2003
John Cage once recounted how, on attending a concert and intrigued by the high levels of amplified sound, he situated himself as close as possible to the loudspeakers in the hall. After a week of high-pitched tones ringing in his ears as a result, he eventually sought medical advice and was castigated by a physician for almost permanently damaging his ears. This anecdote clearly illustrates Cage’s propensity and fascination for the physicality of sound in all its dimensions, and paying attention – sometimes almost perilously – to what might be described as a phenomenology of sonic activity. From this perspective the listener must open him or herself up to the various parameters of sounds, their timbre, intensity, amplitude, etc., realizing a process, whereby, as Barthes once suggested, “listening is externalised, it compels the subject to renounce his inwardness.” Ideally, in Cage’s compositional world it is this process of externalisation that is shared by composer, performer and listener alike – the sounds existing in an abstract interface that traverses and yet deflects their individual subjectivities. This is the domain of indeterminacy and Cage’s particular works that are, as he described them, “Indeterminate with respect to their performance”, remain the cornerstone of a challenging and sometimes problematic performance practice. It is hardly surprising then that Cage’s radical indeterminate works from the later 1950’s including the Variations 1, Concert for Piano and Orchestra, and the piece featured on the present disc, Fontana Mix are not for the faint-hearted, and require immense investment on the part of the performer for any convincing performance to be realized. This release on the Italian Alga Marghen label of six realizations of Fontana Mix from 1965-68, by the (then) percussion virtuoso Max Neuhaus is a welcome addition to the catalogue, not just as a valuable document of his performances of Cage but also representing an important transitional phase in Neuhaus’s development as an artist. What he presents here is a distinctive realization of the score ‘patented’, if you like, by the addition of Feed to the title of the piece, and pointing directly to the nature of the sound source utilised by the performer.
What Cage provides in Fontana Mix is a set of transparent sheets consisting of points, curves, a graph chart and a straight line. From these materials the performer must construct the various parameters of the performance and deduce a time frame of actions and manipulations according to how the transparent points, curves and lines intersect with each other. Depending on the remit and frames that the performers set themselves, the resulting performances of this piece are practically infinite in their potential variety. As the appended title suggests, Neuhaus’s interpretation of the score focuses solely on feedback, the score being used to map adjustments in amplification and the interaction of four channels. Such techniques had been developed around 1963 from his experiments with amplifying sounds from his battery of percussion instruments, and the recordings available here are the results of Neuhaus’s extensive concert tours as a solo percussionist. By the time of these performances Neuhaus had perfected the technique of laying contact microphones on the percussion instruments giving the feedback more timbral grain (the microphones remained loose on the instruments so that movement.
David Ryan
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