Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Mark Bobak <>]

Dear Silence List,

We’re developing a unique interpretation of Cage’s Song Books: a cumulative performable archive that comprises multiple realizations of all ninety pieces, recorded by different performers in various contexts, infinitely combinable via chance operations.  Vir2Ual Cage will function primarily as a creative project that generates renditions of Song Books, but also as a musicological resource that offers a searchable archive of performances; a repository of material that can augment live performances; and a means of creating “playlists” of recorded performances.

As many readers know, Song Books is a remarkably diverse collection.  Some of its pieces—all titled “solo for voice,” though many don’t necessarily involve vocalization—are quite easy to realize, while others require extensive preparation.  Many solos consist not of musical scores but directions for performing various actions—preparing food, eating, drinking, writing—or for constructing pieces based on what appear to be random arrangements of words or numbers.  Other solos call for producing feedback, projecting slides, playing a recording of a forest fire, typing a sentence thirty-eight times on a highly amplified typewriter, or simply entering and leaving the stage.  Thus Song Books is approachable by not only musicians but also actors, dancers, animators, visual artists, and others; in fact, it includes pieces that almost anyone can realize.

To hear/see a particular performance in Vir2Ual Cage, a listener/viewer—who in a sense becomes a director/performer—will select a duration and possibly a few other parameters, then instantiate a computer program that will generate a distinct rendition streaming on the web.  In order to assemble recordings from which to draw, we invite you to contribute one or more renditions of one or more solos to the archive, which we hope will expand perpetually.  We anticipate this project will premiere in late 2012, near the 42nd anniversary of Song Books’ composition, and thereafter continue indefinitely.

Given the nature of Song Books, we expect an extraordinary range of contributions with respect to interpretation and medium.  We also expect many questions to arise.  We’ve posted a FAQ at www.vir2ualcage.org, a site that contains much more information about Song Books and our work.  We invite you to visit us online and, if you’re so inclined, participate in this project.

Vir2Ually,

Jacqueline Bobak

Mark Bobak

Paul Berkolds

William Brooks