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7. Cage and Tudor
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7 cage and tudor Cartridge Music Does anyone have a toothpick? This is the question I usually ask when I talk about John Cage’s Cartridge Music (1960). Most people think of a toothpick as a trivial thing but in fact it is rather a sophisticated manufactured object. Here is a description from a toothpick manufacturer: A toothpick of essentially triangular cross section and tapered at both ends, one or both of the apex edge and base face thereof having an outwardly curved contour. A process for manufacturing said toothpicks involving forming V-shaped grooves of the requisite shape in a raw material and separating the toothpicks therefrom. A conventional type of toothpick made of wood and having a substantially triangular cross-section is marketed in strip form with toothpicks arranged parallel to the sides of one another as a connected unit, so that they can be broken off therefrom singly as required. The individual toothpicks are wedge-shaped and are manufactured in the form of a correspondingly wedge-shaped board, a flat end surface of the latter and a flat bottom side both being partly broken through by V-shaped grooves, extending in a straight line, which are formed in the upper side in a suitable manner. Crazy as it may seem, with so many people in this class, we perform Cage’s Cartridge Music. Does anyone know what a phonograph cartridge is? Or are they a thing of the past? The old lp or 78 record players had magnetic cartridges with phonograph needles c a g e & t u d o r : 57 in them. The needle would track the grooves on the record and transform the mechanical energy into electrical energy. For many years Cage had wanted to be able to hear small sounds and the sounds of physical objects. He was also looking for ways to make electronic music live. All one has to do is remove the needle in a phono cartridge and insert something else, a toothpick, for example . Twang the toothpick and you get the sound of wood. One can do the same thing with a pipe cleaner or a Slinky. The cartridge amplifies these objects enormously. We used to buy them at Radio Shack for about $2.98. They’re hard to get nowadays, the phonograph record is virtually obsolete except for aficionados and disk jockeys. But we can substitute piezo disks, which work almost as well. A piezo disk is simply an audio transducer that transforms pressure into an electrical signal. It’s about as large as a dime. One of the reasons that Cage’s music is so popular is that he is not afraid of whimsy. Toothpicks are unlikely objects to use in a musical performance but they are exquisitely engineered objects nonetheless. Slinkies are silly children’s toys capable of stepping down a stairway, making hyper-reverberant sounds. They are really metal coils similar to the spring reverberation units we had in the old days and are still available in some rock-and-roll guitar amplifiers. That doubleness, that confusion as to function—one object put to a use it wasn’t designed for—has a certain haiku quality. In haiku poetry often the mind has to travel a long distance to get from one image to another of two disparate images (ideas). This juxtaposition activates the mind and gives deep meaning as one listens to Cage’s music. In one of his lectures Bob Wilson remarked that a baroque candelabra on a baroque table means one thing; a baroque candelabra on a rock in a meadow, for example, means something completely different. The score of Cartridge Music consists of a page of instructions, as well as four transparent sheets—one with points, one with circles , another with a circle that looks like a clock face, and a fourth [44.212.39.149] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:36 GMT) 58 : m u s i c 1 0 9 with a dotted curved line with a circle at the end of it—and twenty pieces of white paper with shapes on them. I don’t know how Cage made these shapes but the twenty sheets have a corresponding number of shapes on them, from one to twenty. If one player plays the work, he or she uses the sheet with one shape on it; two players use the sheet with two shapes and so on. The first thing you do is to superimpose the transparencies over the sheet with shapes...