infotext:
DARMSTADT AURAL DOCUMENTS
John Cage in Darmstadt 1958
"The great masters, and Cage was one,
you can't just leave that aside
you can't walk around or you'll get lost."
Hans G Helms, 2008
Late summer 1958. The American composer John Cage is present for the first time at the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music, which takes place that year in the Heiligenberg Castle in Jugenheim. As so often in those years, he is accompanied by the pianist David Tudor and together they play – as European premieres – Cages Music for Two Pianos, the Winter Music and the Variations I, as well as some works by other composers (e.g. Earle Browns FourSystems).
In addition, Cage will be speaking on the subject on September 6th, 8th and 9th Composition-as-Process (Composition as a process) one lecture each: Changes (changes), indeterminacy (indefiniteness) and Communication (Communication). Tudor accompanied each of the three lectures – in the program of the summer courses they are called “Studios” – with the performance of various piano works, including Cage Music of Changes, Karlheinz Stockhausen Piano Piece XI, Christian Wolffs For Piano with Preparations and Bo Nilssons quantities. The texts of the lecture and the compositions performed live respect one another, they do not disturb one another, nor do they influence one another. The pauses of one are the free spaces for the actions of the other.
So that the majority of the 1958 holiday course participants can understand what Cage says in his Darmstadt Lectures, which were held in English, they are translated into German beforehand and copies are given to the audience as read-along copies. The translation work was carried out by Wolf Rosenberg, Hans G Helms and Heinz-Klaus Metzger, who got to know Cage personally at these holiday courses. In a conversation in spring 2008 in Berlin, Metzger recalled: »It was the case in Darmstadt at the time, as in many other places in Germany, that courses that were not in German had to be translated into German. Today it is the case all over Germany that courses that are not in English have to be translated into English so that the listeners can understand what is being taught.«
And Hans G Helms, who met Cage back in 1954 at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, where he and David Tudor premiered his piece 12 '55.6078'' for two pianists - it was Cage's first public appearance in Europe - says, also in a Berlin conversation in spring 2008: »That was our first intimate relationship. I say intimate because - I don't know how many nights it was, I assume three nights - John and my wife Khris and Rosenberg, Metzger and I tried to translate these three texts into German, which worked to some extent. It happened that we three translators were constantly discussing some formulations among ourselves. But every now and then we had to disturb him and he would lie on the sofa with his head on my wife's lap. By the way, the two of them provided us with coffee and something to eat all night long.«
The translations are not always easy for the three night workers. In addition – and this is not unimportant for the reception history of the three lectures – Rosenberg, Metzger and Helms transferred some of Cage's formulations to the Darmstadt discourses of the time. Particularly noteworthy: In the German translation, one of the more than two hundred questions from which the Communication-Lecture consists: "Are tones tones or are they Webern?" But the English original says: "Are sounds just sounds or are they Beethoven?" Possibly the translators, with Cage's consent, replaced one composer's name with the other; Anton Webern, who was widely discussed at the time and claimed to be pre-serial, fits into the holiday course situation of the 1950s much better than Ludwig van Beethoven.
What Cage actually said at this point in Darmstadt in 1958 cannot be checked, the first minutes of this lecture are missing in the historical tape recording. For Heinz-Klaus Metzger, the 58 translation is not entirely unproblematic in retrospect: »I misjudged everything that was mystic at the time, translated it into rationalism, into pure reason. It only dawned on me later that the narratives in their Cageian wording, i.e. the supposed mysticism, was more reasonable than the philosophy of reflection.”
The CommunicationIncidentally, the 1958 lecture is the only one of Cage's three Darmstadt lectures for which, apart from the missing opening minutes, an audio document also exists in the archive of the International Music Institute in Darmstadt. Why the two lectures Changes and indeterminacy It was not also documented on tape or whether the recordings were later lost cannot be said today.
The print version of Communication Cage prefaces that this text consists of questions and quotations, that the quotations come from his own writings and the writings of others, that the order and the respective amount of text of the quotations were determined by random operations, that no performance time was composed, but that it was written before the Lecture determined one and that he determined – also by random operations – when, now and then during the lecture, he had to light a cigarette. Whether that was on September 9, 1958 from 17 p.m. in Heiligenberg Castle during his almost one-hour Communication-Lecture whether there were 19 cigarettes or only 12 or even fewer, which he lights and then stubs out quite quickly, remains uncertain. Eyewitnesses and earwitnesses, including the music critic Hans-Heinz Stuckenschmidt (in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 13.9.1958, 12.9.1958) and Wolfgang Widmaier (in the Darmstädter Echo, September XNUMX, XNUMX), give different numbers. However, it is guaranteed and also audibly documented that the pianist David Tudor played the pieces during Cage's third Darmstadt lecture For Piano with Preparations by Christian Wolff and – as a world premiere – quantities played by Bo Nilsson.
John Cage's first appearance in Darmstadt in 1958 - he only comes to the summer courses for the second and last time in 1990, two years before his death - is an eminent event in music history. With his three lectures in particular, he opens up the small world of new music, he lays the seeds for a heterogeneous and colorful art-sound landscape that will soon burgeon with many different concepts of what music is and what music can be. Heinz-Klaus Metzger sums it up in an interview in 2008: »What Cage offered in Darmstadt in 1958 was theory, whether he wanted to call it that or not. And the effect of theory and also the compositional consequences of theory were simply like this: under the impression of these lectures, the abolition of the very traditional musical thinking was so compelling and went so deep that a musical performance or a score could not have done so ." And Hans G Helms states: "What one must not forget is that at that time the general perception among artists of the history of the time began to change radically, which then continued, for example, in the Fluxus movement . Nam June Paik is a prime example of this. Cage must have been the one who, through these three lectures, gave the impetus that others found the courage to do something that had been on their minds for a long time, but which they had not dared to realize.«
During the 1958 Darmstadt Summer Course, on September 3rd, John Cage and David Tudor perform the European premiere of Cages Variations I, a piece "for any number of performers, any type and number of instruments", which the two had already performed in three versions six months earlier, on March 15, 1958 at the Women's College of the University of North Carolina (Greensboro) - probably as a world premiere – have realized. As in the performance in Darmstadt, Tudor and Cage act primarily as pianists (on and in the piano), and they also use other sound tools. Variations I is a composition that has to be created by the actors before it can actually be realised. The score provides the material for this, which consists of six square transparencies. One of them is printed with dots in four different sizes that are loosely distributed over the entire film. The smallest dots mark a single sound, the largest a mixture of four or more sound events. On the other five foils, which stand for five sound parameters, there are five straight lines of different lengths. Each of these slides offers a different constellation of lines, which sometimes even cross. Point foil and one line foil each are casually thrown on top of each other. The resulting image is the topography, which now needs to be refined by drawing a perpendicular to one of the lines from individual points. Depending on the desired reading and interpretation, one then obtains this or that property of the version of to be executed later Variations I. The way to one Variations I-Release is time consuming; In addition, the procedure also requires a prior conception of all parameters that belong to a piece of music: total duration, duration of the individual events and their occurrence in the event, pitch, volume, instruments, etc. The interpreters of Variations I, if they have configured their realization version themselves, are the actual composers of the piece. Their imagination, their ideas, their self-organization and their compositional skills, which are reflected above all in the type of questions they ask the foil images thrown with the total of all possible answers, are decisive for the result, the first result. The second is the performance of Variations I, from one of their conceivably infinite number of versions. The one that John Cage and David Tudor presented on September 3, 1958 during the Darmstadt Summer Course obviously gave the public at the time a lot of fun, but also caused confusion.
Stephen Fricke
program:
John Cage (1912-1992)
Communication
Third part of the Darmstadt Lecture “Composition as Process” (1958)
John Cage, voice
World premiere recording
[01] Communication 1 06:07
[02] Communication 2 06:19
[03] christian wolff (* 1934)
For Piano with Preparations (1957) 11: 04
David Tudorpiano
[04] Communication 3 07:25
[05] Bo Nilsson (* 1937)
quantities (1958) 04: 35
David Tudorpiano
world premiere
[06] Communication 4 06:18
[07] Bo Nilsson (* 1937)
quantities (1958) 04: 21
David Tudorpiano
world premiere
[08] Communication 5 01:43
[09] Communication 6 05:48
[10] John Cage (1912-1992)
Variations I (1958) 08: 50
John Cage and David Tudor, two pianos and radio sets
European premiere
total time 62:34
Press:
01/2014
[…] There are original recordings of John Cage with performances, readings or lectures. But this one is really something special. […]
[...] This recording [transports] the mood and aura of that moment: Cage's voice, sometimes gently hurrying along, then again delaying or suddenly pausing [...] and last but not least, the audience, who is also always audibly present, with his reactions. […]
Thomas M Maier
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