Reinterpretation: On John Cage’s Aria/Fontana Mix
Introduction
This case study deals with the notion of reinterpretation, understood as the process of recovering not only a particular piece of music but also the circumstances of composition and original performance of the work in order to adapt them for a performance with electronic instruments. Although they are nowadays considered and performed as individual compositions, Aria and Fontana Mix were first performed together as a single work.
This was the point of departure for me to (a) review the compositional procedures behind the creation of Fontana Mix, (b) apply them in the design of a musical instrument to be used in performance, as complement to Aria, and (c) propose a simultaneous performance of both works following the score of Aria as a structural guideline.
Context
One aspect of John Cage’s compositional strategies was his concern with the role of the performer’s contribution to the musical structure of a piece. His abandonment of harmony, and attempt to define structures based on rhythm, opened a creative path that can be illustrated with his early percussion works. The search for new sonorities to fill these structures moved him to extend Henry Cowell’s experiments with preparing the piano and, at a structural level, to deal with the importance of silence as musical material (presented in extremis in his 4’33”). But more important to Cage’s output was his quest for a new philosophical approach to musical phenomena: “I was to move from structure to process, from music as an object having parts, to music without beginning, middle, or end; music as weather.” (Cage 1993: 243–44)
This focus on process rather than on a predetermined structure led Cage to create pieces in which the musical result was entirely dependent on the performer’s creative contribution. The performer’s influence on Cage’s musical output can be perceived through the work of, among others, David Tudor, one of Cage’s closest collaborators. Tudor’s approach to interpreting contemporary piano music was very meticulous; for each piece that was written with a certain degree of indeterminacy, Tudor would produce a detailed performance score with precise, fixed measurements.
Tudor’s approach to Variations II (1961), a piece dedicated to him, was slightly different and marked a departure from the strict notation of performance scores towards a more personal path, a quest that later would lead Tudor towards the creation of his own compositions for live electronics. For Variations II, instead of predetermining a time structure for the sound events, Tudor designed a binary process in which each sonic parameter could have one of two values: simple or complex. His performance notation consisted of fifty squares, one square per sound event, presented sequentially in rows on the front and back of three narrow pieces of thick paper. These square notations he called “nomographs.” In addition to this non-traditional approach to notation, Tudor incorporated another level of innovation: the use of amplification as a creative resource. He used not just an amplified piano but a system “conceived as an electronic instrument, whose characteristics orient the interpretation of the six parameters to be read from the materials provided by the composer.” (Pritchett 2004: 14)
The setup used by Tudor for Variations II included microphones placed above and below the piano, contact microphones attached both to the piano body and to a set of stiff springs that were used either to play on the strings of the piano or to serve as connectors between the strings and phonograph cartridges (with inserted objects) that could be used as amplifiers and as exciters for the strings of the piano.Pritchett (Pritchett 2004: 14) describes the setup as follows:
This setup produces a number of feedback loops. Playing on the strings of the piano excites the various microphones in different ways depending on their placement and nature. When these signals are amplified and played back into the space, feedback is communicated directly through the microphones but also through the sympathetic vibration of the strings of the piano. The whole system presents a very complex interaction of its various parts. Adjusting the levels of the various microphone signals, the ways in which the cartridges are deployed in the piano, and the ways in which the piano is played will alter the behavior of the whole system.
Tudor’s realisation of Variations II encouraged him as a performer to explore the possibilities of the whole system. The sounds, complex as they were, demanded from him the flexibility to drop ideas and change paths while trying to shape the musical result. His later work as a composer and performer of live electronic music would focus increasingly on the real-time manipulation of sound, reinterpreting Cage’s departure from structure towards process and translating it into an even more radical idea: a focus on performative gestures rather than sonic results. David Tudor’s contribution to the fleshing out of Cage’s works of this period was then to solidify these processes into sonic identities, reinforcing with each performance the structural salients of the work, acting as a composer from the perspective of performative practice, and, in doing so, mirroring Cage’s performativity in his compositional process.
Project
My own interpretation of Fontana Mix aims to honour both Cage’s and Tudor’s legacies. To interpret such a piece today requires one not only to be aware of the different musical and social contexts (something applicable to any “historical performance” situation) but also to expose and revise the technical limitations of the original material, demonstrating how these limitations were, and still can be, used by the performer to present his or her musicianship. Pritchett (Pritchett 1993: 132) accounts the genesis of Fontana Mix and its relationship to Aria:
Cage used Fontana Mix to compose several other works, beginning with Aria for solo voice. This work was composed for Cathy Berberian immediately after the Fontana Mix tapes were completed in 1958, and was premiered together with those tapes on January 5, 1959. [...] Here, Fontana Mix was used to determine the placement and durations of the events, along with the colors and languages to be used. Aria can be performed together with the Fontana Mix tapes and any part of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, thus indicating the common ancestry of these three works.
The historical context made presenting Fontana Mix together with Aria a natural choice, not only to provide a clearer view of the historical circumstances but also as a performative strategy that would redirect the time/place structure of “my” Aria/Fontana Mix away from the fixed form of the original (the tape recording) and bring it closer to Cage’s ideas of collaborating with performers. I mention this since other reinterpretations of Fontana Mix, such as Karlheinz Essl’s FontanaMixer (2004–2012) and Max Neuhaus’s Fontana Mix-Feed (1964–1968), have tended to focus on conceptual aspects of Cage’s work (an approach common in modern interpretations of his work), missing the opportunity of (re)instating a dialogue with the inceptual Cage: that is, engaging with and learning from Cage the performer as well as Cage the composer.
Preparing a performance-oriented version of Fontana Mix required that the creative process be divided into three parts:
a) Musical and technical analysis of the original work and its architecture.
b) Design and creation of “Fontana-Mix: The Instrument”.
c) Elaboration of an event-oriented score, based on the pacing and events of Aria.
The sound materials for Fontana Mix are recordings divided into six categories that were defined by Cage for his 1952 piece Williams Mix. These are:
a) City sounds
b) Country sounds
c) Electronic sounds
d) Manually-produced sounds (including music)
e) Wind-produced sounds (including songs)
f) “Small” sounds (requiring amplification)
For each category I selected three different sounds having lengths varying between 3 and 30 seconds. No two of the eighteen sound-files have the same duration, and each category has a “short” sound (3-7 seconds), a “medium” sound (8-15 seconds), and a “long” sound (longer than 15 seconds). At this stage, my first creative decision was to use the “c” category (the electronic sounds) to invoke some historical sonic references. By doing so, I intended to make a performative repository out of my Aria/Fontana Mix. All three sounds belonging to the electronic category are strongly linked either to Fontana Mix itself or to other electronic music associated with Cage. The sounds chosen were excerpts from Max Neuhaus’s Fontana Mix-Feed, a run from Karlheinz Essl’s Fontana Mix Feeder generative patch, and live recordings of electronic music performances by David Tudor.
The second and third steps – the development of the instrument (with an associated performance technique) and the elaboration of a performance score – were realised using the Max/MSP software environment and TouchOSC, a TCP-IP control client for the iPhone. In the instrument, a computer algorithm randomly selects as next-in-queue a sound event from the available sound material, obeying only one rule: never to choose two consecutive sounds from the same category. The reason for doing this was to aim for a continuous flow of contrasting sounds between categories, which I considered a possible point of connection with the way the sound material for the singer in Aria was organised.
In addition to the selection algorithm, a number of mild sound-manipulation algorithms were implemented as additional expression tools for the performer: a panning tool, a band-pass filter, and a reverberation algorithm in which length and resonance are fixed but feedback and early reflections are controlled by the performer.
Performance of Aria/Fontana Mix by Cora Schmeiser and Juan Parra Cancino. Orpheus Institute, Ghent, 8 January 2009.
The rehearsal process soon revealed a need to divide the events into two global categories: structural and incidental. In order to create a repeatable structure, some sound events in my version of Fontana Mix would remain consistent, appearing after or together with specific events in Aria; these could then serve as structural reference points for both the electronic performer and the singer throughout the piece. This led to a slight modification of the instrument in order to allow the electronic performer to recall these specific structural sound events at any time. The sound events in the second, incidental set, remain a mystery to the performers until they appear. Only then can the limited set of sound manipulations (panning, filtering) be used to shape a new sound event into or away from the material that the performer of Aria is presenting.
Reflection
Where the interpretation project of Nono’s A Pierre and Post-prae-ludium started from a technical challenge that later informed the composer and performer aspects of the multithreaded role of the computer music practitioner, my involvement with Aria/Fontana Mix started from a performance-oriented enquiry: to deal with interpretation in electronic music as a process of recovering both historical performance strategies and the material itself. In other words, looking to interpretation through performance (what I call reinterpretation), opens possibilities to the computer performer that go beyond the materials used, or even the work selected for interpretation. The combination of a traditional notion of interpretation and choice-making processes that traditionally lie in the hands of the composers has resulted in musical ideas that inform my personal practice in a broader performance context.
Aria/Fontana Mix has thus turned into an organic play with various elements of the Cagean conceptual palette: inflexibility of the material, extreme flexibility of the material, chance, the unexpected, control, discomfort, fragility and strength. This play reveals new directions for defining musicianship in live electronic music, invoking a task that is commonplace for music practitioners but little explored by performers of electronic media: the development of tools and skills that will allow creative expression and decision-making while honouring the aesthetic and conceptual ideas of a different person.
References
Cage, John (1993). “An Autobiographical Statement”. In Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), John Cage: Writer (pp. 237–47). New York: Cooper Square Press.
Pritchett, James (1993). The Music of John Cage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pritchett, James (2004). “David Tudor as Composer/Performer in Cage’s Variations II.” Leonardo Music Journal 14: 11–16.