Le 30 juin 2017
de 11h00 à 11h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 5
Séance - Circumscribing the Open: Cage and Pousseur
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : André Douw
In the summer of 1952, David Tudor premiered John Cage’s famously silent composition, 4’33’’. The original score was lost by Cage immediately after the premiere and remains lost to this day. In Cage’s account of the compositional process for 4’33 », he said, « All the work was done with chance operations. I built it up very gradually, and it came out to be 4’33’’.” Tudor remembers: “As part of the compositional process he had asked the I Ching about the relationship between even and uneven numbers. By way of coin tosses he received the answer that exclusively even numbers should appear. Since the composition process was identical to that in Music of Changes, even numbers meant: no tones.”
In 1982 Tudor made a reconstruction of the original score from which he played the premiere. The score published by Henmar Press in 2014 is based on it. It forms the basis of a reconstruction of the piece and, by implication, of Cage’s creative process as offered in this talk. A timeblock of 8 quarters, divided into two 4/4 measures and written on one staff, was multiplied by 7; the seven staffs were divided into 3 that were then multiplied by 5. The implications are that a different role was given to even and odd numbers (as it is in the I Ching), that the exact notation is crucial for our understanding of the time construction of this essentially serial composition, and that Cage took measures to obscure the very source of the piece.
