Performance questions

• Play J.S. Bach: Invention #1
• What structures a performance?
  • The performer's relationship to the audience. Binaries:
    • Position (on stage/off stage)
    • Knowledge/ignorance
    • Activity/passivity
    • Talent/taste
  • The clear (programmatic) articulation of events.
• What constitutes a successful performance?
  • Traditional roles of the performer:
    • To articulate the physical gap between performer and audience
    • To emphasize the performer's talent and activity.
    • To match or improve the tastes of the audience ("give the audience what they want or like"/"give the audience what they need").
    • To present distinct pieces in sequence, so that the audience has a clear point of focus.
• What makes a "great" performer? Do we need great performers today, or is this greatness a thing of the past? Why?

We were planning to talk about technologies of time this week, but have decided to postpone that discussion to focus on issues more directly related to the upcoming performance—in particular, the structure of performance itself. This isn't the first time we've brought up the issue: it came up when we talked about sound installations, and it's been present more-or-less explicitly whenever we've talked about your compositions and documentation practices. But there's no time like the present to tackle the issue head-on. The more we get involved with the pragmatics of performance, the less we tend to think about what we're doing, and why. Of course, I don't want to impede the decision-making that's necessary to make a performance happen at all; my point is not to "solve the problem" of the performance by thinking about it. More modestly, it is to tune you in to the richness of a situation that tends to go unanalyzed, to show alternatives to the basic performance structure that you may not have considered, and to use this knowledge to deflate the anxiety that performances tend to generate.

Last Tuesday, we listened to John Cage talk with Morton Feldman about being a "great artist", an artist "deep in thought", and whether this greatness or depth of thought was necessary for art any longer. Cage said it wasn't; Feldman wasn't sure. I think he was afraid to give up greatness and deep thinking because doing so might give license to artistic laziness and ignorance. Perhaps this is true. And anyway, who in their right mind doesn't want to be great at what they do? Who doesn't want to be smart? But perhaps these questions miss the point of art; perhaps artistic greatness and intelligence shield us from something more substantial that art can offer us: what Cage calls "experience". We can ask the same questions about performance.

4'33"

Since we're talking about Cage, let's listen to another classic from the experimental hit parade: 4'33".

It was first performed by the young pianist David Tudor at Woodstock, New York, on August 29, 1952, for an audience supporting the Benefit Artists Welfare Fund – an audience that supported contemporary art.

Cage said, "People began whispering to one another, and some people began to walk out. They didn't laugh—they were just irritated when they realized nothing was going to happen, and they haven't forgotten it 30 years later: they're still angry." (http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/4-33/images/4/)

Why was the audience so angry? There are two perspectives from which to interpret Cage's unprecedented emphasis on silence. The first is purely sonic: the silence allows the audience to listen to noises they otherwise wouldn't hear in a musical performance. But it is not these noises, I believe, that irritated the audience. If "nothing happened" during the piece, as Cage said, it was not from the perspective of sound; indeed, the point of 4'33" is that there will always be sounds, even in a "silent" environment. Rather, "nothing happened" because David Tudor, the performer, just sat there. It is from this perspective, the perspective of performance, that made Cage's piece such a scandal. He had untied an implicit knot that holds together the performance situation: the knot that requires some sort of skill on the part of the performer, and—this is important—some sort of taste on the part of the audience. If nothing is expected of the performer, nothing is expected of the audience. 4'33" continues to irritate audiences for the same reason, as is clear from these YouTube comments:

• This guy is crap, I can totally play this piece better than him
• Cage certainly knew his audience. A bunch of pretentious, self-congratulatory, refuse apologists who pretend to enjoy the squeeking of pop cans more than a Bach cantata. 20th century art is just as brilliant: fecal matter, menstrual blood and crucifixes soaked in urine. This piece is among the greatest written in the 20th century because it's ONLY banal. I guess we can't blame Cage for giving his audience what they want.

Cage's Piano Concerto

Comments from YouTube:

• What bothers me is that music like this is incredibly easy to write, from a compositional perspective.
  • So is writing any type of music. There is nothing difficult about harmony or counterpoint; they take little time to learn and subsequently become convenient and rote. Honestly, writing contemporary music requires much more creativity, for the most part. However, I have an addendum to that statement that you may not be thinking of: there is good contemporary music just like there is bad contemporary music. If you're not familiar with the idiom, it's hard to tell the difference.

Again, difficulty and quality (as regulated by taste) may miss the point.