A Violin Bow for John Cage

interactive composition by Jon Rose

The story goes like this:

A few months back, a good friend of mine in Berlin wrote to say he had discovered a box of cassettes under the bed in his spare room . . . been there for over twenty years. Since he was downsizing apartments, he offered to post them to me here in Alice Springs. Amongst these elderly recordings was one I had thought lost: a 1988 interview with John Cage on the subject of the violin, with the plan (and agreement from the composer) to turn it into a short radiophonic feature.

Cage loved the sound of traffic, but nothing quite prepared me for the overwhelming noise of the air conditioning unit at his West 18th Street apartment. ‘It’s for the plants,’ he said. ‘Could we turn it down a notch,’ I asked, ‘for the recording?’ He shook his head. And so we spoke for the next 45 minutes accompanied by the howl and rattle of his aircon unit at full tilt. Back then, I had regular commissions from major European radio stations for hörspiel productions, but I immediately realised that the quality of this recording rendered it un-broadcastable.

John Cage was in his latter years, so he wasn’t as illuminating as I had hoped, but he did have a few things to offer about the violin. Some of these ideas I had already arrived at myself (challenging the accepted functions of left and right limbs, for example). But, on hearing this tape back over thirty years later, it struck me that I had inadvertently developed one of his ideas, although not in the meaning he had originally intended. He considered violinists to be somewhat like dancers, performing dangerously . . . in the sense that dancers might physically collide with each other onstage. My developing notion of Zusammenstoß would place unrelated musical material together in purposeful collision, suspecting that the sparks might produce a third, as yet unknown, pathway. I believed that improvisation was the best medium to undertake such a project, although many improvisers disagreed. These days the practice seems to have become, in general, quite neutered, safe, and restrained.

After some minutes of discussion, the phone rang. A close friend had died and Cage provided a very sympathetic ear. Indeed, the phone rang twice more while we were talking. So, the recording contains mostly intimate and comforting comments from JC to distressed friends. I found myself intruding on someone else’s private grief. None of this appears on my edited version. I’ve also cut out most of my own contributions.

I’ve taken some of the air conditioning sound blast and utilised it as a sample with the interactive K-bow and violin in a tribute called A Violin Bow for John Cage. For the interview extract, I’ve digitally reduced the decibel levels of the air conditioning down for ease of audibility.

Jon Rose © 21/7/2024

N.B. Bow pressure and the Infra Red Lock are used extensively in this piece as a trigger for changing MIDI parameters at speed. Pitch bend via accelerometers and occasional bow waving also figure in this performance. The 4 channel outputs have been mixed down to stereo.