John Milton Cage (1912-1992) occupies an extraordinary place in the history of music. Exactly what role he has played can be hard to describe, but it hardly seems necessary or even desirable to pin him down. His music, thought and influence have become matters of quiet and durable fact. Cage's peaceful and sometimes maddening sonic inventions may have earned him fame and scorn in equal measure, but he cannot simply be dismissed. He has made his point, and that point will continue to re-make itself: so long as there are listeners, there will never an absence of something to be heard.
In 1928, as a 15-year-old, the young John Cage won the ‘Southern California Oratorical Contest’ with a speech including the following:
In 1928, as a 15-year-old, the young John Cage won the ‘Southern California Oratorical Contest’ with a speech including the following:
One of the greatest blessings that the United States could receive in the near future would be to have her industries halted, her business discontinued, her people speechless, a great pause in her world of affairs created. . . . We should be hushed and silent, and we should have the opportunity to learn what other people think.
This is a curiously non-trivial fantasy. On the one hand, it can seem like the naïve wish of a fifteen-year-old, but on the other hand... stranger things have happened. Moreover, there is no harm in saying that the power of listening should be acknowledged as complementary to the power of making.
Later, after years of intensive compositional study, John Cage became a student of Arnold Schoenberg, who said of him, “he’s not a composer, he’s an inventor.” Somewhat surprisingly, Schoenberg meant this positively, at least insofar as Cage had clearly managed to hold the man's attention – few of his students did. There was something unshakeable about Cage's radicalism which even Schoenberg couldn't ignore.
To enrich the context of hearing Cage’s Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard Instrument, it might be fruitful to look to a description of another of his encounters with Schoenberg, which he recounts in Silence: Lectures and Writings (1973):
After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony.
Cage took himself at his own word, and proceeded to write melodies, such as these Six.
However, this exchange with Schoenberg reached beyond matters of musical technique. Cage’s memory of the conversation points not only to compositional issues, but also to the absolute and monastic dedication of his musical life:
He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.
Later, after years of intensive compositional study, John Cage became a student of Arnold Schoenberg, who said of him, “he’s not a composer, he’s an inventor.” Somewhat surprisingly, Schoenberg meant this positively, at least insofar as Cage had clearly managed to hold the man's attention – few of his students did. There was something unshakeable about Cage's radicalism which even Schoenberg couldn't ignore.
To enrich the context of hearing Cage’s Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard Instrument, it might be fruitful to look to a description of another of his encounters with Schoenberg, which he recounts in Silence: Lectures and Writings (1973):
After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony.
Cage took himself at his own word, and proceeded to write melodies, such as these Six.
However, this exchange with Schoenberg reached beyond matters of musical technique. Cage’s memory of the conversation points not only to compositional issues, but also to the absolute and monastic dedication of his musical life:
He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.
Variations III No. 14 by John Cage
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Cage's time with Schoenberg stands as one of the more emblematic encounters between American and European musical and cultural traditions in the 20th century. John Cage is unable to shake his radical engagement with the entire aural landscape; Arnold Schoenberg is unable to shake his dense polyphonic tradition. And yet, there they are, together, in California, each considering music from his own odd angle, and now and again also making paintings.
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It is perhaps possible to see Cage as an artifact of the distant avant-gardism and art-arguments of the last century, but he also seems strangely ready for the digital age, and not only from his having paid so much attention so early to electronic music. His relevance has also to do with the confounding paradoxes of musical documentation and notation which are now arising in digital media.
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Cage is of course most known for his silent piano piece, 4’33”, and the mute rage which it continues to stir. But a later work, 0'00" (4' 33" No. 2) seems more interesting, prescient, and perhaps maddening in 2021. This score consists entirely of the following instruction:
“In a situation of maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action.”
Just as we now do sit, in our networked system of maximum amplification, before our keyboards and screens, performing disciplined actions.
It is a strange music he has made. But not foolish.
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The Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard Instrument date from 1950, before Cage's compositional ideas became so explicitly radical. Their tone and mood leans toward that of Erik Satie. It is a beautiful collection of sounds.
Just as we now do sit, in our networked system of maximum amplification, before our keyboards and screens, performing disciplined actions.
It is a strange music he has made. But not foolish.
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The Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard Instrument date from 1950, before Cage's compositional ideas became so explicitly radical. Their tone and mood leans toward that of Erik Satie. It is a beautiful collection of sounds.
© Timothy Summers
Photo Credit: Bildgeber/Schallgeber
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Photo Credit: Jennifer Taylor
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Violinist Timothy Summers has been a member of the first violin section of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra since 2009, and has performed on violin, viola, and occasionally mandolin with the orchestra at venues across the world. For twenty-one years, he has served as co-director of the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, which he co-founded in 2000. He is also second violinist of the Orpheus String Quartet. Summers currently teaches violin on the faculty of the Universität der Künste (UdK) Berlin, and has taught violin, orchestral playing, improvisation, and chamber music in Spain, Germany, England, Finland, and Colombia.
An avid chamber musician, Summers has performed at festivals across the United States and Europe. For several years he was a participant in the Emmanuel Music cycle of Bach Cantatas in Boston, led by the late Craig Smith and John Harbison. Mr. Summers has performed extensively as an improviser with electronics. Funded by a grant from the Fulbright Commission, he spent the 2005-2006 year as artist-in-residence at the Danish Institute of Electroacoustic Music in Århus. He has worked for several years on improvisation and computer programming projects with improvisation artist Steven Nachmanovitch. Recently Summers has been developing music learning tools and music reference tools for digital devices. The latest projects are a binary computational engine for musical harmony, Partito, and a metronome for harmonic progressions, HarmoGnome. Mr. Summers holds an A.B. from Harvard University in English and American Literature and an M.M. in violin Performance from the Juilliard School. He was a student of Ronald Copes and Robert Mann at the Juilliard School, Mark Rush at the University of Virginia, James Buswell at New England Conservatory, and Robert Levin at Harvard University. |
Benjamin Hochman is a musician of exceptional versatility who regularly appears in multiple guises as orchestral soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician. In recent years he has ventured into the orchestral repertoire as a conductor. His wide range of partners and projects is matched by his curiosity, focus, and ability to communicate deeply with audiences.
Since his Carnegie Hall debut as soloist with the Israel Philharmonic under the baton of Pinchas Zukerman, Hochman has enjoyed an international performing career, appearing as soloist with the New York, Los Angeles, and Prague Philharmonic Orchestras, and the Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Jerusalem Symphony Orchestras under conductors including Gianandrea Noseda, Trevor Pinnock, John Storgårds, and Joshua Weilerstein. A winner of Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Career Grant, he performs at venues including Konzerthaus Wien, Berlin Konzerthaus, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Louvre in Paris, Liszt Academy in Budapest, Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, New York’s 92nd Street Y, and Suntory Hall in Tokyo. Festival highlights include IMS Prussia Cove, Israel Festival, Klavierfestival Ruhr, Lucerne, Santa Fe, Spoleto, and Verbier. Hochman’s projects in 2021 reflect both his imaginative approach to programming and his ongoing relationships with several orchestras and festivals. He will perform Canonic Codes, a piano recital juxtaposing musical canons by Bach, George Benjamin, and Christopher Trapani (a premiere) for the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, where he is a regular guest. He will play and direct Mozart’s Piano Concertos K. 414 and K. 449 for the season-opening concert at Music Mountain, with musicians from the Roosevelt Island Orchestra, an orchestra he founded in 2015. He returns to Santa Fe Pro Musica to open their 2021-22 season, conducting Beethoven Symphony No. 5 and playing Mozart Concerto for Two Pianos with Anne-Marie McDermott. He rejoins the Orlando Philharmonic and Eric Jacobsen to perform one of his favorite concertos, the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1. Chamber music collaborations in 2021 include Berlin performances with Noah Bendix-Balgley, Viviane Hagner and Amihai Grosz at Framed Berlin. Concerts in the US include a recital with Susie Park for The Schubert Club in Minnesota, with principal players of several major American orchestras at Strings Music Festival in Colorado, and with Melissa Reardon and Raman Ramakrishnan at the Bard College Conservatory of Music in New York. He will make his first chamber music recording for Aparté Records in Paris with violist Dov Scheindlin of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, in a program of the two Brahms Sonatas for Viola and Piano Op. 120 alongside works by Robert and Clara Schumann. Hochman began conducting in 2015 as a result of his longstanding admiration for the orchestral repertoire and his collaborative approach to music making. A graduate of The Juilliard School’s conducting program, where he received the Bruno Walter Scholarship, Hochman trained under Alan Gilbert from 2016-2018. He served as musical assistant to Louis Langrée, Paavo Järvi, and Thierry Fischer at the Mostly Mozart festival in 2016. In 2018 he participated in the Tanglewood Conducting Seminar, where he worked with Stefan Asbury, and he has also participated in masterclasses with Fabio Luisi and David Zinman. In recent years he has conducted the English Chamber Orchestra, the Orlando Philharmonic, The Orchestra Now at Bard Music Festival, the Florida Orchestra, and the Juilliard Orchestra. Hochman’s discography reflects his wide-ranging musical interests as well as his personal path. In 2019, he recorded Mozart Piano Concertos No. 17 and No. 24, playing and directing the English Chamber Orchestra. It was released on Avie Records and received critical acclaim from Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times, among others. Hochman’s first two recordings for Avie Records were Homage to Schubert (works by Schubert, Kurtag, and Widmann) and Variations (works by Knussen, Berio, Lieberson, Benjamin, and Brahms). Variations was selected by the New York Times as one of the best recordings of 2015 and was also praised by The New Yorker. Chamber music has been a vital part of Hochman’s life, from his early years in Israel, to his formative years at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, and as a member of The Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two) at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. His chamber music partners have included the Tokyo, Casals, and Jerusalem quartets, Jonathan Biss, Lisa Batishvili, Jaime Laredo, Miklós Perényi, and David Soyer. Hochman is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, among them the Partosh Prize awarded by the Israeli Minister of Culture, the Outstanding Pianist citation at the Verbier Academy, and the Festorazzi Award from the Curtis Institute of Music. Born in Jerusalem in 1980, Hochman began his piano studies with Esther Narkiss at the Conservatory of the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem and continued with private studies with Emanuel Krasovsky in Tel Aviv. He is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied from 1997-2001 with Claude Frank, and the Mannes College of Music, where he studied from 2001-2003 with Richard Goode. His studies were supported by the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. He serves on the piano faculty of Bard College Conservatory of Music and is currently a Research Associate at Bard College Berlin. He is a Steinway Artist. www.benjaminhochman.com |