360 ARTS

A nuts-and-bolts style

Composer Cage's experimentation is celebrated

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Thursday, September 03, 2009

That his birthday is celebrated every year in Austin with a concert followed by a grocery store sheet cake would no doubt tickle the late composer John Cage, the radical innovator whose experiments challenge the entire notion of what music could be.

For the past nine years, pianist Michelle Schumann has done precisely that. A scholar of Cage's music and a skilled interpreter of his avant-garde stylings, Schumann, artistic director the Austin Chamber Music Center, will again celebrate the composer's birthday.

Schumann will play Cage's complete Sonatas and Interludes, his most ambitious set of works for what is perhaps his signature instrument: the prepared piano.

Cage re-imagined a piano by inserting screws, bolts, rubber, wood, weatherstripping, pencil erasers and various other found objects into the piano at prescribed points along the strings. The result is a piano that sounds tonally and rhythmically like no other, filled with rattles and rings.

'The piano is an iconic instrument,' Schumann says. 'Everyone knows what a piano sounds like, and it has such an incredible history, from classical music to salacious lounge music. When you see someone sitting down at a piano, you pretty much know what to expect. But when someone sits down at a prepared piano, and starts to play, it shatters expectations.'

For Cage, the goal of music was to achieve a certain 'purposelessness.' The role of the composer, in Cage's viewpoint, was to create situations in which sounds could simply be. And in his 'Sonatas and Interludes,' Cage sought particularly to exemplify the emotional impact that music had on the mind.

Schumann says she loves Sonatas and Interludes, a 70-minute piece because of the emotional impact

'It's this incredible journey of the basic emotions of the human spirit, and after all the exploration, you're left with this complete and utter peace,' she says.

And the absurdity of sticking nuts and bolts in a piano?

'I think Cage understood that his breaking down of barriers had both elements of profundity and banality,' Schumann says. 'I think he was very serious about his concepts, but approached everything with a childlike wonderment that allowed him to explore and create without boundaries — and without being self-conscious.'

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699

`Happy Birthday Mr. Cage'

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 4

Where: First Unitarian Universalist Church, 4700 Grover Ave.

Cost: $10

Info: www.austinchambermusic.org.