When John
Cage first conceived his composition, 4’33”, he couldn’t have predicted how the
pandemic-enforced lockdown we’re currently living in would inadvertently create
the perfect environment for it to be heard. 4’33”, after all, is arguably the American
composer’s most taboo-busting piece of all-embracing zen, in which musicians or
performers studiously don’t play their instruments for the time outlined by the
title, while the rest of the world ebbs and flows around them.
Often
misunderstood as a ‘silent’ composition, 4’33” is more akin to a form of
environmental sound art. Here, the sounds of the natural world are captured in
what amounts to a fleeting pause for thought that democratises the experience
for both listener and artist.
This is
something John Wills has taken a chance on for his independently produced
podcast, The Great John Cage Project – in Lockdown. Now five editions in, Wills’
self-produced initiative has seen him present a series of recordings collected
from all over the world following an open call. With some sixty recordings
already heard, this has effectively opened up a global village which has never
been heard in such circumstances before.
With the
first edition setting out its store in the all but deserted thoroughfare of
Edinburgh’s normally bustling Princes St, over an hour each Wednesday night or
whatever time you choose, Wills acts as our genial guide through a series of
home-made soundscapes that eavesdrop on spaces both private and public. Whether
it’s the sound of church bells in a French village, birds singing in an English
garden or a spookily quiet inner city, each aural snapshot has a sense of place
at its heart, capturing a moment in time never to be repeated. In this way, the
recordings are both document and eyewitness - or rather, earwitness - that
creates a rolling aural archive of how we live now in a crucial moment of
history.
The first
episode of The Great John Cage Project – in Lockdown serendipitously premiered
on Earth Day, the worldwide day of environmental action that falls on March 22nd.
Wills explained then how Cage composed 4’33” in 1952 following his experience at
Harvard University in an anechoic chamber, a sound-proofed room designed to
absorb sound rather than echo it. Cage entered expecting total silence, but
instead heard two sounds, one high and one low. As explained to Cage later, the
high one turned out to be his nervous system in action, and the low one the
sound of his blood circulating through his body.
With
influences ranging from his inquiries into Zen Buddhism and the ‘white’
paintings of his contemporary, Robert Rauschenberg, Cage applied a concept of silence
to various compositions before stripping things back to their purest form with
4’33”. In The Great John Cage project – in Lockdown, Wills talks of the
composition being a “meditation on the impossibility of silence.”
There has
been an ongoing fascination with 4’33” from the day Cage’s work was first
premiered by pianist, fellow composer and regular collaborator David Tudor.
This was in a New York concert hall as part of a larger recital of piano music.
Since then, the piece has been treated with ridicule as much as praise. In
recent times, British TV comedy sketch show, The Fast Show, lampooned 4’33” in
its regular Jazz Club piss-take. On a more positive level, in 2010, a campaign
dubbed Cage Against the Machine attempted to get a new rendition of 4’33” to
become Christmas number 1 in order to keep the winner of The X Factor talent
show of the top spot.
Almost a
decade on, pioneering record label, Mute, released STUMM433, a 5 LP limited
edition box set of more than fifty takes on the composition. These were
recorded by a plethora of Mute related artists, with the likes of Richard
Hawley, Goldfrapp, Moby and Erasure being some of the more familiar names
taking part. Also featured on the record was a contribution from Sheffield-sired
electronic pioneers, Cabaret Voltaire.
Like
these, Wills’ approach with The Great John Cage Project – in Lockdown deformalises
an action originally designed to ruffle feathers in the concert hall. Given the
ongoing everyday tragedy of the Covid 19 pandemic, at moments it also lends
Cage’s composition a more explicitly political edge.
In the
second episode, Wills talks of remembrance, and gives a brief history of the
two-minute silence. The show’s own one-minute silence is followed by Wills’ recording
of a Thursday night applause for key workers, complete with the banging of pots
and pans, a routine which has become a new kind of community folk ritual. The
following week seemed to confirm this, when a recording from Belgrade highlighted
a similar weekly appreciation for key workers. This takes things to another
level, however, in a far angrier display that has become part of the city’s own
response to the crisis in protest at the ruling government in Siberia.
Amidst the
calm as well was the pounding industrial clangs of a Brisbane construction
site, still inexplicably working through lockdown. A recording captured in the
bustle of St Thomas’ Hospital in London broke the silence even more.
Beyond the
works presented, one of the many joys of the podcast comes in Wills’
presentation. His is a subject more used to being delivered with either a
wilfully bamboozling sense of conceptual superiority or else a patronising
larkiness at what fun it all is. By contrast, there is a soothing matter-of-fact
clarity to what Wills says, steeped as he is in both the history of his subject
and just how much 4’33” seems to have found its time.
When Wills
talks of how The Great John Cage Project – in Lockdown highlights “the
impossibility of silence,” as “a gentle reminder to embrace our surroundings”
and how “4’33” isn’t about listening to nothing. It’s about listening to
everything,” he isn’t being airy-fairy or consciously beatific. As a musician
whose career began playing drums with 1980s/’90s sonic alchemists, Loop, before
moving on to the more drone-based Hair and Skin Trading Company and more recent
song-based excursions with Pumajaw, Wills understands the power of making a big
noise.
By opening
up the endless possibilities of what 4’33” can be, however, Wills’ podcast
becomes a slow-burning counterblast
to the stampede of online artistic activity that has risen up since lockdown to
an at times overwhelming degree. Wills recognises too that his increasingly
expansive compendiums of everyday exercises in aural psycho-geography aren’t
the only means of getting back to nature in an infinitely quieter way.
In one
show, he mentions Pauline Oliveros, the American composer and accordionist, who
first introduced ideas of deep listening and sonic awareness to the world, in
which people tune in to the sounds around them with a focus and alertness that
is aural equivalent of sorts to John Berger’s notions of visual consciousness
outlined in his book, Ways of Seeing.
Oliveros
made her first ever UK performance in Glasgow, when in October 2005, she took
part in Instal, the Arika organisation’s annual festival of ‘Brave New Music’
held at the now closed Arches venue. Playing alongside trombonist David Dove,
director of the Deep Listening Institute, the pair utilised a specially
installed eight-channel PA. This allowed them to work in three dimensions with
the unique acoustic properties of the cavernous venue created from a previously
derelict railway siding beneath Glasgow’s Central Station.
In terms
of environmental interventions, Arika’s adventures in sound beyond indoor
venues has taken them to less chartered territory. In 2006, Resonant Spaces saw
saxophonist John Butcher and sound artist, field recordist and composer Akio
Suzuki perform in six non-venues across Scotland. These included Smoo Cave,
Tugnet Ice House and the ancient Stones of Stenness. Using the sonic properties
of each, Butcher and Suzuki created a series of one-off responses.
Arika did
something similar the following year with Shadowed Spaces, which took audiences
into the hidden nooks and crannies of urban areas. There was the site of an
abandoned office block in Dundee, a disused railway turning circle in Aberdeen,
the former Abbeyhill Railway Station site in Edinburgh, and others in Glasgow,
Cumbernauld and Newcastle. With the involvement of psycho-geographer Denis
Wood, performances by drummer Sean Meehan, saxophonist Tamio Shiraishi and
percussionist Ikuro Takahashi took place in each space.
Antecedents
to Shadowed Spaces include the percussive sturm und drang utilised by Test
Department in the 1980s in deserted factories. The move to outdoor spectacles this
begat with Test Department member Angus Farquhar’s NVA Organisation saw them revive
the May Day Beltane Fire festival atop Calton Hill in Edinburgh en route.
Shadowed
`Spaces was a precursor of sorts to Scrub Transmissions, the occasional series
of urban occupations currently being undertaken in Manchester by Julie
Campbell. Better known as Lonelady, Campbell’s two albums of jittery inner-city
dispatches, Nerve Up and Hinterland, transform everyday alienation into a
sub-Ballardian mesh of neo-punk-funk.
Scrub
Transmissions sees Campbell cement an mp3 player into the fabric of a wall or
other structure at the end of a city walk. Downloadable maps and instructions
guide those taking part with their own headphones to the installation. Once
here, they plug the headphones into the mp3 player, which plays a recording by
Campbell on a loop until the batteries run out. The third edition, DEMON, is
currently accessible, and features Lonelady covering Bound by Silence, a song
by early ’80 Liverpool group, Pink Industry. Once the batteries die, it leaves behind
a piece of detritus that has lost its function to the elements, but which
creates its own intangible archive.
While
rooted in the Situationist idea of the derive - drifting through a city to
create a psycho-geographic map of an inner landscape as much as a physical one
- Scrub Transmissions relates as well to other sense-heightening walks. At the
end of 2019, the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh hosted French artist Myriam
Lefkowitz’s Walk, Hands, Eyes (Edinburgh). An experience which has been applied
in different cities across the world, Lefkowitz has trained guides lead
participants through the city streets with their eyes closed. Those taking part
experience sounds and smells while temporarily blind, putting their trust in their
guide to transport them safely throughout their route.
In some
respects, The Great John Cage Project – in Lockdown too might similarly be best
experienced with eyes closed, albeit from the luxury of your living room sofa.
This does not suggest passivity, however, and, as with Oliveros, deep listening
and sonic awareness, it invites a concentrated approach.
As too does
Touch: Isolation, a series of new recordings by artists associated with Touch,
which for almost forty years has curated and created a series of impeccably realised
audio-visual artefacts that bridge ambient and experimental compositions. While
many of these have been released on record or CD, Touch doesn’t regard itself
as a record label per se. Releases by artists including Philip Jeck and Chris
Watson have nevertheless made waves, with sounds from the natural world
sculpted into often beguiling immersive experiences.
Touch:
Isolation is a subscription-based initiative in response to lockdown, which
twice a week over two months sent out brand new tracks on Bandcamp by Touch
artists. Like The Great John Cage Project – in Lockdown, these offer little
sonic snapshots of where we are now. While the pieces showcased by Touch:
Isolation are more ‘composed’, the epic ambience running across its twenty-eight
tracks creates a similar experience.
Perhaps
the nearest neighbour to Wills in this context is Chris Watson, the
BAFTA-winning sound recordist who has become a key collaborator of David
Attenborough on his spectacular nature documentaries. Watson’s own albums include
Weather Report, which, when released in 2003, saw him move away from what up
until then had been unmediated found-sound recordings to creating compositions
from the wildlife and their immediate habitats.
It perhaps
should come as no surprise that Wills and Watson worked together on Turn of the
Tides, an ambisonic audio installation at St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall as part
of the 2017 Orkney Music Festival. Like Wills, Watson has roots in more
out-there experimental sounds. He was a founder member of Cabaret Voltaire, who
did their own take on 4’33” on the STUMM 433 box set. Like Wills too, hearing
Watson talk about sound and the sonic world is a joy, with passion for his art
pouring through his gentle Yorkshire tones.
Accompanying
each piece downloaded as part of Touch: Isolation is a quote from American
anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, best known for his work on tribal art. “Auditory space has no favoured focus,” says
Carpenter, talking about the space awareness of Inuit culture he refers to as
Eskimo. “It’s a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing
itself… It is not a pictorial space, boxed-in, but dynamic, always in flux,
creating its own dimensions moment by moment”.
Carpenter’s
quote is taken from Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer’s book, The Soundscape,
subtitled Our Sonic Environment and the Turning of the World. First published
in 1977, Schafer’s book looks at the evolution of sound and its place in the
world as the environment is overtaken by external intrusions that include airports
and factories.
In his
identification of sonic pollution, Schafer offers up ways to engage with sound
in a healthier way through soundwalks and other ways of deep listening. He also
writes of 4’33” and Cage’s nod to Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s nineteenth
century book outlining his experiences while living in a woodland cabin. As
Schafer notes, ‘the author experiences in the sounds and sights of nature an
inexhaustible entertainment.’
Schafer
later refers to Cage’s experience in the anechoic chamber, and his conclusion
that “There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that
makes a sound.” As originator of the term ‘soundscape’, Schafer’s ruminations
are well worth listening to.
One could
apply such notions too to the work of Michael Begg, the East Lothian based
experimental composer, who has frequently absorbed the natural world into his
work. This has included Fragile Pitches, a sound installation drawn from the
landscape around Edinburgh and moulded by Begg and fellow traveller Colin
Potter into a 90-minute sound installation performed at St Giles’ Cathedral
during Hogmanay 2010. More recently, Begg has generated work using data streams,
and in January 2020, performed with cellist Clea Friend at the Scottish
National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh as part of the NOW exhibition that
featured work by Katie Paterson.
Since
lockdown, Begg has released two recordings as part of his new Witness series.
These ambient pieces use software programmed to track live satellites
themselves charged to record activity on Earth in real time. For the second
piece, The Weather Engine, Begg talks of wanting to “make a kind of fingerprint
from moments in the days of lockdown.” As a starting point, he uses the idea
that “time has become deranged. The days slip into each other, moments repeat
themselves whilst other events seem to hang perpetually in limbo.”
Begg also
recently took part in Lockdown Vexations, a globally sourced response to Erik
Satie’s 1893 composition, Vexations, in which the French minimalist composer
instructed that the theme of his work penned on a solitary page of manuscript
should be played 840 times.
The
Lockdown Vexations performance presented to coincide with the 154th
anniversary of Satie’s birth on May 17th 2020 took contributions
from seventy-seven isolated performers, and lasted more than twenty-six hours.
This is a step on from the first ever full performance of Vexations, which
lasted more than eighteen hours. The live event was organised by John Cage in
New York in 1963, a decade after 4’33”. Several pianists took part, including David
Tudor, the original performer of 4’33”.
There are
plenty of other things to listen to during lockdown. Some are constructions
that manipulate air rather than let it be. Since lockdown, even getting a whiff
of such spaces outside of a fleeting moment of allotted exercise time is a
tantalising proposition. Nevertheless, like The Great John Cage Project – in
Lockdown, despite the painful circumstances that sired them, they navigate
space in a less clamorous world that is being preserved.
Glasgow-based
club and record label Optimo have put together a series of five Tranquillity
Mixes to soothe the stresses of such uncertain times. Meanwhile, over on
Resonance FM, the original online sound art radio station, the weekly show, Bad
Punk, presents a woozy late-night collage of sound and spoken-word. This is pulled
together by sooth-saying Geordie visionary Johny Brown, whose work with The
Band of Holy Joy has provided an alternative conscience of the nation(s).
One of
Brown’s key collaborators on Bad Punk is Edinburgh born actor Tam Dean Burn,
who makes frequent appearances on the show. This included playing artistic
provocateur Bill Drummond in The Cherry Blossom Quartet. This series of five
(not four) fantastical auto-biographical plays were penned by Drummond’s alter
ego Tenzing Scott Brown and adapted for radio by Brown. Each play was broadcast
live over the course of a week in 2017, and was accompanied by improvised
soundscapes from assorted artists.
In 2005,
Drummond introduced the concept of No Music Day after growing disillusioned
with the artificial notion of recorded music and the overload of electronically
reproduced sound it produced. Drummond wrote a series of sixty word-based
scores for an ad hoc global choir called The17, which he gathered in various
places and at various times between 2003 and 2008.
The first
of these scores opened with the words ‘Imagine waking up tomorrow morning and
all music has disappeared’. Others invited those taking part to drive around
listening to the sounds in their car or climb a mountain listening to the sounds
in their head. Like 4’33”, The17 and No Music Day was a form of emptying out,
erasing the clatter and leaving something else that you’ve maybe never listened
to before.
Since
lockdown, Drummond published a new piece of writing in April entitled Wait.
Wait is a poetic meditation on the art of waiting, as Drummond reminisces on
his nine-year-old self waiting for sparlings to return to the River Cree. This
becomes a much bigger evocation of wisdom and experience that takes a bird’s
eye view of Drummond’s own life.
On the
face of it, Wait has nothing to do with lockdown. But in its expanse, and its
sense of space and time to engage with past, present and possible futures in a
more natural world than the one most of us are used to, it has everything to do
with it. Like The Great John Cage Project – in Lockdown, there is something
Proustian at its heart.
It’s there
too in Yesterday, Georgina Starr’s contribution to this year’s online edition
of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. Dating from 1991, Yesterday is
a two-minute cassette recording of Starr whistling the tune to the Beatles’
song, Yesterday, in the corridor of Slade School of Art. Hearing Starr’s
recording thirty years on is to eavesdrop in on a fleeting moment of a life
captured for posterity, and which has now become a sense memory of a more
innocent age and a reminder of what came before and after.
The Great
John Cage Project – in Lockdown is destined to do something similar. The
rolling collection of works gathered by Wills will be included in the
Coronavirus Sound Archive and subsequently gifted to the British Library Sound
Archive. While this is important in itself, it needs to go further. The Great
John Cage Project – in Lockdown is a glorious mash-up of psychogeography and
sociology, anthropology and art, and says as much about the human condition in
socially distanced times as it does about the wider world it inhabits.
Under no circumstances
must such an essential encyclopaedia of here and now be filed away in academe or
allowed to gather dust with little or no human contact. Listening to it, really
listening to it, is to commune with a living, breathing thing, where radio
silence is anything but. These recordings gathered in The Great John Cage
Project – in Lockdown are a part of us. They are part of the world beyond. They
need to be heard where they belong. Out there.
The Great
John Cage Project – in Lockdown is broadcast every Wednesday night 9-10pm. An
archive of all the recordings can be heard at https://anchor.fm/greatjohncageproject
NVA’s
archive can be found at www.nva.org.uk
Michael
Begg’s Witness 1 and 2 can be heard at www.omnempathy.bandcamp.com
Yesterday
by Georgina Starr is part of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2020
online, and can be heard at www.glasgowinternational.org
MAP, May 2020
ends
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