Composer John Cage (photograph by Rob C. Croes for the Dutch National Archives, from Wikimedia Commons, made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)
This Friday Islandia Music Records (the label managed by cellist Maya Beiser) will launch a multi-album series of recordings of performances by percussionist Steven Schick, collectively entitled Weather Systems. The title of the first album is A Hard Rain. Most of the release is devoted to innovative approaches to percussion that were explored during the Fifties and Sixties. The contributing composers from that period are (in order of appearance) John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, Charles Wuorinen, Helmut Lachenmann, and William Hibbard. The album then concludes with an “electronic augmentation” of Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate.” Amazon.com has created a Web page for this new album, which is processing pre-orders. Unfortunately, it is only being distributed for digital release; but, fortunately, the download includes the accompanying booklet.
Where the content of this recording is concerned, anyone of my generation will probably see the elephant in the room. That elephant is the album Electronics & Percussion - Five Realizations By Max Neuhaus, a vinyl album released by Columbia Masterworks in 1968. That album is still available through an Amazon.com Web page at what may described politely as “collectors’ prices.” To the best of my knowledge, the CD version has only been produced by Sony Music Japan International, meaning that the price on the Amazon.com Web page will probably also only appeal to serious collectors. Two of the selections on A Hard Rain also appear on Electronics & Percussion: Feldman’s “The King of Denmark” and Stockhausen’s “Zyklus für einen Schlagzeuger” (cycle for a percussionist), given the number 9 in the composer’s catalog.
Now, to be fair, I enjoy the fact that anyone interested in either of these compositions has an opportunity to choose between performances or even listen to both of them. Nevertheless, I have to say that David Behrman tended to make better programming decisions than those made jointly by Schick and his recording engineer Andrew Munsey. As a case in point, consider the opening tracks on A Hard Rain.
The first of these is Cage’s “27 minutes 10.554 seconds” (I have chosen the headline used on the Wikipedia page for this composition to clarify the meaning of the title) scored for a solo percussionist. That meticulous approach to duration suggests that for this piece (and others titled only by the span of the duration), Cage was particularly interested in the interplay of sounds and silence. As a result, there are extended periods of silence in the performance, one of which occurs very early in Schick’s performance (so early that even I wondered whether there might have been a defect in the recording medium). The good news is that Cage was more interested in the general qualities of the passing of time than he was in how time is shared through the alternation of sounds and silence.
However, this becomes problematic on Schick’s new recording when the Cage selection is followed by “Zyklus.” The latter also involves the alternation of sound and silence, since the percussionist has to rotate himself in a circle, surrounded by the instruments he is playing. Stockhausen’s silences tend not to endure as long as Cage’s, but they are just as much a part of the music-making process. The problem, however, is that any listener that is not watching the clock while listening to Cage’s composition will probably have a hard time recognizing when the Cage piece ends and the Stockhausen piece begins! Behrman, on the other hand, ordered the selections on his album in such a way that one could detect significant qualitative changes in progressing from one piece to another.
Is this a matter of picking insignificant nits? Personally, I do not think so. I believe that every composer has a right to have his music recognized as such, even if the indeterminacy of that music is a significant element in the behavior of listening. Thus, while the performer may have to contend with watching both clock and notation at the same time, the listener should only have to focus on listening. In other words, while I can appreciate A Hard Rain as a valuable catalogue of compositions from the middle of the last century, I feel that the production has overlooked the fact that the listener also has a “point of view,” which tends to be even more important when indeterminacy is involved.
The good news for Schick is that the prevailing “digital mindset” is no longer constrained to honor the “program” defined by a recording. One can listen to any track in isolation as easily as one can shuffle the ordering of all of the tracks. (When the tracks are digital, one no longer has to worry about whether or not they are on the same CD!) Were Cage still alive, I suspect that he would relish the ways in which one may take a more creative approach to the act of listening. (On the other hand, I am not sure that either Stockhausen or Feldman would agree with him on this matter!)
Nevertheless, perhaps because my values seem to become more old-fashioned as I get older, the Neuhaus album still appeals to me more than the Schick album does. However, that is just my state of mind in the immediate present. If I spend more time listening to A Hard Rain, who knows where or how my tastes will shift!
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