Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music

6. Rose Art Museum

6 roSe art muSeum 0´ 00˝ In 1965 Sam Hunter, Director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, invited John Cage to come up for a concert. I called Cage. He agreed and suggested we include a work of Christian Wolff, who was teaching at nearby Harvard, as well as a work of mine. I told him I would be happy to include a work of Christian’s but was unsure about including something of my own. I hadn’t been composing much at that time and told him so. I could hear mild disbelief on the other end of the telephone line. I then said that I had been working with a brain wave amplifier in an effort to make a work using brain waves but that I couldn’t get the amp to work consistently. Cage laughed and said that it didn’t matter whether it worked or not but that the intention to try it was what was important. With Cage’s encouragement and a deadline to meet, I started thinking seriously about making a work for brain waves and resolved to get to work. The concert began before the audience came in with Cage performing 0´ 00˝ (1962). He was seated on the small landing between the two floors of the museum in a squeaky old armchair he had brought with him from Stony Point. We had affixed contact mikes to the chair, as well as to a typewriter he used to write letters. The idea of the piece is that you engage in an activity you have to do anyway and amplify it. Cage at that time was fixed on the notion that music was work. He saw around him flagrant examples of wishy-washy pieces by lazy composers. He also had a microphone around his throat, the kind used by World War II Page 4 of For 1, 2, or 3 people by Christian Wolff. Copyright 1964 by C. F. Peters Corporation. Used by permission. 46 : m u s i c 1 0 9 pilots. From time to time he would drink from a glass of water. The sounds of swallowing would be greatly amplified and emanate from loudspeakers positioned around the museum. So the sound material for the work consisted of amplified chair, typewriter and human swallowing. 0´ 00˝ is a companion piece to 4´ 33˝. Both are prose scores. For 1, 2, or 3 people After the audience had come in John, Christian Wolff, and I performed For 1, 2, or 3 people (1964) by Christian Wolff. John played a musical saw, Christian an electric guitar, and I an amplified cymbal. The first thing you notice about For 1, 2, or 3 people is the title. Why did he use the word “ people” and not “players” or “performers”? It’s because the piece is meant for anybody to play, amateurs as well as professionals. The score consists of ten pages. You may play any number of them, repeating none, or any one repeated no more than ten times. This instruction reminds me a little of Cartridge Music, for which there are shapes on the pages for the same number of players. This is different, though; it controls the kind of material to be played, depending on how many pages are to be played. By playing the same page ten times, you hear the same materials in different combinations and continuity; you get into the material by surveying it in different contexts. Playing several pages once each you hear different but similar material in the same way. In a sense, the first activity could be thought of as vertical , the second, horizontal. The players are instructed to play all that is notated on a page. You don’t repeat anything. You may start wherever you want. You don’t read the notes from left to right, as you would in a Mozart sonata. It’s not linear. First, you have to learn Christian’s vocabulary. Black notes are variously short, up to about a second; white notes are any length. This may be confusing because in conventional notation black notes are usually short, white notes, long. When you see a white r o s e a r t m u s e u m : 47 note you must remember that it’s not necessarily long and may be determined by the requirements of coordination. Notes with stems as sixteenth notes are...