Went to see a friend, Jason, DJ on Manhattan’s Lower East Side last night. Jason can seamlessly work David Axelrod, Scritti Politti and the Grateful Dead into one set. He was doing so at a small Italian restaurant, Mangiami, on Stanton Street. You have to love the idea of DJing on a street whose name is synonymous with turntables and turntable cartridges. (Photo by Gianfranco Costa, who owns the restaurant with his wife.)
John Cage’s 18 Microtonal Ragas in Berkeley
The pews were close to full at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California, on Friday, November 2. The evening’s text was no liturgical standard. We’d gathered to view a performance — strike that, a thorough extrapolation (a “realization,” the program notes read) of material that composer John Cage penned almost forty years ago: 18 Microtonal Ragas.
Amelia Cuni, an Italian trained in the ancient tradition of Indian dhrupad singing and deeply informed by the avant-garde, led a group that consisted of Raymond Kaczynski and Federico Sansei, both of them percussionists, along with Werner Durand, who manned a small table of electronics.
Cuni has spent several years taking Cage’s ragas, which he’d sketched as graphic notations of microtones, and transforming them into a proper performable work. The source material, the ragas, comprise Cage’s Solo for Voice 58, but segments were also drawn from his Song Books. The result proved as theatrical as it was musical, with sung texts selected from writings by, among others, Cuni herself, Henry David Thoreau, Erik Satie, and percussionist Sansei’s father, Roberto Sansei, who was the Italian translator of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Below is a close-up of Kaczynski’s copy of the score:
The languages reportedly included Italian, English, French and German, but Cuni’s meticulously syllabic vocal style and the Dadaist, cut-up nature of the work — not to mention how Durand subtly mixed and altered the vocals in real time — meant that little of it was necessarily comprehensible at any particular moment.
Of course, there are different types of comprehension, and what Cuni’s adaptation of Cage’s 18 Microtonal Ragas dispensed with in terms of narrative it compensated for by the precise, almost telepathic give and take between the performers. Cuni danced and moved in time with the rat-a-tat-tat of her delivery, which in turn was matched by the percussionists, whose own precise motions did double duty as musical performance and theater. Cuni, who stood and danced, at one point disappeared back stage only to reappear at the rear of the audience; at another she laid down between the two percussionists. Though the piece was 90 minutes long, with no interruption, she didn’t appear remotely tired. The same can’t be said of the entire audience.
Indian ragas are traditionally performed atop a warm drone supplied by a tambura, a kind of deeply resonant lute. In its place, Durand used prerecorded drones that he had reportedly made by recording a drill inside a PVC pipe. In an opening statement, Charles Amirkhanian, founder of Other Minds, the organization presenting the concert, mentioned that Durand had at one point driven a car 100 miles an hour to get a pitch used toward the end of the work — how exactly that was accomplished, and whether it involved the drill, wasn’t clear, but aside from one purposeful burst of bright white noise, the impact of Durand’s drones was very much in the tambura tradition: providing a foundation, a sensitive context. Below is an image of his setup, with Kaczynski’s drum kit in the background:
We heard a whir like a hairdryer, a sitar sample, a high sine wave. Occasionally the sounds were almost jarringly representative, as when Cuni was heard to say “large hawk” just as a bird call entered the room by way of the speakers.
As the final raga came to a close, a familiar rattling echoed in the room. Kaczynski was rolling dice in his cupped hands, a nod to Cage’s famed chance operations.
More info on Amelia Cuni at ameliacuni.de. The event was presented by Other Minds in partnership with Goethe-Institut San Francisco and the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco. An album of the work was recently released by Other Minds (otherminds.org).
Quote of the Week: Say Butoh
From the text accompanying the exhibit Min Tanaka: Photos by Masato Okada 1975-2005 at the museum P.S.1 MoMA in Queens, New York:
For three decades, Butoh master Min Tanaka and photographer Masato Okada have been active collaborators, with the Japanese contemporary dance pioneer seemingly dancing in time with the latter’s breath and clicking shutter.
More info at ps1.org.
John Cage Microtonal Raga MP3s
Two weeks ago in Berkeley, the Italian vocalist Amelia Cuni performed John Cage‘s 18 Microtonal Ragas with support of two percussionists, Raymond Kaczynski and Federico Sansei, and Werner Durand on, as he was credited in the night’s program, “drones and electronics.” Tomorrow I’ll be posting some impressions of the piece, along with related photos. In the meanwhile, here are two MP3 excerpts of the ragas hosted at Cuni’s website, ameliacuni.de — one features some of the more “foregrounded” electronic beats that Durand summoned up (MP3) and the other has a singular rattling sound (MP3). If you can’t figure out what that rattling is, check back tomorrow.
P.S.1 MoMA (Fassbinder, Abdessemed, Bartók …)
P.S.1 MoMA is to museums what The Shining is to winter getaways. The Queens, New York, structure is a massive, three-story building of exhibit spaces, not counting a spooky basement area and a sizable rooftop. The grounds are encompassed by a concrete divide that brings to mind Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Like some outsized David Ireland project, the inside of the building, a former school, has been stripped of everything but its walls and floors.
The tall corridors and cramped stairwells have an institutional quality that makes most refined, white-cube Manhattan galleries seem like cozy suburban dens by comparison. And P.S.1 (ps1.org) is big enough that the security staff, so uniformly young as to be mistaken for students rather than hall monitors, can often be found consulting a fold-up map.
The museum is also consistently filled with works that appeal to enthusiasts of sound art, and more broadly of sound-in-art. It’s best to visit in winter, because during the summer the building’s rooms are cooled by individual fans, which can drown out all but the most demonstrative installations.
And just how much sound is there right now at the Queens museum P.S.1 MoMA? Suffice to say you’re greeted, at the front entrance, by multiple pairs of headphones, each assigned to one among a stack of video monitors, each monitor displaying scenes from the Performa 07 “visual art performance biennial,” which began on October 27 and runs through November 20. And those many listening options just hint at what’s inside the building. There were no performances slated Monday earlier this week, when I spent much of the afternoon wandering around the museum, but there was more than enough to keep my ears busy. What follows is a quick run through other audio-enabled work currently at the museum:
”¢ The ticket area was filled with a rich ambient swell that suggested a continuous dawn. That audio comprised half of “Party With Us” (2006) by the duo Lovett/Codagnone (John Lovett and Alessandro Codagnone). The other half of the work is the title phrase written in neon script on the wall. (I was disappointed that the tiny Pipilotti Rist video piece “Selfless in the Bath of Lava” [1994] that peeks out from the lobby floor was, in the word of the ticket person, busted.)
”¢ Adel Abdessemed‘s solo exhibition — a collection of videos and sculptures — would be one of the most aurally stimulating at P.S.1, even if it didn’t include “Trust Me” (2007), 30 minutes of unedited footage of David Moss singing a nonsense collage composition by Silvia Ocougne. In a small room just outside the main Abdessemed exhibit space sits “Dead or Alive” (2007), one of the briefest video works I’ve ever seen in a museum; it lasts all of two seconds, though those two seconds are looped endlessly. The image shows a man. The man is standing in the middle of a street. There’s a snake around the man’s neck and as a truck drives by in the background, he lifts the snake as if to take a bite out of it. The soundtrack is the raw noise of the street, and those looped two seconds take the form of an electronic score, the seam in the footage serving as a beat and the noise as ambience. Inside the main exhibit room, but almost inaudible, is another video, this one more than twice as long as “Dead or Alive”; at 5 seconds, “Foot On” (2006) shows a bare foot crushing a full Coke can over and over. The looped sound in “Foot On” doesn’t take on the musical quality of “Dead or Alive” — perhaps because the sound and image in the former are more clearly associated with each other, and perhaps because the crushing was almost impossible to hear with Moss screaming from across the basketball-court-size room. Also on view is “Birth of Love,” a five-minute piece in which a cat fills the screen while it eats a white mouse whole; its munching just about matched the recorded level of the nearby street traffic.
”¢ In 1980, director Rainer Werner Fassbinder brought out his film Berlin Alexanderplatz, which runs for over half a day: 15 hours, 39 minutes. A new installation ponders the challenge of consuming such a work and suggests three different approaches. The movie plays in one room from start to finish. In another, individual TVs, each with its own headset, show brief segments that encapsulate the film’s many techniques. But the real triumph of this re-imagining of Fassbinder’s Alexanderplatz is a Panopticon-like rendering that divides the film into 14 sections and allows them to be viewed sequentially or — and this is where brilliance surfaces — simultaneously. There are 14 hut-like spaces set in a circle around the room. From within any individual hut, one can view an individual section, but in the center of that circle one takes them in as a panorama: all video, and all audio, circulating at once. (Within the hut, the simultaneous audio is mostly cut out thanks to speakers in the hut ceilings, but from within the center of that spectacle, the audio overlaps.) I’d really like an MP3 of that hour or so of multi-layered Alexanderplatz sound. It provides a cacophonic counterpoint to “40-Part Motet,” the Janet Cardiff installation that takes a choral piece and provides a separate speaker for each voice. (There’s a fourth way to view Fassbinder’s film: at home; it was released on DVD this week.)
”¢ Kris Martin‘s solo exhibit includes “Mandi III” (2003), a huge display board of the type that announces train arrivals and departures, each digit the result of a mechanical Rolodex-like wheel that makes a flipping sound as it rotates — the whole thing painted stark, matte black. (The work is about 63″ x 179″ x 8″.) The wall text describes it as a “signboard whose ever-changing face announces only its own futility.” That blank face also concentrates the audience’s imagination on the flipping sound, its sharp, precise “rat-a-tat-tat” echoing down the adjacent halls.
”¢ Manon de Boer‘s “Perfect Sound” (2006), which gets a room to itself, is the most traditionally musical of the works currently at P.S.1. It’s also the most subversive (for lack of a less histrionic word). A projection shows violinist George Van Dam performing the fourth movement of a Bartók sonata. In the production of the work, Van Dam played through the composition several times, and as in most professional recording situations, the best segments were later selected and stitched together into a natural-seeming whole. However, while the resulting audio easily tricks the ear into believing that the sonata was played straight through as is, the accompanying video evidences each occurrence of an edit; it exposes the sonata — or at least this performance of the sonata — as the patchwork it is. (The title “Perfect Sound” is likely taken from the advertisements for compact discs when the format had been newly introduced: “perfect sound forever,” a phrase used in 1991 by the rock band Pavement to name an album.) Hanging just outside the room, a piece of paper lists the timing of each splice, and I found myself wishing that de Boer had had Van Dam change shirts each time through, so as to make the individual performances more distinct from each other. The sound of the Bartók entices you in from neighboring exhibits, but you leave the room that houses “Perfect Sound” with the impact of its artificiality cemented in your consciousness — and because the work so elegantly illustrates such constructed realities, its effect lingered long after I’d wandered out of earshot.