HPSCHD@50 (review)

[Editor's note: Selected reviews are posted on the Web at www.computermusicjournal.org (click on the Reviews tab). In some cases, they are either unpublished in the Journalitself or published in an abbreviated form in the Journal.]

This concert took place 4 March 2020 at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Stage 5, on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA. For more information visit: www.nonopera.org/WP2/hpschd-50. To hear a randomly selected tape from the 52 original tapes used for HPSCHD, call the number +1-217-290-2473.

Fifty years after the premiere of John Cage's immersive, multimedia work HPSCHDat the University of Illinois, it returned to Champaign-Urbana in a performance by Chicagobased NON:op Open Opera Works in collaboration with the Illinois Modern Ensemble. The production, HPSCHD@50, was led by Christophe Preissing with input from William Brooks and Neely Bruce, two of the seven harpsichordists from the 1969 premiere. This anniversary concert on 4 March 2020 followed NON:op's performances of HPSCHDa few weeks earlier at The Chicago Cultural Center, a symposium about the work at Northwestern University, and a panel discussion the day before at the University of Illinois's weekly composition forum.

HPSCHD's premiere on 16 May 1969 represented a culmination of two years of collaborative efforts between John Cage and the university's Experimental Music Studios founder Lejaren Hiller. Laetitia Snow, James Cuomo, James Grant Stroud, and Max Mathews also contributed in realizing the work, which required extensive computer programming and technological expertise. Initially envisioning a work based on a commission from Swiss harpsichordist Antoinette Vischer, Cage would find procedural inspiration in Mozart's dice-based composition game. As one of a handful of proposals he made to the university's Center for Advanced Study, this starting point of combining harpsichord solo with electronic music that used chance operations based on rolling dice eventually expanded into an arena-sized happening in the university's 18,000 seat Assembly Hall (now State Farm Center).

At its premiere in 1969, seven harpsichordists played aleatoric parts on amplified harpsichords constructed from original material, and music from Mozart and other historical composers using FORTRAN computer code that replicated and built upon the dice-rolling procedures. The additional media used, according to Kenneth Silverman's biography of Cage, included 52 monaural tape machines playing 208 different tapes through 59 speakers, 64 slide projectors showing 6,400 slides, and 40 films projected on eleven 100 × 400 film screens as well as a 40-foot circular screen. As if to further pinpoint the work's moment in time, many of the slides contained newly released images from NASA's space missions, anticipating the moon landing a few months later in 1969.

Although HPSCHDis known for the multifaceted spectacle of its premiere, the resources required to stage it are as open-ended as many of Cage's other compositions. As described on the John Cage Trust's Web site, HPSCHDcan be staged with one to seven harpsichordists and at least two speakers playing some of the many tape parts. Similarly, its duration can be any agreed upon amount of time. In this way, HPSCHDresembles other indeterminate works by Cage, where another staging can bring about profoundly different results.

Even so, the premiere's staging and ambience seems to create a peculiar sense of continuity in how HPSCHDis performed, even if the scale of these later realizations is noticeably smaller. The impact of this is similarly visible in tributes to the work. For example, a commemorative concert party on 16 May 2019 (the actual 50th anniversary of HPSCHD's premiere) at Analog, a wine bar in Urbana, Illinois, presented an array of music and art by local artists approximating the premiere's ambience.

Another amusing aspect of this continuity is the presence of David Eisenman at the 1969 premiere, the 2019 Analog concert-party, the panel in Chicago, at this 50th anniversary performance, and other HPSCHD-related events. In addition to being in touch with Cage as part of planning the...