John Cage - Empty words (Parte III) - 1st part | Текст песни

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When John Cage came to Wesleyan in the early Sev- enties, he carried with him the journals of Thoreau. He said he found wonderful things on every page, not to mention phrases concerned with sound. He said that Thoreau thought about sounds the way electronic musicians thought about them. Tho- reau described the sounds of telegraph wires he heard for the first time. Concord, Massachusetts, 1851. Thoreau would hear the wires singing. They were Aeolian harps. Imagine hearing tele- graph wires humming for the first time! Thoreau was excited about the sounds of nature and about the new sounds. Anyway, in Empty Words (1973–1978) Cage subjected the texts of Thoreau to chance operations on five levels: letters, syllables, words, phrases, and sentences. There were twenty-five combinations of these so he simply related the number sixty-four to the number twenty- five. He used the I Ching to choose pages and lines of the text as well as random combinations of the components listed above. Then he worked them together to make a text, which he would then recite in a half chant or dramatic sound-inflected style. It sounded like an ancient soothsayer or shaman chanting.

The text is in four parts. The first consists of combinations of letters, syllables, words, and phrases. The second part consists of letters, syllables, and words. The third, only letters and syllables, and by the fourth part, there is nothing left but individual letters and silences. For all-night performances, the windows would be opened at dawn to let in the outside sounds.

Cage performed part of Empty Words in Crowell Hall in the early Seventies. He came to this class and threw the I Ching to generate a score for altering the volume, balance, bass, and treble controls on an amplifier. At twenty-seven seconds, for example, the treble control is rotated to three o’clock, increasing the high frequencies. Then the bass is boosted. Simple manipulations such as these give the performance an electronic quality. The chance operations serve to interdict the syntax, destroy the meaning, and turn speech into music. Cage isn’t making speech superhuman; he’s not elevating the human voice the way you find in opera, making it grander and more serious than it really is. By simply re- arranging everyday speech he makes it musical. He’s showing how we are connected to the technological world, too.