Sometimes You Need a Composer to Know Which Way the Wind Blows
John Cage loved the notion of chance so he would certainly have been amused, not to mention alarmed by the ”coincidence” that “Lecture on the Weather,” his 1975 meditation on American environmental, social and political directions was scheduled months ago on the SpoletoUSA Festival’s “Music in Time” series the same week as President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. It is not a tribute to American progress to discover, 42 years after the piece was written, that the same issues—environmental destruction, political , economic greed—are just as unresolved and divisive today as they were when Cage drew his words from Henry David Thoreau or, indeed, when Thoreau first published them in the 1850s.
The now iconic performance piece was originally conceived as a work for either radio or the stage, as a commission from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to mark the Bicentennial of the USA in 1976. It was premiered in Toronto on February 26, 1976
To create “Lecture on the Weather’ Cage drew excerpts from Thoreau’s classic texts, which he then cast into a score using I Ching-derived chance operations to deliberately avoid “stressing any particular point.” He also wove into the score chance-determined fragments of Thoreau’s nature drawings, which were to be interpreted as music, in the manner of graphic notation.
The piece begins with a recording of Cage delivering a softly polemic spoken prelude, as twelve readers (”preferably American men who have become Canadian citizens,” according to Cage’s instructions) drift on stage gradually and take their seats in two rows back-to-back. By paragraph three, Cage strikes a nerve:
Our leaders are concerned with the energy crisis. They assure us they will find new sources of oil. Not only will earth’s reservoir of fossil fuels soon be exhausted: their continued use continues the ruin of the environment. Our leaders promise they will solve the unemployment problem: they will give everyone a job. It would be more in the spirit of Yankee ingenuity, more American, to find a way to get all the work done that needs to be done without anyone’s lifting a finger. Our leaders are concerned with inflation and insufficient cash. Money, however, is credit, and credit is confidence. We have lost confidence in one another. We could regain it tomorrow by simply changing our minds.
Cage ends the prelude with a plea that is just as urgent today and it has ever been:
More than anything else we need communion with everyone. Struggles for power have nothing to do with communion. Communion extends beyond boarders: it is with one’s enemies also. Thoreau said: “The best communion men have is in silence.”
Once the prelude ends and the readings and musical realizations begin, human voices compete with a slowly escalating weather soundscape created by the late electronic composer and installation artist Maryanne Amacher. The work culminates with a film by Luis Frangella, an Argentine-born painter and sculptor, consisting of fragments of Thoreau’s drawings, printed in negative, resembling lightning at night when projected. The various elements—voice, music, film, lighting, and weather—combine to create a powerful sensorial experience.
”Music in Time” is the most avant garde and adventuresome of SpoletoUSA’s regular music series. Ably directed and curated by the Festival’s resident conduct, John Kennedy, the series has built a strong following for new, and newish, music among locals and visitors over the past several years. He has a long association with Cage, having recorded many new and rare works over the years and having organized his memorial music event in 1992 at the request of Merce Cunningham.
In this performance, the element that may stay with careful listeners most is this prescient sentence from Thoreau warning of false prophets:
So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.
Jerry Bowles is publisher of the new music website Sequenza21 and a regular contributor to HuffPo and Diginomica.