put a Carnegie Hall orchestra in the middle of New York City and placed an empty podium in front of the musicians with a sign that read, “Conduct Us.” Random New Yorkers who accepted the challenge were given the opportunity to conduct this world-class orchestra. The orchestra responded to the conductors, altering their tempo and performance accordingly.
Improv Everywhere is “a New York City-based prank collective that causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. Created in August of 2001 by Charlie Todd, the organization “has executed over 100 missions involving tens of thousands of undercover agents.” Find more of their “work” on YouTube.
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In most of the performances of John Cage’s famously silent composition 4’33”, the performer sits in front of what appears to be sheet music (as in the performance below). The audience, generally prepared for what will follow, namely nothing, may sometimes wonder what could be printed on those pages. Probably also nothing? Now we have a chance to see what Cage envisioned on the page as he composed this piece. Starting on October of this month, New York’s Museum of Modern Art will exhibit Cage’s 1952 score “4’33” (In Proportional Notation).” You can see the first page above.
As you might imagine, subsequent pages (viewable here) look nothing like a typical score, but they are not blank, nor do they contain blank staves; instead they are traversed by carefully hand-drawn vertical lines that seem to denote the units of time as units of space. In fact, this is exactly what Cage did (hence proportional notation). On the fourth page of the score, Cage writes the following formula: “1 page=7 inches=56 seconds.” Artist Irwin Kremen, to whom Cage dedicated the piece, has this to say about the unusual score:
In this score, John made exact, rather than relative, duration, the only musical characteristic. In effect, real time is here the fundamental dimension of music, its very ground. And where time is primary, change, process itself, defines the nature of things. That aptly describes the silent piece — an unfixed flux of sound through time, a flux from performance to performance.
Interpreters of Cage have frequently taken his “silent” piece as a playful bit of conceptual performance art. For example, philosopher Julian Dodd emphatically declares that 4’33” is not music, a distinction he takes to mean that it is instead analytical, “a work about music…,” that it is “a witty, profound work… of conceptual art.” Thinking of Cage’s piece as a kind of meta-analysis of music seems to miss the point, however. Kremen and many others, including Cage himself, call this notion into question. In the interview below, for example, Cage does make an important distinction between “music” and “sound.” He favors the latter for its chance, impersonal qualities, but also, importantly, because it is neither analytical nor emotional. Sound, says Cage, does not critique, interpret, or elaborate—it does not “talk.” It simply is. But the distinction between music and not-music soon collapses, and Cage cites Emmanuel Kant in saying that music “doesn’t have to mean anything,” any more than the chance occurrences of sound.
Cage’s rejection of meaning in music may have played out in a rejection of traditional forms, but it seems mistaken to think of 4’33” as a high concept joke or intellectual exercise. Perhaps it makes more sense to think of the piece as a Zen exercise, carefully designed to awaken what Suzuki Roshi called “the true dragon.” In a 1968 lecture, the Zen master tells the following story:
In China there was a man named Seko, who loved dragons. All his scrolls were dragons, he designed his house like a dragon-house, and he had many pictures of dragons. So the real dragon thought, “If I appear in his house, he will be very pleased.” So one day the real dragon appeared in his room and Seko was very scared of it. He almost drew his sword and killed the real dragon. The dragon cried, “Oh my!” and hurriedly escaped from Seko’s room. Dogen Zenji says, “Don’t be like that.”
The subject of Suzuki’s lecture is zazen, or Zen meditation, a practice that very much influenced Cage through his study of another Zen interpreter, D.T. Suzuki. Instead of practicing zazen, however, Cage practiced what he called his “proper discipline.” He describes this himself in a quotation from a biography by Kay Larsen:
[R]ather than taking the path that is prescribed in the formal practice of Zen Buddhism itself, namely, sitting cross-legged and breathing and such things, I decided that my proper discipline was the one to which I was already committed, namely, the making of music. And that I would do it with a means that was as strict as sitting cross-legged, namely, the use of chance operations, and the shifting of my responsibility from the making of choices to that of asking questions.
Cage, who loved Zen parables and was himself a storyteller, would appreciate Suzuki Roshi’s telling of Zenji’s true dragon story. While much of his compositional work seems to skirt the edges of music, focusing on the negative space around it, for Cage, this space is no less important that what we think of as music. As Suzuki interprets the story: “For people who cannot be satisfied with some form or color, the true dragon is an imaginary animal which does not exist. For them something which does not take some particular form or color is not a true being. But for Buddhists, reality can be understood in two ways: with form and color, and without form and color.” Read against this backdrop, Cage’s “silent” piece is as much a way of understanding reality—as much a true being—as a musical composition expressly designed produce specific formal effects. And while his published collection of lectures and writings is titled Silence, as Cage himself said of 4’33”, in a remark that provides the title for the MoMA’s exhibit, “there will never be silence.” In the absence of formalized music, 4′33″ asks us to hear the true dragon of sound.
“David Bowie Is,” the extensive retrospective exhibit of the artist and his fabulous costumes, hit Toronto last Friday (see our post from earlier today), and as many people have reported, in addition to those costumes—and photos, instruments, set designs, lyric sheets, etc.—the show includes a list of Bowie’s favorite books. Described as a “voracious reader” by curator Geoffrey Marsh, Bowie’s top 100 book list spans decades, from Richard Wright’s raw 1945 memoir Black Boy to Susan Jacoby’s 2008 analysis of U.S. anti-intellectualism in The Age of American Unreason.
Bowie’s always had a complicated relationship with the U.S., but his list shows a lot of love to American writers, from the aforementioned to Truman Capote, Hubert Selby, Jr., Saul Bellow, Junot Diaz, Jack Kerouac and many more. He’s also very fond of fellow Brits George Orwell, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes and loves Mishima and Bulgakov. You can read the full list below or over at Open Book Toronto, who urges you to “grab one of these titles and settle in to read — and just think, somewhere, at some point, David Bowie (or, to be more accurate, the man behind David Bowie, David Jones) was doing the exact same thing.” If that sort of thing inspires you to pick up a good book, go for it. You could also peruse the list, then puzzle over the literate Bowie’s lyrics to “I Can’t Read.” You can also explore a new related book–Bowie’s Bookshelf:The Hundred Books that Changed David Bowie’s Life.
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On September 21, Pete Seeger performed the Woody Guthrie classic, “This Land is Your Land,” at Farm Aid while being joined on stage by John Mellencamp, Willie Nelson, Dave Matthews and Neil Young. “Friends,” he told the audience, “at 94, I don’t have much of a voice left. But here’s a song I think you know, and if you sing it, why, we’ll make a good sound.” And that’s just what the singer and audience did. Seeger, who still has his wits about him, even improvised a bit and added a new verse, “New York was made to be frack free!” Bless him.
For some vintage Seeger, don’t miss this film featuring the folk legend when he was only 27 years old. Released in 1946, To Hear Your Banjo Play is an engaging 16-minute introduction to American folk music, written and narrated by Alan Lomax.
Attention David Bowie fans: If you’re going to be in Toronto between now and November 27th, you’re in for quite a treat. AGO, the Art Gallery of Ontario, just opened the exhibit “David Bowie Is,” a hugely comprehensive multimedia show “Spanning five decades and featuring more than 300 objects from Bowie’s personal archive,” including handwritten lyrics, instruments, photos like that of Bowie and William Burroughs below, and lots and lots of costumes like the bodysuit at the bottom. Originating at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, this is the first international exhibit solely devoted to Bowie.
If you can’t make it to the show, you can see a brief preview here and at AGO’s own site. In the short video at the top, Curator Victoria Broackes describes the title of the exhibit as “both an unfinished sentence and a statement.” The exhibit, she says, illustrates “Bowie’s own belief that we all have within us so many different personalities, and we should work hard to figure out what they are and bring them out.” It’s difficult to imagine anyone but Bowie bringing out so many uniquely fascinating personalities as he has in one lifetime. As Broackes’ fellow curator Geoffrey Marsh comments, Bowie is “an astonishingly hard worker” who “performed on average once every 11 nights” for 32 years, all while recording album after album and becoming an international movie star. Bowie may inspire, but he also blows most performers away with his seemingly endless supplies of creative energy and single-minded focus.
The work of folklorists and musicologists like Alan Lomax, Stetson Kennedy, and Harry Smith has long been revered in countercultural communities and libraries; and it occasionally reaches mainstream audiences in, for example, the Coen Brother’s 2000 film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and its attendant soundtrack, or the playlists of purists on college radio and NPR. But their recordings are much more than historical novelties.
Archives like Lomax’s Association for Cultural Equity—which we’ve featured before—help remind us of our origins as much as bottom-up accounts like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Lomax and his colleagues believed that folk art and music infuse and renew “high” art and provide bulwarks against the cynical destitution of mass-market commercial media that can seem so deadening and inescapable.
That is not to say that notions of authenticity aren’t fraught with their own problems of exploitation. Approaching folk art as tourists, we can demean it and ourselves. But the problem is less, I think, one of gentrification than of neglect: it’s simply far too easy to lose touch, a much-remarked-upon irony of the age of social networking. Lomax understood this. He founded ACE “to explore and preserve the world’s expressive traditions with humanistic commitment and scientific engagement.” The organization resides at NYC’s Hunter College and, since Lomax’s retirement in 1996, has been overseen by his daughter, Anna Lomax Wood. Through an arrangement with the Library of Congress, which houses the originals, ACE has access to all of Lomax’s collection of field recordings and can disseminate them online to the public. Lomax’s association has also long been active in repatriating recorded artifacts to libraries and archives in their places of origin, giving local communities access to cultural histories that may otherwise be lost to them.
Lomax underscored the significance of his organization’s name in a 1972 essay entitled “An Appeal for Cultural Equity,” in which he lays out the importance of preserving cultural diversity against the “oppressive dullness and psychic distress” imposed upon “those areas where centralized music industries, exploiting the star system and controlling the communication system, put the local musician out of work and silence folk song.” Are we any more improved forty years later for the shocking monopolization of mass media in the hands of a few conglomerates? I’d answer unequivocally no but for one important qualification: mass media in the form of open online archives allows us unprecedented access to, for example, the awesome late-seventies film of R.L. Burnside (top), who like many Mississippi Delta bluesmen before him, would only achieve recognition much later in life. Or we can see native North Carolinian Cas Wallin (above) sing a version of folk song “Pretty Saro” in 1982, a song Bob Dylan recorded and only recently released. Then there’s one of my favorites, “Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor,” picked and sung below by Mississippian Sam Chatmon—a song played and recorded by countless black and white blues and country artists like Mississippi John Hurt and Gillian Welch.
These and thousands of other examples from the ACE archive bring musicologists, historians, folklorists, activists, educators, and everyone else closer to Lomax’s ideal—that we “learn how we can put our magnificent mass communications technology at the service of each and every branch of the human family.” The ACE catalog contains over 17,400 digital files, beginning with Lomax’s first tape recordings in 1946, to his digital work in the 90s. The archive includes songs, stories, jokes, sermons, interviews and other audio artifacts from the American South, Appalachia, the Caribbean, and many more locales. The archive features recordings from famous names like Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly but primarily consists of folk music from anonymous folk, representing a variety of languages and ethnicities. And the archive is ever-expanding as it continues to digitize rare recordings, and to upload vintage film, like the videos above, to its YouTube channel.
One of the defining moments in Elvis Costello’s career happened on December 17, 1977, when he appeared on Saturday Night Live. Costello was 23 years old. His debut album, My Aim Is True, had just come out in America a month earlier. When the Sex Pistols were unable to appear on the show as planned (see their last live concert here), Costello and his recently formed band, the Attractions, got their big break.
They were supposed to play his single “Less Than Zero,” a catchy tune about a loathsome politician in England. But only a few bars into the song, Costello put a stop to it. “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “but there’s no reason to do this song here.”
At that point he and the band launched into “Radio Radio,” a song that takes a jab at corporate-controlled broadcasting. Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels was furious. According to some reports, he raised his middle finger at Costello and kept it up until the unapproved song was over. Costello was banned from the show for nearly 12 years. You can learn more about the incident by watching this video from the Daily Guru:
The rift between Costello and Michaels eventually healed, and Costello was invited to appear again on Saturday Night Live in the spring of 1989. Ten years after that, on SNL’s 25th anniversary show, Costello went on the show again and parodied his notorious 1977 appearance by bursting onstage while the Beastie Boys were playing “Sabotage” and ordering them to stop. He and the Boys then launched into a raucous version of “Radio Radio”:
In an interview this month with Details magazine, Costello talks a little about the 1977 incident. “They’ve run that clip forever,” he says, “and every time anybody does anything outrageous on that show, I get name-checked. But I was copying Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix had done the same thing on the Lulu Show, when he went into an unscheduled number. I remember seeing it and going, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ ” To see for yourself what Costello is talking about, visit our post, Jimi Hendrix Wreaks Havoc on the Lulu Show, Gets Banned From BBC.
Their conversation has been resurrected as a four minute animation for PBS Digital Studios’ Blank on Blank series. The cartoon Janis bears a close resemblance to Gloria Steinem, an uncomfortable fit once the topic turns from her sadness at critical rejection to the sisterhood’s alleged withholding of affection.
Smith hits his subject with some leading questions that smack of the myriad ways Women’s Lib was distorted by even the liberal media of the time: “It seems to bother a lot of Women’s Lib people that you’re so upfront sexually,” he muses.
No need to take that one at anything less than face value…
Joplin allowed herself to be led, tossing off several statements that animator Patrick Smith faithfully illustrates. (In my opinion the wounded female drummers rock far more than pregnancy and vacuums, his shorthand for “settling.” )
When later, Joplin timidly asks if “all that $#*% I said about chicks” sounded bad, Smith reassures her that no, she said what she wanted to say. Perhaps he got what he wanted her to say.
As commenter heyitsmoiobserved on YouTube, “It’s always bothered me when people ask successful women to comment on how some other women don’t like them. I’ve yet to hear a successful man to be asked why other men don’t like him, even though there’s sure to be plenty. Women seem to constantly be put in this defensive position where they can’t answer the question without making it sound like all women are jealous beasts who can’t handle that some woman made it, and that’s simply not true.”
If you’re left feeling vaguely queasy, I suggest “Stiletto Power,” Blank on Blank’s take on Larry Grobel’s 1994 interview with Farrah Fawcett. Grobel’s approach seemed to have been one of turn on the tape recorder and then get out of the way. Mission accomplished. The resulting monologue is as ferocious as it is funny.
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