Microcinema DVDs - Variations VII by John Cage

2008-06-05 Houston Chronicle
By Douglas Britt

John Cage performance is 'cheerful and strange'
While artist Robert Rauschenberg is best known for his "Combines" — assemblages of found materials that trampled the line between painting and sculpture — performance was also an important part of his creative output.

"Bob was all about theater. Always," says Fredericka Hunter, owner of Texas Gallery and an editor for ARTPIX, a nonprofit publishing company that archives contemporary art-related materials. "That's why he liked making big works rather than little works."

Rauschenberg's theatrical side came to the forefront in 1966, when he helped bring 10 artists and 30 engineers and scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories to the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, where they collaborated to present a nine-evening series of experimental performances.

The goal of 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering was to animate works of art through technology such as transistors, motion detectors and photoelectric cells — with heavy doses of improvisation thrown in.

More than 40 years later, ARTPIX and Experiments in Art and Technology — the collaborative Rauschenberg founded with engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artist Robert Whitman — have teamed to publish a series of DVDs documenting 9 Evenings. The first in the series, Rauschenberg's Open Score, came out last year.

The second DVD, Variations VII by the composer John Cage, a friend of Rauschenberg's, was released this week.

"You get a flavor of what the evening was like — what Cage and the engineers and various composers like David Tudor were doing with these electronic things," Hunter says.

Much of Cage's performance was phoned in — literally.

That's because he wanted to bring sounds from all over New York into the Armory but insisted that none of them be recorded, wanting only sounds that were, as he put it, "in the air."

Klüver got 10 dedicated telephone lines from New York Telephone and installed 10 phones at the Armory, keeping them locked in a steamer trunk to prevent unauthorized long-distance calls.

"John chose 10 places around New York City to call and leave the phones off their hooks during the performance," Klüver wrote in a 1988 essay that accompanies the DVD. "Magnetic pickups attached to the receivers fed the sounds into the sound modulation system devised by David Tudor."

Sounds came in from sites including a restaurant, a zoo aviary, a Con Edison power station, a dog shelter, a sanitation department depot, the New York Times press room, dancer Merce Cunningham's studio and the minimalist composer Terry Riley's apartment.

Riley, who had turtles, placed his phone next to a motor that circulated water in their tank.

On a stage at the Armory, Cage had a dozen microphones attached to a blender, a juicer, a toaster, a fan, radios and other household appliances.

The equipment was triggered on and off by photocells that Cage and his collaborators activated as they moved along the stage, breaking light beams that struck the cells and cast shadows off the performers.

One of Cage's assistants, the composer David Behrman, says during the documentary portion of the DVD that he "felt like a bartender going up and down the bar."

But instead of serving drinks to the audience, they were serving sounds, including those generated by Behrman's brain waves, which were detected by electrodes attached to his scalp.

Another sound, composer Lowell Cross says in the documentary, came from a loudspeaker that a little "fooling around" caused to emit a noise like air raid sirens, prompting Cage to rush over and exclaim, "Oh, isn't that marvelous! It sounds like war; let's open with that tonight!"

While all this might sound oppressive to sit through, Cage, who died in 1992, had an ability "to imbue everything with a kind of enthusiasm and a positiveness," Hunter says, calling the performance "cheerful and strange," but "not aggressive."

"I know plenty of composers who set you on edge, almost to make you leave," she says. "That isn't what's here. That's not the driving force. So you're smiling by the time you're finished looking at the disc."

The DVD includes a 41-minute film — consisting of a truncated version of Variations VII followed by documentary interviews — directed by Barbro Schultz Lundestam and produced by Julie Martin and Klüver, who died in 2004. It also includes a previously unreleased recording of the full performance.

Patrick Kwiatkowski, the owner and founder of Houston-based distributor Microcinema International and microcinema.com, says the first two releases in the 9 Evenings series have had strong sales, particularly by the standards of art DVDs.

Preorders for Variations VII reached nearly 1,000, and Open Score has sold steadily since its release, he says, adding that sales spiked after Rauschenberg's death on May 12 sparked renewed interest in the work.

In addition to individuals and stores such as Barnes and Noble, art museums and universities have expressed interest in screening the DVDs for audiences and classrooms, Kwiatkowski says.

"We're happy the world is still interested in something that happened in 1966," he says.

Future releases will include performances by the other artists Rauschenberg and Klüver invited to participate in 9 Evenings: Tudor, Whitman, Lucinda Childs, Öyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer.

Rauschenberg, in an interview on the Open Score DVD, may have hit on why enthusiasm for the series endures, making people wish they were part of "the small club of people who brag" about having seen 9 Evenings live.

"It couldn't be done today," he says. "It was done before its time, and it's too late now. That's a rare moment."

2008-04-15 La Folia online
By Grant Chu Covell

Mode's 29th volume in its ongoing Cage traversal presents the Variations series' first three installments. Motion Ensemble emphasizes a technological progression with acoustic instruments in Variations I to live electronics in Variations III. David Tudor's spirit hovers over these performances. He is Variations I's dedicatee: for David Tudor, on his Birthday (Tardily), and several Motion Ensemble players cut their signal-processing teeth (sawteeth?) on Tudor's live electronic works. Variations I, taken here by clarinet, horn, trumpet, violin, double bass, prepared piano and percussion, sounds like any of the unstructured aleatoric pieces cluttering the 20th century. However, Motion Ensemble's musicians play reservedly, producing ample savory sounds.

Variations II introduces electronics and a simultaneous performance of Lecture on Nothing. Helen Pridmore delivers the odd, self referential text as much about nothing as it is about something. Several times she burbles the words through water or projects them in a laughing voice. Double bass and violin squawks and scratches are amplified. A percussionist plays with gadgets ranging from toy pianos to amplified slinky. It's entrancing to follow the text's thread, and as in the other performances, Motion Ensemble proceeds with delicate restraint.

Variations III includes pre-recorded and live sounds: twittering birds, a revving gas powered lawn mower, a bus pulling up to a curb, etc. The live electronics aren't heavy-handed. These aren't DJs using Cage's shadow as an excuse to bring down the house. Many quiet sounds are amplified, and countless percussion and widgets are treated to filtering, reverb and delay. Instruments and techniques may differ from Variations I, but the atmosphere is similar. Heard coming after Variations I and II, a listener might not notice that traditional instruments are absent. It'd be a treat to hear these folks live. True to form, Mode presents an excellent recording, capturing these caucuses' every nuance.