Tomorrow, Wednesday, June 16, stop what you’re doing at 10:30pm France time (4:30pm EDT, 1:30pm PDT, etc.) and turn on France Musique and listen to Couleurs du Monde. At some point during the show, they’re going to play Thibaut Frasnier’s, Alvaro Martinez’s, Fabrice Richaud’s, Gabriel Rigaux’s, and my arrangement of Algerian songs. Perhaps they will even announce our names, though this is far from certain. In case not, mine, Yelha Wurar, is the up-tempo, crowd-pleasing number that they’ll probably play at the end?

If you’d like to avoid any confusion with the France Musique site, go straight HERE.

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.