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<< -- 4 -- Jennifer Paull UNCAGED JOHN
Light dawns. 'ONE', written upon the back page information of the sepia
CD, predates the green, as I have now discovered its copyright date.
Undaunted, fortified, and with a further machine percolating the coffee
bean, I decode the second spiral of my choice -- 'ONE'. I feel sure John
Cage would not wish me to change the order in which free choice affected
my selection. This is also part of the random factor, is it not? I could
be forgiven for thinking that 'THE FIRST RECORDINGS' indicate that the Green
CD predated the sepia. Is this simply some conventional, inner clock telling
me that green spring precedes sepia autumn in the earthly hemisphere in
which I write? How mundanely predictable of me!
'These number pieces represent Cage's final project, his last wholesale
rethinking of the intertwined ritual-assumptions of performing and listening
to what we call "music". Over the last five years of his life,
John Cage wrote some 45 compositions that bear a number, often with an additional
number as superscript, as their only title. I bring up these points because
they also describe Cage's deployment of musical sounds in these "number
pieces", the fleeting and fragile sense of "Illegal" or "anarchic"
harmony (his description) that he seemed to get closer to in these last
years. Unlike a title like "concerto in G major" or "pictures
at an exhibition", Cage's numbers are prescriptive rather than descriptive,
and convey information that is joyfully obvious and basic to the act of
making music: the first number indicates the number of performers while
the second, the number in superscript, refers to the chronological rank
of the piece at hand among the other "number pieces" written for
this number of players. Or are these in fact titles at all? It is tempting
to believe this student of Zen Buddhism loved numbers for the properties
that distinguish them from letters of the alphabet: namely, their simplicity
and their self-sufficiency. The first thing to notice here is that Cage
has made the composer's number -- the superscript -- subservient to the number
signifying the performer(s).
Arved Ashy -- sentences
Basilica of St Adalbert (Grand Rapids, Michigan) space ONE- 6
Riwoche Tibetan Buddhist Temple, (Toronto, Ontario) space (ONE-10)'
I have quoted the above, which I presume to be written by Arved Ashby
in (slightly more) conventional script. From what I can faintly distinguish
upon this multi-coloured background, the spiral's words are printed
with all their letters 'L' in upper case, whilst the remainder of the alphabet
clings to the lower with obstinate persistence. I do however admit that
a certain word blindness is descending upon me like a welcomed cloud of
insecticide.
This is the exact state of mind in which I need Cage. His music --
for want of a better word to describe sound sculpture, is a magical balm
to 'lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive
...', to dip into Thomas Cranmer's wonderfully poetic Biblical
translations of 1559. Today we might say that we are burdened by 'an overabundance
of omnipresent-pollution and purposely-destructive computer viruses for
which we need to install and activate protective software programmes, terminally
obliterating any remaining traces of the passage of negativity before downloading
further data, virtual, or otherwise.' Cage does it all single-handedly for
me every time! A magician, indeed.
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Copyright © 28 August 2002
Jennifer Paull, Vouvry, Switzerland
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