Episode 91
The Silent Episode
Playlist
Morton Feldman, “Intersection” (1953) from First Recordings: 1950s (1999 Mode). Feldman, like Cage, had already been a proponent of including silence in his pieces. Feldman was a part of the Project of Music for Magnetic Tape (1951 to 1954), an artist’s collective founded by Cage to explore experiments in magnetic tape music. From this period came several works, the most famous of which was Williams Mix (1952) by Cage. For Williams Mix, Cage commissioned the recording of hundreds of taped sounds by Louis and Bebe Barron and then specified how to splice them together using a daunting 192-page graphical composition created using chance operations. Cage conceived the work for eight tracks of magnetic tape played simultaneously. The other members of the collective, in addition to helping edit Williams Mix, also created some unique works of their own using the same library of sounds. Feldman was one of these composers but took a decidedly different approach than Cage. For Intersection, Feldman used a graphic score composed of a grid, a method he had been testing for various instrumental works such as Intersections No. 1 for Piano (1951). The score could be likened to a sheet of graph paper with one row assigned to each of the eight channels. Each square, or cell, of each row represented a unit of time to be occupied by either a sound or silence. The sounds were assigned only as numbers representing the lengths of tape snippets to be used, thus regulating the duration of individual sounds. The sequence and simultaneity of the audio was dictated by the “intersection” of sounds and silences across the columns of the score. The realization of the piece was left in the hands of Cage and Earle Brown, who assembled the tape segments by following the grid score. The choice of sounds drawn from the tape library was left to the executors of the score. Whereas Cage had not actually specified the use of silence in the score of Williams Mix, Feldman clearly had, and this is evident from the result. Speaking about the piece later, Feldman famously said that he “loathed the sound of electronic music.” He disliked the labor of executing a piece by cutting up magnetic tape and didn’t feel the result was justifiably unique. He also said, “John [Cage] says that experimental music is where the outcome cannot be foreseen. . . . After my first adventure in electronic music, its outcome was foreseen.” 3:24
John Cage Variations I from Darmstadt Aural Documents Box 2 – Communication (2012 NEOS). Two Pianos, Electronics, Radio Sets, David Tudor, John Cage. This German disc is part of the Darmstadt Aural Documents projects and features recordings from 1958. This track was of the European premiere of Variations 1 and was recorded at the International Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt September 3, 1958. This track is enlightening because it not only contains a work by Cage with purposefully scored silences, albeit by chance operations, but is also a live recording with an audience. You can clearly hear how the audience responds during the silent passages, mostly in their bemusement. Whereas the implied humor was unintentional, I often experienced this phenomenon while seeing a Cage performance. I wanted to include this as an example of what can happen when silence becomes part of a live performance. Chance operations were used to determine the placement and duration of silences. 8:50
John Cage, “WBAI” (1960) from Early Electronic And Tape Music (2014 Sub Rosa). Sine wave oscillator, record player, synthesizer, radio. Description of the piece from the score in the Edition Peters catalogue (1962) of Cage's works: “Certain operations may be found impossible e.g., 3 or 4 at once. Let the operator do what he can without calling in assistants.” Chance operations were used to determine the placement and duration of silences. This performance for sine wave oscillator, record player, synthesizer, radio. Not performed by Cage an