Filed under: Commentary | Tags: 4'33", David Tudor, Duchamp, I Ching, Jasper Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Rauschenberg
Merce Cunningham died Sunday, July 26, at the age of ninety. There is no doubt that he was one of the most important artists of the 20th century because he expanded everything that we take for granted in ballet and in choreography.
He was also part of a group of remarkable artists and musicians in New York City that has an equally astounding impact on the 20th and 21st centuries of art and music. The members of the group, including Merce Cunningham, were John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, David Tudor, and Marcel Duchamp. All of these individuals divided their audiences because what they did was so far on the cutting edge that many in the audience did not understand what they were trying to accomplish, while others relished the excitement of something new. Mr. Cunningham destroyed the relationship in dance between the music and the steps that the dancers took. As a choreographer, he did not insist that the dancers accomplish their task within a certain beat or on a certain beat. He wanted the dancers to work adjacent to the music, but not as a part of it. And, like his collaborator and partner for many years, John Cage, he was interested in the element of chance, particularly Zen Buddhism and I Ching. To determine how a series of events would be sequenced, Cunningham would often roll dice. In one of his ballets, “Split Sides,” two different sets were designed along with different costumes and lighting. Mr. Cunningham would come out on stage and roll the dice in front of the audience to determine which set to use. However, it should be pointed out that Cunningham’s choreography was not left to chance as he wanted the dancers to work faultlessly together. It was only the music that contained the element of chance.
John Cage also used the element of chance. He wrote a piece, “Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” for twelve radios and twenty-four performers. One performer worked the volume knob and the other performer controlled the tuner. The performance took place much later in the program than had been anticipated. Some of the radio stations had gone off the air, and most of the programs were very different from what had been heard at rehearsal. Many of the radios had nothing but silence. The critics were merciless the next day saying that obviously this piece was a failure. Cage, however, was delighted because it exemplified his theory of chance. It was at this point that he named his theory indeterminacy.
Both Cage and Cunningham were interested in sounds as opposed to our concept of music. To Cage, everything that one could hear was music. It was the same, but in a slightly different way, with Marcel Duchamp’s works of art. Duchamp was the Dadaist (Dadaism came to fruition around 1916 after World War I. It was a reaction against colonialism, rationality, and beauty – anything that the founding artists considered to be the cause of the recent war), and promoted the concept of “found objects” as works of art. They just wanted to change the aesthetic standard by which art was judged. Many of you readers will recall Marcel Duchamp’s most notorious work entitled “Fountain (1917).” It was originally banned from an exhibit by the Society of Independent Artists. Many critics now speak very highly of it. Photographs of this “found object” can be found on Google. Marcel Duchamp was, in his own way, like Cunningham and Cage, stating that anything we see can be a work of art.
Painter Robert Rauschenberg, often collaborated with Merce Cunningham in designing the sets for his ballets. And, to mention one instance, he collaborated almost unknowingly at that time with John Cage. In 1949, Rauschenberg painted a series of all black and all white paintings. He did this because, and I quote, “I didn’t want color to serve me.” Keep in mind that Cage is interested in sound that is not governed by our European concepts of scale and form. Cage’s concept of sound did not have to be governed by a scale, that is to say linear, but as extending in all directions. He was supremely cognizant of the fact that in order to have sound one also had to have silence. Cage told me one afternoon in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, that he almost viewed Rauschenberg’s white paintings as silent paintings because they had no color. I think that Rauschenberg may have disagreed with this a little bit, because he still considered the canvas full. In any case, it was the Rauschenberg white paintings that gave Cage the courage, as he put it, to write this piece “4’ 33″. This is a piece of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. Cage told me that he was quite sure that many people do not understand the piece at all, and that was in 1975. Cage considered this piece to be one of his most important pieces, and he still would like to have the public take it seriously. It simply points to the fact that many in the public do not feel the need to find a meaning in a piece of art or a piece of music. That poses too many difficulties for them – particularly the difficulty of time. This piece has three movements and the length of each movement was arrived at by using the method of I Ching. The pianist who premiered this piece in 1952 was David Tudor.
In 1992, after John Cage’s death at the age of eighty, David Tudor became the music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, a position Cage had held for a long time. David Tudor was one of the leading performers of avant garde piano music. Many of his performances were of pieces by Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, Pierre Boulez, and LaMonte Young. Tudor composed several works for Merce Cunningham’s Dance Company, and thus became known as a composer as well as a fine pianist. David Tudor died in 1996 at the age of 70.
The last member of this incredible group of artists is painter, Jasper Johns. Johns experiments as well, like the other members of this remarkable, yet loosely formed group. I say loosely formed because they were not as politically united as the well remembered French group of composers known worldwide as “Les Six.” The composers that made up that group were Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre. Their influence, however, unlike the group that Merce Cunningham belonged to, had minimal influence. Jasper Johns was one of the first painters, if not the first, to add sand and wax to his paint to give them more character and texture. He was also the first painter to use iconography such as maps, target, letters and numbers. His most famous work is entitled “Flag” and comes from the years 1954 – 1955 which he painted after having a dream of the American flag. Nonetheless, he is not considered a Pop Artist, but a neo-Dadaist because he presented so many paradoxes. He has also done sculptures and intaglio prints.
When thinking of any of these artists, it is impossible to not recognize the entire group. Their legacy has been profound.
Filed under: Commentary | Tags: Berlioz, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Eusebius, expressive, Floristan, Murr, Raro, Robert Schumann, Romanticism
The music of the Romantic era is one of the most popular genres, and yet its origins are a mystery to many people. Please note the use of the word mystery. We will come back to this word several times in our discussion of the Romantic movement. The popular consideration, or conceit, of non-musicians when they describe Romantic music is almost always that Romantic music is Romantic because it is very expressive. Well, that’s true but then all music is expressive and has been for thousands of years. Some of the ancient Greeks considered music to be dangerous because it was so expressive that it led to those who listened carefully down the garden path. Have we heard this before? Of course. Every new age of music has its own built in warnings that too much of it can be a bad thing. The music of today, that is to say the popular music which is written solely for entertainment purposes, is more flagrant in its encouragement for the listener to behave in antisocial behavior. However, we are not going to discuss that right now.
Often, most people aren’t even sure what they mean when they say that Romantic music is expressive. Expressive, how? In what way? Gregorian chant is extremely expressive. And there are those who say that 20th-century music should not be expressive. But again, how? Why shouldn’t it be expressive?
Romantic music – the Romantic era is roughly 1800 to 1900 – began as a reaction against what composers thought were constrictive and restrictive forms, not only architectural forms, but harmonic forms as well (many new chords were “invented” during the Romantic period). It is a little strange that the Romantic composers still used forums that came to life in the preceding classical period. The main form, of course, was the sonata allegro form. But the real essence of the Romantic era is its association with literature and miniature pieces. From Schubert came the art song with texts by the German Romantic poets, Schiller and Heine, to name but two. Schubert also wrote miniature piano pieces which he named Impromptus. He also wrote waltzes. These small pieces were totally unconnected with any large piece, such as the sonata form. Chopin followed suit in this direction with impromptus, nocturnes, etudes, polonaises, and ballades – a clear reference to storytelling and literature.
But clearly, it was Robert Schumann who was the progenitor of musical romanticism. He very obviously drew on the works of author Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann, whose pen name was Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (in clear homage to Mozart), known as E.T. A. Hoffmann. He was a German Romantic author who was gifted in many, many ways. He was a music critic, caricaturist, and composer. His stories often involved mystery and fantasy. For example, one of his publications dealt with the man who believed that he met the composer, Christoph Gluck, after Gluck had been dead for at least 20 years. But to me, his most interesting imaginative character was that of the Kapellmeister Kreisler. A Kapellmeister is a person who is in charge of all of the music at a church – he conducts the choir and plays the organ, as well as writes the music for the service. In Hoffmann’s story, Kreisler is an individual who loves art and cannot abide philistines and dilettantes. He attends a party where all of the other guests annoy him greatly because they are philistines and dilettantes. Kreisler walks over to a window which he opens, climbs through it, and steps onto a magic carpet, and thus escapes the boredom of those he cannot tolerate. Now, the point of this is, that when it is read, one isn’t sure if Kreisler really climbs onto a magic carpet or if that’s what he just wants to do in his dream of escape. That is the mystery.
Kreisler appears in another piece of literature by Hoffmann, “The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr.” This is really a story about duality and the combining of two bibliographical narratives. In it, Kreisler decides that he will write his biography, and he does so during the day. The cat, Murr, decides that he will do the same. At night, he begins writing on the opposite sides of the pages that Kreisler has used for his biography. Thus, when one begins to read what Kreisler has written, and then turns the page over, the second page results in total confusion and mystery.
Schumann deals with this in his own mysterious way. First of all, he writes a suite of pieces (a suite is a set of miniature pieces, in this case written for the piano) of pieces which he calls “The Dances of The Band of David.” In this suite, Schumann invents the individuals who make up the Band – or organization – of David; Raro, Eusebius, and Floristan. The purpose of the Band of David is to deal with the Philistines. So, this suite written for piano becomes a biblical pun on the story of David and Goliath. Schumann also wrote another suite of miniature piano pieces which he entitled “Kreislerianna.” His imaginary characters of Raro, Floristan, and Eusebius also appear in this suite. In addition, Schumann uses a technique which is called “eye music.” It is usual in the printing and writing of music, that when a composer wishes to have a cadenza like passage which involves many fast-moving notes, they are written in smaller print or type. That enables the addition of many notes in a measure of music where there would normally be a certain limit dependent upon the meter signature. So, when the performer comes upon a measure filled with notes of smaller typeface, that is the indication that they should be done more quickly. However, Schumann sometimes filled his measures with a smaller typeface so that the performer might become a little mystified as to how to perform that measure. But upon closer examination, it can be seen that the proper number of notes is in the measure after all. In addition, Schumann also wrote “secret mottos” for the performer, for example, “the sound of the Carnival fades into the distance.” The audience has no knowledge of these additions to the score and they often have now relationship to the music; they are the fleeting extra thoughts of Schumann himself. They are for the performer only, and for his edification and “eyes” only; no one else’s. He sometimes puts an accent mark over a note that is tied, and thus held for a long time. How does one accent a note while it is being held down? Very mysterious.
The other composers of the Romantic era that followed Robert Schumann used the new freedom of that age and invented new harmonies and enlarged the expectations of their audiences as to sources of expression. The orchestra was enlarged – witness the huge orchestra required by Berlioz in his Requiem Mass (sixteen tympani), for example. And even in daily discourse, subjects such as death were dealt with freely, whereas in the past they were taboo. Music and literature were strongly influenced by the new freedom.