[silence] Variations VII: March 24

[David P Miller]

Hello everyone,

If you’re in the general area of Boston (Massachusetts, USA), I want to
let you know that the Mobius Artists Group will present Cage’s Variations
VII on Saturday, March 24. The place is the New Art Center, 61 Washington
Park, Newtonville, Massachusetts. It starts at 8 pm – please see the web
site at www.newartcenter.org for directions. The performance is by Mobius
members Margaret Bellafiore, Lewis Gesner, Larry Johnson, Tom Plsek,
Joanne Rice and me, and friends Forrest Larson, Landon Rose, and Eric
Phelps. Many thanks for Eric, the Executive Director of the New Art
Center, for inviting us to present the work there.

Longer-time Silencers may remember that the Mobius Group has been
producing the Variations pieces in sequence, beginning with Variations I
(for two voices) in 1996. Variations VII is distinct for a number of
reasons, not least of which is that there is no published score.
Fortunately, the archival/documentary material is plentiful, particularly
because the piece was first presented as part of the 9 Evenings: Theatre
and Engineering series of performances in 1966. (I believe that our
presentation will be the first since that time, although I am more than
happy to be corrected.) Here I want to thank Laura Kuhn of the John Cage
Trust, and Julie Martin of Experiments in Art and Technology, for allowing
access to and copying of much archival material. The archives include at
least two documents which arguably serve as good drafts of what would have
been the published score, and in fact could be published as the score in
my opinion. It would be a score entirely made of brief written statements,
as is Variations V.

As was the case with our version of Variations V, presented in 2002, we
are attempting a realization of the work which takes into account what was
done originally, but does not aim at anything like a reproduction of the
original. (An aim that would be extraordinarily costly if not outright
impossible!) Instead, we’re interested in a 21st-century presentation
which tries to locate the essence or most salient aspects of the original
performances, particularly as captured in the (in this case likely) score.
Among the statements in the score material, we have particularly focused
on “Inside composers picking up outside sounds / Fishing”. In another
place, Cage expresses this a little more verbosely: “catching sounds from
air as though with nets, not throwing out however the unlistenable ones”.
Also “no playbacks used, tape machines i.e. no previously prepared sounds”
and “making audible what is otherwise silent therefore no interposition of
intention. just facilitating reception”. We are extending “fishing”
activities from sound-finding – using a variety of means from Web-scanning
to the lowest-tech devices possible – to real-time development of
projected visual images using found material as well. There is a great
deal more to say, but I hope this at least gives some sense of our general
principles, or what we believe the core principles of Variations VII to
be.

Admission will be $10 general, $7 students and seniors. Reservations will
not be necessary.

Best wishes,

David M.
dpmiller@world.std.com