John Cage's Europera5

Ann Hamilton - Untitled (Body Object Series) #14

The following was the program note for Santa Fe New Music's debut production in 2001.

In launching a new musical organization in Santa Fe, whose mission is to present the music of our time, we choose for our first production the bold work of a composer whose mission was to redefine the way we think about and listen to music. Because after the sounds have faded, we hope our listeners will still be fulfilling the musical process by translating sound back into idea.

John Cage has been widely misunderstood and popularly dismissed as an iconoclast and enemy of “real” music. In fact, in his wide and prolific output one can find all manner of music, conventional and unconventional, and most importantly, find an ever-present openness to possibility and attention to the environment around us.

One of Cage’s most favorite statements (in part borrowed from Ananda Coomaraswamy) was “It is the responsibility of the artist to imitate nature in its manner of operation.” At its deepest level, Cage’s work is ecological, a form of environmental consciousness. His "silent" piece, 4’33”, is often regarded as a comic absurdity, when it might be better heard as an environmental meditation in the context of Zen. In the case of the work we present tonight, Europera5, the sonic environment is largely cultural, and the work challenges its listeners to filter meaning from the many competing messages.

If one of Cage’s signal messages is in finding music in everything around us, then with his Europeras 1-5 we are perhaps attuned to discovering the elements of opera in everything around us. With opera, there is always convention – even within an opera as unconventional as the one you are about to hear. Opera has evolved to be thought of as a total theater, an artform capable of embracing all artforms. Beyond the stage, opera is a confluence of the most conventional social traditions of high culture, where off-stage drama often competes with and overshadows the stage.

The Europeras play with opera’s conventions and its potential to be a constellation of many kinds of cultural activity. The title forms a new word that, like opera itself, connotes more than the sum of its parts. While each of the Europeras is a collage of activity and layered meanings, it is this chamber opera, Europera5, which captures opera’s essential intimacy. And like much of Cage’s work, all of these serious subtexts most definitely have their dose of humor.

Europera5 is a drama of many collisions: between cultures, the past and the present, the interior emotional life and the outer world. (This sounds like Verdi!) Its characters, played by two singers performing arias of their choosing, are a many-faced representation of the past. Singing unaccompanied arias, their expression of individual thought is set against a backdrop of musical and cultural interference.

That interference includes an “orchestra” accompaniment of operatic piano music and the Victrola. Like an opera orchestra, the piano becomes a character of sorts, with wordless expressiveness offering omniscient commentary. The pianist also does “shadow playing,” the silent miming of music, at once absurd and poignant.

The Victrola provides another kind of poignancy, that of cultural excavation using one of the first means for preserving our musical past. Voices of another era emerge and provide true recorded history. Occasionally, the past rumbles through in the Truckera, a name Cage gave to an audiotape of over 100 opera recordings superimposed on one another, resulting in the ghostly sound of a passing truck laden with the weight of history.

Juxtaposed against these elements of the European past and the emotional immediacy of opera are intrusions of our modern electronic culture. The radio sounds from afar, broadcasting the wide spectrum of modern culture. An icon of our times, the television sits ever-present as it is, a character with no feeling or emotion.

For each of these components, Cage specifies only how many sound events occur and when. The content, however, is for the performers to choose within the framework of the given instructions, or is left to chance.

For me, this structure of excerpting and layering such beautiful and powerful music triggers memory. It peels away my own layers of life’s clutter to revive in auditory and emotional memory the essence of a melody, the shadow of past experience. It is a reminder that in considering both the context and presentation of new music, we must rediscover the past and find new ways for it to breathe its meaning into our lives.

Throughout Cage’s setting, we wrestle with the contrast between traditional operatic design and the abstract nature of modern art. But the collisions Cage sets up, which range from the sad to the funny, and from the resonant to the ridiculous, are not so very different from any other opera. Despite the interference, in this drama, opera endures.

– John Kennedy

This departing landscape expresses where the sound exists in our hearing –

leaving us rather than coming toward us.

– Morton Feldman