We then heard a recording of Cage reading from the lecture, while, for whatever reason, a photo of the avant-garde Soviet poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky was projected. At the point where Cage writes that it is OK to go to sleep if you are sleepy, Wilson got up from his chair and deliberately walked to a bed at the other side of the stage, got under the sheets and closed his eyes. He makes observations about society and music but undercuts himself, repeating, “Slowly, as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere and that is a pleasure.” Regularly throughout, Cage tells his listeners where he is structurally in the lecture, which is made up of large and small sections in mathematical proportions. As is typical of Wilson, his movements were very slow, his painterly touch was seen on every inch of the stage and the lighting was so exquisite that it created a magnificent world of its own. After that theater-of-cruelty electronic blast, we were now in the right place. “What we require is silence but what silence requires is that I go on talking,” Wilson read, as he began Cage’s text while moving his fingers across sheets of paper. It may be awful, but it can also be enjoyable if, deep down, you know it’s for your own good. It was a sound not unlike what you experience when you are given an MRI. A piercingly loud, complex electronic sound blared for an unbearable seven minutes, as if attempting to re-create in the audience the response Cage got at the Artist’s Club. The stage was littered with crumpled newsprint and backed with banners that have collage-like fragments of Cage’s text. PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The TimesĪ one-man show, this “Lecture” began with Wilson, dressed in white and covered in white body paint, seated at a table and motionless as a statue. Wilson’s once revolutionary 1976 operatic collaboration with Philip Glass, “Einstein on the Beach” - just concluded at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion - is itself now a classic, and the director in this new Cage production reminds of where he came from and why. premiere Tuesday night in Royce Hall by the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA - goes far further. Robert Wilson, in his theatrical production of “Lecture on Nothing” - which was commissioned for a German celebration of the Cage centenary last summer and given its U.S. After hearing the line “if anyone is sleepy, let him go to sleep” repeated more than a dozen times, a member of the club stood up and screamed as she walked out, “John, I dearly love you, but I can’t bear another minute.” The composer first delivered the 40-minute lecture - which is structured like a piece of music, with pauses and repetitions - at the painter Robert Motherwell’s 8th St. One of its much-quoted lines is “I have nothing to say and I am saying and that is poetry as I need it.” The conductor Robert Spano read the lecture at the 2006 Ojai Festival, as the director Peter Sellars once did at the Salzburg Festival, slowly savoring every instant.īut what Cage called a composed lecture didn’t always go down so easily. Follow him on Twitter at on Faceboo k.“Lecture on Nothing,” which is published in John Cage’s “Silence,” is a classic, studied and often recited. Notations: John Cage Publishes a Book of Graphic Musical Scores, Featuring Visualizations of Works by Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky, The Beatles & More (1969)ĭiscover the 1126 Books in John Cage’s Personal Library: Foucault, Joyce, Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, Buckminster Fuller & Moreīased in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Listen to John Cage’s 5 Hour Art Piece: Diary: How To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)Īvant-Garde Composer John Cage’s Surprising Mushroom Obsession (Which Began with His Poverty in the Depression) How to Get Started: John Cage’s Approach to Starting the Difficult Creative Process The Curious Score for John Cage’s “Silent” Zen Composition 4’33” But even a sampling of the recordings here suggests that being John Cage, in whatever setting, constituted a productive artistic project all its own. Have a listen through the rest of Ubuweb’s collection and you’ll hear the master of silence speak voluminously, if sometimes cryptically, on such subjects as Zen Buddhism, anarchism, utopia, the work of Buckminster Fuller, and “the role of art and technology in modern society.” The contexts vary, both in the sense of time and place as well as in the sense of the performative expectations placed on Cage himself. Cage has more to say about Duchamp, and other artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, in the undated lecture clip from the archives of Pacifica Radio just above.
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