On Saturday 12 January 2013, there will be ‘An Evening Of John Cage’ at Oxford’s teeny-tiny upstairs venue, the Port Mahon. The event will include performances of a couple of John Cage works – ‘Indeterminacy’, ‘4’33″‘ and ‘Water Walk’ – performed by Jack Goldstein and Roo Bhasin (Fixers), Max Levy (King Of Cats) and Ian Staples (Red Square).
There will also be a recording of ‘Indeterminacy’ released at the gig, through Oxford experimental microlabel Fourier Transform. Initially available as a very limited edition sixty-minute cassette with hand-numbered and hand-finished packaging, the recording will also be released a free download.
All of this John Cage-related activity is spearheaded by Fixers’ Jack Goldstein. We asked him a few questions about this Cageian project and where inspiration for it all came from…
MusicInOxford: Give us an overview of the project, what (and who) is involved, and when/where things will happen?
Jack Goldstein: It’s an evening of performances and compositions written and inspired by the post-war avant-garde chance composer, John Cage. Its happening on Saturday 12 January at The Port Mahon. We wanted a domain which wouldn’t latently boycott or muster any kind of pre-conceived aesthetic baggage earmarked to classical or experimental performance, and The Port Mahon perfectly concedes to this; anyone can book the venue by simply calling the downstairs bar and arranging a suitable evening to turn up and play.
Roo Bhasin, Max Levy and I will be performing John Cage’s ‘Indeterminacy’. Ian Staples, of the 1970s avant-garde improv band Red Square, will be performing ‘Water Walk’. Hallowe’en marked the first rehearsal of ‘Indeterminacy’ in which, due to Max’s university commitments in Brighton, Roo and I rehearsed along to an MP3 player on shuffle which featured Max’s voice; it was so much fun.
Every now and then, ‘4’33″‘ gets perfunctorily dug-up to serve as an obstinate, misappropriated counterpoint to the perceived social normalities of the day. Because of this, it seems that whilst many people know of John Cage, they don’t really know much about his ideas or his music. I’m no expert, I simply like the idea of practical assignments; they make you remember things. I’d love for anyone else interested in John Cage or experimental music to get in touch and be involved with the project.
MiO: How did you get into Cage’s music?
JG: Three years ago, I saw the UK premiere of one of John Cage’s final pieces of work, ‘Seventy-Four’, at The Roundhouse in London. Much of John Cage’s later work was cognominated by the use of numbers. He would have pieces which would appear to resemble squared numericals, with radicals and radicands indicating both the number of performers as well as the amount of times aforementioned performers had been utilized previously. It’s a soundscape for an orchestra of 74 musicians. There isn’t much in the way of a score, just two parts; one for high instruments and one for low.
MiO: How do you see avant-garde music influencing popular music – if at all?
JG: I can see the two meeting halfway but I’m not sure if its that interesting or not yet.
As soon as we give a musical genre, or sub-genre, the prefix of being ‘avant-garde’, we circumscribe the perimeters of augmentation to the point of irony; ie the newly baptised genre becomes confined to its own methodology.
All too often, the line between indubitable influence and rudimentary musical consumption is blurred; I’ve grappled with that quandary in Fixers. For the sake of argument, supersede the term ‘avant-garde’ with ‘experimental'; it feels healthier and makes more sense.
MiO: Whilst somewhat academic, Cage also seemed to see absurdity in music – is that something you share?
JG: I appreciate that music doesn’t carry emotion. The listener projects his/her own emotions whilst listening; meaning that what we choose to believe constitutes music simply stops being so whenever we want it to.
If you consider absurdity a contrast to seriousness within reasoning then what many people perceive as ‘music’ does infact become absurd. For instance, Cage paraphrases Wittgenstein in a question and answer session at Cabrillio Music Festival in August 1977, he says that “beauty doesn’t have any meaning whatsoever as a word, it simply means that you except whatever it is you say to be beautiful.”
MiO: Do you plan to do more musical experiments and happenings like this in future?
JG: I would love to perform Stockhausen’s ‘Helikopter-Streichquartett’ with iPods strapped to remote controlled helicopters. It would be a lot more environmentally friendly!