John Cage] Bird Cage 2000, EMF CD 013 for 12 tapes & 1 performer in a space with freely moving people and birds TT: 59:43 Eleven tracks: Part 1-9 2 excerpts from a conversation with John Cage One day in 1972, John Cage was en route to the Walnut Street Bookstore in downtown Philadelphia when he discovered a bar called The Bird Cage. From this establishment, he procured a beer coaster that featured an attractive design of the name of the bar in the shape of a bird cage. What would for most composers seem a rather pedestrian situation became for Mr. Cage inspiration for a new piece. Constructed over the course of less than a week in Albany, New York, with the aid of Joel Chadabe, Bird Cage, for twelve tapes, is a work intended as an installation for "a space in which people are free to move and birds to fly." The work was constructed from a number of source tapes, which fell under three categories: bird sounds that Mr. Cage "had recorded in aviaries during the previous two weeks;" a recording of Mr. Cage singing his work Mureau (which is based on the writings of Henry David Thoreau); and recordings of environmental sounds, including the brushing of teeth, someone blowing their nose, typing, [End Page 76] water sounds, etc. The composer reported that he included the recording of himself singing Mureau to make "the birds seem less ridiculous." By and large, the quality of these source recordings is not very good, which makes for some distorted moments in the completed piece. Mr. Cage used chance procedures to instruct the assemblage of these source recordings into twelve "submasters." He then applied chance procedures to determine the manner in which these submasters would be processed, using filters, ring modulation, and other equipment. As Mr. Chadabe reports, "Sometimes John would say something like, 'that's absurd.' Sometimes we would all laugh. Sometimes we were delighted." In performance, Mr. Cage used an 8-input/8-output mixer built for him by Pete Linder in Basil, Switzerland to route the sound to one of eight loudspeakers. The Bird Cage disc released by Electronic Music Foundation is a two-channel mixdown version (by William Blakeney) of the original work. This recording breaks the experience into nine different tracks in order to "allow a listener to pause and find different sections for further listening." I find these breaks to be somewhat jarring to the continuity of the piece. It may have been more effective to produce the recording as one long piece. Not having seen the score for Bird Cage (published by Henmar Press, available through C. F. Peters), it is hard to determine whether Mr. Blakeney may have "stacked the deck" in the sense of shaping it more than originally intended. As an example, the first track starts off with an interchange between Mr. Cage and a talking bird. "What's your name?" the bird asks. "My name is John," replies the composer. This comes off as being perhaps overly cute. Two additional tracks at the end of the disc provide bits of conversation between Mr. Cage, Mr. Chadabe, David Tudor, and others prior to the American premiere of the work at the State University of New York in Albany, 9 September 1973. These recordings were made for Tom DeWitt's film, Bird Cage at Albany. These conversations help to humanize the CD, reminding us that this piece is about people and experience as much as it is about music. The art direction of the disc's packaging is very attractive too, likewise pointing to the enthusiasm surrounding this experience. Bird Cage received its New York City premiere later that year as the finale of "Two Evenings with John Cage" at the new Wooster Street location of The Kitchen. Sautéed mushrooms were provided, as were Bird Cage beer coasters (a reproduction of which is included in the disc tray of the CD) for the potables. Personally, I prefer the densely rich vitality of HPSCHD, or the fast-edit excitement of Williams Mix. In comparison to these works, Bird Cage is somewhat static and atmospheric. However, both in the liner notes and in the conversational track at the end of the disc, Mr. Chadabe reports what an enjoyable time he had in his involvement with the piece. This joy comes through clearly in John Cage: Bird Cage, not only providing a document of what this composition is, but also a vignette of who John Cage was. Reviewed by James Bohn ------- Cage: "Did you have a good breakfast?" Parrot: "What's your name?" Cage: "My name is John. What's your name?" P: "What's your name?" C: "I told you. My name is John." P: "My name is Harvey" C: "That's what I thought. That's what it says up here. It says your name is Harvey." P: "What's your name?" C: "My name is John." This conversation between human and avian takes place at the beginning of one of the many tapes that are played through eight loudspeakers during the course of the entire evening that constitutes the "live electronics" performance of Bird Cage in a open space with people coming and going (the setup is similar to those of his pieces Musiccircus, certain performances of his Variations IV, and other works). The tapes for the live performance are played according to a score. The original tapes were made from three masters which consisted of one tape of bird sounds recorded by the composer in 1972 at various aviaries, one master tape of the composer singing and chanting his work Mureau, based on Thoreau's writings, and one master tape of environmental sounds (brushing teeth, water sounds, etc.). These three masters were then placed on eight "source" tape recorders according to a complex timing score -- "Put tape C3 on tape recorder 7 after 72 seconds," and so on. And then the eight sources were then mixed and matrixed at various quasi-random time intervals. This resulted in 12 sub-masters, which were in turn mixed and processed through various signal modifying devices, such as ring modulators, according to another chance procedure, so that the signal processing and the original sounds were independent in timing from each other. The surprising results were independent of the "taste" of any of the participants. Chanting, singing, and birds processed and unmodified appear all over the fantastical space, along with water sounds, squeezing electronic sounds, granular ring modulations. There were several influences that inspired the title of the piece: Cage remarked once that "When people who don't know me telephone and ask how I spell my name, I never spell C-A-G-E, I simply say Cage like a bird cage. So it was a title ready at hand." Shortly before he conceived of the piece, says Cage, "I got very interested in birds ... I was returning from the Carolinas. And choosing to drive on a back road ... went along a beautiful highway, I think it's number 9 in Delaware and came to one of the national wildlife refuges called Bombay Hook. There weren't any people in charge there; it was the weekend of course. But there were no rules either. There was nothing about doing this or doing that. There was simply dirt roads so that you couldn't go very fast. And you went by pools of all sizes. I was many different kinds of birds, it was an extraordinary experience and I also found some mushrooms." One final "coincidence" was reported by author-musician Don Gillespie of C.F. Peters. Cage appeared at the publishers one day in 1972, excited that he had found a colorful orange, black and white beer coaster with the image of a singing dove in a bird cage from a working-class bar in Philadelphia called "The Bird Cage." Eventually permission was obtained from the owners of the bar to use the image on the published score. ~ All Music Guide