Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Lê Quan Ninh <>]

Hello silencers,

I am proud to announce that the association Ryoanji for which I work has just 
created its own label and published the CD of Variations VII recorded at the 
festival Le Bruit de la Musique last August in a village in central France.

We will soon be ready for the distribution of the physical disc and the audio 
files but here is already a page with an extract : 
https://soundcloud.com/user-989952031/john-cage-variations-vii-excerpt

The first article about the record has just been published:
https://auralaggravation.com/2021/06/01/john-cage-variations-vii/

Here are the liner notes I wrote:

Variations VII was created by John Cage to be performed at a special event, 9 
Evenings, Theatre & Engineering, held from 13th to 23rd October 1966 in New 
York and in which a team of engineers, led by Billy Klüver, worked with ten 
artists from the American “avant-garde”, with the aim of enabling them to 
extend their exploration of the possibilities of electronics in their own 
art. Here is how John Cage described this piece in the programme for the 
event:

« It is a piece of music, Variations VII, indeterminate in form and detail, 
making use of the sound system which has been devised collectively for this 
festival, further making use of modulation means organized by David Tudor, 
using as sound sources only those sounds which are in the air at the moment 
of performance, picked up via the communication bands, telephone lines, 
microphones together with, instead of musical instruments, a variety of 
household appliances, and frequency generators. »

Ten telephone lines connected to the sounds of ten different locations in New 
York City. History has taught us that one of the first uses of the telephone 
at the end of the 19th century was, besides transporting voices, the live 
re-transmission of concert performances of opera. A few privileged listeners 
could therefore listen to the music in their own homes. Several decades 
later, John Cage reversed this, so to speak, by inviting the sounds of 
several distant environments into the concert venue!

This recording of Variations VII by John Cage was made in public on 15th 
August 2020 as part of the 8th edition of Le Bruit de la Musique festival at 
Domeyrot (Creuse). 6 artists were present, supported by a sound engineer, and 
17 others participated remotely.

John Cage did not really write a score for Variations VII. We therefore had 
to rely on the one hand, on precious documents from the time kindly sent to 
us by Julie Martin, and on the other, on our experience of performing other 
works by the composer.

The 6 participants present decided to use Andrew Culver’s IC and TIC 
programmes, available online, which allowed them to perform chance operations 
similar to those used by John Cage for the composition of all his musical, 
literary and pictural works from 1951 onwards.

There is no space here to enumerate all the questions that were put to these 
programmes for this performance, but the answers given included the total 
length of the piece, its division into sections for each participant, the 
order of the alternation between sound and silence, the families of objects 
and means used for each of these sec- tions and even, when radios were used, 
their frequency range, etc.

Some used optical sensors which, when the audience moved, switched on various 
electrical devices. Moreover, the 6 artists had their own computer through 
which each received the audio of some of the online participants via 
videoconferencing software, each of these participants having received a time 
bracket score resulting from the same procedure, allowing them to turn the 
micro of their computer or smartphone on or off.

Although the context was very different from that of the 1966 evenings, we 
opted for simplicity by reproducing the same staging, that is, two long 
parallel tables on which all the equipment was placed, all subtly lit by 
Sébastien Daubord. The 6 stereo sources were mixed by Laurent Sassi and 
distributed over 6 loudspeakers arranged all around the audience.

The recording is presented in extenso with no editing, combining the action 
of the 6 live participants, the 17 remote participants and with the presence 
of the audience revealed by their remarks and comments and by their 
involuntary interaction with the optical sensors.

Ninh

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Lê Quan Ninh
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