Documentary and digital approaches to performing John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra

The premiere of John Cage’s Concert for Piano and orchestra (1957–58) is notorious for being disrupted by the behaviour of the orchestral musicians, decried by Cage as ‘foolish and unprofessional’ (1968, p. 136). Yet, scholarly discussion of the piece has tended to focus on the elaborate notations of the Solo for Piano part, with little attention given to the innovations and peculiarities of the remaining thirteen instrumental parts. The Concert’s formal instructions state that the parts can be played in any combination, including with other pieces, offering seemingly endless performance possibilities. How these possibilities are experienced and operate in practice reveals a great deal about individual and ensemble approaches to performing indeterminate music.

This paper considers performing the Concert from two research angles, drawing on material from a major data collection event with musicians from the ensemble Apartment House. First, using video interviews with the musicians, we explore the creative possibilities of Cage’s notations and how they respond to their complexities and ambiguities, and consider how these perspectives might contribute to a developing performance practice surrounding the work and to the performance of indeterminate music more widely. Second, we present an interactive website app, which allows the user to experiment with layering audio recordings of the separate performance parts to create infinitely variable audio versions of the piece. The resource is designed to offer the user the freedom to explore the heterogeneity of possible realisations, whilst also making clear the interpretative decisions assumed by the musicians and by the research team in developing it. In employing these complementary approaches to examine the Concert as it relates to performance and practice, our aim is to demystify it in the broadest sense: to advance how it is viewed and understood and to provide insights and a range of possibilities to future performers.

Conceptually and methodologically, our research builds on previous studies that investigate the creative processes of performance in ‘contemporary’ musics, (see, e.g., Bayley, 2011; Clarke, Doffman, & Lim, 2013; Clarke, Doffman, & Timmers, 2016) but it develops this work further in two significant ways: by grounding the research historically in detailed analysis of various archival sources relating to Cage’s work and the premiere and subsequent performances of the Concert; and by developing innovative methods to disseminate data and findings in an accessible manner through the website, a unique tool for performative and musicological understanding.