Atlas Eclipticalis – The Music of John Cage and Earle Brown

The John Cage Trilogy – Inspired by Hidekazu Yoshida’s interpretations of Japanese Haiku poetry, John Cage formed a trilogy of his existing works honoring the essence of the poetry. Atlas Eclipticalis (1961), the first piece in the trilogy, represents nirvana. Variations IV (1963), the second work, represents samsara—the turmoil of everyday life. 0’00” (1962), the third piece, represents individual action.

Atlas Eclipticalis/Winter Music – Atlas Eclipticalis (for up to 86 instruments), performed here by a chamber ensemble of flute, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, harp, violin, and violoncello, is coupled with Winter Music (for 1 to 20 pianos), performed here by two pianos. Electronics are also engaged using random processes similar to Cage’s Cartridge Music. Page 3 of the four-page Atlas Eclipticalis score was used for all parts, giving a performance length of 20 minutes and 45 seconds. Each page has five systems (lines). Space horizontally equals time. Each system took 4 minutes and 10 seconds to complete in this performance.

Example: Page 3 of the harp part of Atlas Eclipticalis.

Two numbers above an event tell: the first, how many notes are as short as possible; the second, how many have appreciable duration. The absence of numbers means all tones are as short as possible. A fermata means all have some duration.

The loudness of tones is relative to their size. Thus, most tones are played softly.

The musicians’ parts were prepared in advance, and the notes and durations were transcribed to standard music notation so they could be easily and quickly read. Placement in time, though free, followed the composer’s score.

Variations IV – Cage’s score for Variations IV is mainly concerned with placing performers (or sound sources) within a given space. It is written for any number of players, any sounds, or combinations of sounds. No further musical direction is given in the score.

In the version presented here, a 100-year-old Brooklyn brownstone row house was used as the performance space. A map of the performance space was drawn, showing the various rooms and floors of the house. Instead of using the transparency sheet with points and circles that Cage used (no transparency was provided with the score ordered from Edition Peters), a different method for determining where a sound would occur was developed using random processes. The results (called a casting) were recorded on a spreadsheet.

Figure 1 shows the map of the row house used for the performance.

Rooms include the kitchen, living room, front parlor, bedrooms, a study, bathrooms, a basement office, a storage room, and a boiler room. Microphones were also placed outside in front of the house on the street side and in the backyard.

Figures 2-4 show the results of castings made to determine where sounds occur. Blue represents the initial anchor (the circle in Cage’s method), and red represents each of 7 points. Connections are made between the anchor and the red points, and sounds can occur along those lines.

The house map was replicated using a spreadsheet.  Random numbers were generated between 1 and 524.  Each number chosen corresponded to a place on the map.  This performance uses 7 separate castings of sound points on the map. Each casting created about 1 minute and 45 seconds of performance time. Sound sources were placed in each space prior to the performance. In some cases, the home’s furniture and built-in utilities served as sound sources. Outdoor sounds were captured when the red points fell outside the map of the house.

0’00” (4′ 33″ No. 2) – Cage’s brief instruction for this piece is: In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action. It was meant to be a follow-up to his “silent” work – 4’33”. Like Duchamp’s placing a bicycle wheel inside a museum, we hear an everyday action divorced from its usual location, and our listening is heightened. This recording of Cage’s 0’00” amplifies the sounds of a homeowner working in his backyard. Besides the sounds of tools, the recording captures ambient sounds natural to living in a large metropolitan city. They become part of a sustained listening experience.

As Cage explained in an interview in 1965: What the piece tries to say is that everything we do is music, or can become music through the use of microphones.

0′ 00″… is nothing but the continuation of one’s daily work, whatever it is, providing it’s not selfish, but is the fulfillment of an obligation to other people, done with contact microphones, without any notion of concert or theater or the public, but simply continuing one’s daily work, now coming out through loudspeakers.

November 1952 is a graphic score from Earle Brown’s Folio collection. Brown’s notes for the score state: To be performed in any direction from any point in the defined space, lines and spaces may be thought of as tracks moving in either direction. The defined space may be thought of as real or illusory.

This realization of the score is for violin, cello, harp, and electronics. It is performed at a pianissimo dynamic throughout. Key centers were chosen for each instrument. The violin plays notes within an F major tonality, the cello plays within B Major (Lydian), and the harp plays in an Eb Major (Lydian) tonality.

The duration of the performance was chosen in advance, with a total time of 6 minutes.

A transparency was placed over the score, which was divided horizontally into 6 sections. This was used as an overall guide as to where sounds would occur in time and gave a sense of how the piece would breathe and use space. However, the parts were not played directly from left to right; rather, they were abstracted from the idea of the score.

Musicians:
Cecilia Cuccolini – harp
John Bickerton – Behringer [ARP] 2600, Korg DW8000, electronics
Jessica Townsend – violin
Thomas McCluskey – violoncello

December 1952 – December 1952 became Brown’s most famous graphic score from Folio. It suggests where elements exist in space… space as an infinitude of directions from an infinitude of points in space…to work (compositionally and in performance) to right, left, back, forward, up, down, and all points between. The score being a picture of this space at one instant, which must always be considered as unreal and/or transitory… a performer must set this all in motion, which is to say, realize that it is in motion and step into it.

This recording is a mix of 2 performances. The first was made mainly inside the piano with a plectrum, brushes, timpani mallets, a superball mallet, a rubber ball, and other found objects. The second was played mostly on the piano keys. Sounds are treated electronically with ring modulation, filtering, and delay.

A performance time of 10 minutes was chosen in advance. A transparency overlay was used to determine when sound events would occur in time. For the purpose of this performance, horizontal lines were taken as a sound event’s duration, and line thickness was taken as amplitude. The score was rotated 90 degrees for each take.

Radio Music—This recording of Radio Music is a mix of four separate performances. Random processes were used to determine when each of the four was “on” (audible). Each radio is positioned at a different place in the stereo field. Radio performances were taken from local afternoon broadcasts of New York area AM radio stations in July 2022.