1.) Conceived in 1952, Theater Piece No. 1 consisted of Cage collaborating with Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg, and Charles Olson at Black Mountain College where the performance took place amongst the audience. "Happenings", as set forth by Cage, are theatrical events that abandoned the traditional concept of stage-audience and occur without a sense of definite duration; instead, they are left to chance. They have a minimal script, with no plot. In fact, a "Happening" is so-named because it occurs in the present, attempting to arrest the concept of passing time. Cage believed that theater was the closest route to integrating art and (real) life. The term "Happenings" was coined by Allan Kaprow, one of his students, who was to define it as a genre in the late fifties. Cage met Kaprow while on a mushroom hunt with George Segal and invited him to join his class. In following these developments Cage was strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud’s seminal treatise The Theatre and Its Double, and the “Happenings” of this period can be viewed a forerunner to the ensuing Fluxus movement. In October of 1960, Mary Baumeister's Cologne studio hosted a joint concert by Cage and the video artist Nam June Paik, who in the course of his 'Etude for Piano' cut off Cage's tie and then washed his co-performer’s hair with shampoo.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage#Happenings_.26_Fluxus

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2.) Many performers of "New Complexity" find the extremely difficult requirements of these scores (extended techniques, microtonality, odd tunings, highly disjunct melodic contour, innovative timbres, complex polyrhythms, irrational meters like 4/3 and 21/6, unconventional instrumentations, quick changes in loudness and intensity, and so on) to be liberating in their very difficulty and abstraction, performing a live critique of classical music performance practice. Others have suggested, more radically, that the demands of "New Complexity" scores celebrate the relationship between composer and performer as role-playing a sado-masochistic relationship; the composer as sadist, the performer, masochist. Some believe that New Complexity is a "postmodern" rebellion from the sometimes conservative performance practice that evolved around the highly systematic and modernist "old complexity."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Complexity

John Cage might be considered a precursor to such movements as New Complexity.

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3.) There's something that seems (from my brief investigation) playful with John Cage but there's also something that seems a little too rigorous and maybe even militant. I am drawn to Mark Rothko (see below) and wonder if this passage isn't somewhat relevant here with respect to Cage:

Rothko labeled Pop-Art artists "charlatans and young opportunists" and wondered aloud during a 1962 exhibition of Pop Art, "are the young artists plotting to kill us all?" On viewing Jasper Johns' flags (see here) , Rothko said, "we worked for years to get rid of all that." It was not that Rothko could not accept being replaced, so much as an inability to accept what was replacing him. He found it valueless, though it received much admiration as collectors sold off their Rothkos, Newmans and Gottliebs and replaced them with Rauschenbergs (see above: #1), and staged retrospectives of artists then in their mid-twenties.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rothko#United_States

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4.) I guess that's what this is: a brief investigation. A slurred dance through lamppost streets. A drop of coriander, a wisp of cumin. A few cars going by on the highway. One street light flickers on and off, wavering between the two.

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5.) I HAD to include this. Please enjoy.

A preface to Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen for a Chinese edition.

A NOTE TO THE READER

Dear Reader,

Thank you for coming to this book. It is an honor, and a surprise, to have the frenzied thoughts of my youth expressed in Chinese characters. I sincerely appreciate the efforts of the translator and the publishers in bringing this curious work to your attention. I hope you will find it useful or amusing.

When I was young, my friends and I read and admired the old Chinese poets. Our ideas of love and friendship, of wine and distance, of poetry itself, were much affected by those ancient songs. Much later, during the years when I practiced as a Zen monk under the guidance of my teacher Kyozan Joshu Roshi, the thrilling sermons of Lin Chi (Rinzai) were studied every day. So you can understand, Dear Reader, how privileged I feel to be able to graze, even for a moment, and with such meager credentials, on the outskirts of your tradition.

This is a difficult book, even in English, if it is taken too seriously. May I suggest that you skip over the parts you don't like? Dip into it here and there. Perhaps there will be a passage, or even a page, that resonates with your curiosity. After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover. In any case, I thank you for your interest in this odd collection of jazz riffs, pop-art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer æ an interest which indicates, to my thinking, a rather reckless, though very touching, generosity on your part.

Beautiful Losers was written outside, on a table set among the rocks, weeds and daisies, behind my house on Hydra, an island in the Aegean Sea. I lived there many years ago. It was a blazing hot summer. I never covered my head. What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book.

Dear Reader, please forgive me if I have wasted your time.

Los Angeles, February 27, 2000

Leonard Cohen



from http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/lcbook5.html

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6.) And back a bit to John Cage.

Another of Cage's works, Organ² / ASLSP, is currently being performed near the German township of Halberstadt, in an imaginative interpretation of Cage's directions for the piece. The performance is being done on a specially-constructed autonomous organ built into the old church of St. Burchardi. It is scheduled to take a total of 639 years after having been started at midnight on September 5, 2001. The first year and half of the performance was total silence, with the first chord -- G-sharp, B and G-sharp -- not sounding until February 2, 2003. Then in July 2004, two additional Es, an octave apart, were sounded and are scheduled to be sounded later this year on May 5. But at 5:00 p.m. (16:00 GMT) on Thursday, 5 January, the first chord progressed to a second -- comprising A, C and F-sharp -- and is to be held down over the next few years by weights on an organ being built especially for the project.

(see also: here and here)

(the earliest year available to "buy" is 2025...better hurry! it only costs 1000 Euros.)



and

Between 1987 and 1990 Cage composed a major series of works entitled Europeras, numbered one to five. Cage was invited to compose the first two works for the Frankfurt Opera. They deconstruct operatic form, yet are not merely parodic. Plots, librettos, and arias (often sung simultaneously) were assembled via chance methods from a wide range of conventional 18th and 19th century operas whose texts and scores were in the public domain. Chance determined other aspects as well, from stage lighting, scenery, costumes and props to the actions of the singers. There was no conductor; performers were instead guided by large projections of a digital clock according to strict time intervals. Cage even went so far as to hand out two separate sets of librettos to the audience at the premiere, themselves culled from previous operatic works. Being overtly based as they are upon previous works, the Europeras provide one of the most intriguing examples of Cage defamiliarising the familiar, rendering a complex new web of symbols and meanings overlapping across conventional aesthetic domains.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage#Subsequent_works

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7.) "I am for the birds, not for the cages people put them in."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage#Writings.2C_visual_art.2C_and_other_activities

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8.) Jarrad, I feel that John Cage is somewhat similar to our previous discussion regarding our attraction to etymologies and whatnot: something to do with resonances and reverberations.

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