»… Play-rew-forward-stop …« audio-video music serie 3.1

The audio-video music series will continue at the Palazzo Cini at San
Vio from October to December, when it will come to a close. The
remaining two short series, entitled after the forward and stop
buttons on video players, are intended to convey a powerful impression
of the plurality of passions, of the “forward” and “stop” in artistic
research, which may be represented by Virgil’s sprawling beech tree (sub tegmine fagi): an uncontrollable manifestation of the hypertrophy of the sense organs trained on beauty.

Venice, Palazzo Cini at San Vio
3 October 2009, 5.00pm

First session: 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs – HYMN TO THE SACRED MUSHROOM – AN
EXPEDITION TO CAGE’S SEMIOSPHERE

49
Waltzes for the Five Boroughs

A
film by Don Gillespie and Roberta Friedman 1994-1995 (2008 version)

From
a composition by John Cage dedicated to the first New York issue of Rolling
Stone magazineof 6 October 1977

Prelude
Bob Cobbing

A
British sound, concrete and visual poet, Bob Cobbing (1920-2002) was a key
figure in the British Poetry Revival.
He
was involved in the Hendon Experimental Art Club and in 1951 founded the
magazine And. In 1964 he
published ABC in Sound which
featured a series of sound experiments exploring the auditory potential of the
English alphabet. In the 1960s he was a leading figure in the British
counterculture (or the happenings of the “Bomb Culture”).
In
the 1970s he ran the Writers Forum, organising numerous series of experimental
events with groups such as Bird Yak and Konkrete Canticle, and projects such as
Domestic Ambient Noise.
A
passionate explorer of ambient sound effects, Cobbing is commemorated here with
a poem as a prelude to a radically ambient work by John Cage. In fact Cobbing
dedicated this brief poem to the American composer and inventor of happenings
and so it provides a fitting introduction to Cage’s 49 Waltzes for the Five
Boroughs in the film by Don Gillespie and Roberta Friedman.

John
Cage

49
Waltzes for the Five Boroughs for performer(s) or listener(s) or record
maker(s) – (1977)
Transcriptions
may be made for other cities (or places) by assembling through chance
operations a list of CXLVII addresses and then, also through chance operations,
arranging these in XLIX groups of three (Waltz)

John Cage’s artwork is a
suite of waltzes build by from 49 multicoloured triangles arranged on top of the
Hagstrom map of New York.
This
initial work was published for use by performer(s) or listener(s) or record
maker(s), with the exact individual street locations and their visible
neighbourhoods, thus establishing the precise point for listening or viewing
situated in the three vertices of each triangle.
The
waltz is only derived therefore from the base triangle of perception generating
the artwork (in this case a film).

Cage was an inveterate
New Yorker. After his death in 1992, Don Gillespie, his long time colleague,
decided to celebrate his friend’s memory by videotaping each of the 147
locations indicated in the score. An “impartial” camera was used to capture
each of the 147 locations by rotating 180° (or less). The overall environmental
parameters and the duration of filming were determined by the I-Ching. The
brilliant, enjoyable fluent result captures the chance alternations of big
noises and unexpected silences in New York.
The
sounds and visuals in the film are extremely authentic and the high-power
multiplication of the tangible and intangible reality of the metropolitan
soundscape has a powerfully Zen-like aura.
The
temporal indexing of the piece was constructed by Andrew Culver who used John
Cage’s personal I-Ching software for the purpose; the result was a series of
duration’s ranging from a minimum of 16” (Waltz #23, step 1) to 3’44” (Waltz
#20, step 3).