During the most productive period of his life, in 1970 John Cage was commissioned to write two sets of voice solo pieces around a minute long each for singers Kathy Berberian and Simone Rist during only about three months. Cage continued in his Song books to experiment with voice solos or “vocal impressions of electronic music” (Fox, 2011), the first three of which were written in 1958 while visiting Luciano Berio and Kathy Berberian in Milan, Italy. In planning the quantity of solos in each book, Cage consulted with I-Ching book (Pritchett, 2012) out of an interest in random numbers generator rather than any in spiritual aspects of the book; I-Ching determined the amount of songs per book as 56 and 34. To create each of the 90 songs originally, Cage asked I-Ching three questions:
- “Is this solo relevant or irrelevant to the overall theme of the Song books?”
- “What kind of solo is this?”
- “How will I compose this solo?”
The first question pointed to the main chosen by Cage theme of the Song books: “connecting Satie with Thoreau”; the relevant to the theme songs include references to Satie or Thoreau, or both (Pritchett, 2012), the irrelevant one provides no such references. The second question had placed each song into one of the 4 categories:
- Song; 2. Song with electronics; 3. Theater; 4. Theater with electronics.
The third question to I-Ching had determined the methodology of composing each song with three possibilities: a method applied before, a varied method of the one used before, a new method of composing. In this way, Cage came up with more than fifty original ways of composing solos (Pritchett, 2012), many of which had appearances in his earlier compositional styles (for example, solos 8, 12, 13, 18, 23, 28, 30, 39, 47, 49, 52, 53, 59, 62, 63, 66), yet some others were completely original. Some of the ‘different’ kind of solos were “coloratura songs” with high tessitura and melismatic arabesques (Pritchett, 2012), for example, solos 11, 35, 40, 41, 85.
The ideas behind this vocal experiment were not new to Cage’s imagination: in 1950th Bruno Maderna and Luciano Berio had broadcasted the “new sound art… a mixture of normal radio programmes, albeit with extra helpings of sound effects, and rather more esoteric productions” (Fox, 2011) in Italian Radio “Studio di Fonologia” in Milan. The first three solos for voice of 1958 were written after Cage listened to Kathy Berberian’s virtuosic vocal imitations of the random sound editing which Cage implemented in Fontana Mix: “singing in one style, then abruptly switching mid-phrase to another style, then another”. (Fox, 2011)
The incidental character of the Song books was embossed as Cage prescribed to have no rehearsals before the performances. Some of the theatrical solos “range from the ordinary to the inexplicable” (Pritchett, 2012) featuring the performer entering and leaving the stage in various ways, eating, drinking, putting on a hat or an animal head, typing, and projecting slides of Satie or Thoreau. In many ways, the “determinacy and indeterminacy” (Pritchett, 2012) of the theatrical solos made the piece quite vulnerable to misinterpretation (Fox, 2011) by suggesting the almost complete freedom of the performer. The almost setback back had to occur when Julius Eastman came up with the sexualized content to Cage’s theatrical song’s prescription “give a lecture”, and Cage had argued the difference between the “liberty and license” (Dohoney, 2014, p. 39) by shouting: “permission granted. But not to do whatever you want”. (Ibid.). Identified with the Fluxus movement in the Song books cycle, Cage clearly accentuated the virtuosity of the depersonalized performance over any kind of a socio-political conceptualization or an impersonation of the solos. Christopher Fox (Fox, 2011) explains:
“An undisciplined performance of Song Books is about as much fun as being stuck in the middle of someone else’s stag party and, although there’s nothing in the score to say so, the Song Books work best when the balance is firmly tipped in favour of virtuosity, so that the more theatrical actions become incidental to the overall vocal spectacle”.
Bibliography
- Cage, John. (1970). Songbooks (solos for voice 3-92), Vol. I. NYC: Henmar Press Inc., C. F. Peters Edition, August-October 1970.
- Cage, John. (1970). Songbooks (solos for voice 3-92), Vol. II. NYC: Henmar Press Inc., C. F. Peters Edition, August-October 1970.
- Cage, John / Fiedl, Reinhold. (2016). Complete Song books (digital album). Berlin: Karlsrecords, Nov 18, 2016. Available at: https://karlrecords.bandcamp.com/album/complete-song-books .
- Dohoney, Benjamin Piekut Ryan. (2014). John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego. Tomorrow is the question: new directions in in experimental music studies, 2014, pp. 39-62.
- Fox, Christopher. (2011). You are the Synthesizer: John Cage’s experiments with the human voice. The Guardian, March 17, 2011. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/mar/17/john-cage-song-books .
- Pritchett, James. (2012). John Cage: Song books. James Pritchett: writings on Cage (and others), 2012. Available at: http://www.rosewhitemusic.com/cage/texts/SongBooks.html .
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