Ryoanji: Solos for Oboe, Flute, Contrabass, Voice, Trombone with Percussion or Orchestral Obbligato (1983–85)

John Cage, Where R = Ryoanji R-17 (2/88), ©John Cage Trust.

In recent years I have made a number of works, some of them graphic, some musical, all having the Japanese word Ryoanji or a reference to it, in the title. These began in 1982 when I was asked by Andre Dimanche to design a cover for Pierre Lartigue’s translation into French of my Mushroom Book. This is a part of his series of fifteen books called Editions Ryoan-ji, all of which are paperbacked with a paper that reminds one of raked sand. My suggestion for the cover of my book that I draw around fifteen stones (fifteen is the number of stones in the Ryoanji garden in Kyoto) placed at I Ching-determined points on a grid the size of the cover plus the flaps was accepted.

In January of 1983 when I went to the Crown Point Press to make etchings I took the same fifteen stones with me, but soon found that what can be done with pencil on paper cannot be done with needle on copper. The mystery produced by pencils disappeared, reappearing only on copper when the number of stones was multiplied (225: 15 X 15; 3375: 15 X 15 X 15).

That summer I began a series of drawings which continues even now, having titles such as 3R/5, or R/12. R is Ryoanji or 15 and the number below the line is the number of different pencils (between 6B and 9H) used to make the drawing. At some point that year an oboist in Baltimore, James Ostryniec, began writing a number of letters asking me to compose some solos for him to play in Japan. I kept putting him off. Eventually he came to visit bringing both his oboe and several textbooks about playing the instrument. I was amazed to see that one of the books began with the division of the octave not into seven or twelve tones but into twenty-four. Students of oboe playing must make special efforts to keep from sliding up or down while playing a single tone. I told Ostryniec that I would write some music for him.

Paper was prepared that had two rectangular systems. Using two such sheets I made a “garden” of sounds, tracing parts of the perimeters of the same stones I had used for the drawings and etchings. I was writing a music of glissandi. Where, through the use of chance operations, more lines than one were drawn in the same vertical space, I distinguished between sound systems, taking four as a maximum (loudspeakers around an audience; prerecorded tapes). For the accompaniment I turned my attention to the raked sand. I made a percussion part having a single complex of unspecified sounds played in unison, five icti chance-distributed in meters of twelve, thirteen, fourteen or fifteen. I didn’t want the mind to be able to analyze rhythmic patterns. I dedicated this work to Michael Pugliese because he was the first to discover a way to play my Etudes Boreales, which I had thought were too difficult to play literally, that is, to play all of the notes that had been written.

These were the first pieces in a series that continues: flute solos for Robert Aitken, songs for Isabelle Ganz, pieces for double bass and voice for Joelle Leandre for whom I also made (enjoying a Commande d’Etat from the French Ministry of Culture) an orchestral version of the percussion accompaniment. I am about to write trombone pieces for James Fulkerson. Inclined as I am to listen to as many environmental sounds as there are I look forward to hearing these solos together, providing the space in which they are heard is large enough to accommodate several “gardens,” i.e., multiples of four sound systems.

All of them are eight in number, except the songs for Isabelle Ganz which are nine. The ranges within which the glissandi play are sometimes wide, sometimes narrow. The...