Photograph by Scott Ferguson, courtesy of SLSO
If you've heard of John Cage at all, you most likely know him as the guy who put brackets around four minutes and 33 seconds of not-playing and called it 4'33”. What listeners of the piece hear is never complete silence, exactly, but the ambient sounds of the venue where the piece is (not) played, like traffic noises, or your neighbor scratching at a spot on his corduroy pants. It's a Zen thing. Cage, who died in1992, might explain that it's also a challenge to the notion of what music is, or can be.
The composer's other avant-garde stunts were often about chance, as in composing scores with variables and uncertain outcomes. Play this sequence, but at any tempo you wish; play this sequence at some point before the five-minute mark; and so on.
Then he really got weird. In one piece, Cage directed a clarinetist to dunk his head in a bucket of water. In another, he encouraged the use of a cactus as a musical instrument. He once beat a live cat with a dead fish while a bassoonist responded in mournful galumphs. (Just kidding about that last one.)
Fans of unpredictable musical forms are getting excited about the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra performing the U.S. premiere of Cage's Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras amidst the rarefied concrete of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. For this score, Cage calls for an entire orchestra to split into five groups, and play a selection of passages while the audience sits at the nexus of the pentagram of noise, taking in 30 minutes of semi-random bursts of music.
Eric Gaston, the SLSO's Director of Artistic Programs, is helping to make Cage's squishy science sound groovy on the 22nd.
“Audience members won't necessarily be able to see all the musicians,” he said, “but the building itself is going to be a great instrument.”
Indeed, it's easy to imagine the notes bouncing repeatedly off the polished concrete surfaces within the solemn zendo of the Pulitzer before arriving at the ears.
And there will be plenty of notes, or at least plenty of musicians. The Pulitzer has played host to Symphony musicians as part of a successful concert series for some time, but never all 82 SLSOers at once. They'll split into five groups of 15 to 17 musicians per gaggle for the Cage piece. For those familiar with the Pulitzer layout, the groups will perform from the entrance area, Main Gallery, Lower Gallery, Cube Gallery, and upstairs on the Mezzanine. The audience will sit in the Main Gallery.
The Cage-ian rules for the piece call for 30 tiny, one-minute pieces. The conductor can direct the musicians to start at any point within each 60-second interval.
“The conductors' instructions are to get through all the material for that time frame in that time frame, specified in the score,” explained Gaston. “Each conductor will use a clock or a stopwatch.”
The entire piece will be performed twice that evening, with the groups switching positions within the Pulitzer the second time.
The concert is part of a nine-day series of programs at the Pulitzer called Reset, which includes “a broad spectrum of performance, time-based, and participatory programs to emphasize the range of experiences the public can have with and in an arts institution—from personal and meditative to highly active and engaged.”
Thirty Pieces' five conductors will be SLSO Music Director David Robertson, and SLSO's Steven Jarvi, Rei Hotoda, Jerry Hou, and Lee Mills.
The evening also features violist Brett Dean performing his own composition, “Sketches for Siegbert” (2011).
Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras, January 22, 7:30 p.m. $20. Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, 3716 Washington, 314-534-1700, stlsymphony.org.
