"Keeping Company with Cage" to mark composer's centennial

Keeping Company with Cage, a program of sound, dance, and music to celebrate the centennial of the birth of composer John Cage, is scheduled for Sunday, April 15, at the Arthur Zankel Music Center on the Skidmore College campus. 

Moratorio, a layered sound experience created by artist Margo Mensing and Brendan Gaffney, begins at 6 p.m. The audience is invited to arrive any time between 6 and 7 p.m. to experience this sound installation, a multitude of Cage quotes programmed using the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of changes, and change methods dispersed from multiple sound sources throughout the lobby and environs. 

At 7 p.m., David Porter will perform Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano in the Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall with choreography by Debra Fernandez. Inspired by Cage's interest in the "so-called permanent emotions of traditional Indian aesthetics" and the I Ching, nine dancers with camera will create an atmosphere for listening. 

The program is free and open to the public. Tickets to the piano/dance portion of the program in Ladd Concert Hall are required and may be reserved here. 

Moratorio for Cage's Centenary,by artist Mensing and Gaffney, a member of Skidmore's Class of 2012, "uses the I Ching the way that Cage did, which is different from the way people traditionally use this work," explained Mensing. 

Her Moratorio gives a nod to Cage's Roaratorios, "municipal compositions." Cage's idea was "to make a city audible to itself." He constructed the composition from ambient sounds recorded in multiple locations throughout the city. Moratorio knits together numerous short clips from Cage's writings. Interspersed with Cage quotes are readings of the images from the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching (from the translation recently completed by Margaret Pearson, professor emerita of history at Skidmore). Also included are passages from disparate sources, such as Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory. Gaffney recorded students, faculty, and others over several weeks in various locations. He arranged the selected clips using chance methods based on the I Ching.

Moratorio for Cage's Centenarywill be broadcast by WSPN, the campus radio station, throughout the Zankel lobby from an assortment of radios and the speaker system.Many of the sounds will be relayed through old-fashioned transistor radios. The sound also will be accessible via smartphones and QR codes, offering a contrast between old and new technology.

At 7 p.m. David Porter, Tisch Family Distinguished Professor and president emeritus of Skidmore, will perform Cage's avant-garde classic, Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, in Ladd Concert Hall. The Skidmore student dancers and guest artist Stevie Oakes will dance original choreography under the direction of Debra Fernandez, professor and chair of the Department of Dance. 

Porter has been performing Sonatas and Interludes, the composer's last and most ambitious composition for prepared piano, since the late 1960s, around the time that he first became acquainted with Cage himself at Carleton College. On one of his first visits to Skidmore, in 1975, Porter performed selections from this work, and in 2000 to celebrate the opening of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery he performed an abbreviated version as the centerpiece in a first collaboration with Fernandez and Mensing, A Satie Cage Tango.

The piano used for the piece is "prepared" with some 75 objects?bolts and screws, rubber and plastic mutes, a large pink eraser?inserted between strings of the piano in accordance with Cage's precise instructions. The altered instrument resembles an Asian gamelan in sound, a consequence that fits with Cage's description of Sonatas and Interludes as "an attempt to express in music the 'permanent emotions' of Indian tradition." Porter credits his long association with Cage with changing his whole approach to music (he thinks for the better!), and describes his several collaborations with Fernandez and Mensing as the most exciting and satisfying artistic experiences of his life.

The dance piece features nine dancers and a camera, with images to be projected on a stage wall. Fernandez and the ensemble choreographed the dance to create an atmosphere that encourages relaxed attention. Fernandez was inspired by the Zen notion of rigorous formal practice alongside informal mind. The choreography is clearly set and rehearsed but it also makes a space for the dancers to observe the pianist and the dance in moments they are not performing. The camera will project images of the dancers as they perform. It is there "to remind us that what we think we see is but a single element in the field of activity," said Fernandez. She relished "the challenge of reimaging this piece in a new location."

Click here to read an interview with Dance Professor Debra Fernandez published in the April 8 issue of The Sunday Gazette.