Very little of this music initially circulated in the form of commercially released recordings. For composers and musicians whose work was not released until decades later, the landscape of avant-garde music available in recorded form would be unrecognizable. Thus the task emerges to articulate the conceptual distance between the creation of this music in the 1960s and its consumption in the present. For a genre of music whose work was initially encountered almost exclusively in performance, the ways in which listeners encounter experimental music has changed radically. The ease of access to recordings of this period has never been greater, and the cost of accessing them never less. With the recent establishment of online archives, a vastly larger number of these recordings have suddenly been made available. Why approach experimental or avant-garde music of the 1960s through its hostility towards being represented as a sound recording? Because when this work is experienced today, it is most often encountered in the form of a recording. And the record is the medium where the dichotomies of musician/non-musician and professional/amateur lose force. The record allows for the distribution of organized as well as disorganized sound. may become just another part of the world, no more, no less." 2 Records may not change, but they do travel. This is the person whose second collection of writings, A Year from Monday, was dedicated "To us and all those who hate us, that the U.S.A. Cage was an exceptional, tireless correspondent and a cheerfully committed internationalist who maintained a vast network of contacts. Logo for DRAM, formally the Database of Recorded American Music But one also would have expected him to acknowledge the potential embodied by the record as a medium of communication across geographical distances, to say nothing of time. It is the expression of a pioneer of works that were radically indeterminate as regards performance, works that on the basis of their design change significantly with each iteration, except when instantiated in the form of a recording. On the one hand Cage's opposition to the fixed form of the record, the tedium of the medium, could not be more straightforward. Remove the records from Texas / and someone / will learn to sing." 1 In his 1949 "Lecture on Nothing," he lamented, "The reason they've no / music in Texas / is because / they have recordings / in Texas. Indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, and free improvisation were predicated on being experienced in performance they can be said to have actively undermined the form of the sound recording.Ĭomposers and performers in this period tended to hold sound recordings in low esteem, and John Cage set the standard for expressing antipathy towards them. Most new genres in experimental or avant-garde music in the 1960s were deliberately ill-suited to be represented in the form of a recording. With her new performance, Fritz further pursues her romance with dance, poetry and the digital screen."Remove the Records from Texas": Parsing Online Archives In 2017 she performed ‘Indispensible Blue’ at Beursschouwburg, another poetic quest combining choreography and the theme of our digital world. She’s since lived and worked here as a dancer, performance-maker and poet. Silence and text are carefully distributed over the time structure, forming a subtle duet, in which this composition - because that is what it is in the end - explains, among other things, its own structure as it unfolds.īryana Fritz was born in Chicago and has studied dance in Minneapolis (US), Essen (DE) and with P.A.R.T.S. Together they form 48 time blocks of 48 bars, all of which follow the ratios 7-6-14-14-7 at the level of the number of units (the bars) and at the level of the number of blocks. Cage divides the text into four columns so that it has 4 "measures" per line, which can be filled with either text or silence. Moreover, the Lecture on Nothing is literally composed: it uses the same "rhythmic" structure as he used in his compositions from the previous years, with different structural levels all following the same proportional division. "Nothing" is literally the most important subject, in a text in which Cage collects anecdotes, makes references to Zen Buddhism (which he was deeply involved in at the time) and above all plays an amusing game with the audience's expectations. Non-conformist as he was, John Cage chose to turn a lecture about his music into a work that is not even a lecture (at the most, it keeps up appearances) and is not even about his music.
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