[silence] WBAI

[Ralph Lichtensteiger]

"WBAI (1960) is a csore for the operation of machines. Durations are  
graphed."
— John Cage, Notes on Compositions II (1950-63) in. John Cage Writer,  
Selected Texts, Edited by Richard Kostelanetz, page 61

"Between January and May he prepared WBAI, 'material for making a  
mechanical program,' used since principally for sound projection." —  
David Revill, The Poaring Silence, page 198

WBAI
Musical composition
Stony Point, New York; Middleton, Connecticut and Ann Arbor,  
Michigan, January - May 1960.
Instrumentation: Material for making a mechanical program
Duration: Indeterminate
Choreography: Merce Cunningham: Antic Meet (1958)
Published: Edition Peters 6772 © 1960 by Henmar Press.
Manuscript: Score (holograph in ink, signed - 1+20 p. + 1  
transparency) in New York Public Library.

WBAI is named after New York's Pacifica station. This composition may  
be used in whole or in part by an operator of machines. Cage gives  
some examples on the title-page of the score:
1. tape machines in a performance of "Fontana Mix" with "Solo for  
Piano", "Aria"....
2. Record players with amplifiers and tone controlers.
3. Amplifier and tone control of the speakers voice in reading a  
lecture like "Indeterminacy", "Communication" or "Where Are We Going,  
And What Are We Doing?". The durations in the score are graphed in  
space. The length in time is to be determined by the performer.
http://www.johncage.info/workscage/wbai.html

1960 WBAI, auxiliary score for use with lecture or instrumental  
performance involving tapes, recordings, radios etc.
Events, indeterminate performances, and other works not conducive to  
recording:
WBAI, instructions for a radio broadcast (1960)

1960: WBAI. tape machines, record players, amplifier and tone  
controls in a performance of lectures Indeterminacy, Communication,  
Where are We Going? And What are we Doing? or Fontana Mix in  
combionation with Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Aria, etc.; may be  
performed with Songbooks (graphic notation) [6772]
http://solomonsmusic.net/cageopus.htm

"What Cage has done here is to design a system for composition and  
then simply present it to the performer to execute. The situation is  
markedly different from that of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra,  
in that a step has been removed from the compositional model. Fontana  
Mix is a method waiting to be applied to some specific collection of  
materials. Cage himself used this method to compose six different  
pieces: Aria for voice (1958) Fontana Mix for magnetic tape (1959),  
Water Walk (1959), Sounds of Venice (1959), Theatre Piece (1960), and  
WBAI (1960). Each of these diverse pieces can be seen as  
"realizations" of Fontana Mix, as can the solos for guitar and for  
percussion made using it by Cornelius Cardew and Max Neuhaus,  
respectively. If, in the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Cage had  
gained flexibility by creating objects that moved fluidly among their  
multiple meanings, with Fontana Mix he gained even more flexibility  
by removing the need for objects at all. Throughout the 1950's Cage  
had become more and more aware of the act of composition as being a  
process; now, he extended this principle so that the product of  
composition was a process itself."
http://www.music.princeton.edu/~jwp/texts/DissCh6.html

http://www.johncage.info/index2.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WBAI

WBAI: Panel on John Cage
http://www.earle-brown.org/archive.focus.php?id=124

John Cage as a Horspielmacher
Richard Kostelanetz
The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring, 1990), pp. 291-299
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0277-9269(199021) 
8:2<291:JCAAH>2.0.CO;2-G

WBAI by John Cage (1960). performed by Chris Twomey. New Adventures  
in Sound Art issued a call for submissions in the Toronto area for  
DJs, turntablists, and radio programmers to make a realization of  
WBAI, a piece by John Cage scored for one radio technical operator.  
The score is a graphic score for four playback sources that can be  
scaled to any duration of radio programming. DJ Chris Twomey was  
selected from this process to realize a fifteen-minute version. He  
has elected to use Cage and Tudor's recording of Indeterminacy with a  
selection of other Cage pieces and interviews.

http://www-fofa.concordia.ca/cec/econtact/NAISA/notes.html

kind regards,
ralph li
http://www.lichtensteiger.de/cage01.html


On Dec 21, 2006, at 8:02 PM, John McDonough wrote:
> Does anyone have any information on or have performed Cage's WBAI?
> I'm curious about the piece.
>
> Thanks
>
>
> --
> To join or leave the Silence mailing list, please go to https:// 
> list.mail.virginia.edu/mailman/listinfo/silence.
> You can find searchable list archives at http:// 
> list.mail.virginia.edu/pipermail/silence/

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://list.mail.virginia.edu/pipermail/silence/attachments/20061221/463666b7/attachment.html