You Know My Name (Look Up the Number): Late Cage

Zradci
Music of John Cage
Marsh Chapel, Boston University
August 16, 2009

The meager turnout for Sunday’s bouquet of John Cage’s late music presented by the new-music group Zradci might well be attributed to a sweltering Boston afternoon, and the un-air-conditioned state of the venue, Boston University’s neo-gothic Marsh Chapel. Or it might be attributed to a lack of familiarity with John Cage’s late music, since, if you know John Cage’s late music, you know that there isn’t a lot of music better suited to a sweltering afternoon: an easygoing, laconic avant-garde, the musical surface air-conditioned to a McLuhanesque cool. The program played off of Cage’s post-1987 convention of naming his works by the number of players, counting down from “Five” to “One¹²,” an aleatoric hit parade.

The number pieces, as they’re usually referred to, are mostly composed to unfold less rhythmically than chronometrically, musical events taking place within times specified in the score. (As such, the performers were all reading both music and small analog clocks, the kind you might see attached to an atom bomb in a 1960s spy movie.) “Five,” for any five instruments, is an exercise in long tones and gradually-gelling tone clusters; the chosen combination of violin (Heather Braun), viola (pianist Molly Wood, multi-tasking), bass recorder (Jacob Mashak), tenor saxophone (Lauren Haley) and oboe (Beth Goodman) made for slow-motion, distant epiphanies of ringing partials. “Four⁶” (the superscript means it was the sixth piece in the series for four players) found Haley, Goodman, Wood (on piano this time) and Mashak (switching to vocals, whispering and whistling) opting for a distinctly classic-new-music sound, Wood tapping and scraping inside the piano, Haley and Goodman alternating between a market basket of multiphonics, key clicks, and breath sounds. The comparative profusion of timbral variety created a more scattered, intermittent, constellation-like structure.

For both thermostatic and aesthetic reasons, the windows and doors were left open; as ambient soundscapes go, Commonwealth Avenue, running through the heart of BU, is a Mahler-sized orchestra, with cars, buses, and even the regular tolling bell and whining air brake of the “T” lending a rich Cagean counterpoint. Sometimes, though, the performers were trafficking in sounds too delicate to cut through. “Three²” is scored for three percussionists on unspecified percussion, an instruction taken liberally by Mashak, Wood, and Goodman—in addition to a tam-tam, the instruments also included a trombone (drumsticks on the body, soft mallets on the bell, rolling it like a cymbal) and more inside-the-piano action. Cage no doubt would have appreciated the creativity, but, as a pioneer in all-percussion music, I think he might have preferred instruments with a little more specific percussive personality—the visual novelty didn’t quite pay off aurally, and with the performers constantly moving between instruments triangulated around the whole of the chapel, the effect was a little too frantic by the rest of the afternoon’s still standards.

“Two⁵” was terrific, though, with Mashak intoning soft, long pedal tones on that trombone, and Wood at the piano dropping sparse hints of tonality that were invariably immediately, gently contradicted. (Not for nothing did Cage study with Schoenberg.) Silence became a third member of the ensemble; events spread across time not in a constant stream, but like occasional, irregular tourist markers, serendipitously discovered points of local interest.

Zradci is one of those groups that spring up like perennials in college-saturated Boston, like-minded students and/or recent graduates entrepreneurially banding together like unorthodox Mickey Rooneys and Judy Garlands. Some survive, some don’t, but this group has a we’ll-try-anything vibe that makes one wish them well, especially in a town that could stand a greater dose of the more far-out experimental tradition. Mashak took to the chapel’s pulpit for “One¹²,” a piece for a lecturer orating chance-determined content and syntax. (The created parameters for the work merely end up specifying the number of letters in each word.) Mashak mixed languages—Finnish? Russian? Maybe?—while dropping in deadpan English punch lines: “and,” “elephants,” &c., surrealisms jutting out of the incomprehensible stream. It really did come off as a commencement address stripped down to its internal music, a welcome visit from Cage’s sense of absurdist humor.

The concert closed with a tacit chaser: Cage’s now-classic “4’33″,” though leaving the stage empty and only having the players come out to bow at the end robbed the piece of its own comedy, the performance-etiquette frame that made it such a scandal in the first place. The work doesn’t just admit that the emperor has no clothes, it makes that very nakedness into an unexpected virtue. Certainly, on a sweltering afternoon, nobody would question the wisdom of a few less layers.