John Cage's Organ Masterpiece

Since I first wrote about John Cage's composition "organ2/ASLSP" in January, there has only been one chord change. A recent article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press addresses this piece of music and the connection Cage had to Minnesota.

Because St. Paul Chamber Orchestra conductor Dennis Russell Davies favored an inventive repertoire in the 1970s, he worked closely with John Cage. Layton James, a keyboardist with the SPCO since 1969, shared with the newspaper his memories of performing Cage's music.

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James recalled the time he was told that a performance of a new piano work by Cage required him to walk out on stage, sit at a grand piano, depress the damper pedal and await further developments.

After a few minutes of silence — another Cage trademark — the stage manager came out carrying a revolver, which he pointed at the piano and fired. The shot was a blank, but the concussion caused the strings on the piano to reverberate loudly.

"You never heard such a clanger," James said. "That was the piece. They never told me about the gun, so I guess my reaction was supposed to be part of the experience."
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Roy Close, a former Twin Cities music critic, says knowledgeable concertgoers also knew what to expect from Cage, whose most famous work was "4'33," " a piece created for orchestra in 1952 that required the musicians to sit silently for four minutes and 33 seconds.

The point, Close said, was the realization that there is no such thing as silence — that the sound of "4'33" " was provided by the environment where the concert was taking place. All sounds, Cage believed, are equally musical.

Some people question whether Cage's compositions qualify as music. Over four minutes of silence? Not in my book. Even "organ2/ASLSP" began with 20 months of rests after the bellows were turned on. How can one count silence as the start of a song? I'd compare that to a movie beginning with 10 minutes of black screen. ("The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" has no dialog for the first 16 minutes, but at least the plot develop in the images.)