thank your hecklers

All music is new music to somebody. The other day, a friend posted on my Facebook wall that her students’ eyes “nearly popped out when they saw all the screws in the piano” as she taught about John Cage’s prepared piano music. It reminded me that, yes, people out there still hadn’t actually heard of the prepared piano, just as I hadn’t heard of it until one day as a teenager when I stumbled upon a dusty LP in my high school library. These first-encounters happen every day. 

I still find myself surprised by even centuries-old repertoire. My jaw nearly hit the floor when, last month, I saw Anthony Newman perform a Bach organ work I’d never heard that employed only the pedals for well over a minute. Revolutionary, I thought. And yet, he’d probably played the thing since he was fifteen years old.

Last Saturday I played a concert of John Cage’s music at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Going into it, I felt a little insecure about the placidity of the program, a short series of mostly tranquil works interspersed with readings. These are the hits, I thought. 

Well, two things happened: 

1) Some people really loved the program, and had possibly never heard anything quite like it before. Wow. 

2) Some people really hated the program, and had possibly never heard anything quite like it before. Wow.

I’d share the messages received since Saturday about how the concert touched certain people’s hearts and opened their minds to the breadth of Cage’s music and writing, but of course I’m drawn more to the small faction of (so I heard) elderly folks who created a disturbance throughout the performance. Hecklers, so I called them. 

“Why don’t you shut up!” one person groaned as I answered a question asked by the curator of the series during an onstage interview.

“Look at him, he looks more miserable than I am!” another remarked during a particular moment of concentration. 

“What do you want!” echoed through the hall during one of the more serene moments of the program, either during “Dream” or “In a Landscape,” perhaps in response to someone else asking this person to be quiet.

“This is ridiculous,” one person announced as I performed Cage’s Radio Music (1956) before the concert even started. 

These were all “unusually overt distractions,” as one friend texted me later, and indeed I doubt that the interruptions came from individuals we’d describe as mentally stable—this was, after all, a free afternoon concert, and audiences for these affairs can be a mixed bag, to say the least—yet the chaos both helped make the afternoon, to be sure, a memorable occasion, but most importantly (and surprisingly) also reminded me that even what seemed like the most harmless of programs could still have the power to shake and provoke. 

The composer Gerald Busby, who attended, wrote this to me: “You use the word hecklers, but I think those that made intrusive noises were actually just reacting to the beauty and terror of being present. They weren’t heckling you; they were heckling the intimate precariousness of being awake and alive if only for a few seconds.”

“The intimate precariousness of being awake and alive…” These words really got me. I often forget that we in the music community have the sacred opportunity to open the path toward absolute presence for our listeners, whether they embrace or reject it in the moment. Or if they even notice. 

We all still remember those moments of first discovery from our virginal musical upbringings—and let’s hope we’re still open to such discoveries in adulthood—but now we have become the ambassadors of those moments. Is it really just a job? Can we actually call it a blessing?

I remember, the first time I heard Copland’s Piano Variations, I didn’t know what to do with the piece, but I was sure I didn’t like it. Within two years, though, it became the riptide that dragged me out to a sea of modern American music in which I still tread water. Now I hum it while walking down the street. 

So I urge all of us to take nothing for granted, to avoid assuming that our programs are either commonplace or radical. We have the opportunity to make everything we play new, every time. To create from nothing an experience, a path, a riptide. Our assumptions are just that—guesses and fantasies—even the assumption that someone who disrupts a concert hates the music. After all, some people laugh at funerals. 

Funny enough, the last piece I performed was the ‘silent’ 4′33″. No one made a peep.