He was being interviewed about a John Cage Uncaged weekend at the Barbican, which included a performance of the piece broadcast on Radio 3 – which required them to turn off the station’s emergency system which kicks in whenever there’s too much silence
The broadcast does raise a question, though: are you supposed to listen to the ambient noise from the concert hall, or the stuff around you at home? Do two sets of ambient noise make it a completely different work?
Either way, you can still listen yourself and make up your own mind about it. The video is 7'20" – it's the 12" remix* (*It isn’t. I am a child)
One of the intriguing things about Cage’s work, though, is that it has precedents. Erwin Schulhoff’s ‘In Futurum’ is the central movement of a work from 1919 called Five Picturesques. The New Yorker describes most of the piece as “boisterous, clanging chords”, but... well, here is that middle bit
And here’s the sheet music. It’s different to Cage’s: covered in marks, almost all of which are signs for rests, but it’s a page which is *busy* with resting (and the Italian phrase at the top means “the entire song with as much expression and feeling as you like, always, right to the end!”)
Schulhoff was an avant-garde composer with an enthusiasm for jazz and Dada, and the New Yorker says there are “directions that are not merely challenging but downright nonsensical, like the time signatures—3/5 in one hand, 7/10 in the other”. Oh, and the smiley faces are original elements
This is the piece in the context of the whole work, and I can’t help wondering, given when it was written, if the frenetic, choppy bits, contrasting with the calm of In Futurum (and the final movement) aren’t in some way a response to what had been happening from 1914-18
(Mind you, as an aside, this is his Erotic Sonata, which “calls for a female singer to moan orgasmically”, and is also from 1919 – three years before Molly Bloom said “yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”)
Unfortunately, Schulhoff was a Czech Jew, and – what with that, and being artistic, non-conformist, and politically radical – he didn’t survive the *next* world war. He tried to get to Russia (which wasn’t exactly safe for Jews either), but was caught and died (of TB) in prison in 1942
This is the full New Yorker piece. There isn’t a huge amount out there about Schulhoff, who was rather forgotten about after his early death, but this piece (from 2004) marked a weekend dedicated to his work, so he is starting to be heard more again
And, strangely, even Schulhoff had a forerunner – although this wasn’t performed. Marche funèbre composée pour les funérailles d’un grand homme sourd (Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man) was ‘composed’ by French writer Alphonse Allais as a joke in 1897
Interestingly, both pieces appear to be in C major. :)
Good spot! I don't know enough about music to see stuff like that
Grade 3 in piano in 1981, so I'm not exactly an expert myself! :D
this is literally just someone making counting rests as unnecessarily complicated as possible
I was there. The orchestral version is inferior to that for solo piano. Another piece (where the conductor just moved his arm in a circle, to "represent the passing of time" while the orchestra played three different works simultaneously) was so ludicrous that one violinist just burst out laughing.
LOL
Yes
My thought exactly. 😄
www.antiquatedfuture.com/stickers/joh...
Oh, I like that
As someone who used to work in radio, and had an incident where the emergency system did kick in, that makes me panic 😱 (Although if I shelve that, I do love the concept)