Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Matt Rogalsky <>]

I would love to find an affordable copy of Shigeko Kubota's book of photographs from Reunion (with accompanying recording excerpt of the performance, on vinyl). Anybody have a spare?

An aside:

I participated last year in a re-visitation of the first Reunion performance, in the theatre at Ryerson in Toronto where it was originally done, and including some of the original cast. From my perspective, it was entertaining and educational. As part of Toronto's "Nuit Blanche", the event ran from 7pm to 7am, with chess games by masters and amateurs all night. The attitude of the thousands of audience members who came and went during the evening was not particularly conducive to real enjoyment of the total event, either as performer or audience -- there was a lot of hooting and hollering and heckling -- but it was interesting nonetheless, and it was a pleasure to have the chance to perform alongside David Behrman and Gordon Mumma. This version used a reconstruction of Lowell Cross's chessboard made by Rob Cruickshank, and live performances in rotation by Behrman, Mumma, John DS Adams, Malcolm Goldstein, and myself.

Here's a bit of video I posted, of Behrman and Mumma and the others preparing for the night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NnpMQVXfKs

There are other Youtube clips you can find from the performance itself.

Event promo page:

http://2010.scotiabanknuitblanche.ca/exhibition.aspx?zone=B&mapID=8

MR

On 2011-10-26, at 11:49 AM, Lowell Cross wrote:

Perhaps this connects somehow with Reunion (also 1968), although in that collaborative performance the game players' actions were not amplified.

There were 8 channels of audio (amplifiers and loudspeakers) at Reunion. The loudspeakers surrounded the audience.  The actions of the 2 chess players (Cage and the Duchamps) were those of making the moves in a chess game on an electronic chessboard of my design and construction, the 8 outputs of which were individually directed to the 8 channels of audio amplification.  The chessboard has 16 inputs (it still exists at the John Cage Trust); at the first performance of Reunion, 4 collaborating composers each provided 4 inputs to the chessboard -- from their own compositions of electronic music.  The composers were Behrman, Mumma, Tudor, and Cross.  The moves on the chessboard selected audio signals from among the 16 inputs and directed those signals to the 8 individual outputs.  

The chessboard could be described as a 16 input / 8 output matrix mixer.  See LC, "Reunion: John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Electronic Music and Chess," Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 9, pp. 35-42 (1999).