Reflections on Being a Star

John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis; Carnegie Hall, Oct. 22, 2012 S.E.M. Orchestra

2012 is a stellar year for John Cage performances, his centennial sparkling with a veritable myriad of concerts in his honour. The largest scale of these, at least in terms of performers, is the production of Atlas Eclipticalis in its most expansive version, which took place in historically star-studded Carnegie Hall, on Monday Oct.22, 2012. The “Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble”, which premiered this version twenty years ago, played it as part of their "Beyond Cage" festival, to its maximum duration of 100 minutes, with its maximum instrumentation of 86 musicians, simultaneously with Winter Music in a two-piano version, as per the signature optional directions of Cage.

This concert witnessed a veritable conglomeration of New York City new music freelancers, including players from Argento, Absolute Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Talea, FLUX Quartet, Composer's Concordance, Either/Or, 20-21, Yarn|Wire, Signal Ensemble, Talujon, Loadbang, American Composer's Orchetsra, ACJW, Ensemble Moto Perpetuo, Guidonian Hand, North/South Music, The Knights, Ljova, and - the list goes on. As one of the performers, I enjoyed the opportunity to interact with so many of my colleague-friends all at the same time.
I also enjoyed the reaction of many of my non-musician invitee-friends, who before the concert said, "Wow, that sounds intriguing", and after expressed, "What an amazing experience!" Old new music is still fresh, even if its rays of light take longer to reach us now.

www.johncage.info tells us that Atlas Eclipticalis was composed as follows: “Cage used the Atlas Eclipticalis 1950.0 (an atlas of the stars published in 1958 by Antonín Becvár (1901-1965), a Czech astronomer), superimposing musical staves over the star-charts in this atlas. Brightness of the stars is being translated into the size of the notes in the composition.”
The score consists of 344 pages of music, which are divided up among the 86 musicians, hence we each play 4 pages, at 25 minutes a page. The dots on the page, are organized into clusters connected by lines, according to chance processes. There is a nice link to pictures of all of this here: http://greg.org/archive/2012/06/25/john_cage_antonin_becvar_and_leonard_bernstein_walk_into_a_bar.html

We play the notes in each cluster in whichever order we wish, following instructions for each cluster as to how many notes shall be as short as possible, and how many shall have “some duration”. The only parameter around “some duration” is that each cluster should be completed more or less according to its positioning on the staff, as the piece is spatially notated, meaning that each line of staff is to last for the length of one cycle of the conductor's, or clock's, arms – which in our version is five minutes (there are 5 lines of staff per page). Petr Kotik, founder and conductor of S.E.M., and the driving force behind this performance, did his yogic work well, conducting the twenty cycles like a Tai Chi exercise. Slow movement, especially for such a long time is not easy. The audience was privy only to the movement of his arms, which started above his head, and continued slowly in a circle, liked the hands on a clock. Occasionally, time stood still, as the score allows for; perhaps once or twice it backtracked slightly. We players could of course see his serious yet humourful (might one say, universal?) expression.

Star-gazing is a meditative enterprise. Re-creating the dots of light is no less so. While the instructions provided by Cage stop short of specifying “attempt to sound as you might imagine the stars do”, the analogous parallel between light and sound is woven inherently into the score, and appears as such in the sound. The task of performing the dots on the page, with specific instructions, yet with freedom with respect to their timing and length and balance, over the course of 100 minutes, also sets the stage for a zen-like focussedly unfocussed state of being.We started sounding really good by the third page. Our egos had disappeared – each dot was no longer a solo in Carnegie Hall, but a twinkling with the others in the orchestra; we'd gone from being stars to connecting the – galaxies.

When I had a few minutes of rest, about an hour into the piece, I found myself staring at the floor of the stage. For some reason, I have always liked the particular colour of Carnegie's stage – a light, almost tan bare-hardwood. It makes me feel at home, and with the stage lights, it seems cheerful. But something appeared to me tonight: Carnegie's stage is a star-map in itself, marked by galaxies - hundreds, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of cello endpin holes, stabbed into history by the world's most famous, most revered, most renowned cellists. Jacqueline du Pré, Rostropovich, Yo-Yo Ma, generations of Berliner Philharmoniker and Cleveland Orchestras – well, the current stage is not so old (1995), but old enough to have seen every major orchestra in the world multiple times, and all the soloists too. Sometimes the cello sections sits at stage left, where I was, and sometimes they sit further inland; for contemporary works they could sit anywhere, and for large-scale youth orchestras and other non-Carnegie-Hall-presents groups, they also might be squeezed in anywhere. The stage is layered in endpinpoints, in months, as stars are layered in light-years. How often can we busy New Yorkers take a moment out of our hectic schedules, to contemplate such things, to star-gaze? A worthwhile reflection.

Needless to say, we were warmed up for the post-intermission piece, John Marclay's Shuffle – of which we gave a spunky and humourous rendition, and which, at 10 minutes, felt much too short.