33.358175 Paragraphs for Reviewer

This review was written - perhaps I should say "constructed" - with the assistance of a computer.

Of course, all MiV reviews are written on a computer: after all, without the computer, there would be no World Wide Web and no MiV.

That is not what I mean.

But first, a little history.

The first involvement of a computer and music was in 1950, when Geoff Hill, the Southern Hemisphere's First Programmer, used the speaker of the CSIR

a good T-shirt.)

If he intended to convey the notion that Cage's artistic philosophy was the (then) dominant one in the field of the avant-garde, then it would have been difficult to argue.

If, on the other hand, he was suggesting that the modern world has become seemingly as random as a post-1950 Cage score, well

I only spoke with John Cage once, during a performance of HPSCHD, the computer-assisted composition collaboration with Lejaren Hiller, for up to seven harpsichords and up to fifty-two tape recorders.

This was the opening event in the International Carnival of Experimental Sound, shortened to ICES '72, probably the largest festival of avant-garde music ever held, including, as it did, some 300 artists from 21 countries.

Given the scale of the festival, of course this performance of HPSCHD featured the maximum: all seven harpsichordists and all fifty-two tapes. The harpsichords were played by a

Mark 1 (later renamed CSIRAC) to play ("buzz" to be precise) simple popular melodies. In June 1951 it made its first public appearance, playing "Colonel Bogey".

(Incidentally, the CSIRAC, built in Sidney, Australia, was the world's fourth computer: the first two were both built in England and the USA only managed to enter the race in third place - but

he had a point.

If, on the third hand, he imagined that Cage was one the verge of becoming "mainstream" in the musical world, he could hardly have been farther

bevy of avant-garde notables, including David Tudor, Cornelius Cardew, John Tilbury and Roger Woodward. My then-girlfriend and I had supplied one of the tape machines.

During the performance, at London's

"We're Number Three!" is hardly a catchy chant.)

The first music actually composed with the aid of the computer would appear to be Lejaren Hiller's and Leonard Isaacson's Iliac Suite, premiered in 1957.

From that to Boulez's IRCAM, the emphasis was on the computer's being able to

from the truth.

Even today, Cage is widely regarded, by many music-lovers, as less of a composer, more of a prankster, even a charlatan.

It is gratifying, then, that the Victoria Symphony, not obviously a bastion of avant-garde sensibilities, should have made such a splendid contribution to the Cage at 100 Festival in Saturday's concert.

The three pieces by Cage which were included in the concert may be from a limited period - the four years from 1947 to 1951 - but this

Roundhouse (a converted railway shed, once housing a massive turntable) the audience was ambulatory - and so was the composer.

While standing in the gallery, I realised that next to me was Cage in person. He turned to me and asked: "How do you think it's going?".

According to Confucius, in Book II of The Sacred Rites: The early kings were careful about that which might affect the heart. They instituted li to guide the mind and

give the composer more control.

In 1967 John Cage was a Visiting Associate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; he had been invited to compose music relating to "chance procedures". Hiller requested two proposals from Cage, one of which would eventually become HPSCHD.

Although it would be possible to produce (pseudo-)random numbers directly on the computer, Cage balked at this, but he did allow Hiller to derive the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching and print

was a critical juncture in his career, during which he finally abandoned any conventional notion of "self-expression" in his music and turned instead to "chance" operations (the term "aleatory" - from the Latin for "dice" - is courtesy of Pierre Boulez and not one

music to harmonise the sound, the government to unify the actions, and penalties to restrain the evils...To know music is to be versed in li. One who knows music and is versed in li is said

out the results.

Hiller thus created an important subroutine called ICHING (in the FORTRAN language of the time everything was in uppercase).

The first run produced a printout with 6,000 randomly-selected hexagrams (saving Cage 18,000 tosses of three coins, or even more work with the yarrow-stalk method).

which found favour with Cage or his school).

The concert opened with three pieces by Charles Ives, a composer admired by Cage, although they never seem to have met.

I don't believe I have heard Tone Roads Nos.1 and 3 ever

to possess virtue; virtue is but music and li.

In 2004 the BBC broadcast a documentary film about experimental music in the 1960s, entitled Here's a Piano I Prepared Earlier.

"I now have many answers to questions I have not yet asked" Cage remarked.

One question he did ask manually of the I Ching, using the coin-tossing method, was what it thought of "being subjected to computer technology. The enthusiastic commentary, attributed to Confucius, promised an abundance of benefits to culture."

Another product of the Cage-Hiller collaboration was DICEGAME, which generated the music for the seven harpsichords

played by anything other than a one-to-a-part chamber ensemble. The difference when played by an orchestra (no matter how small) is quite remarkable. The strings, in particular, related the first piece quite clearly to - of all things - the second symphony.

The second, with tubular bells underpinning its entire span, is distinctly more acerbic. Both were performed with panache and style.

Probably Ives' best-known work is The Unanswered Question which is, surely, an

In his Note at the beginning of the Draft Constitution for a Scratch Orchestra, Cornelius Cardew wrote: The word music and its derivatives are here not understood to refer exclusively to sound and related phenomena (hearing, etc.). What they do refer to is flexible and depends entirely on the members of the Scratch Orchestra.

Sozan, a Chinese Zen master, was asked

in HPSCHD. It was based on Mozart's Musikalisches Würfelspiel (Musical Dice Game), K.294d/K.Anh.C30.01.

As Hiller remarked, "John wanted the piece to be a homage to Mozart and to quote his music on the harpsichord. I suggested the Dicegame and he went along enthusiastically with

unqualified masterpiece.

With the strings backstage and the solo trumpet somewhere in the balcony, Tania Miller was left with the four wind players to direct onstage.

No matter how curious a spectacle, the performance was first-rate: the string body making a quite beautiful, yet enigmatic,

by a student: "What is the most valuable thing in the world?"

The master replied: "The head of a dead cat."

"Why is the head of a dead cat the most valuable thing in the world?" inquired the student.

Sozan replied: "Because no one can name its price."

Arnold Schoenberg once said: John Cage is not a composer, he is an inventor - of genius.

Cornelius Cardew, writing in

the idea".

For HPSCHD a variant of Mozart's original game just sixty-four bars long was used. It was run twenty times and the resulting material formed the basis of five of the seven harpsichord parts.

For one harpsichord, the

sound; the trumpet - excellently played by Ryan Cole - posing the eponymous question; and the superb winds - Salley Harvey, Richard Volet, Michael Byrne and Keith MacLeod - making increasingly desperate attempts to "answer" the question, until it is posed, finally and for the seventh time, into the void of the strings.

Another excellent performance.

John Cage's most notorious composition, is of course, 4'33".

The orchestra reassembled on the stage for this silent piece, firstly - a nice touch

1960: In LaMonte Young's 'Poem' in Cologne a few days ago I had 2 durations to fill; in the first I smiled and in the second I changed my shirt.

John [Cage] opened letters, read them, tore them

original bars of DICEGAME were replaced with extracts from other compositions by Mozart: "John went through one of the regular editions of Mozart piano sonatas and used the I Ching to choose which sonata and which movement".

This "review" was written/constructed in the spirit of Cage, specifically inspired by works such as 45' for Speaker, the Lecture on Nothing and Indeterminacy.

The review, as you may well have noticed by now, consists of three strands each in a different colour.

The first is an

- ensuring that they were still in tune.

The first movement, I must admit, was rather dull. The audience were on their best behaviour and even the traffic, which can normally be counted on for a rumbling counterpoint, kept its peace.

In the second movement things started to pick up and there was even a crescendo towards the end and in the finale we even heard the odd shuffling and cough from the gathered multitude (oh, alright, but it was still a fairly healthy turnout). But, had it not been

up small, and threw the pieces out of the window.

David Tudor roasted cloves, cinnamon, peppercorns and mustard seeds in that order, making a wonderful smell.

Christian Wolff went to sleep.

Ben Patterson practised the double-bass part of Tristan and Isolde and Helms did some typing.

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow

actual review - well, as much as one can sensibly review anything by Cage; the second a selection of Zen koans, quotations and stories.

Obviously I could have copied stories from Cage's Indeterminacy, but that would have felt like plagiarism; instead most of the stories are from my own experience and

for the traffic...

Rick Sacks's Water Music began humorously enough, with distorted quotations from Handel (of course) and Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice - although I admit the water connection took a couple of seconds to sink in.

All good, clean fun, not to mention extremely well crafted and played.

But the things got Very Silly Indeed, with the appearance of a large plastic flying fish, ditto shark, apparently under

until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"

"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How

several revolve around that most Cageian of experimental groups, the Scratch Orchestra of fond memory.

The mechanics of assembling the piece are as follows: I wrote the three strands separately. The, using a program I had written myself - having started to write computer programs for a living in 1974, the notion of writing one to solve a particular problem is as natural as breathing - I wove the three together, choosing a random number of words from each

radio control, flying around the auditorium, shortly followed by a deep-sea diver, who later turned out to be the composer himself. In addition to lurching ponderously in front of the stage he also, from somewhere, produced what I believe to have been some form of octopus, although it was a strange, livid, almost

can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"

By the time of the London performance of HPSCHD, Cornelius Cardew and John Tilbury (among other Scratch members) had become extremely political and concerned with the Maoist "utility" of music.

John Tilbury writes: Cardew

strand in turn. Each strand is in a different colour.

In order not to upset Cage too much, there were sixty-four possible word counts (from 30 to 93), corresponding to the hexagrams of the I Ching.

The program - to be precise, two programs, one to take the words from each strand (each in a different file) and one to weave them together, specifying the colour of each.

While the three strands are as

fluorescent green.

The piece was wonderfully entertaining - although, try as I might, I couldn't detect any of La Mer amidst the mix - and extremely well received.

A fitting commission for the occasion.

When Cage's ballet score The Seasons was first performed on May 18, 1947 the critics positively gushed - little did they suspect what the next few years would bring - comparing it to Schoenberg, Ravel and

and myself took part with an undisguised display of professional cynicism. I recall that Cardew's attitude was that of studied detachment; a job presented itself and he needed the money. Cage was understandably hurt: 'if they don't like it, why do they perform it', he protested.

Yamaoka Tesshu, as a young student of Zen, visited one master after another. He called upon Dokuon of Shokoku.

Desiring to show his attainment, he said:

similar as possible in length, the randomising process inevitably means that one strand will end before the others, in which case it start repeating.

Finally, a little hand-tweaking of the HTML (computers a marvellous, but the are some things they cannot do) and, viola!

For those interested in the technicalities, I wrote the programs in the python programming language (one of my favourites among the many I have used) and there is a

Stravinsky, with one enthusiast claiming that "on this evidence, Cage could have been one of the supreme orchestral colourists of the mid-twentieth century".

In the light of what did come afterwards, The Seasons is something of a shock to the system: in a word, it is absolutely gorgeous. It possesses a sheer sonic beauty which even the most dedicated Cageophobe would surely appreciate.

Moreover, it

"The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings, after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness. There is no realisation, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is no giving and nothing to be received."

Dokuon, who was smoking quietly, said nothing. Suddenly he whacked Yamaoka with his bamboo pipe. This made the youth quite angry.

"If nothing exists," inquired Dokuon, "where did this

total of around one hundred lines of code.

The programs were written using the Emacs text editor running under the Linux operating system and the final output previewed using both the firefox and chromium web browsers.

The title of the review also used a random number (pseudo-random to be precise, as computers cannot do true randomness) and is named in honour of a number of Cage pieces which involve impossibly precise durations.

was marvellously directed by Miller, who summoned a stunningly coherent and lovely performance from the orchestra. I'd love to see the orchestra play this at one of their regular concerts without announcing the composer beforehand, to see what the audience reaction would be - both the to music and to the discovery

anger come from?"

In early 1971 I was the guitarist in a rock band formed from within the Scratch Orchestra. One of our first (perhaps the first) "gigs" was at the German Cultural Institute in London, in May of that year.

Our participation was one of many Scratch sub-groups, into which we would splinter after the evening's opening performance (the world premiere) of Paragraph One of Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning. For this reason, John

This review was written - perhaps I should say "constructed" - with the assistance of a computer.

Of course, all MiV reviews are written on a computer: after all, without the computer, there would be no World Wide Web and no MiV.

That is not what I mean.

But first, a little history.

The first involvement of a computer and music was in 1950,

of its author.

It's not often that you see a soloist walk onto the stage, acknowledge the applause and then bend over and look inside the piano. Perhaps Tzenka Dianova was ensuring that this was the same instrument she had spent hours lovingly preparing that no practical joker had switched it for - oh, the humanity!

Tilbury, our regular keyboard player was not available for this one performance - he was committed to playing in Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic, which was taking place simultaneously - and thus was replaced, this once, by Michael Nyman.

In order to transport our equipment

when Geoff Hill, the Southern Hemisphere's First Programmer, used the speaker of the CSIR Mark 1 (later renamed CSIRAC) to play ("buzz" to be precise) simple popular melodies. In June 1951 it made its first public appearance, playing "Colonel Bogey".

(Incidentally, the CSIRAC, built in Sidney, Australia, was the world's fourth computer: the first two were both built in England and the USA only managed to enter the race in third place -

- an unprepared piano?

Dianova is, of course, a world authority on Cage's music for prepared piano; she is also one hell of a pianist.

We have heard Dianova and the Symphony give Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano before - some twelve years ago; on that occasion the conductor was Christopher Butterfield.

Despite the merits of that performance, which were manifold, this was altogether another kettle of fish (as indeed is the orchestra today); despite its sparse textures it gripped like a vice from beginning to end, brilliantly played by all concerned.

For a thoroughly-deserved encore, Dianova played Cage's A Room, leaving us with the sound of arguably Cage's greatest single invention, the prepared piano, ringing in our ears.

For those who had ears to hear this was an exhilarating evening.

to the rehearsal space, Bryn Harris, our drummer, had arranged for me to borrow Cardew's VW camper van.

I arrived at Cardew's house in Barnes, South London, late one afternoon, only to find that he was out. His wife, Stella, was, however, expecting me.

She showed me to the van in order, or so I thought, that I could familiarise myself with the controls.

I seated myself in the driver's seat and she explained to me - somewhat elaborately, I thought - that this pedal was the accelerator, this the brake, etc, etc.

Switching on the engine, I engaged the clutch, put the engine into first gear and slowly pulled away from the kerb.

"Oh", said Stella, surprised, "you've driven before."

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