Revisiting Cage’s “Concert for Piano and Orchestra”

Today I decided to return to the “ONLINE Series” of How Music is Made programs prepared by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP), having discussed the first of those programs last month shortly after it was released. These programs have been released through the SFCMP YouTube Channel; and the video I visited today was organized around John Cage’s “Concert for Piano and Orchestra,” which I had seen in performance this past January in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). While I appreciated the opportunity to revisit this performance, much of the value of this video version resided in the introductory material and its efforts to go beyond the “talking heads” approach of the pre-concert conversations one encounters at SFCMP performances.

One of Kate Campbell’s score pages for performing Cage’s “Concert for Piano and Orchestra” (screenshot from the video being discussed)

Of particular interest was the segment presented by pianist Kate Campbell. This included showing images of the score pages that Cage had prepared, following by a discussion of how she would go about interpreting those pages. Ultimately, she created a score of her own, which reflected how she chose to realize the directions associated with each of Cage’s pages. The visual content could not have been more informative, and Campbell’s delivery was consistently clear. In addition, by way of comparison, she also displayed score pages that pianist David Tudor had prepared for the world premiere performance of this composition. Presumably, each of the instrumentalists was faced with a similar task for his/her respective tasks and responded similarly to prepare realizations for performance.

Dudley’s explanatory discussion included mention of Merce Cunningham’s “Antic Meet,” which he created to be performed with Cage’s “Concert” as musical accompaniment. Dudley explained the aesthetic shared by both Cage and Cunningham: that the relationship between dance and music should be one of coexistence, rather than one of causality, in which what happens in the dance reflects what is happening in the music or vice versa, “business as usual” in the performance of both ballet and modern dance. What is particularly interesting about “Antic Meet” is that it is one of the funniest dances that Cunningham ever created: a parade of deliberately silly images and actions with no unifying sense of a narrative line. In other words, while Cage went to great length to allow his performers extreme liberties in how they would interpret his score pages, Cunningham prepared scrupulously-crafted choreography in which (as is always the case for comedy) timing is everything!

As I observed in writing about the concert performance, choreography was again part of the mix. This time it was prepared and executed by the dancer Antoine Hunter, founder and director of the Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival. Hunter’s participation offered a different perspective on the preference for coexistence over causality. As had been the case in “Antic Meet,” Hunter’s execution conveyed the sense that he had planned out everything to fit the overall duration of the performance, meaning that he did not have to draw upon coordinating with the sounds emerging from that performance. My personal feeling was that there was far more diversity and expression in what Cunningham had created, but I could still appreciate the decision by Artistic Director Eric Dudley to invite Hunter into the mix.

In the video version the only shortcoming was that one could not see the projections of the score pages. However, on the basis of Campbell’s presentation, I have no idea whether the projections were of Cage’s score or Campbell’s material. I would assume the latter, because her own page-turning did not seem to align with changes in the projections.

I do not feel that this is a major issue, though. More important (to me at least) is the significance of Cage’s choice of the noun “concert,” rather than “concerto.” The whole piece is an innovative “concert experience” unto itself. The listener is free to find his/her own way of directing attention to the piano (the only instrument absolutely required for the performance) or to the other instruments, played by SFCMP members joined by three SFCM students. From my vantage point (both in the audience for the performance and in front of my computer screen) this was a mix of familiar and unfamiliar faces; but it was a pleasure to see that the selected SFCM students responded to the “constructive task” of interpreting their score pages as attentively and imaginatively as the SFCMP “regulars” did.