“Making the Right Choices: A John Cage Centennial Celebration” (review)

The New World Center, designed by Frank Gehry, houses advanced technical capabilities that enable innovations in the fusion of music, performance, architecture, and technology. Michael Tilson Thomas himself admitted that while devising “Making the Right Choices: A John Cage Centennial Celebration,” it was understood that its unique performance spaces and logistical ingenuities were essential to elicit the necessary insights into such a seminal figure of twentiethcentury music. Becoming a monument to Cage’s work over the weekend-long festival, the Center harnessed a wide range of expressive technical media in communicating the composer’s life and work to audiences.

One example of the collaborative multimedia environment that characterized this celebration of Cage was a unique video installation titled NWS: 4’33”, created specifically for the festival by composer Mikel Rouse. Using a matrix system based on chance procedures, Rouse juxtaposed multiple recorded performances of Cage’s 4’33” submitted by individuals through YouTube (see the NWS433 playlist on www.youtube.com) in a silent-film format that ran throughout the length of the festival. By choosing to display the submitted performances with only video and not sound, Rouse enabled those viewing the installation to create their own distinct sound environment at the SunTrust Pavilion in the New World Center. Laura Kuhn also gave a complete reading of Cage’s Lecture on Nothing as NWS: 4’33” continued to run in the background as a silent accompaniment. It was this notable desire for active engagement, stimulation, and interaction that remained a clear goal throughout the festival.

Film screenings served as a principal means of delineating Cage’s life in relation to his music while also providing engaging perspectives on the evening performances. Documenting the “Musicircus” held at London’s St. James Church to celebrate Cage’s seventieth birthday, Peter Greenaway’s 1983 film John Cage offers illuminating interviews with the composer as well as extended looks into specific works, whether it is an explanation of how he came to devise the prepared piano or the charming one-minute stories from Indeterminacy that show Cage as a source of levity. With the help of an outdoor projection and sound system, the Greenaway film materialized on the front wall of the New World Center facing the Miami Beach SoundScape Park that serves as the Center’s front lawn. Surrounded by an evocative urban soundscape, one felt that Cage would have approved. Elliot Caplan’s 1991 film Cage/Cunningham received a screening indoors at the SunTrust Pavilion as a primer to performances of Cheap Imitation/Second Hand and Song Books. Caplan’s film explores the artistic and philosophical issues Cage and Cunningham tackled during their lives; also during the festival, an exhibition titled Collaborations displayed to patrons pictures and archival film footage from the John Cage and Merce Cunningham Trust.

Each concert featured video and lighting displays that enhanced the experience of listening to Cage’s music. The first concert in particular highlighted the complementarity of a visual medium paired with music. Credo in Us (1942) for percussion instruments, piano, and a radio and phonograph operator accompanied a constantly shifting display of stock images and period pictures from the 1940s projected onto the arched “sails” that adorn the walls of the New World Center Performance Hall. With each concertgoer enveloped by the projections from a slightly different perspective, one gained a more perceptible sense of the historical atmosphere in which this composition was originally conceived. The images used for Credo in Us were not entirely abstract; quite often they matched seamlessly with the metallic sounds of the percussion and small fragmentary jazz riffs supplied by the piano while highlighting the subtly satirical undercurrents of the work. For Meredith Monk’s performance of Aria and Fontana Mix, the sails inside the Performance Hall were illuminated with the pages of the performer’s score moving along with the music. Cage’s 1960 appearance on the game show I’ve Got a Secret performing Water Walk mirrored a live performance similarly projected onto...