Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[John Hails <>]

Hi

The Cage connection comes because (according to Grimshaw in Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young) Cage seems to have instigated the composition of Poem. He wanted to perform Vision with Tudor in New York, but it is for such a large ensemble that he felt he couldn't. Young wrote the text score of Poem and sent it on to them after he'd given the world premiere in UCLA.

'Rather than indicating a specific duration for the piece, Young provided guidelines for determining, through chance operations based on figures from a random-digit book, the length of time the piece would occupy within the time span available for the performance... with the resultant event-density to be kept within the practical limits of whatever number of people would be available. Young also provided a chart for determining the fundamental increment of time to use in the chance operations related to the entrance and exit of each sound event' (p.67) which means that:

• if the performance lasts between 10" and 20', the unit of measurement is 1/4 of a second;
• if the performance lasts between 20' and 2 hrs, the unit of measurement is 1/2 of a second;
• if the performance lasts between 2 hrs and 12 hrs, the unit of measurement is 1 second.

Cage and Tudor gave the NY premiere on April 11 1960 at the Living Theatre using 'benches pulled across a tile floor. "The sound was magnificent," Cage reported. "The whole building was put into vibration"' (p.68). Grimshaw lists the performers of the piece within the first four years of its release into the world as including Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Phil Corner, Dick Higgins, Walter de Maria, Robert Morris, Larry Poons, Alison Knowles, Marian Zazeela, Merce Cunningham, and Yvonne Rainer, He also notes that Poem shaped the way that audiences received his work from then on and meant that rather than the Trio for Strings being received as a serial work, it was received as a conceptual work.

When he wrote Poem, Fluxus didn't really exist yet and it came to be with him as a part of it in around 1961. It really does seem that it is a real pivotal work (along with Vision) that catapulted Young away from the serial conception of composition towards the conceptual not just in the reception of his music but in the conceptualisation itself of how to compose and what music was. Maybe this would have happened without the encouragement of Cage but it is an interesting moment where the working lives of the two intersected.

Grimshaw, J. 2011. Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Young and Grimshaw fell out during the writing of the book and Young utterly rejects the conclusions that are drawn in its pages (see http://drawastraightlineandfollowit.com/ for more but avoid the strange links that appear to have been inserted by spambots), and while many devout Young acolytes would argue that you should avoid the book, it provides the only real narrative of Young's music. If you're interested in his music, read it alongside Sound and Light: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela (Duckworth, W. and Fleming, R. eds. 2012. Sound and Light: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press) and (of course) listen to as much of it as you can. You will struggle to find it through conventional pathways because Young retains such a tight grip on official dissemination of his music so you will either have to travel to his loft in NYC to experience his music live, or take to the sonic underground of the internet. I can suggest that ubu.com is a good place to start.

Best wishes and I really should get back to my actual work now. Sad.

J 

On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 4:47 PM Andre Chaudron <> wrote:

Hi Dionysis and others,

Michael Nyman mentions the 'Poem for Chairs.....' in his book Experimental Music on page 82-83 and also gives a description of it. 

Warm regards,

André Chaudron

Op di 10 nov. 2020 14:51 schreef Dionysis Boukouvalas <>:

This is not Cage related, but I don't know where else to ask, and surely people here will know the answer, so here you have it!

Is there a (fluxus) piece asking from the performer to slowly and steadily drag a chair on the floor, as to create a continuous sound?

Looks like La Monte Young, but I could not find it.

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