Listening - or not - to Cage

After hearing quite a decent piece of music by John Cage yesterday when we were driving to the supermarket, something that had lots of fun arpeggios on the piano and people clapping rhythmically at other times, I thought I'd give Cage another go and listen to today's episode in the series the Concert programme is running. 

So far I'm remaining almost complete underwhelmed. It was interesting to hear in the introductory talk about this series that Schoenberg thought Cage had little sense of harmonic structure.  Certainly in the piece playing now (Concerto for prepared piano & chamber orchestra) he just seems to add note after note without any obvious musical connection: though of course he was into music constructed by maths/graphs and whatever, so perhaps that explains why it sounds like it does...

And you can hear the music of his followers echoed in every bar: the long held notes crescendoing and descrecendoing but going nowhere in particular; the burps and sudden interruptions from the brass, always in dissonance; the percussion sounding as though they've lost one of their mallets and are banging their way around amongst the instruments trying to find it; the sudden squeaks from the high instruments as though someone had pinched their bottoms; the modified ('prepared') piano making various interesting but unconnected noises. (I bet some pianos aren't prepared for the indignities that are 'performed' upon them!) The only thing missing are plucked notes from an Ovation guitar - perhaps it hadn't been invented when Cage was writing. 

The current piece has been going on in this vein for several minutes.  It must be very unsatisfying to play.   I can't quite figure out where the concerto element comes into it: the piano doesn't seem to be doing anything more or less than the other instruments.  They're all being as random as each other.  According to the link above, the piano and orchestra never play together in parts one and two of the three parts, and the thing as a whole was originally worked out from a 14 x 16 chart.  You need to read the explanation - and hopefully you can make more sense of the phrase towards the end: 'thus the prepared piano is released from its hunger for self-expression.'   Apparently self-expression was banned from Cage's later works. 

The Concert programme is just about to start playing Hector Berlioz' Requiem.  This is a wonderful piece of music, and I've seen/heard it performed live twice, once in the Dunedin Town Hall way back in the sixties, and once in St Paul's Cathedral in London - only a few years later.  The walls of St Paul's were reverberating with the vibrations coming from the multiple timpani.  

I wonder what Berlioz would think of Cage's mechanically-made music? 

Making stuff

My wife is currently experimenting with making a tri-broomstick for Grimhilda!  You'll all know what a tri-broomstick is, of course.  If you don't, you'll have to come along and see the show.

She's also been working on a prototype for a cage large enough to hold a growing male teenager - this is also for Grimhilda! (I don't want to give the impression she gets on and makes these things just for the fun of it.)  The cage is being made out of heavy wire, with twine pulling together the wire in various places and as wire cover for certain joins.   At this point the thing is standing without someone holding it up, but we're waiting to hear whether it's quite what's going to be needed before we make further improvements.

In the meantime it's taking up half of the front hall and eliciting enquiries as to what it is from each and every visitor we have...

Triptych

In a bit of a movie splurge, caught up with three movies last week: Shutter Island, A Serious Man, and, Adaptation. All of them are unusual, each in different ways. Shutter Island is the most mainstream, in that it has plenty of money to throw around, stars Leonardo Di Caprio, and is directed by Martin Scorsese. It's a fairly bleak psychological thriller with echoes of Hitchcock, and overall, I thought was worth watching. The cast is uniformly good, but the thing that stood out for me was the cinematography. Since dreams and memories are a significant part of the story, there's a dream quality to much of what goes on, even when it's meant to be the 'real' part of the story. (The thing hinges on a trick, somewhat like The Sixth Sense, or Hitchcock's own Vertigo.)

A Serious Man was a puzzle. I'm sure it's the sort of movie that leaves plenty of open ends so you can ask questions, but equally, in answering almost nothing, I found it just unsatisfying. It's as if the Coen brothers wanted to make a black comedy where they didn't have to explain anything; they could just go with whatever came up. Again there are dreams that at first appear to be reality.

This isn't to say that it's a poor movie in any sense; the cast are wonderful, with even those characters who are seen only for a minute being fully inhabited by the actors; the cinematography is again rich and full of detail, and it has lots of subtle (often 'Jewish subtle') humour in it. There's even a Jewish folk story sequence at the beginning which is wonderfully done, but appears to have almost nothing to do with the rest of the movie. An article in Wikipedia has this to say about this sequence:

The Yiddish story that introduces the film was created by the Coen Brothers, as they did not find any folk tales they thought were suitable. They note the story has no developmental relationship to what follows other than to set the tone. One possible interpretation of the faux folk tale at the beginning of the movie is that the couple seen in the folk tale are Larry's [the main character] ancestors and may through their action toward the Visitor have introduced a curse or a strain of sin into the family tree, as Yiddish folk belief would have construed the story. A portrait of Reb Groshkover [the 'visitor'] is glimpsed on the wall outside the Rabbi Marshak's office later in the film.

I suspect that several viewings of the movie would reveal a good deal that isn't picked up in one viewing.

Adaptation is a movie that plays constantly with the idea of movie-making, of adapting books to movies, of screenwriting, and of teasing the audience. In the opening credits we see that the screenplay is written by Charlie Kaufman - who exists, and is played in the movie by Nicholas Cage - and Donald Kaufman - who doesn't exist, and is also played in the movie by Cage. (Charlie Kaufman is the somewhat fat and morose twin - who'd probably benefit from a course of curvatrim - while Donald is the upbeat guy for whom life falls into place, even when he doesn't expect it.)

Three other real people appear in the film, but are played by Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper and Brian Cox. What these three 'characters' do in the movie isn't what the original 'real' people did, or are likely to do. And then there are several real people who play themselves - if that's what you do when you're just being you.

Kaufman the character is trying to adapt a book by the Streep character - and it's an actual book that was on the NY Times bestselling list. His earlier movie, Being John Malkovich, is seen being made early in this film, and becomes yet another part of the real/fictional/adaptative aspect of this movie. Adaptation also occurs in other areas: in relation to the orchids that are the subject of the book being adapted, in relation to changes in the characters' behaviour, in connection with Charles Darwin's theories about evolution, in relation to the way the movie itself adapts to its audience, since Robert McKee, the scriptwriting guru (he's the person played by Brian Cox) tells Kaufman that there has to be a satisfying third act - so Kaufman, after much internal debate, provides one, which of course, he's part of. Trying to describe this movie is a task.

Of the three movies I think I enjoyed Adaptation the most - its twists and turns at least contributed to a satisfying whole. Serious Man remains something of an enigma, although I enjoyed it while I was watching it. Shutter Island is overlong; some cutting would have improved the suspense and edge.

Treasure and Emma

Just watched National Treasure: Book of Secrets - in other words, the sequel. Worst thing about is Nicholas Cage's dreadful hair style. I presume it's some form of wig or toupee to make him look younger; whatever it is, it's so unsightly, it's a wonder Cage himself didn't have it banned. It has a definite front line, unlike normal hair, and he's lacking even a hint of sideburns, which makes it look as though a cap's been stuck on his head. Unbelievable.
Apart from that the story is so thoroughly far-fetched that you just have to take it as it comes - and with Cage, Helen Mirren, Jon Voight and Ed Harris in the cast, not to mention Diane Kruger and even Harvey Keitel, it's certainly not going to fail on the acting side of things. It sends itself up gently on a number of occasions, and is mostly as good as the first movie.
On a different line altogether, I went and saw Emma last night at the Fortune Theatre. It had had rave reviews, and a number of people had said they were going to it or had been. I can't explain why I was disappointed, because the actors did their utmost, particularly Mel Dodge, who played a shy and awkward Harriet Smith, a tottering and verbose Miss Bates, and a dragon-like Mrs Elton, each with such delineation of detail that she captured the show.
And the direction was energetic and busy, laughed at itself and threw in some marvellous non sequiters. Perhaps it was too busy - and yet the subtle moments came off beautifully.
I think I was just very tired, and the seats were uncomfortable (no arm rests between people, which means you have to sit up straight), and I came away feeling somewhat grumpy that I hadn't enjoyed it.
It had the same approach as Jane Eyre, which I saw at the Fortune last year (but don't appear to have mentioned in this blog): a small cast playing a wide variety of characters, one basic set that was manhandled by the cast, various props picked up and used for different reasons, a sense of reinventing the original while still telling the story. Only here the actors played with the audience as well, giving them knowing looks at certain points, or being very aware of something silly happening to them, and so on. Which can work, but can also be rather twee. It was also a play within a play - five young people perform Emma for themselves, in an attic amongst all the family's no-longer-needed clutter - and at time revert to their non-Jane-Austin roles.
These reinventions are all very well, but the curious thing is that they still work best when the straightforward dramatic elements are allowed to run without any authorial or directorial interference - as in the last scene, where Emma finally realises her foolishness (it's a wonderful scene in the book too - and in the movie), or where Emma insults the nattering Miss Bates and has to be told off by Mr Knightly.

Listening to John Adams (I)

I’ve finally started catching up with some of John Adams’ music – and I’ve also got the new book out from the library that I wrote about recently.
The interview at the beginning of the book gives a fairly laid-back view of Adams, tells how he was enamoured of John Cage’s music for a time, but left that behind, how he’s been classed with the minimalists, but isn’t really one of them. Seems to me, from what I’ve been listening to, that he has minimalist leanings, in the sense that he takes a very small amount of material and uses it constantly, but the difference is that he adds variety to this: things don’t stay the same for hour after hour until you want to scream. And the piece in which the recording of a preacher features, even the preacher’s words are swapped around and edited so that there’s a different sense to them each time they appear. Unlike those pieces where some words are just looped over and over, while the musicians play randomly, Adams’ looping is done with some finesse, with the hand of an artist, rather than that of someone who thinks that looping for the sake of looping is artful.

I make the top of the search list more than once!

I have to ask, what the heck is a crowl cage? This is what someone went searching for on Yahoo a couple of days ago. I shouldn’t worry, as it brought my blog up at the top of the list, but since Yahoo thought that John Cage and Mike Crowl had something in common with a crowl cage, it seemed a bit of a pointless result for the query.
Various other equally inconsequential results turned up, none of them having anything to do with a crowl cage. The results are much the same on Google, and I still come up at the top of the list. Well, good on John Cage for providing me with some assistance in terms of search queries.
I'd still like to know what the person was looking for, and what they thought 'crowl' meant.
I didn’t do nearly so well when it came to people getting search results for Baldwin St and wheelie bins. I’ve written about the incident in which a student died elsewhere, but it’s interesting to see that a number of other people have also written about this, and several of them have got their facts wrong. Word-of-blog can be just as muddled as word-of-mouth, rather like the equivalent of Chinese whispers on the web.
Which reminds me that I had a good idea about blogs at lunch time while talking to a friend – which I’ve now forgotten. Maybe it’ll come back before I finish this post.
I did manage to get to the top of the Google list with ‘skin game coughing’ – a fairly meaningless phrase, you’d think, until you realise, as Google apparently did, that it might have something to do with Hitchcock’s movie, The Skin Game, and the scene in which the auctioneer has a persistent cough.
Eeyore’s characteristics turn up again, and I get to third place. Pretty good for a little blog that only three people ever read….
The film, Deliverance, must be being studied at the moment, since a common search is for ‘notes deliverance’. And I get to third place for that too, even though my only comment on this film is to quote from another source – the Christian Science Monitor, in fact – which actually has something good to say about the movie. I remember it as a shocking and nasty piece of work, with the only brief moment of quiet and gentleness being when one of the four main characters stops to play a duet with a young mountain boy. It’s a well-known sequence, but it has very little to do with the violent nature of the rest of the movie. Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.
Back in 2007, I mentioned that Peter Jackson was likely to be directing a film (or perhaps three films made back-to-back) about Tin Tin. Seems like that’s going ahead, with Jackson and Spielberg co-directing. One source says they’ll each direct one movie, and then co-direct the third. I get the impression this is all still in the pipeline as yet.
Extraordinarily I make it to the top of the list again, with a query about John Adams Composer. I was very taken with a piece of music by this composer that I heard in England, and intended to get to know his music better when I got back home. For a brief period, Adams was flavour of the month on the local Concert radio program, but they didn’t play the piece I’d heard, and what I did hear didn’t great excite me. Adams appears to be in the mode of composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, guys who have their moments, but who have chosen to compose minimalist music that can drive you quite insane. Unless that’s their intention, of course.
I’ve been trying to think how I can introduce strollers into this post, and so far haven’t succeeded. Strollers, for those who don’t have, or never have had, children, are those awkwardly-shaped devices that fold up into equally awkwardly-shaped shapes, and in which you carry your toddler (when it’s not folded up – the stroller, I mean, not the child). We used to call them baby buggies, and I think they have a number of different names, depending on where in the world you happen to live. Baby buggies were okay – they were lighter than some strollers I’ve since come across, and we didn’t go through too many of them in carting our five kids around over a period of several years. Nor did any of them ever fold up while the child was in them, which I’ve seen happen with later versions. When we first bought one (in fact, I think we brought it back from England with us), they were the new thing. After that, everyone had to have one. Of course.

John Cage engages

Earlier this month a thousand people gathered at the former church of St Burchard in Halberstadt to listen to the latest progression in John Cage’s ORGAN2/ASLSP – As slow as possible. All they heard was a change from a note that has been playing continuously, day and night, for several months to another note that will now play continuously until November. The ‘piece’ is due to finish in 2639 – I won’t go into the complicated permutations relating to why it should finish then.
The organ note (it’s an automatic organ, so it doesn’t need to have someone stand there holding it, though that might make it more interesting) is loud enough to sound like an air-raid siren, apparently. Great for the neighbours. I wonder how many of them have gone slightly bonkers having this monotony going on in the back of their heads for months at a time? How many have shifted out of the neighbourhood since 2001 when the first note began?
Note that I say the first note: the one that changed on July the 5th, was only the sixth note in a series.
Some call this a masterpiece. On what basis I can’t imagine. A masterpiece requires someone to be at the top of his game, working perfectly with the best of materials. Nothing that Cage ‘composed’ in his later years is a masterpiece. He’s not a composer (though once upon a time he did actually write music). He’s a purveyor of that old school of the Emperor’s-New-Clothes. And the thousand people who attended the change of note are testament to the fact that there are still plenty of fools around who will claim anything weird and peculiar is a masterwork merely in order to be in on the game.
And even better if the thing either needs enormous explanation – or no explanation. As one of the crowd said, ‘It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just there.’ Yup.
Cage was only a master at convincing a certain number of people to take him seriously.

To convince yourself that I'm wrong and Cage is right, you can read more about the Project here.

The photo is of John Cage laughing at all the people who take him seriously (!)

The Lady in Question

Somehow managed to catch an old movie from 1940 on tv this afternoon. It was a very classy print, and fitted the wide screen format without anybody looking twice their size, so obviously some work had been done on it to make it viewable.
Seemingly this particular movie was notable for being the first in which Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth appeared as a romantic couple. It took me a while to recognise Ford because he looked so young. By the time he came back from the war, a few years later, he’d aged considerably, and was much more the way I remember him. Hayworth plays a very subdued role; she’s a character who’s under suspicion and always on the back foot. None of the temptress here, even though Ford falls for her at first glance.
The film was The Lady in Question adapted from an earlier French movie called Gribouille. It concerns a bicycle shop owner played by Brian Aherne who’s called into jury duty, and, by speaking out at the right moment, manages to get Hayworth (the accused) acquitted. He’s a bluff, good-humoured character - a bit too off-hand about the other relationships around him, and not always wise. However, he offers to give Hayworth a job after the trial, and she comes and lives with the family. Of course one of the other jurors believes she was guilty and keeps popping up every so often; and of course both Ford and his sister’s boyfriend know who Hayworth really is. It’s surprising half the town doesn’t, but that’s neither here nor there.
The acting is all a bit over-the-top - these are Americans being French people, remember, (even though they call their wives ‘Mrs’ rather than ‘Madame’ and speak with good, solid American accents), and anyway the French are more ebullient than the Americans - aren’t they? The script isn’t well written, never being sure whether it’s a drama or a comedy, and several scenes are played for their comedy effect, which undercuts the dramatic ones. Nevertheless it’s an interesting example of a typical studio production, with the small parts being played by actors who bring an eccentric quality to their roles.
One piece of trivia: the part of Lurette, the little accountant who causes so much hassle, is played by Curt Bois. Bois’ career in German movies began in 1907, when he was only six (!) and ended in 1989. Around 1937 he came to Hollywood and appeared in nearly forty movies before returning to his native Germany. He’s often uncredited in the Hollywood movies, or has tiny parts (such as a pickpocket in Casablanca). But he kept on working, and survived long enough to revive his career in his own country, appearing in some 35 movie and tv roles, including that of Homer the poet in Wim Wenders’ famous Wings of Desire. (Later remade, like Gribouille, into a much less worthwhile movie, City of Angels, starring the lugubrious Nicholas Cage and the super-cheerful Meg Ryan.)