This appeared in the Los Angeles Times this morning 6 July:
An Epic John Cage Work Tests the Chaos Theory in Holland
By MARK SWED, Times Music Critic
AMSTERDAM--America's government, having turned 225 years old on
Wednesday, satisfies us as a success story. But that doesn't exactly mean we
know just how much of it is a good thing. If an administration is elected
because it pushes for more government, voters will next probably turn to one
that espouses less, and so on. Political parties restlessly shift positions,
depending on immediate wants and needs. Even anarchists are divided into
feuding factions.
Such ambivalence is the realm of not just politics but also the arts,
and Saturday night, the Holland Festival offered a curious example of the
tensions between our urge for government and our resistance to it. The
occasion was the festival's closing event, a gala performance of John Cage's
complete "Song Books," in Amsterdam's famed, hallowed concert space, the
Concertgebouw.
"Song Books," a collection of 90 individual solos (some songs, some
theater pieces), was written in 1970 and reflects the political activism of
that era. Cage had become enthusiastic about Henry David Thoreau, and his
aim was to connect Thoreau's hearty endorsement of the motto, "That
government is best which governs least," with an earlier passion for
rule-breaking, irreverent French composer Erik Satie.
It is an epic collection. The solos range from relatively standard
songs to conceptual art. A singer might be asked to follow conventional
notation or treat the contours of Thoreau's face as a melodic line. Another
solo might require a performer to eat a meal or write a letter, with a
microphone amplifying the sounds. Along with direct references to Satie and
Thoreau (principally "Civil Disobedience" and the journals), "Song Books"
invokes James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp and even Schubert and Mozart.
Cage never suggested that all the solos be performed together. His
instructions called for any number of solos "used" by any number of
performers. Each makes an independent program and doesn't worry about what
anyone else is doing. But completeness (and then some, with other Cage works
added as well) was the intention of the Holland Festival, which turned "Song
Books" into a full-scale theatrical event, with a vast and diverse array of
performers, and the hope of creating a model that could be reproduced at
other festivals.
The Concertgebouw was transformed. The stage could not hold all the
performers, props (a chaise longue, one table with typewriter, another set
up for a chess game, a small kitchen and much more) and electronics, so
several rows of seats in front of the theater were removed. Two large video
screens were placed on either side of the theater. The small rear balcony
also held performers, as did the aisles and rear of the hall.
About 40 soloists were involved, and they included Joan LaBarbara and
Susan Naruki (two well-known American specialists in modern vocal music),
Ars Nova (an exquisite Danish vocal ensemble), Louis Andriessen (Holland's
most important composer), Bambie (a tasteless Dutch mime troupe), 100% Isis
(two feisty female DJs), Merzbow (an electronica group) and Greetje Bijma (a
stunning Dutch improvising singer). Others participated on film, among them
the rock band Sonic Youth and Dutch Fluxus artist Willem de Ridder, and
there were films of Cage himself, adding a spooky presence. Gail Zappa
created a solo over the Internet from Los Angeles.
Given such a complex array of performers, and the sheer density of
sound when many were performing simultaneously, more government than Cage
called for proved necessary. Dutch filmmaker Frank Scheffer, who produced
the event with American composer Ron Ford and American musicologist Benedict
Weisser, imposed structure. He needed to make sure that every solo was
assigned and that the entire program would last exactly 90 minutes (a
limitation imposed by the Concertgebouw). A complex road map, using Cagean
chance procedures, was produced.
A less ambitious performance of "Song Books," in which the soloists are
simply individuals acting on their own, can be a profound social exercise. A
musical society convenes onstage and demonstrates that unrelated music and
activities--the singing of a virtuoso coloratura soprano number, say, and
the typing of a letter, the coming and going of performers--need not
interfere with one another and can even lead to interesting combinations and
counterpoints that no one had ever thought of before. That, however, is not
quite what happened at the Concertgebouw.
A note in the program encouraged listeners to sample the performance
from various places in the theater. But rather than move from one seat to
another, the audience invaded the stage, intrusively peering over the
shoulders or directly into the faces of singers and actors. The entire hall
was a mob scene. Carefully choreographed movement was blocked. A convention
atmosphere ensued. The mime troupe and the DJs began to play to the crowd,
stealing attention from others. No longer was there a situation in which
individuals responsibly replaced government, but rather a blur of the
various lines of responsibility and a temptation to revolt.
Still, the performance did not totally fall apart. Nearly all the
soloists kept their professional cool. The singing was in many cases
extremely beautiful, often wafting over the crowd like the voice of reason
calling from afar.
* * *
And the audience seemed to have a very good time. The performance had
become a happening, and one that may prove important to musical life in
Amsterdam. In recent years, the Holland Festival has moved away from music
to theater, but this June it made an effort to return more music to its
schedule with a series of programs (focusing on Cage and Elliott Carter)
designed by Scheffer. The upbeat note of the "Song Books" performance may
encourage the trend.
But it also may have missed accomplishing something more valuable.
Watching the performance from the balcony (infected by the rule-breaking
mass psychology, I wandered upstairs where the audience wasn't allowed), I
sensed a mood of condescension. The Dutch can be among the most
sophisticated and intent audiences found anywhere. But once the strictures
of concert hall etiquette were removed, they became (with the encouragement
of a couple of irresponsible performers) a garishly gawking mob and treated
"Song Books" as little more than an amusing American spectacle.
Cage's score empowers the performer to illuminate the audience. At the
Concertgebouw, everything was reversed. Too many rules constrained the
soloists while the audience felt entitled to do as it wished. And the
example from Holland was not that of the responsible individual thriving
without government, but a warning about the dangers of too much government.
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