Vinyl: ~RARE~John Cage David Tudor Indeterminacy New Aspect Of Form... 1959 2LP box set

VERY RARE IN THIS CONDITION. NEW NEVER OPENED, NEVER PLAYED BOX SET. ABSOLUTELY MINT

John Cage

David Tudor

Indeterminacy

New Aspect Of Form In Instrumental and Electronic Music

Folkways Records FT_3704 1959 2X12" 33rpm (USA)

For this by now legendary lecture based on musical principles for speaker and instrumentalist recorded in 1959, the composer assembled enlightening and highly entertaining incidents from his experience and that of his friends ("My aunt said, I love this washing machine more than your uncle"), parables and stories from ancient texts, from secondhand sources (the wonderful story of going out of Amsterdam backwards) and from spontaneous insight (watching the people outside a window accompanied by the music inside). These now well-known stories and anecdotes were then arranged in quasi-random order and each was read at varying speeds to conform to the limit of one minute--thus, some proceed slowly with long silences, and others rush along, ignoring normal inflections to meet the deadline. Cage manages to do this with clarity and an amazing verbal skill based on an appealing non-projected calmness or centered-ness and a warm, peaceful voice. Each story is treated with equal import(ance), the complexity of their interrelation and meaning left to the listener. Simultaneously, Cage's instrumental works that use indeterminant procedures (Water Walk, Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Williams Mix, etc.) are performed on piano and live electronics by David Tudor seated in another studio and not listening to Cage's voice. The indeterminant coincidences between the stories and music are constantly surprising and even shocking. Tudor's mastery of the conceptual and practical aspects of Cage's scores are breathtaking. At times, the voice even becomes obscured and that is accepted in this musical situation which attempts to replicate "nature in its manner of working," and the way thoughts, observations, and stimuli all intermix within the mind and also within daily living--the way that samsara (the physical world of causation and appearances) and nirvana (transcendent realization) are considered interwoven in most forms of Buddhism.

Tracklist

A Indeterminacy: New Aspect Of Form In Instrumental And Electronic Music 22:30

B Indeterminacy: New Aspect Of Form In Instrumental And Electronic Music 22:30

C Indeterminacy: New Aspect Of Form In Instrumental And Electronic Music 22:30

D Indeterminacy: New Aspect Of Form In Instrumental And Electronic Music 22:30

Design [Cover Design] – Ronald Clyne

Performer [Music] – David Tudor

Performer [Reading] – John Cage

Photography – David Gahr

Producer – John Cage, Moses Asch

Includes booklet.

Notes:

Late in September in 1958 I was in Stockholm in a hotel. I set about writing the present lecture which I was obliged to give a week later at the Brussels Fair. I recalled a remark made years before by David Tudor that I should make a talk that was nothing but stories. The idea was appealing when he gave it to me but I had never acted on it. A few weeks before, in Darmstadt, Karlheinz Stockhausen had said, "I'll publish your Brussels talk in Die Reihe." I replied, "You'd better wait and see what it is I write." He said, "No matter what it is, I'll publish it." My intention in putting 90 stories together in an unplanned way is to suggest that all things, sounds, stories (and, by extension, beings) are related, and that this complexity is more evident when it is not over-simplified by an idea of relationship in one person's mind. Most of the stories are things that happened that stuck in my mind. Others I read in books and remembered, those for instance, from Kwang-Tse and Sri Ramakrishna. The 2nd, 15th, 16th, 46th, and 75th stories are to be found somewhere in the literature surrounding Zen. David Tudor: piano, whistles, tape machines, and amplified slinky.

David Tudor plays material from his part of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58), using tracks from the Fontana Mix(1958-59) as noise elements where these are notated in Concert