Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Cage on original instruments

So much went on at Sunday's John Cage happening that I wasn't able to mention everything in yesterday's post. To follow up: I was told by one of the performers that Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (the one for 12 radios and 24 performers) is getting harder to present as written, because it calls for radios that have dials, which most don't anymore (at least not for tuning), and because the numbers on the score refer to AM settings, and there are fewer AM stations than there used to be. (The piece was written in 1951.) The guy I spoke to admitted to using FM. Most of the radios on stage, however, were older varieties with dials (or knobs) for both volume and tuning, which led the guy to say we had just witnessed an original-instrument perfromance.

A lot of the postmortem conversations were like that, which, I guess, goes a long way to explaining my happy mood on the way home.

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