49 Waltzes for the 5 Boroughs, A Complete Video Realization

In 1977, at the invitation of Edition Peters to contribute to a piano collection entitled "Waltzes by Twenty Five Contemporary Composers," John Cage composed 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs, scored "for performer(s), or listener(s), or record maker(s)." The score, in typical Cage fashion, consisted of a set of instructions to assemble, through unspecified chance operations, 147 addresses from any city and randomly arrange these into three groups. Beyond that, the work is left up to the performer. Cage's original though incomplete realizations were audio recordings of the ambient noise at a number of the addresses he prepared for New York City. After the composer's death in 1992, Don Gillespie, an employee of Peters, decided to resurrect this work to celebrate the memory of his late friend. Taking the option of "record maker(s)" as his cue, Gillespie set out with artist Roberta Friedman to make a video version of the 49 Waltzes. Using chance operations to determine the length of time spent at each address, Gillespie and Friedman captured the 147 addresses over the course of the one year and compiled them into this two-hour DVD. The resulting work consists simply of shots and the ambient sounds of each location (cars, shouts, birds, etc.), with the option of turning on subtitles that display the address.

The first and perhaps most crucial issue the artists encounter in this project is where, at each address, one points the camera. Sound recordings can be more or less omnidirectional, giving one a panoramic portrait of the sound of that location (a special feature allows the viewer to listen to an audio-only realization of the ninth waltz), but a camera must look at something. Gillespie and Friedman's solution is to keep the camera in constant motion, panning right to left and back for the duration of each scene. While this allows the viewer a greater understanding of the context of the location, it also has the unfortunate effect of disrupting an attention to the details of the location. We get the forest and not so much the trees. However, were the artists to fixate on a single spot for each address, the viewer would be robbed of the diversity of scenery one finds time and again in the different locations throughout the video. Included in the DVD is a purely audio realization of the ninth waltz.

The other striking aspect of this rendition is the timeframe in which it was set. Filmed between 1994 and 1995, this work provides an extensive portrait of life in New York–both the urban and suburban–in the early Guiliani years, both before 9/11 and the "cleaning up" of the city. As such the 49 Waltzes serve as a particularly accurate and unbiased historical document, capturing the essence of a place in a specific time without the colorization of political and personal histories. In fact herein lays the strength of this particular piece. The work is in constant evolution, as are the cities it would map. Cage's original 1977 realization of the work, while using the same addresses would show a different New York City altogether, as would any version compiled today.