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Cage:Percussion:MoMA

Just announced…Third Coast Percussion will be presented in concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on August 9th of this year as part of the John Cage Centenary Celebration. The concert will feature music from our soon-to-be-released Cage percussion album on Mode Records, and the world premiere of the collaborative, 100-composer piece that TCP is curating entitled RENGA:Cage:100.  MoMA will announce the full details of the concert later this month, so stay tuned for more info. If you’re in New York City, we hope to see you there!

Between 1935 and 1943, John Cage composed at least 17 works for percussion and commissioned and performed dozens more. He organized concerts of percussion music on the West Coast in Seattle, Portland, Walla Walla, Montana, and Idaho; on the Third Coast at the Arts Club of Chicago; and finally on the East Coast at the Museum of Modern Art.

This now legendary concert at MoMA on February 7, 1943 was the culminating event of the first major period of Cage’s creative life. He had recently moved to New York City and could not afford the real estate necessary to hold on to the 300+ percussion instruments he had collected over the past few years. After the MoMA concert Cage gave away his percussion instrument collection and moved on to other creative pursuits.

But the concert at MoMA did bring Cage some fame (if not fortune) thinks to a big feature article in Life Magazine. See last weeks post for a scan of that article, including images of Cage’s ensemble and their instruments. TCP’s own concert at MoMA is in part a tribute to the historic 1943 Cage percussion concert.

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When a percussionist decides to perform John Cage’s music from the 1930’s and 40’s, he or she might expect to see a list of instruments that looks something like this:

This is the instrument list for First Construction (in metal) from 1939, now a classic of the percussion ensemble repertoire. Aspiring professional percussionists have been tackling it for many years (we saw a brisk and exciting performance by the Arizona State University percussion ensemble last month). Knowledge of and experience with percussion chamber music performance is a standard requirement for the majority of percussion performance programs in higher education today.

But as with all of Cage’s early percussion (composed primarily between 1935 and 1942), First Construction was not performed by trained percussionists until decades after it was composed. John Cage gathered a motley crew of dancers, composers, students, and even his young wife at the time, Xenia, to form the first de facto professional percussion ensemble.

There is no record of Cage having any contact with professional percussionists when he was leading touring performances of percussion music in the 30’s and 40’s, and even if he had, it is uncertain whether the orchestral percussionists or jazz drum set players in that day would have been willing to put in the time necessary to master the quintuplets, septuplets, and other complicated rhythms ending in “-uplet” that were characteristic of Cage’s music at the time.

A professional classical percussionist in the 1930’s and 40’s would certainly have been asked to play quick and dexterous music on a xylophone for a performance of Gershwin Porgy and Bess or Strauss Salome. Many an orchestral percussionist was likely chastised for playing the snare drum too loud in Prokofiev’s Lt. Kije or Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade, thus instigating a now decades-long tradition amongst student percussionists of paranoia and near-hysterical fear of performing these relatively lighthearted works.

But if Cage had asked a trained percussionist in 1939 to assemble a suspended thunder sheet, a suspended string of small sleigh bells, and 12 graduated oxen bells (or 12 graduated Balinese button gongs suspended horizontally), there is a good chance said percussionist would have looked at him askance and gone back to practicing their quiet snare drum roll. These were not standard instruments by any stretch of the imagination; these were the instruments that Cage happened upon as he amassed his collection in his delighted search for new and interesting sounds. Some of the instruments Cage calls for in these pieces, such as the water gong or the Chinese cymbal, have become relatively common, at least in the working vocabulary of the modern percussionist.

But other instruments, for instance the oxen bells, can still puzzle even a professional percussionist. Oxen bells are not a standard instrument that can be purchased from any of the go-to percussion instrument retailers. A quick google search pulls up this link, but in our research at the John Cage Collection at the Northwestern University Library we happened across an article from Life Magazine (at the top of this blog post) about Cage’s percussion concert at MoMA in February 1943. The middle picture, bottom row, shows the instruments Cage referred to as “oxen bells.” The caption above the photo even reads “graduated oxen bells produce high and dampened tones,” giving us an aural snapshot of the instruments.

But does this now mean that our anointed task as the diligent percussionist is to scour the face of the earth for a row of tiny black bells with “high and dampened tones”? Will failure to procure said bells result in a lackluster performance? Clearly TCP did not feel that way. We recorded the piece in question (First Construction in Metal) this past June having already done this research and chose 12 graduated almglocken to stand in for Cage’s oxen bells. The almglocken (Swedish cowbells) are graduated in pitch from low to high, and are arranged on a padded table, which partially mutes their sound. This preserves both the low to high contour in the music and the boisterous rhythmic interplay between these instruments and the array of other metallic clanks, bangs, pings, and pows spread throughout the ensemble.

And speaking of onomatopoeia, it is worth considering that the sounds of our percussion objects may be far more important than their historical accuracy if our end goal is to create engaging musical performance. That is not to say that historical study is without merit - Third Coast in fact drove hundreds of miles to procure a set of great sounding Chinese tom toms for our recordings of Third Construction, Second Construction, Trio, and Quartet. The typical tom tom one finds on drum sets and in concert halls today has a sharper attack and longer decay than the Chinese instruments Cage and his ensemble would have used, and we felt strongly that the Chinese toms would blend better in these pieces than the modern instruments. But while this was a decision born out of a knowledge of historical performance practice, it was still ultimately a musical decision based on the sound of the instruments, not a decision based upon historical accuracy for accuracy’s sake.

So the answer for us has been thorough historical research coupled with an acute sensitivity to the sounds of the instruments, and how those sounds come together to bring Cage’s music to life. It was sound, not historical accuracy, that excited Cage when he was creating music. Why should it be any different today?

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John Cage was many things in his lifetime: a composer, an author, a philosopher, an inventor, a poet, a pianist, an orator, a fundraiser (both for his own projects and for Merce Cunningham), a leading mycologist. Among his many inventions and innovations, he is credited with writing the first piece of electro-acoustic music (Imaginary Landscape No. 1), inventing the prepared piano, incorporating concepts of Zen Buddhism in music vis-à-vis chance operations and indeterminacy. He was uncompromising – spending the first 30 years of his career with almost no money, pursuing the artistic challenges and inspirations that were vital to his own visions of the future of music and art. It was thanks to this bull-headed refusal to conform or compromise that Cage was so innovative, and has left such a lasting influence on the creative world.

One of Cage’s earliest inventions, and perhaps (in our opinion!) his greatest, was the professional percussion ensemble. Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation was premiered in 1933, two years before Cage’s first percussion piece, but it was Cage who first assembled an ensemble of percussionists to tour and perform notated percussion music - Cage’s own works, the few works yet written, and new works that Cage solicited from composers both nationally and internationally.

In May 2012, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of John Cage’s birth, Third Coast Percussion will release an album of Cage’s percussion music on the record label dedicated to recording Cage’s complete works, Mode Records. In preparation for that album, which was recorded in June 2011, TCP was fortunate enough to gain access to Cage’s original manuscripts at the New York Library for the Performing Arts, and Cage’s personal correspondence at our alma mater – the Northwestern University Music Library, John Cage Collection.

For fans of John Cage, such as ourselves, this research was a complete and utter joy. Revelations ran from the anecdotally splendid (a list of the 13 Essential Rudiments published by the National Association of Rudimental Drummers had a note in John Cage’s hand: “See if you can teach these to that garbage collector; I couldn’t.” [emphasis is Cage’s]) to the profound. The quote below comes from an unmarked letter written in 1941, regarding Cage’s 1935 piece, Quartet:

I organized the composition on a rhythmic basis, indicating no instruments. Friends helped me perform it on kitchen utensils, pieces of wood, tire rims, brake drums, etc. I was unaware at the time that I was doing what many negro street musicians in New Orleans had done. I was sharing points of view of Schoenberg and hot jazz combined. I gave private performances of the results and everyone encouraged going ahead.

We wanted to share some of this information with a broader audience, which has led to this, the first in a series of blog entries dedicated to John Cage’s percussion music, and to his life and writings during this time period – roughly 1935 to 1943. Some of this may be of more interest to percussionists than it is to the general public (raise your hand if you think you might get giddy at the sight of the instrument check list Cage took on tour to Portland …I know I did). But fans of Cage’s music will hopefully find interest in a closer glimpse at some of Cage’s earliest work, both as a creator and as an advocate for new thoughts and new music.

Stay tuned: we’re planning to post these blog entries on a weekly basis. Next week’s post is dedicated to instrument selection in Cage’s percussion music - historical accuracy vs. contemporary innovation, including some very cool rarely-seen photos of Cage’s own percussion instruments.

RENGA:Cage:100

2012 marks the 100th anniversary of John Cage’s birth, and the year has already seen some extremely exciting performances, festivals, exhibitions, lectures, and more. Here’s a full listing of events provided by the John Cage Trust.

Third Coast Percussion has been celebrating so far with concerts, master classes, a soon-to-be-released DVD and CD on Mode Records, a John Cage iPhone app, and more. Beginning next week we will also be launching a series of blog posts dedicated to John Cage, specifically Cage’s percussion music written between 1935 and 1943.

Celebrating this momentous year is a lot of fun, but also a lot of work. So for the next phase of the Centenary Celebration we thought we’d ask 100 of our closest composer friends to help out.

The idea for RENGA:Cage:100 came from Cage’s own works Renga and Apartment House 1776, which can be performed simultaneously. Renga is a form of Japanese collaborative poetry involving 2 or more poets taking turns writing lines of the same poem. Our RENGA will be one piece of music composed by 100 different composers, each contributing a sound, a musical idea, or some other prescribed performance or activity. We will use chance operations to determine the order in which we perform the contributions of each composer.

We began reaching out to composers late last week, and we’re extremely excited to have 63 composers already on board. Here’s a complete list of those who have signed on so far… Aaron Holloway-Nahum, Aaron Jay Kernis, Aaron Siegel, Aaron Travers, Alejandro Vinao, Alexandre Lunsqui, Amy Beth Kirsten, Amy Williams, Andrew Norman, Andrew Tham, Andy Akiho, Anna Clyne, Annie Gosfield, Augusta Read Thomas, Ben Leeds Carson, Brad Lubman, Christopher Adler, Chris Cerrone, Chris Fisher-Lochhead, Christian Wolff, Corey Dargel, Dai Fujikura, Daniel Dehaan, David Paha, David Smooke, David T. Little, Dominick DiOrio, Eric Beach, Hans Thomalla, Jacob Cooper, Jacob TV, Jason Treuting, Joan La Barbara, John Supko, Josh Quillen, Joseph Schwantner, Judah Adashi, Louise Fritensky, Marc Mellits, Marcos Balter, Mark Berger, Martin Bresnick, Mathew Rosenblum, Matthew Barnson, Michael Burritt, Nick Norton, Oscar Bettison, Paola Prestini, Paul Lansky, Rob Honstein, Robert Pound, Roger Zahab, Ross Karre, Ryan Ingebritsen, Sam Scranton, Samuel Adams, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Sean Shepherd, Shani Aviram, Stacy Garrop, Steve Mackey, Ted Hearne, and Timo Andres.

We are planning to give a preview performance on May 25 at our CD release concert at the Mayne Stage in Chicago. The full premiere will take place in New York City on August 9th at a soon-to-be-announced very exciting concert.

Here is a glimpse at the instructions we’ve asked our composers to follow in creating their portion of the RENGA:

• To create your portion of the RENGA:
o Compose 5-7 seconds of music, or
o Compose 1 measure of music, or
o Choose 5-7 seconds of music you have already written, or
o Choose 1 measure of music you have already written, or
o Create a recorded sound to be included in performance, or
o Create an image, text, or other artwork to be interpreted in performance, or
o Prescribe a disciplined action for the performers.
• Spend at least 100 seconds on your contribution.
• Do not spend more than 100 minutes on your contribution.
• All of the instruments you write for must weigh less than 100 ounces (6.25 lb.), or
• We will find a way to accommodate your instrumentation to the best of our abilities. Remember we are an ensemble of 4 percussionists

Below is one of our first submissions, from the fantastically creative Corey Dargel:

And here’s another submission, this one from the brilliant mind of Christopher Adler:

We’ll plan to post more of the composers’ contributions as we receive them. And stay tuned for the first post in our Cage:Percussion blog series, coming soon.

The Year Behind and the Year to Come

2011 was a truly unforgettable year for Third Coast Percussion.  The Steve Reich Celebration with Eighth Blackbird drew over 9,000 people to Millennium Park in August.  In September, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio, with the premiere of David Skidmore’s “Common Patterns in Uncommon Time,” which was commissioned for the occasion. We also thoroughly enjoyed our collaborations this year with Tim Munro, Nick Photinos, Signal, eighth blackbird and Meehan/Perkins Duo, the premiere of great new works by Anthony Pateras and our own Clay Condon, and dozens of other performances across twelve different states.

TCP will mark John Cage’s centenary in 2012 with a CD/DVD of his early percussion works and numerous concerts, but the coming year will also include the premiere of a newly commissioned percussion quartet by Augusta Read Thomas, a rare performance of Gerard Grisey’s “Le Noir de l’Etoile,” new community engagement initiatives and an ever-growing touring schedule.  In the near future, Third Coast will also release an album of Philippe Manoury’s music, a CD/DVD of ensemble member David Skidmore’s new architecture-inspired work, and another album including works by Louis Andriessen, Arvo Pärt,  Peter Garland, Christopher Deane and TCP members David Skidmore and Clay Condon.

Thanks to all of you who have supported us during the past year by coming to concerts, buying CDs and t-shirts, volunteering your time or making a tax-deductible donation.  We couldn’t do it without you!

Happy Holidays!

-Clay, Rob, Peter and David