MUSIC: Sound of Silence
John Cage Uncaged, Barbican
John Cage Uncaged, BBC Symphony Orchestra, conductor Lawrence Foster, Barbican Hall, 16th January 2004.
Your reviewer, although his musical heart is probably nowadays anchored somewhere in Paris around 1840, has never been a coward when it comes to the avant-garde; witness for example his intrepidity in venturing into the aether in the company of the (Tory) radical tearaways of ERO. In my distant youth I could even be found in the company from time-to-time of British music’s greatest hope for musical revolution, the gentle and talented Cornelius Cardew, and indeed my finest sheepskin jacket was stolen from a cellar in Covent Garden whilst we were performing the premiere of his ‘The Tiger’s Mind’. Corny alas died young on his motor-bike; but perhaps because a few drops of the spirit of those heady days are still lurking within me, I was strangely attracted to the opening concert of the weekend at the Barbican, organised by the BBC, celebrating his hero, indeed the musical cult-hero of his time, John Cage (1912-1992), and to contain the first UK performance of the orchestral version of Cage’s seminal work, 4’33”, which as every fule kno is completely silent throughout.
The BBC seemed to get quite excited as well during the day of the concert itself. Perhaps BBC4 got an adrenalin zing from the viewing figures for the Alan Clark Diaries the evening before — anyway, the radio was busy pumping out plugs for the concert, which was broadcast on that most elusive and elite of TV channels, and an interview with the conductor even featured in the 5 o’clock news bulletin. Whether as a consequence of this or not, the Barbican Hall was satisfactorily full at baton-down, although a survey of the audience, whose part in 4’33” is self-evidently crucial, was not entirely encouraging — large contingents of nerds, beardoes of both sexes and Hampstead-types in the 25-60 age range. I shall exercise the right of silence rather than allocate myself within these categories.
We had before us a varied evening, in which two of Cage’s works were presented alongside (although not simultaneously with, as was Cage’s frequent wont) works by his contemporaries William Schuman (1910-1992), Henry Cowell (1897-1965), Georges Antheil (1900-1959), Charles Ives (1874-1954) and Aaron Copland (1900-1990). With one exception, the performances were as alert and lively as they could be, and therefore all credit must go to Foster and the BBC Symphony for delivering these mostly unfamiliar scores; but musically speaking, three of the items can be dismissed summarily: Copland’s very well-known ‘El Salon Mexico’ (or, as I like to think of it, ‘Petrushka meets Pancho Villa’); Antheil’s ridiculous, if mildly entertaining, ‘Jazz Symphony’ of 1925; and, I regret to say, Cage’s ballet ‘The Seasons’ (1947), which is as tamely boring as most of the master’s notated works. The programme notes allege the influence on this music of Indian philosophy and of Meister Eckhart, sources which are held responsible for a large quantity of dud music in the last half of the last century, although I cannot believe that they could be quite so jejune and soporific.
Schuman’s ‘New England Triptych’ (1956), which was new to me, is however definitely the right stuff. It is based on the hymn tunes of the eighteenth-century Bostonian William Billings, described by a contemporary as ‘short of one leg, with one eye, without an address and with an uncommon negligence of person’, and whose tunes and harmonisations have much of the bluff individuality that the description suggests. The hymn ‘Chester’ set in the third movement, contains in the original the verse:
Howe and Burgoyne and Clinton, too,
With Prescott and Cornwallis joined,
Together plot our overthrow,
In one infernal league combined.
No doubt where the Evil Empire was to be located in those days. Let’s have this Triptych at the Proms soon, in any case.
The real find of the evening was undoubtedly Cowell’s Piano Concerto, of which this was apparently the first London performance. It was fortunate to find a heroic soloist in Philip Mead. Anyone who did not know what to expect might have been put on the qui vive when Mead elegantly donned a pair of reinforced mittens as he sat at the keyboard, although I hope the elbows of his jacket were padded. Throughout the piece the piano is treated purely as a percussion instrument to be addressed by fists, elbows and forearms; but this is a genuine and exciting piece of music, not a stunt. The counterpoints of block-harmonies and rhythms between soloist and orchestra, the new forms taken by line and melody given the extraordinary treatment of the piano, and the audience’s complete identification with the soloist as we saw him counting the complex beats for his entries and then executing them with such panache, made for a thrilling twenty minutes. Let’s have this at the Proms too — it would certainly guarantee that nessun dorma.
Of Charles Ives of course one can write nothing but worshipful admiration. This extraordinary visionary produced wonderful, original, music, humorous, wise, virile and sensitive, until about 1920, and when his countrymen would have nothing to do with it, virtually gave up music and became a millionaire through life insurance. His vignette ‘Central Park in the Dark’ (1906), which was originally twinned with his numinous masterpiece ‘The Unanswered Question’, received its first concert performance only in 1946. Ives recalled a run-through of a pared-down version with a New York theatre orchestra at around the time of its composition, ‘the players had a hard time with it — the piano player got mad, stopped in the middle and kicked the Bass Drum’. The BBC Symphony were much better behaved, perhaps because the additional conductor (Anthony Legge) required by the piece was able to assure order. However he certainly did not inhibit the raucous fragments of ‘Hello My Baby’, swung by the wind section, from ripping into the velvet nightscape created by the orchestra’s strings.
This latter effect — very quiet, rich harmonies, moving extremely slowly — is used by Ives in many works to ‘represent’ silence, and does so successfully in that it forces the audience to concentrate on noise at the very threshold of hearing. It is a natural transition, in it way, from the classical to the aleatory. Classical music could be held to be the articulation of time by form (as architecture articulates space). The composer sets a recognisable framework and fills it with demarcated events which his audience comprehends. Strip away the demarcation, as Ives does, and you have a slightly unnerving, but fascinating, conundrum. Cage, a great admirer of Ives, took the next logical step in 1952, writing 4’33”.
The score of this piece (which was available for purchase in the foyer at the price of £4.33) is simplicity itself. Silence is to be maintained for the stated period, divided into three sections, the lengths of which can be arbitrarily determined. Although the piece was originally conceived for piano solo, the orchestra rose to the challenge and gave a technically faultless performance. I do however have serious reservations about the interpretation.
The enigma of 4’33”, which Cage himself was careful to maintain, is whether it is serious or is a joke. The joke aspect is apparent to us — it is music catching up, 25 years late, with Duchamps. That there may be a serious — or at least non-trivial — point to consider in this jape (as with Duchamps), I have tried to adumbrate above. The only way in which you can try to catch both these (and any other) aspects is to play the piece absolutely po-faced.
The performance interestingly demonstrated this. Foster mounted the podium and lowered his baton as the indication that the work had commenced. Nobody stirred — not in the orchestra, or even in the audience. The absence of coughing or spluttering was in fact astonishing. No-one wanted to break the spell, to giggle, to boo — we were genuinely held in suspense, the more so as we had no idea at what point the first section would end, or indeed what we might do at this release. As it happened, when the baton was raised to mark this event, we did, remarkably, what we always do — cough, mutter to our companions, stretch a little. This was also in its way interesting, but then I am afraid Foster broke the spell — he drew out his handkerchief and, in the time-honoured affectation of the orchestral maestro, mopped his brow. So now we were all safe — it was clearly just for laughs. The last two sections were marked by a notable lack of concentration compared to the first section, particularly after a further lapse at the end of the second section, when the orchestra-members turned the page of their parts.
Well, it is certainly a valid interpretation of 4’33”, but not, I fear, one that reaches its full potential. But perhaps the perfect 4’33” is as elusive as the perfect ‘Ring’.
Allen Buchler is ERO’s music critic
Allen Buchler, January 17, 2004 08:56 PM