Trapped in a John Cage
Category: General
Tags: John Cage, PURL
We stood outside of the building for a few minutes, just feet from the guarded entryway, while a friend finished his cigarette. A sandwich board sign on the ground pointed inside the glass doors, exclaiming "CAGE CONCERT" to anyone who dared pass by. The tracks for the light rail ran parallel to the sidewalk, edging through the expanse of high-rise buildings and expensive bars, cutting across vintage apartment buildings and the art district of downtown Phoenix.
While we waited for the red-hot tobacco to consume itself, one of our quartet postulated, "So. The Luke Cage concert's this way?"
"No," another responded. "But the Nick Cage concert is."
A quick flick and the guard opened the locked door for us; we entered under a metal detector to a lush, tiled hallway. A young man with a clipboard stood in front of the elevators, doing his best to look professional. I was on the list. He added the two friends I brought in my car, as the other had invited us here in the first place, to a performance in which his college percussion group was participating. A John Cage performance. In the elevator, he warned us that we may not like it while simultaneously preparing us to have our minds blown.
The performance area was a wide open, loft-style room on the eighth floor, complete with a large model of the entire downtown area on the hardwood floor at the entrance. Rows of chairs faced a piano, marimba, various small percussion instruments, a screen with a projected picture of John Cage tinkering with piano strings, and a few neon-colored plastic tubes and a bright orange Nerf shotgun. At the back of the room, interspersed between groups of men and women lounging in full black attire, were positioned tables with rainsticks and cacti equipped with contact microphones. A snare drum on top of a tall ladder displayed a single explosion from a paintball. I was suddenly relieved that I wore my artsy skirt.
We sat. The high ceiling was decaying through hand-painted beams and archways and a safety net had been strung directly below it, the ghosts of trapeze artists past simply waiting for the lights to extinguish. Around 7:30, closer to 8, the performance began. With a short introduction, a middle-aged man with thick-rimmed glasses explained that the following pieces were relatively tame in the way of John Cage and that the truly strange stuff would be after intermission. In the terribly pretentious room, surrounded by artists, musicians, and expensive boutique clothing, I was tempted to laugh aloud at the cliché of it all. Open your eyes--or can't you see your own perpetuated stereotype through the low hang of your artfully-cut fringe? But instead, as the performers took their places at the tables of percussion instruments and oddities, I decided to give it a chance. I focused on the display of musicians and on the sounds they would be producing, on dissecting the music of the night, not the audience.
And so they began.
I had a perfect view of the back of one woman's head, a loose bun held in place by a bejeweled hair clamp, just covering the back profile of the pianist, an attractive blonde woman in a geometric-patterned dress. As the pianist surged back and forth into the woman's hair, I reveled in the inconsistent sounds produced by the altered instrument, the pounding of blocks and chimes emanating from ivory keys that would rightfully produce clear, ringing notes, the perfectly out-of-tune minor scale under her left hand. She was good. The remainder of the ensemble played wood blocks and tin cans, among other awkward sounds whose origins I could not see. Cage's music is disjointed and chaotic, free, as some would say. The rare moments of normal rhythm, a few measures of nightmarish jazz backlit by triplet beats, sounded wrong. Our minds crave the consistency, the patterns we are taught to find before we even speak, but in the score there already was a common beat interwoven in the lyrical anarchy, more difficult to pinpoint exactly but always there. Patterned rhythm is unnecessary at that point. Still, it was soothing in a way that I did not wish to be soothed, though my foot continued to bounce in the hidden beat accentuated by those very phrases.
The second half was strange indeed. The cacti came into use, as well as the rainsticks and elongated maracas, booming dome percussion instruments, synthesizers, an electric bass that a man played with a bright pink vibrator, and a pair of snare drums hit with the projectile darts from the Nerf shotgun, among other things. Many other things. A man distorting his voice read-sang random words from the PowerPoint screen, certain letters taking up the entire page while others hid behind their neighbors. My friend played the radio, turning it on at specified points with other students from his percussion group. I wanted a large glass of wine and a Grecian couch to lie against; would have felt more comfortable with some Opium and a blindfold. Music is an awkward term to apply to what we heard that night.
Half-way through this piece, staring at the intense concentration on one of the performers faces as he poured rice over the strings of a prone electric bass, I realized they were reading to us. Music is a language, truly, and like reading Shakespeare to an infant, this was a level of language that I could not comprehend on my own. They were reading to us. They understood so much of the language of music that this noise was the only way they would stay interested anymore, the only challenge left after the Dr. Seuss of Mozart and Beethoven. In this sense, in their passion and dedication to this psychedelic noise, they were simply reading aloud.
The piece ended, immediately followed by the last song of the night, 4'33". It was fitting for the night's theme. If you've not heard it before, it sounds surprisingly similar to this.
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