Indeterminacy in the Classroom

 As much as I might like to post about indeterminate processes in pedagogy, this piece is quite literally about John Cage's Indeterminacy in the classroom. I find that this is a wonderful opportunity to explore Cage's indeterminate methods in a very hands-on way. We took liberties, certainly, but liberties that align with Cage's own thinking (at least that is my hope).

For this year's Cage seminar, we used the Peters performance edition of the work, and selected the cards to be used by chance procedures (outlined below). We "rehearsed" once, and established a better flow the second time through. While some might argue that rehearsal nullifies the spontaneity of the piece via chance procedures, I would say that it honors the integrity of the work as a performance piece. Rather than compromise the work, using 12 people instead of one--all of whom are reading someone else's story--renders an "arrangement" of the piece that I think is most effective.

We chose 12 cards (from the "score")--partially due to time constraints--so that we could focus on the process rather than the content. The 90 score cards were kept in order per the instructions/suggestions of the score. The first student used score card #1, and then picked an additional card from a deck of cards. The number on the playing card determined how many score cards would be skipped in order to select one for the next student. That student then picked a playing card, and the process continued until we had 12 cards.

We opted for accompaniment in the form of two to three iPhones on shuffle. Each student had an iPhone or other smart phone with a stop watch function to monitor the time. Only one of the selected score cards was a so-called "attacca" card (meaning its story was a continuation from another card), so Carolyn chose to adjust her card's opening text for clarification by changing "we" to "David Tudor and I". Other performance aspects were followed as closely as possible, most notably trying to keep each card to a minute and to interpret brackets as ten seconds worth of text. Cage's own pronunciation keys proved useful (e.g. "Gnostic" with a hard g).

While we did videotape the realization, the audio by itself is much more effective. Many thanks go to my student Ryan Fossier for extracting the audio and putting it on Soundcloud. We were not able to provide amplification, but strove to "avoid audible strain." I've included the link below for your enjoyment.

MU 552: John Cage Seminar at The Boston Conservatory performs John Cage's Indeterminacy

Many thanks to the students of my Spring 2015 Cage seminar at The Boston Conservatory for their fine work on this project: Michael Bennett, Christina Cheon, Daniel DeSimone, Ryan Fossier, Eri Isomura, Carolyn McCrone, Aaron Newell, Lucian Nicolescu, David Vess, NianShee Yon, Lin Zhang, and Hanhan Zhu.