[silence] Fwd: Petr Kotik's Umbilical Cord

[Herb Levy]

Glenn Freeman wrote:
> Begin forwarded message:
>
>   
>> From: Glenn Freeman <glenn@ogreogress.com>
>> Date: December 12, 2008 2:26:45pm GMT+01:00
>> To: "Joseph Zitt" <jzitt@josephzitt.com>
>> Subject: Re: [silence] Petr Kotik's Umbilical Cord
>>
>> Joseph Zitt wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> In this discussion, one might compare the Written Law to Cage's
>>> written scores, and the Oral Law to the information and experience
>>> gained, though not necessarily documented yet, by people such as Petr
>>> and others on this list who did get to work with him.
>>>
>>> For example, my own sole interaction with Cage involved his saying a
>>> single word, but it cleared up a question for me: when, after one of
>>> his last performances in New York, I asked him whether the pitches
>>> that he used in his performance of a section of Empty Words were
>>> following a system or improvised, he said "Improvised." (And, come to
>>> think of it, I don't think I'd ever logged that here.)
>>>       
>> So now you've logged it, great! Would Cage's answer have mattered or  
>> not if you simply took the time to closely study the score and  
>> decide for yourself?
>>
>>     

Empty Words is a text derived from Thoreau's Journal's by deleting 
sentences, phrases, words and letters. The complete work was published 
in the mid-70s in Wesleyan University Press book of the same name, 
sections of it appeared in various literary magazines prior to that.

The only published versions of the work and/or excerpts I've seen 
include some notes about how the text was drawn from Thoreau's writings. 
This is consistent with how he published other performance texts 
(Writing through Finnegans Wake, Themes and Variation, Composition in 
Retrospect, etc). Generally these works have been presented as 
free-standing texts or with introductory matter that describes in detail 
how the texts were selected from the original source materials. Except 
for passing references to time length and/or relative speed of delivery 
of the texts, I don't recall reading any detailed description of how 
someone else might perform these works.

What seems most interesting to me about Cage saying that his performance 
of Empty Words was improvised is that each of the two times I heard him 
read portions of the work, he intoned it in a sort of ornamented melody 
with what seemed to be a strong modal focus.

Bests,

Herb