[silence] More Atlas Eclipticalis

Mon Apr 21 12:54:40 EDT 2008

I see that I got myself in trouble by reacting on the Atlas announcement.
This is the worst time (as far as schedule goes) for me to engage myself in
anything else than my never ending work and tasks here at SEM/ocnm.

Mr. jdavid is absolutely right to point out the problem with Cages music
“how might people know [such and such thing] in fifty years?” The problem is
of course with the way Cage left things “in the air” so to speak.

On the other side, every kind of notation is incomplete and lacks the
essentials to turn it into music. This is true with Mozart, Chopin, Mahler,
or Stravinsky. The reason why we perform their music with confidence and
know what to pay attention to and what to disregard is a performance
practice, which goes, uninterruptedly back to the composer himself. Once
this chain is interrupted, it is very difficult to put the music back
together – as it is apparent in the case of early music. The way we perform
Chopin reflects a chain – one generation of performers teaching by
experience the next generation how to do it. And that goes to Chopin
himself. This is why music can only be learned by direct encounter with the
“master” and not from reading instructions. There is no way instructions can
relate to you, in a meaningful manner what to do with a score. And it takes
years, and years of practice and being corrected, and practice and being
corrected to attain a little bit of musical know-how. There is no way around
it. 

Cage came up with am entirely new concept of music making and brought in a
lot of ideas previously unheard of. It is naïve to think that by being a
good musician with a solid classical education, one can simply read
instructions and proceed in performing the music well. Imagine that this
would be the case with, say Chopin, Never done it before, having a chance to
listen only to few performances and reading some instructions. The
performance would most probably be a pitiful caricature of what it should
be. Why does any one think that it is different with Cage is beyond me.

There are problems with Cage’s instructions (all of them up to the early 70s
were written either directly for David Tudor, or with Tudor in mind). Tudor
loved puzzles and that’s why they are so cryptic. I never forget a session
with Cage in the later 1980s. Ben Neill and myself were going with Cage over
VARIATIONS IV. Ben (who was at that time member of SEM) wanted to do few
things that I was not sure about and so I called Cage and we went to his
place to look at the piece. As it turned out, the score is quite exact and
one has just few possibilities to make choices. What was so interesting was
Cage’s answers to Ben when he would say „but in the instructions, it is this
and that“ and Cage would answer – "disregard it. It is another level and you
are not there yet." What he meant was – if you would be doing the music for
10 or 20 years, then you can take these liberties. You will then exactly
know the limits. Right now disregard it.

If Tudor would have switched from the piano to live electronics (and he
started to work with live electronics in the late 1950s), he would have
never accepted to perform Winter Music at Carnegie Hall in ‘92. The story is
not so simple. But it is too soon to go into it and he certainly would have
never liked to discuss it in public.

PK

On 4/21/08 10:23 AM, "john david" <john@magicboxesco.com> wrote:

> Joseph
> Good point.
> Maybe the Cage Trust can chime in here.
> 
> About DT and the piano, my personal opinion is that he went off looking
> for more challenging things to play.
> 
> See an interview where David talks about the transition from piano to
> new instruments:
>   http://www.emf.org/tudor/Articles/hultberg.html
> there are more interviews out there.
> 
> -jdavid
> 
> 
> Joseph Zitt wrote:
>> This leads me to wonder, once again, what is being done to capture
>> what appears to be a huge oral tradition regarding the appropriate
>> performance of Cage's works. Petr, for example, appears to have
>> collected and experienced essential events and information in the
>> performance of these works. If, indeed, for example, the Conductor
>> Score is not appropriate for performance, how might people know this
>> in fifty years?
>> 
>> I suspect that the Cage Trust is doing work behind the scenes to
>> collect this information, and hope that Petr and others are fully
>> documenting what they have learned to prevent the tradition being
>> lost. Is this so?
>> 
>> For that matter, the question of why David Tudor stopped playing the
>> piano has been of continuing interest. I hope (if the answer is not
>> something so private that Tudor wished that it not be known to future
>> historians) that this information might enter the record of
>> information about Cage and his associates.
>> 
>> On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 4:04 PM, Ingvar Loco Nordin
>> <loco.nordin@mbox200.swipnet.se> wrote:
>>>  Petr Kotik sent me his response on the brewing Atlas E discussion
>>> privately, but also told me it was ok to post it anywhere, so I'll post it
>>> to the Silence list:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I really don't have the time (or wish) to go into lecturing on Atlas. The so
>>> called CONDUCTOR SCORE Peters No. 6782 is not a score, it is a set of
>>> instruction for the conductor, which – to my knowledge – was never used,
>>> certainly not by Cage, or everyone working with him. Bear in mind that Cages
>>> ideas in that time (1956 – 1961) were so new, so untested and and they
>>> include few aspects, which were later abolished as impractical or
>>> unnecessary, as praxis continued leading to more familiarity with the
>>> material through performance experiences. I met Cage in 1964 to perform
>>> Atlas – a 3-hour version with David Tudor, Cage, Cerha, and two more people
>>> in Vienna. That was for the Cunningham's Event #1 at the Modern Art Museum
>>> there. Cage and I worked together for the next 28 years and – by a
>>> coincidence – our last project was the first complete 2-hour version of
>>> Atlas at Carnegie Hall in 1992 (our last meeting regarding this project was
>>> one week before he died).
>>> 
>>> I am sick and tired (I am not alone, Christian Wolff feels the same way) of
>>> encountering presentations of Cage done in almost total ignorance of the
>>> work.
>>> 
>>> There are two recordings I have done – one is on Wergo WER 6215-2. This is a
>>> "composite" recording, where we only had one third of the orchestra and
>>> recorded the whole material 3 times (It was done in March 1992 and Cage was
>>> there – he had to be practically dragged over as he hated recorded music and
>>> recordings in general). After I mixed the three recordings into one complete
>>> 86-piece orchestra performance and heard it for the first time -- the sound
>>> with 3 harps, 3 tubas, 3 sets of timpani (!) 5 horns, etc., I was so taken,
>>> that it gave me the impetus to organize a real 86-piece orchestra for a
>>> Carnegie Hall performance next October as a 80th birthday gift to Cage (this
>>> was the start of the SEM Orchestra). Fortunately, I had a financial backing
>>> here in New York to make it possible. When Cage died in August, I called
>>> David Tudor to ask him to perform the Carnegie Hall concert with us and
>>> expected him to say "Petr – I didn't play the piano in public for 20 years I
>>> cannot do it." To my big surprise, David said immediately yes! [why did
>>> Tudor stopped performing on the piano is another matter, which I discovered
>>> in the course of our collaborations in the last years of his life]. So we
>>> did it and an invitation from Berlin came right afterwards to do it also
>>> there in May, 1993. That performance (also with Tudor, this time 2-and-half
>>> hour version) at the Konzerthaus in Berlin was recorded and released at
>>> Aphodel (4-Cds together with 103).
>>> 
>>> Greetings,
>>> PK
>>> 
>>> 
>>> /Ingvar Loco Nordin
>>> 
>>> 
>>> ---------------------------------------------------
>>> All places are here! All times are now!
>>> 
>>> Sonoloco Record Reviews:
>>> http://www.sonoloco.just.nu
>>> 
>>> Ingvar Loco Nordin's hompage:
>>> http://home.swipnet.se/sonoloco
>>> 
>>> Loco's MySpace:
>>> http://myspace.com/ingvarloconordin
>>> 
>>> Loco on LastFM:
>>> http://www.lastfm.se/music/Ingvar+Loco+Nordin
>>> 
>>> Loco's albums on lastFM:
>>> http://www.lastfm.se/music/Ingvar+Loco+Nordin/+albums
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Sonoloco Records on lastFM:
>>> http://www.lastfm.se/label/Sonoloco+Records/
>>> 
>>> AIM/iChat contact name: locovarg
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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