Playing the Audience
Nick Richardson · John Cage on TV
In 1960 John Cage performed his piece Water Walk live on the game show I’ve Got a Secret (thanks to Jenny Diski for pointing it out). Back then it must have seemed like an elaborate joke at Cage’s expense. The presenter who introduces him is fatuous and sceptical, rolling his eyes when Cage tells him he is going to knock radios onto the floor (a union dispute over who should plug them in meant he couldn’t switch them on – a chance intervention he was no doubt delighted with). ‘I’m with you boy,’ the presenter says patronisingly.
Cage stands in front of a piano, and behind a trestle table laden with radios, a pressure cooker, a food processor, a vase – things a game show in the early 1960s might have given away as prizes. He walks round his set-up, stopwatch in hand, methodically slapping, tickling, blowing, spilling his instruments as dictated by his score, to whoops of mocking laughter from the crowd..
Now it’s clear that the crowd were unknowing performers: not just spectators laughing at the piece, but instruments laughing inside it. Water Music is a distillation of the sound of the contemporary American household: there’s the kitchen, with its bubbling pans and the hum of appliances; the bathroom – Cage puts the vase of flowers in a bath and waters it – and the living room, centred on the TV, blaring the chortles and howls of a peak-time game show audience.
Comments
It just seemed like you were a bit too keen to frame the event as Boorish Mainstream vs. Isolated, Misunderstood Avantgardist (who - ha! - nonetheless has the Last Laugh on the philistines…)
Wolpe's own response to that challenge was to produce dense, intricately-wrought music of considerable notational complexity--the opposite of Cage's approach, where vastly more latitude is offered to the performer. But the source of their inspiration was the same.
I found this on the Wolpe Society website, a reminiscence by John Cage:
"And I went several times to 110th Street, out where Stefan had an apartment with Irma Rademacher. And it was always filled with students who were absolutely devoted to him, so that one had the feeling being there that one was at the true center of New York. And it was almost an unknown center of New York. And that was what gave a very special strength to one’s feeling about Stefan, that it was in a sense a privilege to be aware of him, since it was like being privy to an important secret."
Many, many thanks for sharing this.
JSB.
Here we see the whole problem with this kind of self-referential music: it is not that it is meant for the ivory tower, for a small clique of composers and rather snobbish connoisseurs, but that it depends on the particular ivory tower of university music faculties and conservatories. This means that anyone who doesn't choose to follow one or another accepted party line is ostracized and is lucky to find a way to do his or her own thing by say, composing for the movies.
I was at a talk Philip Glass gave in Quito a month ago, and though he also had only good words to say about Cage's influence on him, this was not the case when it came to the academy: he chose the harsher and longer path of slowly building a business out of his music just so he could do what *he* wanted, instead of obeying the dogma set down by some professor or self appointed guru.