Tag: john cage

In the Niebelungenlied, the dragon Fafnir lived in Drachenfels, a mountain towering above the Rhine. Siegfried killed him and became invulnerable by bathing in his blood. The poems of Byron and travelogues of Schlegel turned the Burg Drachenfels and other ruins of medieval castles along the peaks of the Rhine Gorge into Romantic tourist destinations, from which western culture has not recovered. Since 1883 a railway has taken tourists to the Burg Drachenfels, which once protected Cologne from southern invasion. Halfway up is the Niebelungenhalle, a shrine to Richard Wagner filled with Hermann Hendrich’s paintings of the Ring Cycle.

At the base of the railway, in the town of Königswinter, from the end of WWII until the rise of cellphone cameras, Richard Kern ran his family’s Schnellfotografie studio, taking instant souvenir photos for tourists. His 90th birthday last fall was the occasion for all of Germany to remember their childhood visits to Königswinter, when they sat on the donkey, and behind the cardboard plane.

Thanks to Jeremy Millar on Bluesky for noting the 72nd anniversary of the first public performance of John Cage’s 4’33”. David Tudor premiered the groundbreaking work in Woodstock, N.Y. on August 29th, 1952.

I recently performed it myself a couple of weeks ago, using the 4’33” app, and I posted the recording to johncage.org. It’s the first recording of the piece in Greenland, and you can listen to it here.

[update: yeah, it should be Rømer Fjord, my bad]

Actually, it’s the second recording posted from Greenland; I had made and uploaded the first recording a few minutes earlier. I was on a boat in a fjord when the wind picked up, and some tarps began clacking and thrumming in an unusual way. Rather than just take an audio snapshot, I decided to make a 4’33” recording.

The way the app works, I uploaded it without listening to it first. Playing it back, I noticed a difference, inevitable, between the stereo experience of by ears listening to the original performance, and my phone mic’s recording. But more than that, I also felt like it sounded less like an experience of opening to the sonic world around you, and more of a fixation on an unusual found sound, which, admittedly, it was.

So I set off to find a quieter [sic] place to perform Cage’s silent piece. The result, mostly wind and waves, with a few inescapable lines snapping against masts in the wind, is the one linked above. So a big 4’33” Day shoutout to John Cage, who knew that silence sounds different everywhere.

John Cage works index: 4’33” [johncage.org]
4’33” app for iPhone [johncage.org]

Clearly I need to get on instagram more frequently, because then it might not take Yoshi Hill to point me to Geoff Snack’s 5-day-old post about scoring this 4’33” chair from Merce Cunningham’s studio. On the other hand, it’s nice when someone sees some wack thing like this and is like, you know who’d get a kick out of this, and thinks of you.

Previously, very much related: Scoring John Cage’s Table

A screenshot of Columbia linguist John McWhorter’s latest NYT newsletter was posted to social media by Bo Austin:

Last Thursday [18 Apr 2024], in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is “4’33”,” which directs us to listen in silence to the surrounding noise for exactly that period of time.
I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon, because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway, but infuriated chanting from protestors outside the building…

The protestors are from the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, and they are calling for Columbia to divest and disassociate from Israel and to stop the genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. The protest began alongside university president Minouche Shafik’s testimony at the US House of Representatives last week. It has intensified and spread to other colleges after Shafik called NYPD into campus to arrest student protestors for the first time since 1968.

The idea that Cage meant 4’33” to be an ersatz reflection on bird calls and room tone is misguided at best. In 1999 art historian Jonathan D. Katz wrote of 4’33” that it, “inaugurated a process of reading that moved the listener, potentially, from unselfconscious complicity with dominant forms of expression…toward a degree of self-consciousness about one’s role as a listener or a maker of meaning.”

Which would be a helluva thing for these kids to learn in their humanities class anyway, including right now. If experiencing performances of 4’33” in the midst of protest, or resistance, or military attack could make a difference of even a day in this horror, then I’d say everyone download the John Cage Trust’s 4’33” app, and start recording.

But McWhorter’s entire newsletter turns out to be a sonic justification of police violence against the protestors. He repeatedly cites the sounds of the student encampment and of sympathizers on the street with destroying the peace, the kind of peace that requires no response. No ruckus, no police.

While an audience question that is more of a comment is a curse, a lecture that’s more of a performance is a blessing. Mindy Seu writes in Outland about artists who work in the medium of the lecture.

Lecture-as-performance calls assumptions of authority and credibility into question, Seu argues. It also opens the process and tools of lecture—such as podiums, Powerpoint, and Zoom grids—for critical examination or reworking.

One intriguing example Seu cites is Gordon Hall’s 2014 work, Read me that part a-gain, where I disin-herit everybody. Through the course of talking, Hall registers the implications of power, precarity, tension, and chill as he engages an array of prop-, screen- and podium-like objects.

Seu’s article was a reminder to look again for one of the most spectacular artist lecture/performance works, Suzanne Bocanegra’s Honor, which took place at The Met in February 2022. And wow, finally, it is on YouTube. Honor, as The Met describes it, was “a stage work that masqueraded as an artist lecture about one of The Met’s most important 16th-century tapestries.” If the theatrical link wasn’t strong enough, Bocanegra had actress Lili Taylor present the lecture while she, the artist, sat at a table on the edge of the stage, apparently feeding Taylor her text.

Which, in turn, makes me think way back to an artist talk I attended at the New School, by Maurizio Cattelan. Except, at the end of the lecture, the speaker revealed that he was not actually Cattelan, but a friend of the artist named Massimiliano Gioni, who was then an editor for Flash Art. Carol Vogel wrote about it months later, but I have not yet found this recording online.

Claire Bishop wrote about the lecture-performance as a form and namechecked some more classics of the genre, including Andrea Fraser and John Cage, in her review of Honor for Artforum’s Best of 2022 roundup in December.

Performing Lectures, by Mindy Seu [outland.art]
Best of 2022 | Claire Bishop on Suzanne Bocanegra’s Honor [artforum]