from two emails in which i complain about learning cage's 34'46.776" for a pianist
[two days ago]
I’m immersed in the incredibly straining activity of trying to physically internalize this nutty John Cage piece, 34'46.776" for a pianist, which no one can or should play, but of course I’ve decided to try to do. Blah blah. A Cage scholar shared the most amazing phrase with me when I wrote him for help… indeed, for inspiration…because I was majorly stalling on this piece after transcribing it note-for-note. He described the approach to the music as akin to hurling sound into silence. “Moments thrown into silence,” he said, and this might be the most helpful thing anyone has ever said to me. Like, really. But the music is still a bitch. In a program that stretches emotion and memory to such beautiful extremes, this piece aims to negate memory, to destroy association, to negate reason and connection. In other words, it wants us to seal the dam on all we [have been taught to] hold essential to music-making, but still to make music. Breathe without air. Run without gravity.
[yesterday]
While I’ve only gnawed on little pieces of 34 since arriving up here in Maine, by the end of the week I hope to have at least created some kind of physical language for the excerpt. Thinking about it tonight, I tried to remind myself (for the millionth time) that Cage was probably most interested in [experiencing a pianist’s] physical and aural problem-solving in the moment of execution, the choreographic and audible solution a pianist might come up with when handed this kind of Sisyphusian score, what the struggle might sound like and look like as the pianist works to honor each event as faithfully as possible. That manic tension, that friction, fuels the piece, so I tell myself, and makes that disconnectedness compelling to anyone bearing witness. I feel most at one with the music when in that kind of “flow” state Csíkszentmihályi writes about, flaying about and barely seeing. It’s a music that invites… in fact, demands a kind of out-of-body execution.
I also wonder if it was a big fat mistake trying to get this part of it ready for September 12th. I’m trying to remember my frame of mind a month before the John Cage Weekend last year [when I performed the companion piece to 34′46.776″, 31′57.9864″]. It was probably just as full of wonder and fear.
[note to self: today]
It occurs to me that I’m good at writing about, talking about, waxing poetically about in the most inspiring prose, how Cage, in his chance-based music, forces a player out of their comfort zone, cuts off the air supply to their habits and conditioning, and invents a music that seems intent, maybe primarily, on erecting and exploring a kind of playground of failure, to make the player live in this world until, like breathing liquid oxygen (I always think of that scene in The Abyss), their panic gives way to surrender and submission—to peace. You can breathe, as it were, once the fear and shame vanish in the face of embracing imperfection. One reaches, perhaps frenetically so, and that’s the music. Selfless. Confidently imperfect.
Yes, it’s so, so much more inspiring to write about it, to think about it, to coach myself on all of this when I don’t actually have the music in front of me, when I’m not practicing, hunched over the instrument and painfully reaching, tearing psychological muscle and feeling my body stiffen and brain freeze and breath shorten and spirits sink. I stop at the end of each passage wanting to quit, thinking about how far there is for it—for me—to go. And then I try again and watch it change.
A lot of suffocation imagery lately.
