Sabado 16 de febrero, 22h. noche PULSION A/V. en LA INVISIBLE. Conferencia/Performance sobre JOHN CAGE. Sesión a cargo de Een Pianist? Dj's improvisados. http://www.myspace.com/eenpianist
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Een_Pianist/
John Cage: 'Artist of the Arbitrary' An iconoclastic maverick who upturned the musical world with the simplest ideas: David Nicholls surveys Cage's impact on the 100th anniversary of the composer's birth. In his obituary of John Cage, published under the title 'Artist of the Arbitrary' inThe Sunday Times on 16 August 1992, the critic Paul Driver ventured to proclaim: 'I doubt if we will go on listening to more than a handful of Cage's hundreds of works.' Two decades on, at the time of Cage's centenary, it would seem that Driver's remarks were -- to say the least -- somewhat premature, as might in part be surmised from the 2004 opinion of another Sunday Times critic, Mark Edwards: 'Not only is Cage's music not being forgotten, its influence is clearly spreading.' Evidence for Edwards's supposition is abundant: apart from tonight's Prom, there have been numerous celebrations of Cage's 100th birthday. For example, already this year international conferences and colloquia have taken place in Berlin, Paris and the Polish city of Lublin (which has rather gamely -- and bravely -- designated 2012 'John Cage Year'); in November, these events will be succeeded by others in York and Evanston, Illinois (the latter, not coincidentally, being home to one of the repositories of Cage's voluminous estate; other parts of it reside at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Bard College, New York; and the New York Public Library). In almost every case, these academic meetings will have been accompanied by performances, between them representing the full gamut of Cage's compositional achievements. At the time of Cage's death, he was represented by only one biographical study, David Revill's The Roaring Silence: John Cage -- A Life; now there are three, with the most recent having been penned by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Kenneth Silverman. In addition, there have been several studies of Cage's visual art (including Kathan Brown's John Cage -- Visual Art: To Sober and Quiet the Mind), editions of Cage's otherwise uncollected writings and conversations and several volumes of essays, including The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. A major selection of his letters is at the planning stage, as are further collections of essays; his first and most famous book, Silence, was issued in 2011 in a special 50th-anniversary edition, and the number of doctoral theses on Cage's work has blossomed -- not just in the English-speaking world but also elsewhere, including France and Norway. On the recording front, meanwhile, Mode Records's Cage Edition has reached volume 45, while the MDG label -- not to be outdone -- has so far issued 15 CDs of Cage's works, including the complete piano music performed by Steffen Schleiermacher. Notwithstanding such merely statistical proof of Cage's continuing importance, a greater legacy exists in the degree to which his compositional and other innovations have become an integral part of the contemporary musical fabric. Percussion ensembles -- which barely existed before Cage championed them from the late 1930s on -- have become a staple in our conservatories and colleges. The 'prepared' piano -- developed by Cage around the same time from the earlier experiments of his teacher Henry Cowell -- is a common resource for today's composers. Similarly, the extended instrumental techniques -- whether for piano, voice, violin or other instruments -- pioneered by Cage are taken for granted by present-day performers, while Cage's many collaborators -- from Irvine Arditti, through Cathy Berberian, Merce Cunningham and Jasper Johns, to Robert Rauschenberg and David Tudor -- are rightly hailed as internationally significant leaders in the arts. Lest, however, this centennial view appears merely to be a work of hagiography, it is important to highlight a few negatives. Cage continues, in many more conservative quarters, to be ridiculed, being routinely referred to as (at best) a comedian or (at worst) a charlatan: in 1998, for instance, the philosopher Stan Godlovitch likened Cage's 'silent' work, 4'33', to a nonexistent doughnut, served in an empty folded napkin with fresh coffee. Cage's occasional clashes with musical institutions (most infamously the New York Philharmonic, who in 1964 laughed, talked among themselves, played inappropriate material and destroyed electronic equipment during performances of Atlas eclipticalis) have continued to some extent right through to the present day. Many uninformed listeners assume that, in his compositional use of chance operations, Cage gave his performers permission to do anything they liked; in fact, nothing could be further from the truth for, as the composer himself once pithily put it, 'Permission granted. But not to do whatever you want.' Perhaps most sadly of all, given Cage's almost lifelong struggle to make a living from his work, his exquisite prints and watercolours (mostly produced in the last 15 years of his life) now sell for very large sums, almost exclusively to the benefit of art dealers. Ultimately, however, Cage has won through -- not as a result of artistic arrogance, or pushiness, or having friends in high places (though he did), but rather through accepting the circumstances in which he found himself and (quite often, perhaps reflecting the spiritual side of his character, which by no means began with his interests in Zen Buddhism) choosing to turn the other cheek. In short, as I have written elsewhere (paraphrasing Cage's own view of one of his musical heroes, Erik Satie), it's not a question of Cage's relevance. He's indispensable. Introduction & Text by: David Nicholls