Martin Iddon

The graphic notations of John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58) are among the most intricate and abstract that he ever wrote; and the piece’s formal instructions (that the thirteen instrumental parts can be played in any combination, including with other pieces) offer seemingly endless performance possibilities. Yet, while the premiere of the Concert is notorious for being disrupted by the behaviour of the orchestral musicians, who, in Cage’s words ‘introduced in the actual performance sounds of a nature not found in my notations, characterized for the most part by their intentions which had become foolish and unprofessional’ (Cage, 1968, pp. 135–36), surprisingly little scholarly attention has been given to the instrumental parts—how they function, and their implications for performance.

This paper considers the questions that the instrumental parts of the Concert raise for performance and what they might bring to a discussion of creativity. We explore the creative possibilities that are afforded by the notations and how musicians respond to their complexities and ambiguities, and consider how these perspectives might contribute to a developing performance practice surrounding the work and to the performance of indeterminate music more widely. We present material from a major data collection event with musicians from the ensemble Apartment House, which documents performances of the thirteen solo parts, the conductor part, and the piano part (both as separate works and as a whole), and includes a recording of the culminating tutti performance. Audio recordings of the separate performance parts will be embedded in an interactive website, which will allow the user to ‘play’ with the recordings to create infinitely variable versions of the piece. In addition, the website will present audio-visual footage of performance activities and semi-structured interviews with the participants, enabling current and future performers to draw upon the ideas and practices of other musicians and thus to inform future performances. 

Conceptually and methodologically, our research builds on previous studies that document the creative processes of performance in ‘contemporary’ musics, (see, e.g., Bayley, 2010, 2011; Clarke, Doffman, & Lim, 2013; Clarke, Doffman, & Timmers, 2016) but it develops this work further in two significant ways: by grounding the research historically in detailed analysis of various archival sources relating to Cage’s work and the premiere and subsequent performances of the Concert, alongside interviews with musicians who have performed the piece in the years since its premiere; and by developing innovative methods to disseminate data and findings in an accessible manner through the website, a unique tool for performative and musicological understanding. Moreover, since the process of embedding the performance materials in the interactive element of website itself represents an act of creative decision-making, the research raises broader methodological questions about the nature of creativity in digital musicology.

‘John Cage and the Concert for Piano and Orchestra’ is a three-year AHRC project exploring issues of historicity, analysis, reception, and performance in relation to this seminal work in Cage’s oeuvre. A major output of the project is an interactive website, which will allow users to ‘play’ with notations, create notated realisations, and produce infinitely variable versions of the work. This special session focuses on the piano score, otherwise known as the Solo for Piano, and includes an examination of its historical context, analyses and performances of selected notations and their potential outcomes by Philip Thomas, and a practical demonstration of elements of the website, considering the practical, technical, and interpretative decisions required to embed the notations within it. In offering the website as a tool for analysis and performance, we forge an interpretative view of the Solo for Piano that goes beyond any single performer’s vision of it.