Review: 'Song Books' by John Cage (1970) by Exaudi

Review of Exaudi doing 'Song Books' by John Cage (1970)Kingsplace, London, 28th March 2011

The performance space we entered was a flat studio about 20 M square with a black curtain and a stage on one side. The seating was in rows of moveable chairs and the singers were arranged on stage to the side of the stage and to the rear. The evening was sold out for this rare performance of one of Cage's most ambitious scores - 90 individual 'songs' to be performed with random start times.

The performers were dressed as we might expect of serious music, like bank clerks without their jackets and ties on. The electronics man Bill Thompson at least had his shirt hanging out. One man in black had dreadlocks. But who was the character with the big furry hat on stage looking at his Applemac laptop? About half way through the hour long performance a technician joined him on stage as if something had gone wrong with whatever the laptop was in charge of. Later he walked off with his gigantic hat still in place, as if in a huff. Had something gone wrong? The Cage masterwork was a rather crammed into the hour and I wondered if this was because they were aiming to make a CD. There being a gap in the market for a recording of Song books... Also the performance, which was polished, seemed to have a rehearsed feel to it. The random juxtaposition of pieces seemed to go all too smoothly with few lulls or cacaphonic pile ups that we might have expected. The score isn't smooth, its all bitty with odd variegations of texture. In the catalog James Weeks, Exaudi's director, describes the scored songs as beautiful, which is strange because they often seem visually quite ugly compared to say the graphics of Cardew's Treatise. Certainly Cage is no great graphic artist that's not the point anyway.

Why was it so smooth? Why shouldn't it be smooth? The professionalism of the troupe is not in question what is in question is whether a professional sort of discipline can give us a satisfactory rendition of Song books which is comprised of 48 scores needing various levels of musical ability and 42 instructions for ' theatre'. The need for perfect timing and pitch dominated the visuality with stopwatches hanging like medallions and tuning forks struck on knees to intone a song. The actual theatre half of the concert was tastefully kept on table tops that were hardly visible to most of the audience. The visual impact of the concert was perhaps just 5%. But then if your aim is to make a CD then.... but wouldn't more overt theatre performances have dislodged the cosy safety of the delicate virtuoso singing? The CD might then have had a bit more edge, danger excitement? A bit more feeling for 1970 and the space between Satie and Thoreau that half of the pieces are meant to be enacted within. 1970s radicalism was a distant prospect here: in spite of Cage's famous anarchist song, "The best form of government is no government at all", being repeated at least 3 times in some nice, if subdued, variations.

Their dress code reminded me of a place of administration. It felt like Song Books had been administrated or accounted for in the new millenium and in time to be on-sale in the shops by Cage's anniversary in 2012. Certainly commodification and comfort were in my mind... I may be wrong.

The other thing that spoilt it was the use of microphones on stands to render vocals for electronic modulation. The scores just say 'with electronics' or not. This doesn't mean that the voice has to be wholly modulated. The mic stands emphasised the fixity and anal rigidity of it all. (and anyway I hate unnecessary amplification of the human voice; it is so reductive of vocal subtlety.)

To be fair there were some moments of loveliness you might not guess from my diatribe! The babel of voices near to the end that came out from an earlier linguistically impenetrable libretto seemed to be very relevant to the London of today with its over 300 languages spoken in schools. But even such moments didn't save it from trampling on the memory of John Cage rather than investigating what he meant when he wanted to start from scratch.

Kingsplace itself intones an atmosphere of professionalism and mental hygiene with its hard-faced acoustics. It is a corporate environment par excellence in which art is gathered to provide a throne for the Guardian Newspaper that seems to inhabit the upper reaches. The space inveigles against the cultural freedom that Cage is surely reaching out for. With ultra-professionalism comes a pretentiousness and a type of discipline that curtails the human spirit. It is perhaps a danger of such scores. But anyway its not a home for the live and living avant-garde. When Ali sung a workers folk song on the way out it was like a breath of fresh air making us realise what a conditioned environment we had been in.

A central problem of realising Songbooks is whether you do a retro version or try to realise it with contemporary idioms. Do you actually use an old typewrite for its clickety clackety sounds? Do you evoke the space between Thoreau and Satie or do you think of what is todays equivalent?

Stefan Szczelkun