is doing. Not so different from what you’d expect to hear wandering the
corridors of Manhattan Plaza, the artist’s complex where Richard and I
live among hundreds of other musicians. Cage’s composition calls for pieces
that might have been heard in an apartment house in 1776. Thinking of the aesthetic
resonance with Duke Ellington’s “Harlem Air Shaft,” we chose
to focus on the 1940s.
“Solo #17” is a bird of another feather.
The text is drawn from entries in Henry David Thoreau's journals: randomly combined
excerpts from his comments about the "telegraph harp." This piece
is completely different from the "Aria" and “Solo #43”
(among others), which ask the performer to create and juxtapose several different
styles. “Telegraph harp" demands the opposite: that one work with
a single sound ideal in mind, a sonority that "resembles singing wires,
not strident, but whirring (Aeolian harp, musical saw)." The piece exists
in a very specific soundscape, a little world unto itself. Our ensemble found
this notion immensely intriguing. But who has actually heard a telegraph harp?
We all found our own ways of expressing it. It’s something like a unicorn:
one can imagine it very well, but who has seen one?
“Solo #67,”“Solo #90,” and “Solo
#72” (“Mensa, Osaka”; “coloratura” songs, as Cage
called them) are yet another breed. The composer represented melodies as note-heads
in a tube-like two-line staff; staff lines indicate upper and lower extremes
of the performer's range. The top line is a kind of ceiling; the bottom, a floor.
Only register extremes are used in the piece, the melodies appearing as note-heads
that cling to and cluster around top and bottom lines. Cage asks for pitches
in the upper register to be performed in an exaggerated staccato manner, the
lower register to sound like slurred "grunts." The melodies make frequent
quick leaps from one domain to the other. In La Faute de la Musique, we did
the “coloratura” pieces as a collage, with three songs performed
simultaneously. To me, the result is like a field of strange wildflowers, little
organisms with roots sharing the same grunting soil, their tiny heads sprouting
up in different colors.
The notation for “Solo #12” (“mud luscious”)
is a tad more conventional: a series of note-heads of various sizes are arranged
on five-line staves, along a horizontal time-axis. The performer is free to
choose an appropriate clef; none is indicated. Some pitches are not centered
on a given line or space (some large notes take up both a line and its adjoining
space). In these cases, the performer is asked to make microtonal alterations.
The pitches are accompanied by swatches of text: sounds and phrases in English,
French, German, and Sanskrit. Above each note is a marking that looks like a
conventional slur or tie, but is used in a unique way. The markings are drawn
either slightly to the left of, directly above, or slightly to the right of
the note, indicating that the given pitches are to behave as target notes in
freely-improvised phrases that use them as either the starting point, central
tone, or ending pitch of the phrase. This approach to melodic invention resonates
with the idea of “guide tones” in jazz pedagogy: the improviser
locates structural pitches in a given progression and develops improvisations
that move around and through them in various ways. To create an ebb and flow
of energy within the piece, Cage includes dynamic markings (espressivo, crescendo,
diminuendo) below the note-heads.
My adaptation for jazz quintet presents the piece in a modified homophonic texture.
As with “Solo #43” and other pieces, I saw that instrumentalists
could use the text snippets as prosodic and rhythmic guides, as well as frames
for timbral and emotional coloration. For a singer who doesn’t have perfect
pitch (I don’t), the pitch demands of this piece were somewhat daunting
at first, particularly in a group context where vocal lines are surrounded by
swirling atonal or polytonal melodies. The solution I found was to arrange for
the voice to key off of a melodic drone (as one would do in India). In jazz,
it’s often the bass (sometimes piano) that is asked to perform drone duties,
where required. As an alternative (the bass holds up the world most of the time),
I asked Bill Goodwin to improvise a continuous free-rhythmic accompaniment on
a tiny pentatonic “bell harp” (see Thomas Mann’s cover art
for La Faute de la Musique). This bitty harp functioned a little like a tanpura
in Indian classical music, providing a constant pitch reference. Bill Goodwin
likened his role in our arrangement of “mud luscious” to a character
in Charles Schultz’s comic strip, “Peanuts,” calling it “a
Schroeder state of mind.”
La Faute de la Musique closes with “Solo #27”
(“lusty growth”). In this final piece, we experience Cage’s
beloved silence. In each phrase, a conventionally notated melody is surrounded
by a prescribed number of beats of silence. Richard Oppenheim and I performed
it as a duet: he improvised on imagined chord changes as I sang the tune. We
each breathed in the silent interludes. This created a density around the melody
(a “lusty growth,” if you will) that made the intervening silences
all the more piquant. The pregnant silences bring an air of expectancy, and
we decided to close with it.
PRESS KIT:
Cage & Ferlinghetti recordings. READ MORE about the Cage and Ferlinghetti
twin release. LISTEN
to the Cage and Ferlinghetti
recordings. View this document in PDF
format. BUY the CDs.
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