A variation on music making

Jan 5 2008 by Paul James, The Journal

ONE of the most celebrated and bizarre musical arrangements in history, featuring a blender, a toaster, Geiger counters and telephones, will have its European premiere in the North-East next month.

John Cage’s Variations VII will be one of the highlights of the AV Festival when it is performed at Baltic in Gateshead on February 29.

The piece, first performed in New York’s 69th Regiment Armoury in 1966, involved having 10 open telephone lines to various city locations that included the New York Times press room, a restaurant, a dog pound, a dance studio and a terrapin tank.

The ‘instruments’ used in the auditorium included a range of kitchen equipment, fans and radios.

Now three artists have taken up the challenge of recreating and updating that unique sound, which will form part of the third AV Festival.

The original audience was also involved in the production. Thirty photocells and lights were mounted at ankle level around the performance area, which activated different sounds as the performers moved around. Cage invited the audience to move around freely and many stood near the performance area.

Last night, festival director Honor Harger said: “Variations was not the equivalent of seeing a concert. It’s quite an immersive experience where you are intimately involved in something which felt as much like a film production as a traditional performance.

“It has seldom been performed at all. Most of John Cage’s works were meticulously scored. This, unusually, had no score at all. The only guide that people like ourselves have is the technical diagrams which he left, which show the way the stage was arranged and how the various technicalities were constructed.”

The Newcastle upon Tyne experimental music duo :Zoviet*France: and composer Atau Tanaka, who has just taken up the post of chair of digital media at Newcastle University, will perform the piece.

Honor said: “Our challenge is to work out how much of the performance relies on the original list of instruments and how much we update, using contemporary, complimentary technology.

“For example, we’re not constrained by analogue phone lines – we have mobile phones and we have the internet. Part of our creative process is working out how much of the original technology we keep and which bits we update to 2008.”