🎶 Bacchanale, de John Cage:
https://open.spotify.com/track/23HAfNFR2286jt1evmWoPw?si=HMVVvtiORp6THgXXZq00UA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNM9DLrxOZA
We hear the sounds of a 'prepared piano' by the artist who knew how to inspire new ways of listening; an instrument that has been tampered with, used for something other than its intended purpose, another 'un-concert' from the man who composed the silent yet noisy 4'33".
Cage painted, wrote and made music, pushing language to its visual and sonic limits, yearning for "words without syntax",1 "each one polymorphic", treating language as if it were a source of sound that could be transformed into nonsense. He sought to liberate sounds from the abstract ideas we hold of them and let them exist, to hear each sound suddenly, before reason could grasp it: "To know-see, to submit to the real", as he put it in his "Diary: How to Improve the World (You'll Only Make Things Worse) 1965".
He sought to ensure the work was free from his own tastes and aversions, from his ideas and feelings, relying on chance to determine the composition.
When, in 1938, Syvilla Fort commissioned him to write the music for one of her dances, Bacchanal, he considered writing a piece for a percussion orchestra, in keeping with the dance in question. Upon seeing the theatre stage, he realised there was 'no' room for an orchestra and that there was a grand piano, the only instrument available; he set about writing a piece for piano but could not find a suitable twelve-tone sequence.
A pupil of Schoenberg and Weiss, he also studied with Cowell, whom he had seen alter the sound of a piano by plucking the strings with his hands and using objects that he moved along the strings whilst playing the keyboard.
Thus, he devised his solution, not without a touch of excitement: to 'operate' the piano, modifying it with screws and nuts: 'It was an immense pleasure to discover that, through a simple operation, two different sounds could be produced. One, resonant and open; the other, muffled and muted. The second could be heard when using the 'una corda' pedal. "I composed the Bacchanal quickly, fuelled by the excitement of continuous discovery."2
For later compositions, he added thumbtacks, plastic, a wooden spoon, a clothes peg, pieces of felt, rubber weatherstripping, an aspirin box, and a doll's arm to the piano. There was no room for the bear and the whale.
Modulations, silences and noises interpreted by the analyst, words as sounds, make the same thing sound different. Is the analyst's role to intervene in the way each person has invented to set the 'nothingness' to music?
[1] Cage, J., "Conferencia en Juilliard," Ritmo etc., Buenos Aires, Interzona Editora, 2016, p. 108.
[2] Cage, J., "Cómo surgió el piano preparado," op. cit., p. 186.
