One of the exciting things for me about Rauschenberg is that he was relentlessly
collaborative, so if you look at the exhibition there are collaborations with
scientists, with artists, with writers, with dancers, with musicians. He imagines
that there is a universe of interconnected disciplines and
interconnected thought. He's in the middle of this you know to himself he
imagines there's all this exciting stuff happening in the world and if I put
myself there I can be right at the center of it.
Classical music is very small and it's very local and it lives in a little tiny
box and so for me one of the really exciting things is that when I see
someone who was able to define the world as on being all these incredible
connections that only connect because they connect in him, it makes me feel
like I can do that. It makes me feel like I can live a bigger life. And it makes me
feel like the music which I believe fundamentally is universal—that the
music can be part of a larger kind of citizenship.
The New York School is a historic term. It means a moment in time in the 1950s
when composers started looking at ways to challenge ideas that came from Europe
by incorporating freedom and indeterminacy and democracy and music
And thank you all for coming and for those of you who haven't seen the show
yet you should rush to see it. It's incredible, and this piece, in particular, 4 Minutes and 33...
The central figure in this New York School was always John Cage.
One of Cage's most notorious pieces is a piece called Four Minutes and 33 Seconds.
Cage saw the white paintings of Rauschenberg and realized how powerful
the provocation was to have something on which you could project anything.
So it was given to David Tudor who at the time was the avant-garde music world's
greatest virtuoso of the most difficult piano music.
The idea that you are asking this incredible virtuoso
to sit down at the piano, we expect him to do something.
So what he does is he takes out the music and he closes the lid of the piano
for the time specified for this first movement, and he opens the lid of the
piano and he closes the lid of the piano for the second movement, and he does this
for all three movements for four minutes and 33 seconds.
He really is the closest
thing that music composition has to a philosopher. It's Cage identifying what
the core action of composition is. Composition is the designing of an
experience which makes an audience a better listener. Something happens in
sound in front of you and you put it together and you listen to it. If there's
an emotional reaction that's not that's happening, it's not that the composer
makes you have the emotional reaction— you are making that emotional reaction
yourself. How better to show that that's the core of what classical music is than
to say there is nothing on stage other than the opening of the proposition to listen.
...and I actually don't I don't know enough about lighting technology because I'm a sound guy
I don't know enough about lighting technology, but I know it
just has to do with when you know when you jiggle the two next to each other.
Yeah.
Okay, so this monitor's five...
And that's six.
Okay, show me what to do.
Twelve lights, twelve sounds. All you have to do is turn them on.
There was a moment where David Tudor moved from being a performer, a recreator
into being a creator and that was something that Rauschenberg did for
David Tudor. Rauschenberg invited David Tudor to participate in a project with
him and David Tudor's idea was he walked into this gigantic hall where there were
two hundred and seventy plus fluorescent lights in the ceiling and he put a
microphone on every single one of the lights and so then he had a little
control board where he would make music by turning the lights on and off
So one of the things that we've done for our show here is that we've made a kind of
homage to this piece. You don't want to dim it? Because that's sometimes where
you get the fun flicker there's a problem with the fact that
contemporary fluorescent lights don't make sound for the most part. They're
lighting modern lighting fixtures are very very quiet, and so I had to go and
find some recordings of vintage fluorescent tubes and utilize those in a
sort of software environment that allows us to turn on and off fluorescent lights
in a way that corresponds with sounds that would be, you know, as near as we can
tell would be appropriate to what we might have heard in that gallery space
Rauschenberg saw that there shouldn't be a distance between composer and
performer, just as he saw that there shouldn't be a distance between artist
and choreographer or artist and costumer or composer and poet. He imagined that
somebody could do this job, and that kind of enthusiasm and an invitation ended up
changing David Tudor's life. The notion that you should be making your work and
also living in a world and giving opportunities to other people and
helping people grow and finding people who are interesting, who are interesting
and supporting them—that's rare. The idea that he can be useful to someone
else, that is very beautiful and that goes...
that's a theme that goes through this entire show.