Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Cage and Friends
- Part II Colleagues and Criticism
- Part III Earlier Interviews
- Part IV Extravaganzas
- Appendix I Finnegans Wake
- Appendix II John Cage Uncaged
- Selected Bibliography
- General Index
- Index of Works by John Cage
- Eastman Studies in Music
16 - Cage with David Sylvester and Roger Smalley: BBC Radio 3, London, December 1966
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Cage and Friends
- Part II Colleagues and Criticism
- Part III Earlier Interviews
- Part IV Extravaganzas
- Appendix I Finnegans Wake
- Appendix II John Cage Uncaged
- Selected Bibliography
- General Index
- Index of Works by John Cage
- Eastman Studies in Music
Summary
Introduction
Extracts from an interview recorded at the BBC, London, in December 1966, broadcast in 1967, and printed in the program of John Cage and David Tudor, presented by Music Now at The Royal Albert Hall, London, on May 22, 1972.
Reprinted in edited form by permission of Naomi Sylvester and Roger Smalley.The British response to Cage's first visit since 1966, when Music Now billed him as “the most influential living composer,” cannot have been encouraging. Hugo Cole went to hear Cage and Tudor read and talk at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on May 10, 1972. He reported that Cage emphasized that he used the I Ching merely as a utility “to become free of my likes and dislikes,” but Cole was perplexed because Cage apparently said he didn’t particularly want to compose but people kept asking him for works, adding: “My favorite music is no music at all; I enjoy the sounds round me.” Cole interviewed Cage and wrote a sympathetic article as a preview to The Royal Albert Hall concert on May 22. Each half of the concert consisted of a simultaneous performance of a work by Tudor and one by Cage: Tudor’s Rainforest with Cage's Mureau, and Tudor's Untitled with Cage's Mesostics re Merce Cunningham.
Peter Stadlen, the Vienna-born British pianist and critic associated with the Second Viennese School who had given the premiere of Webern's Piano Variations in 1937, gained some satisfaction over the poor attendance in the vast Royal Albert Hall in spite of the publicity and added, “What was actually heard, in a darkened hall with two shadowy figures crouching over the usual apparatus, might have been mistaken by the un-Tudored ear (sorry about that) for two low-voiced drunks, making their way home, to the steady accompaniment of high-pitched tinnitus, such as will result from chronically inflamed Eustachian tubes and taking all of an hour over it.” The musicologist and editor of The New Grove Dictionary, Stanley Sadie, went even further by asking how one could judge something that “conscientiously avoids all points of reference to artistic experience” and “professedly has no standards.” Sadie concluded: “The pieces given at the Cage-Tudor concert are not designed as musical experiences which embody planning and organization (built-in or spontaneous), but are actively nihilistic in intention. As far as I was concerned, they were successful: my senses were numbed, my mind left blank.” Cage himself was dissatisfied and told Eric Mottram a few days later:
Even though we desired a situation like the Round House, in which the audience was free to move, we were … in the Albert Hall, where the audience was seated.
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- CageTalkDialogues with and about John Cage, pp. 185 - 195Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006