I have an opinion: John Cage’s Roaratorio should be performed outside.

Well, perform is maybe not quite right for a tape piece, but still, it should be outdoors and amongst the people. Really, what other avant-garde “classical” work is so ideally suited to being public art? It will get the attention of unsuspecting passersby and, as it were, bring them in from the cold. (It will make them pause for a minute, thinking, “what is this I hear?”) For the “sophisticated” crowd it has all kinds of cool weird noises. For the conservatives in the audience, there’s Irish music. It isn’t narrative, so no harm done if you wander in and wander out again.

So, IRCAM, for next year’s Agora, I want to hear Roaratorio piped out onto the place Stravinsky for the people to hear, instead of hidden down and away in your Espace de projection.

And while you’re at it, could you maybe please put Cage’s voice back into the mix! It’s really a travesty that this fellow Sarkis has seen to remove him from the piece, I think. Sure, it’s a work of sound art, but it’s also explicitly a response to a piece of literature, and removing the words robs the work of a lot of its continuity and its humanity. The stream of words in a single voice connects what otherwise becomes a random mix-up of noises.

So put Roaratorio outdoors and bring back the Cage vocals! Please! Good sirs, I beg you.

More fallout from my lecture at Stony Brook.

One of the students responded to the music I played them - 2 of the Preludes for Harpsichord, for Baroque Trio by comparing the sound of the harpsichord to horror movie music, or even better, to the music in the haunted houses or the especially the castle worlds in Super Mario Bros. This took me totally off-guard, but as soon as I heard it, it was pretty obvious. The harpsichord at the beginning of the first movement - high dissonant chords in funny rhythms kind of like screaming - does everything it should to fit the part.

The fact that I didn’t think of the harpsichord’s connotation in the popular imagination as a spooky instrument beforehand makes me nervous. I thought about The Doors, even though I sort of hate them, and of course I know the classical literature from the Baroque to Ligeti etc. But how did I miss the most basic contemporary cultural allusion that the instrument implies? (more…)