Part one of two

This was the second conference on John Cage to be held in the UK in under 3 years. The opening chair of the conference, Keith Potter, paid tribute to the growth of Cage scholarship in the last thirty years. The two themes of the day were roughly split between morning and afternoon. Two of the organisers of the 2002 Cage conference gave the opening papers.

Stephen Chase gave a paper on improvisation after Cage. He noted that although a link between Cage’s work and free improvisation was widely acknowledged, it was hard to pin down in practice. For much of his career, Cage was dismissive of improvisation, regarding it as a method which led practitioners to be fettered by their memory and taste.

Many early free improvisors sought to distance themselves from the rhetoric of free jazz, but continued to emphasise interaction, attentiveness and dialogue.

Unsurprisingly, Chase cited AMM as a crucial link with Cage. In particular, Keith Rowe’s insistence that his musicianship was characterised by “not listening” aligned him with Cage’s interest in music that was governed by non-intention and the avoidance of memory. He further referred to the recent ‘reductionist” school of improvisors who create a sound world akin to Cage’s using silence and isolated sounds.

Clemens Gresser discussed the idea of “co-creatorship” – the effort that a performer has to put into realising a Cage score. From the early fifties, Cage created scores that were indeterminate in respect of the aural result. His notation varied, but all these works required ingenuity and imagination in devising realisations of the instructions contained in the score. Gresser’s concept of co-creation came in for some criticism as the performers are not so much required to create as to demonstrate discipline and integrity in carrying out Cage’s instructions. Gresser acknowledged this, but insisted that his aim had been to demonstrate the difference in relations between composer, score, and performer brought about Cage. He suggested power sharing as an alternative way of considering this dissolution of hierarchy.

The next two papers were the least successful of the day in my view. Darla Crispin discussed Susan Sontag’s essay The Aesthetics Of Silence and how it illuminates Cage. For Sontag, silence is an impossibility – an elusive and receding ideal that is constantly pursued as a spiritual ideal. Nic Melia referenced Nietzsche and looked at how silence can be reclaimed by refusing to regard it empirically or phenomenologically as a negation or absence. Rather he argued that it is indeterminate in meaning, because it is incomplete, but also has the possibility to carry meaning in discourse because of this.

The keynote address was an entertaining, and self-confessed, divertissement by David Nicholls, who has written on much American experimental music. Nicholls stressed the importance of performance for Cage. He early vowed that he would never write music unless he knew it would be performed – having seen his early composition teacher Adolph Weiss become embittered as he wrote work after work for the bottom drawer. Cage himself stated, “I don’t think of my music as finished when it is simply written down”. Linked with this is a view of composition as a craft rather than an art, and that the importance of a work is what happens when it is translated into words or actions.