Visceral Communication

There’s a very long pause, then a single plucked string bends up. Pause again, followed by a long screech from the highest flute register. Another pause. Something rattles. So begins my very own realization of John Cage’s “Concert for Piano and Orchestra”—built using the Concert Player App on the Cage Concert website assembled by Philip Thomas with Martin Iddon, Christoper Melen and Emily Payne. One result of a three year Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded project led by Thomas, the app allows the user to select any length of time in hours, minutes and seconds, choose any of the 16,383 possible combinations of the 14 scored instruments plus any of the 12 to 16 pages of score Cage wrote for each instrument. The software then generates your unique version of the Concert using recordings specially made for the app by musicians from the group Apartment House. I went for a three hour, 14 minute and six second-long version for just flute, viola and trombone. I’m guessing this particular realization is not exactly going to enter the canon. But for Thomas it’s a fascinating way of discovering “new possibilities” in the piece. “I play around with it all the time,” he tells me when he chat over Skype one Monday morning. I can see why: the opportunity to play conductor of one of the most notorious and obscure works of 20th century music, about which even the composer said, “The only thing I was being consistent to in this piece was that I did not need to be consistent.”