James Wagner

sounds of the city: part of the audience for John Cage’s “Music for Carillon”

I love John Cage’s music, always have, but even I understand that not all of it is lovable.
Late Sunday afternoon it was totally delightful. Sunday evening was a different story. The “Music for Carillon” which engaged much of Fifth Avenue at dusk reflected both the beauty of his art and the playfullness of the man. There was no way for devotees to avoid the ambient sounds of a busy city and there was no way the busy city (or at least that part of it) could avoid the musical occasion.
Best parts: the smiles, and watching the music engage and sometimes totally arrest passersby, especially children; oh, and listening to the counterpoint added by the beep beep beep of the front-end loader across the street.
The NYTimes reviewer referred to the “humming Cagean symphony of the street.” I wonder if he had also been at Saturday afternoon’s performance by Margaret Leng Tan of Cage’s “Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano”.
That day’s musical experience would have been perfection but for the regular interruption of rehearsal sounds and security guard radio conversations throughout. This time Zankel Hall’s persistent subway sounds were totally overwhelmed by totally avoidable screw-ups. Ms. Tan briefly interrupted her performance early on and turned to the audience, smiling, to comment, “This is something of a Cagean moment.” In spite of continual distractions, she went on to play magnificently for almost another hour. Unfortunately Cagean moments would not have been embraced even by Cage until the fifties, years after he had composed the delicate piece she was performing. Carnegie Hall owes her and the audience a formal apology.
Sunday night was . . . interesting. But for me, and also at least for the same Times reviewer, Jeremy Eichler, who had reported on the Carillon concert, it was a disappointment. Three extremely austere pieces were programmed for the evening, “Music for Three (by One),” excerpts from “James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: an Alphabet” and Cage’s “Winter Music,” was performed simultaneously with a solo vocal work from his “Song Books.” Eichler laments:

More Cage followed that night at Zankel Hall, where 15 pianos were strewn across the stage and balconies, conjuring hopes of more exhilarating sonic anarchy, but alas it was not to be.
. . . .
It was of course a musical lecture on Zen-like awareness and Cage’s theories of silence, and there are profound truths here if one is in the right frame of mind to receive them. Some in the audience seemed up for the task, sitting with eyes closed in poised reflection. This listener was not among them. For about 15 minutes I admired Cage’s refusal to compromise, but I found the mandated stillness to be heavy-handed. After that I just kept hearing the subways coming and going beneath Zankel Hall, and wished I were on one of them.

Oh yes, these concerts were all part of the “When Morty Met John…” festival, of which the highlight was almost certainly Morton Feldman’s Second Quartet. John Rockwell reviewed that performance, but he must have missed the “Sonatas and Interludes” excitement of that afternoon, because he praised Zankel Hall’s “acoustically sealed” insulation and its impressive doors, writing that passing through them was “like entering a bank vault”.
He praised the Flux Quartet for a remarkable performance, and he described the work itself as “an amazing composition one whose beauties (longeurs is a word that doesn’t even apply) are still slowly revealing themselves, from performance to performance.” [There have been exactly two since it was composed in 1983.]
The Quartet is approximately six hours in duration, so we will probably always have some wait between hearings, meaning there is at least little chance of tiring of it. I bought the CDs, so I guess that means I will enjoy testing that proposition.

Some people would like us to think that it’s all about the literature of literature, but the rest of us would probably rather read books than reviews, even if (or apparently for some, especially if) the pen is wielded by Dale Peck.
Actually I don’t even like to go to readings unless the book is the work of a friend, or someone who is as brilliant and provocative as, say, Gore Vidal – or Dale Peck. But here’s a recommendation.
Dale is a friend, but he’s also a great artist who never lets his readers get too comfortable, so I’m going to be at the Chelsea Barnes & Noble next Thursday at 7 o’clock expecting to be both patted and scratched.
He wrote today, “please come hear me read from ‘What We Lost‘, my new memoir (or, as the Times Magazine would have it, novel)”. With that reference and a look at the James Atlas piece itself you can see that, although I believe the book hasn’t yet been reviewed outside of the trade publications, the dustup has already begun.
The NYTimes site includes an excerpt of the “memoir”, of which this is itself an excerpt:

He must fall asleep then because when he opens his eyes the truck is stopped and the old man is not in the cab. He assumes they’ve stopped for gas until he sees a gnarled branch above the windshield like a jab of brown lightning and he sits up. To his right a row of leafless trees stretches up the side of a hill and to his left there is a white house, small and rectangular, its tiny second-story windows the shape of dominoes laid on their sides. Before he gets out of the cab he grabs the pillowcase containing his brothers’ clothes and the old man’s medicine, and the first thing he does is fall flat on his face because he can’t feel his feet. Still half asleep, he sits on the crust of snow that covers the ground like stale cake frosting and takes off Jimmy’s shoes. The ground is cold and hard beneath his bottom but the bottoms of his feet feel nothing at all, and, teetering, rudderless, he stands up and floats around the truck in his socks, the pillowcase less ballast than slack sail hanging down his back. A pitted two-track driveway runs around the house and up the hill toward a pair of barns and a tall round building that the boy recognizes instinctively as a silo even though it reminds him of a castle tower. At the foot of the silo he sees the old man talking to another man. Like the old man, this stranger is short and thin and has only half a dozen strands of hair slicked flat to his skull, but unlike the old man he stands absolutely still, one hand holding a pitchfork lightly but firmly, tines down, and a cap on the ground between the two men, bottom up like a busker’s. The only thing that moves is his head, which shakes every once in a while, back and forth: no. The old man’s legs are wobbling and his arms are flapping in the air, and as he wobbles toward them the boy is reminded of a seagull he saw once in the bay. The seagull’s legs were trapped in a fishing net, and every time it flapped its wings its orange legs would lift out of the water trailing weed-draped mesh. Over and over the bird’s legs had shaken like the old man’s with its efforts to free itself but each time, exhausted, it splashed down again.
The old man and the stranger are still a good twenty yards away when the old man turns and reels toward the boy. His legs and arms make motions like the spokes of a rimless wheel, and he is shouting,
I won’t let her send him away! Not my boy! Not my firstborn son! Not again!
He jerks right past the boy without seeming to see him, his doddering gait half step and half slide on the slick grade, and it seems pure chance that one of his flailing hands catches hold of the door handle, a veritable miracle that he is able to crack it open. The shotgun sound is like an echo of itself in the quiet air, and the boy whips his head from side to side as if he can find the original source. He is in the back of the house now. From this angle he sees that it is actually L-shaped. He can’t see the farmhouse across the street, the mountain twenty miles to the south. He sees only a bulbous clump of gray-green evergreens and the tin-domed silo and the two barns and a patch of leafless woods at the top of the hill and then a big field studded with black-and-white and butter-brown cows. When the truck coughs into life one of the cows looks up from whatever thin strands it is pulling from the ground, looks first at the truck and then at the boy and then drops its head again and roots around for more grass—green grass, the boy can see, even from this distance. It is the middle of January and thin streaks of snow paint zebra stripes on soil hard as a city sidewalk, but the grass that grows from that soil is still green, and by the time the boy turns back to the truck it has backed out of the driveway, narrowly missing what looks like a fencepost with some kind of placard mounted atop it. The truck would have gone into the ditch on the far side of the road had there not been a tree there. Instead something glass breaks, a taillight that is not already broken perhaps, and when the old man shifts into first the boy hears first the transmission’s grind and then the glass as it falls onto the road. The truck goes so slowly that had he wanted to the boy could have run after it, could probably have caught it even, even with his numb feet. But he just stands there swaying, watching the truck recede as if one of them, the truck or the boy, is on an ice floe borne away from the shore by a half-frozen current. By the time the truck disappears over the hill the stranger has walked down from the barns and walked on by. There is smoke coming from a chimney on the left wall of the house and the stranger’s pitchfork makes a metallic ping each time it strikes the frozen ground.
Feeling floods into the boy’s feet then, as if a pot of pasta water had tipped off the stove and spilled over them. He reels, bites back a cry of pain; catches his breath and catches his balance.
Uncle Wallace? he says to the thin brown back retreating down the hill.
The stranger doesn’t stop, doesn’t turn around.
Get my hat, Dale, he says. At the door he pauses to look the boy up and down, and then he shakes his head one more time. In the failing light his scalp looks white and cold.
Don’t forget your shoes, he says, and walks into the house.

For Dale’s friends, fans, and the disgruntled too I suppose, the details for this reading and others scheduled across the country in the months ahead are these:

Wednesday, October 6 @ 7
Barnes and Noble Chelsea
675 Sixth Avenue, between 21st and 22nd
New York
Monday November 10 @ 6:30
Free Library of Philadelphia, Independence Branch
Philadelphia
Tuesday, November 11 @ 7
Olsson’s Dupont Circle
Washington, DC
Tuesday, November 18 @ 7:30
Wordsworth Bookstore
Cambridge, MA
Tuesday, January 6 @ 7
Barbara’s Bookstore
Chicago
Thursday, January 8 @ 7
Bound to be Read
Minneapolis
Tuesday, January 13 @ 7:30
Cover Bookstore
(Cherry Creek location)
Denver
Saturday, January 17 @ 3
Elliot Bay
Seattle
Monday, January 19 @ 7:30
Annie Bloom’s Bookstore
Portland, Oregon
Thursday, January 22 @ 7
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books
San Francisco
Sunday, January 25 @ 5
Obelisk Bookstore
San Diego
Tuesday, January 27 @ 7:30
B&N (West Pico location)
Los Angeles
Friday, January 30 @ 7
Book People
Austin
Tuesday, February 3 @ 7
Rainy Day Books
Kansas City

It’s a six-hour-long string quartet in one movement, but Morton Feldman’s second is both greater and less than the sum of its parts. Greater because it’s ultimately much much more than a succession of minimalist pings and rrrr’s, and less because hearing it live doesn’t seem at all like being kept after school until nine o’clock at night. Even with my own abreviated experience with the work, I now completely understand Jan La Barbara’s program note:

For the performers, to play a work like this is to live for a time inside the mind of the composer, to share, for an instant, that artistic sensibility. To listen to such a work is to come close to that experience, the sense of immersion in another’s mind.

As part of a series of concert events in New York this weekend called “When Morty Met John…”, curated by La Barbara, which describes the extraordinary legacy of the work of Morton Feldman and John Cage and of their personal and musical friendship, the magnificent young Flux Quartet braved Morton Feldman’s (yeah, “seminal”) 1983 Second Quartet. The performance took place in beautiful new Zankel Hall, which has been blasted out of the bedrock below the much larger Carnegie Hall itself.
OK, Barry and I did actually leave before the piece had run its course, but that was for reasons totally unrelated to its merits. I think I can say that if anyone other than the performers themselves bore any kind of burden tonight it was the working Carnegie Hall staff, which had to hang around until past midnight, and which kept the bar open throughout the evening.
Zankel seems to be having some success in its announced intention of appealing to youth. The crowd this evening looked nothing like that you’d normally find around Lincoln Center, and in fact might have made even the youthful crowds which flock to Columbia University’s Miller Theater these days look a little mature – or at least dowdily academic.
The members of Flux rivalled their rapt audience for cuteness, but there was no competition in the honors for heroism. No stops, no stretching, no snacks and above all no bathroom breaks for the four stalwart artists who generously shared their platform with shoeless and barefoot youths, cheeks of tan and pale (and a few of their elders), reclining around them on a couple of kilims and the bare boards themselves.
I haven’t seen anything like it since Pandit Pran Nath performed in the sanctuary of the Cathedral of St. John’s on acres of oriental carpet over a decade ago. This is my religion.
When everything comes to a halt, about a half hour from now, I would not be surprised if their enthusiastic audience seizes the players and carries them out of the auditorium on their shoulders in triumph. Laurels would be nice.
Morty would be very surprised, and John would be delighted.
Oh yes, there’s a CD set, and even a DVD, of the Flux doing this piece. It’s available through Mode Records.
More events on Sunday, October 26:

Feldman’s “Triadic Memories” at Columbia’s Miller Theatre 2:30
Cage’s “Music for Carillon” [on Fifth Ave., and free!] at St. Thomas Church 5:15
An evening of Cage at Zankel Hall 7:30

[image from Preview/Musicview]