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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > September > 03 > Entry
Big weekend of new music (Happy Birthday John Cage!)
It’s a big weekend for new music in Austin, with two stellar concerts offered.
`Happy Birthday Mr. Cage’<br>
7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 4
First Unitarian Universalist Church, 4700 Grover Ave.
$10
www.austinchambermusic.org
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.’
Image: Michelle Schumann at the piano. Photo by Ricardo Brazziel.
‘Immeasurable Space & Infinite Worlds’
8 p.m. Saturday
Mexican-American Cultural Center, 600 River St.
$12-$15
www.amoda.org
Think you know percussion music? Think again.
Six musicians and a truckload of percussion instruments will envelop the audience Saturday night at the Mexican American Cultural Center, as the New Music Co-op and ensemble Line Upon Line join talents to present three of the 20th century’s most radical experiments in percussion music.
The musicians will transform the concert venue into a giant bell for a rare eight-channel surround realization of Xenakis’ 1962 electroacoustic piece `Bohor.’
Next, they will coax otherworldly sonic colors from metal, wood, skin. bamboo and live electronics in Luigi Nono’s 1979 work `Con Luigi Dallapiccola.’
Finally, Xenakis’ celebrated work `Persephassa’ - commissioned in 1969 by the Empress of Iran and premiered at the historic desert site of Persepolis - will be performed by six percussionists in a ring around the audience.
Think of it as live surround sound - with a beat.
Image: Line Upon Line.
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