As we're looking at modern
innovations in music, one of the pioneers that
we still talk about a lot even though he's no longer with us, is the composer
John Cage.
Sounds like a good American name doesn't it; it's because he is a good American guy.
He was from California and California even in the forties and fifties,
as it is now was sort of the place that different things happen you know
if there's something
kind of weird going on in the world we think, "Oh, it must be California, right? So
he was in California where he was influenced by a lot of different kinds
of cultures.
You know, there's a lot of Chinatown's in major cities in
California. There are all sorts of different cultural influences coming in
and he studied those things. He was very much interested
in Asian cultures,
Asian religion, Asian music. So, a lot of the things that he did, which is sort of his
big significant contribution to
innovations in music in the 20th Century, was to create a new way
of playing the piano. When we talked about the modern era and the kinds of
musical things that were happening,
one of the things that we saw was that composers would take
instruments that have been around for a very long time
and play them in different kinds of ways, and so that's what John Cage did.
We're going to look at what he did with that in a minute but to just sort of give you an idea
of some of the interesting things that he did,
he did a lot of music that we call chance
music or aleatoric music, which is not just you know stand on the corner and
listen to things happen, it actually has structure but
there's an element of what could happen in the middle of it.
One of the pieces that he is most famous for is called, "4 minutes 33 seconds," (or 4'33")
and what happens in this piece is that
there's a piano on the stage, the performer comes out onto the stage,
sits at the piano, and they sit there for four minutes and 33 seconds
and never play the piano at all. So what's the music in that?
What becomes the music is
everything that happens in the building. All the sounds that you hear
while that pianist is not playing. So, you might imagine the first time that this
was performed, people were
waiting very patiently, they applauded when they came out and they
waited for something to happen and
nothing happens and nothing happens and you can imagine that people might have
started muttering to each other.
They might have started flipping through their program trying to figure out why there's
nothing happening on the stage and what am I supposed to be hearing.
All of that became the music, and at four thirty three the
performer gets up and
bows and goes off. That's one thing he did. Another piece
he did, he had a set of radios on the stage
and each radio has a performer, an operator,
and they would have their music, their score that tells them what to do,
and so they were told, alright, so tune your radio to
this frequency for this long,
at this volume level, so we've controlled all the things that we can
control on
the radio, and the next person has their instructions, and the next person has theirs,
so there's
however many radios, each person has their own instructions about what to do with
their radio and for how long.
Well, what happens?
That performance is going to be different depending on where you are
when you do it, because the radio stations will be different.
Perhaps the frequency that that person was told to tune to
doesn't even have a station. Maybe it's just static, so you just get white noise
and static for 30 seconds or however long
while other radios are playing different things.
So, it's structured. You have to do a specific thing for a specific amount of time
but the chance becomes... what's the sound source that's coming in
to that radio? So, those are the kinds of things people were experimenting with and John
Cage obviously did some very interesting experiments.
So, as I said he was interested in Asian music and he became very interested in
particular
in a Southeast Asian type on ensemble called a gamelan,
and in a gamelan what you have is a variety of
mostly percussive kinds of instruments, but they're not
marimbas and xylophones and things like that that were used to. They are made
out of, in many cases, they would be like a brass bell mounted on
something, and maybe there will be 10 different ones in different sizes so you
have a massive long instrument that the
performer would go up and down playing. Or, you might have something that looks sort
of like
a marimba where you have bars that you play,
but it's a very unique sound. So let's listen to a little bit of gamelon
music just so you get
the sense of the sound that John Cage is trying to create
in the next thing that we're going to talk about.
(music playing)
K! That video is much longer if you want to listen you can hear all the different kinds
of things that happen.
But you get a sense of the sound here. It almost sounds like toy piano sort of
things again because it's a very
metallic sort of sound and you can see that in most cases they're striking
their instruments with
some sort of metal hammer device, so it's a very percussive effect.
He liked this sound and he wanted to figure out some way
to create the same sort of sound without having to have
all these people and all these instruments, and to use something that we
already had
available to us. So what did he do? He went into his
piano room. Got this nice grand piano. You can hear him thinking, how am I going to make that happen
because this is something that's pitched,
so we know we've got pitches we can work with. How can I get those sounds
out of the piano, which obviously doesn't sound like that?
What he did was come up with what we now call that prepared
piano... prepared piano, and as we'll see when we watch the video of someone actually
playing one,
inside the piano, in the strings, which you know we've looked at that when we look at the piano
in detail,
he puts things in the strings.
In this case, you're going to see a lot of metal screws
stuck in between the strings on the notes.
So we put these metals pieces in here between the strings that were vibrating.
That's going to limit how much vibrating they can do so you can get a more percussive
sound that way,
and you're also going to get the metal. Now we have screws gonna vibrate as well so
you get a whole new sound quality.
He also would do things like, and I don't think there are any in this particular one, but
you might put pieces of paper, thread them
in between the strings. So these sort of dampened
the thing and you get a more of a fwoop, fwoop, fwoop sort of sound to it.
You could put erasers on top of the strings. Anything that's going to make
the string vibrate in a different way.
So, do we just randomly go put those in there? No!
If you look at the score, which is the musical piece of paper that we work
from,
there's a whole long list and it's very specific, it'll say like
take a two and a quarter inch galvanized steel screw
and put it between the second and third strings
of the G4 on the piano, which is the numbering system we use so we know which of the G's
that is. So you, the person who is preparing the piano
has to get the right kind of screw, put it in the right place. He even tells you how far
away from the tuning pegs and everything. So everything is very specific
because he wants you to get the right sound at the end. If you don't do it the way he
did it, you're not going to get the sound that he was creating. So let's listen now
to a Sonata; so he's using a very old, formal structure which you can call
a sonata-sounding peace
on prepared piano. So the video is great because it actually shows you the
interior view of the piano so you can see what's been done and then you'll see that the pianist
is really just playing the piano, so you can
tell this is not a trick!