defending
4′33″ as a standard in a piano repertoire
Thinking about tomorrow’s final day of recording, my voice already hoarse and body buzzing from three days of recording—nearly nine hours of shooting each session.
I’ll have more than enough to say about 4'33" tomorrow before the camera and audience, but stumbled onto something just now that I’ve never thought about with regard to the piece, namely, how to defend it as a standard in the canon for instrumentalists, particularly pianists.
Of course someone might respond with the typical argument that the piece doesn’t challenge a pianist’s technique or ability. Well, in one regard, sure. It doesn’t involve passagework, tone, articulation or pitch. It doesn’t require accuracy with regard to notes and their production. However, it demands a crucial, maybe the crucial element, that leads to any successful performance, something that even in the most polished performer, can tend to go missing.
Poise.
And poise can mean a lot of things. It can mean stage presence—the energy one emits that tells the audience to give the work their attention—presence begets presence. Poise can mean also control, and yes this might mean resisting the urge to fiddle, stare at the clock, clear ones throat or even swallow. Poise can mean integrity, the attitude that communicates that one takes the piece and their task seriously, that they understand the background of the work, and have shaped some sort of psychological profile for it, an intention. Poise can mean focus, performing a “disciplined task,” to borrow a term Cage uses for the later 0'00", under pressure. This feels a lot like “accuracy,” because conventionally, control means executing correct notes and rhythm in the explicit manner that a piece outlines. In this case, however, it means the handling of (again traditionally) a piano lid, a clock, and a body—fingers, legs, torso. We use these parts of our body as instrumentalists, of course, but 4'33" isolates them, zooms in on them. It puts a microscope onto the passage of time and how our body—the thing that performs— behaves in that time.
Poise.
I can’t tell you the number of times I have attended a fine, accurate, acceptable and perfectly usable performance from a musician who has never actually learned to sit.
—London, July 13, 12:43am
