Indeterminate Acts

In 1959, the Smithsonian Folkways label released an album called “Indeterminacy,” a piece that features John Cage speaking, and David Tudor playing mashed-up material from the former’s “Fontana Mix” and “Concert for Piano and Orchestra.” Since comedian Stewart Lee and pianists Tania Caroline Chen and Steve Beresford first decided to perform “Indeterminacy” around 15 years ago, it’s become something like a repertory work for this occasional trio, who come together only in the performance of this piece. “Every time I think it’s not going to happen again, it suddenly rises up again like the Terminator,” Lee said on a recent call. They’re back with another “Indeterminacy” on February 1 in York. (A notice at the bottom of the online listing reminds York comedy fans that this is not an extra Lee tour date.)

“Indeterminacy” came about through Cage’s attempts to turn lectures into experiments with form. “My intention was, often, to say what I had to say in a way which would exemplify it, which would, conceivably permit a listener to experience it rather than to just hear about it,” he wrote in a liner note to the Folkways record. His “Lecture on Nothing” employed some of the same rhythmic techniques used in his musical compositions; the “London Lecture” employed chance procedures; and a Brussels talk, eventually published in Stockhausen’s music journal Die Reihe, was made up entirely of stories.

The title of the Brussels talk was “Indeterminacy: new aspect of form in instrumental and electronic music.” It involved 30 stories, most from things that had happened to Cage—the regular use of the personal “I” pronoun lends the piece a vaguely memoir-like feel. Later, Cage added 60 more stories, and invited Tudor “to make a 90-minute accompaniment for the occasion.” They recorded it, each in separate rooms, so as not to hear each other, making moments of synchronicity between speech and music solely the product of the listener’s ear. (Cage seemed to want to put this idea on trial through the piece anyway. “My intention in putting the stories together in an unplanned way was to suggest that all things—stories, incidental sounds from the environment, and, by extension, beings—are related,” he wrote, “and that this complexity is more evident when it is not oversimplified by an idea of relationship in one person’s mind.”)

Much stays the same in the piece, aided by Lee’s deliberately “fairly monotonous, unexpressive” delivery. This is in spite of the content of the stories, which, while celebrating the banalities of everyday life, are far from monotone in subject. (Schoenberg, mushrooms and Zen Buddhism feature regularly in the stories, which you can flick through on this site.) But the thing that makes “Indeterminacy” a diverting listen is its approach to pace, a single changing parameter in a sea of constants. Each story is told in one minute, but they vary in length and in space of delivery—there are gaps built into each card, and timings down each side denoting when to deliver each of the lines. The overlap with comedy, and particularly Lee’s flavor of comedy—of formal games, repetition, and a special attention to pace—is sizable.

In two short conversations, one with Lee and another with Beresford and Chen, we spoke about the vaudevillian aspects of Cage’s work, what the classical music establishment gets wrong about “4”33’,” and how to ignore your fellow performers.