[silence] Cage and Jazz

Thu Oct 9 21:59:44 EDT 2008

Dear Phil and Silencers,

Thanks for the timely reference to the issue of Cage and  
improvisation.  Incidentally, I am due to deposit a final copy of my  
dissertation at Columbia tomorrow.  This include a chapter on Cage's  
relationship with jazz, beginning from about 1939 (emphasizing that  
percussion composer and jazz historian William Russell was Cage's main  
interlocutor of jazz) as a prehistory to the analysis of Cage's score  
and realization for Imaginary Landscape No. 5 (during William  
Fetterman's 1989 interview with Jean Erdman, she played Cage's 1952  
realization on a reel-to-reel copy, which is now thought to be lost,  
and which Phil rightly points out was assembled from Erdman's record  
collection; Fetterman was nice enough to donate this interview to the  
Northwestern archive, so you can hear a secondary recording of Cage's  
realization on that CD).  The discussion then turns to Cage's 1965  
"Jazz at Midnight" performance with the Joseph Jarman Quartet in  
Chicago, and concludes with a brief consideration of Cage's  
"Improvisation" series of 1975-82.

Regarding the earlier reference to George Lewis's article on Cage and  
improvisation, "Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and  
Eurological Perspectives," you can find a reprint of the entire essay  
with a new postscript in _The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz,  
Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue_ (Middletown: Wesleyan UP,  
2004).

I'm not sure how soon you can access the dissertation, but the  
citation will be: Rebecca Y. Kim, "In No Uncertain Musical Terms: The  
Cultural Politics of Indeterminacy" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University,  
2008).  The four other chapters address the meanings of indeterminacy,  
the grid as a symbol for the ethics of indeterminacy, a comparison of  
Cage's teachings at the New School and Darmstadt in 1958, and the  
issue of authorial absence and presence in Cage's vocal works, both  
sung and spoken.  Feel free to drop me an email privately about  
anything.  Thanks for well-timed diversion...back to work now.  Rebecca

Quoting Phil Gentry <pgentry@ucla.edu>:

> Jean Erdman, who choreographed the dance Imaginary Landscape No. 5 was
> written for, pressured (in a friendly way!) Cage into using jazz
> records for the work, and I believe he used records from her
> collection. Incidentally, Rebecca Kim recently wrote a dissertation on
> post-war indeterminacy at Columbia, and has a chapter on Cage's
> relationship with jazz. I recommend it highly; among other things she
> discusses his collaborations with AACM musicians in the 1960s. There
> is also, incidentally, a funny anecdote in Carolyn Brown's recent
> memoirs, about all of the dancers in the Cunningham company aching to
> dance to jazz. They get rather mutinous at one point.
>
> When I was an undergraduate, in one of my composition courses we had
> to make a realization of Imaginary Landscape No. 5 using a computer.
> It actually worked better than you'd think; unlike Williams Mix, which
> is somewhat "about" the physical process of obsessively slicing and
> dicing magnetic tape, I think the aesthetic approach of good ol' #5 is
> fine with a cleaner sound--it lets you focus less on scotch tape, and
> more on figuring out what "mobility to immobility" could possibly mean.
>
> But I'd also love to hear the original--I think Rebecca talks about
> its whereabouts in her dissertation, but I don't recall the answer.
>
> phil
>
> ----------
> Phil Gentry
> pgentry@me.com
>
>
> On Oct 9, 2008, at 5:12 PM, Thomas Gaudynski wrote:
>
>> Re: this thread
>>
>> When I made my "realization" of Imaginary Landscape No. 5 circa 1976
>> (and determined to use only Cage phonograph records instead of jazz
>> phonograph records), I did a bit of research and seem to recollect,
>> that because Cage's "tape music" explorations of the time were
>> financed by Paul Williams (i.e., Williams Mix, et al), and besides
>> the stated goal of using jazz recordings which he disliked (like the
>> radio, consequently No. 4 and Radio Music, etc.), I imagined the
>> recordings came from William's collection. What jazz recordings
>> would a young hip architect from Black Mountain College have had
>> available in 1952? Or were sitting around in Louis and Bebe Baron's
>> NYC studio, which is where I imagine the piece was created. Parker,
>> Mingus, Roach, Baker, Mulligan, MJQ, Getz, Gillespie, et al? And
>> speaking of which, has anyone ever heard the resulting recording?
>>
>> The Hat Art recording of No. 5 using Anthony Braxton's work (I
>> assume for copyright reasons) doesn't seem to follow the score
>> correctly, and being done digitally, seems like the wrong approach
>> for this clearly analog piece.
>>
>> Any thoughts?
>>
>> Best Regards,
>>
>> Thomas Gaudynski
>>
>> Necessary Arts LLC
>> www.myspace.com/thomasgaudynski
>>
>>
>>
>>
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