[silence] Fwd: Petr Kotik's Umbilical Cord

[Joseph Zitt]

Yep, that's quite the point.  Having studied the available score
closely, I see nothing whatsoever about pitch. I had heard,
anecdotally, that Cage had occasionally used methods from one piece in
constructing a performance of another, so the answer was, indeed quite
pertinent.

In fact, I've long been curious about Cage's choices of pitch
material. To my ear, and without having given the recordings a precise
analysis, it seems that much of Cage's vocal performance, across quite
a range of pitches, used a fairly small vocabulary of pitch flow and
relationships. (Does software yet exist into which one could feed a
recording of unaccompanied vocal performance and extract either
notation or analysis?)

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 9:19 AM, Herb Levy <herb@eskimo.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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