Carillon Concert with Electronics

  as part of the musical program for the exhibition "USArts"

June 20, 1993 at 2 p.m.

Jeffrey Bossin, Carillonneur, Berlin

Program

Music by John Cage and Erik Satie

 

Music for Carillon no. 1 (1952)     John Cage

 

Gnossienne no. 1*     Erik Satie

 

Music for Carillon no. 2 (1954)     John Cage

 

Aus "Sports & Divertissements"

La Balançoire*     Erik Satie

 

Music for Carillon no. 3 (1954)     John Cage

 

Premiere Gymnopedie*     Erik Satie

 

Music for Carillon no. 4** (1961)     John Cage

 

Aus "Sonneries de la Rose + Croix"

Air de l'Ordre*     Erik Satie

 

Music for Carillon no. 5 (1967)     John Cage

 

*Arranged for carillon by Jeffery Bossin

**Electronics: Folkmar Hein, Electronic Studio of the Technical University of Berlin


Organized by CarillonConcertsBerlin in cooperation with Podewil GmbH and the
Electronic Studio of the Technical University of Berlin and with the support of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt


With the help of the Electronic Studio of the Technical University of Berlin it was possible to perform all five of John Cage's pieces entitled Music for Carillon for the first time in Berlin. However, Cage composed the first four of these not for a carillon with a traditional baton-and-pedal console but for an instrument with an electric piano keyboard. In the USA such instruments are usually called carillons for lack of a better term, and Cage dedicated his second and third carillon pieces not to a carillonneur but to the pianist David Tudor. Such electric instruments often even have no bells but instead produce tones via small electronically amplified metal bars, and Cage wrote his fourth piece especially for such an electronic instrument. Only the range of a traditional Dutch carillon of four octaves without the first two semitones c-sharp and d-sharp and the directions stipulating that the piece was for each of 47 bells point to the fact that Cage composed the fifth piece for a carillon with bells and a traditional baton-and-pedal keyboard. However, it is still possible to perform the first four of his pieces on a traditional carillon as well.

      The three-octave version of  Music for Carillon no. 4 which Cage wrote in 1961 consists like its predecessors of single notes and groups of notes arranged in clusters (in 1966 Cage also wrote a two-octave version). Because the sound of a carillon isn't dampened but dies out on its own Cage notated all the tones as whole notes. Music for Carillon no. 4 uses live electronics: a microphone and loudspeaker are used to either amplify the sound of the bells or create a feedback. This is accompanied by a dull electronically generated wooden sounding thump which is heard at irregular intervals (When the piece is played on an instrument with an electric piano keyboard the musician can generate the thumping sounds by using an electronically amplified pedal attached to the piano keyboard. If the piece is played on a carillon, the thumping noises have to be produced electronically as the carillonneur needs his feet to play the pedals of the carillon console). The work is the opposite of Mandolinis Vox veterrima: it is based on chance rather than on compositional technique. While Cage composed the Music for Carillon no. 3 as the retrograde inversion of the Music for Carillon no. 2 in 1954, he relinquished every traditional means of composing when he wrote the Music for Carillon no. 4 seven years later. The piece has no meter and only the graphic distance between the notes determines the point in time when they are to be played. Rhythms and melodic figures are products of chance. The arbitrary arrangements of tones are derived from Cage's mystical veneration of nature. Instead of basing the notes of the piece on chords or scales he created the score by laying a transparent piece of note paper on top of an atlas of the heavens and writing a note every place where a star could be seen. This predetermined abstract arrangement of the notes led to a musically completely arbitrary result similiar to that achieved by using serial technique however without the characteristic continuity of serially generated textures. Cage's piece has no connections to musical traditions, tonal systems or formal structures. The endproduct resembles a senseless row of abitrarily chosen combinations of letters.
  What musical substance remains when Music for Carillon no. 4 is performed - the connection to the stars? In spite of using an atlas of the heavens as the basis for determining which notes are to be played nothing in the music allows one to feel any kind of connection to the stars. For in contrast to Karlheinz Stockhausen's Tierkreis, which uses the traditional qualities of the twelve astrological signs to create musical character pieces, there is nothing in Cage's work that builds an audible bridge from the notes to their underlying constellations. Instead Cage places the experience of pure sound at the heart of his piece. The unusual timbre of the Carillon in Berlin-Tiergarten with its very large bells fascinates the listeners and is amplified by the feedback of the piece. In addition to this there is the individual interpretation that each listener projects onto this work devoid of any inherent musical sense and which is determined by his own personal musical education and experience the same way he can see a certain cloud in the sky as having a concrete shape such as that of a horse or tree. And finally the "happening" experience of the performance of Cages Music for Carillon no. 4., its effect as a crazy event is an important part of the piece. It represents the spirit of the happenings and the Fluxus movement, that cult of the absurd which grew out of Dadaism and which was the negation of the canon of traditional European art as well as everything conventional. It reached its zenith in the 1960s and Cage took part in it at the same time he composed the Music for Carillon no. 4. Due to its iconoclastic substance which cannot be understood in terms of traditional musical categories the Music for Carillon no. 4 creates the sensation of a completely arbitrary musical experience free from any connections to tradition. Cage's reputation as the composer of bizarre music clothes the performance of this intentionally senseless piece in the cloak of a crazy happening. The listeners experience an enthusiam for it similiar to that they would have when listening to one of poems of the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters being read aloud.
  Cage's Music for Carillon no. 4 is a challenge to perform. The completely arbitrarily chosen set of notes is almost impossible to memorize, so that one has to play from the score. Cage has set a fast tempo for the piece: the carillonneur is allowed only fifteen seconds to play each of the 37 cm long staves which sometimes have clusters of up to 32 notes per second. In this space of time a carillonneur has to overcome much larger distances than the musician which Cage meant to play from an electric piano keyboard: on a carillon console the batons of an octave are at least 35 centimeters apart. While performing the carillonneur has to keep an eye on the stopwatch in order to coordinate his playing with the electronically generated thumping sounds. When playing the Music for Carillon no. 4 the carillonneur is best advised to use the many clusters which cannot be properly read or performed at the prescribed tempo to spontaneously improvise passages whose sounds and gestures resemble those which Cage chose arbitrarily. This will imbue the performance with another characteristic typical of a happening, namely that of spontaneous singularity incapable of being repeated. However, the more often one listens to performances of this work, the less the singular character of each performance can be heard, because it doesn't result from improvising on a recognizable theme or on clearly recognizeable musical figures such as motives, melodies, rhythms and elements of form that the listen can remember and which allow him to recognize the singularity of each different performance. Instead the endless variability of the improvised gestures in Cage's piece cancels the differences between the variations and thus their recognizeable identities and their effect as different versions. Rather than strengthening the feeling of singularity, listening to repeated performances of the piece cause it to gradually disappear. The variations paradoxically create the feeling of uniformity, the same way the differences between ever finer gradations of an infinitely large scale of colours gradually become unrecognizeable.