The Cage Project

Cédric Tiberghien and Matthias Schack-Arnott
Perth Concert Hall
Perth Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

The third and final week of Iain Grandage’s penultimate Perth Festival leans heavily into two of his strengths as an artist and curator: namely, First Nations performance (including the Australian Dance Theatre’s new work Tracker and BIGhART’s work-in-progress showing of Punkaliyarra) and contemporary music (with The Cage Project, Kronos Quartet and Linda May Han Oh’s Ephemeral Echoes all being performed on successive nights at Perth Concert Hall). One senses that having programmed some large-scale crowd-pleasers in the opening week (as well as the series of concerts by Björk that close the festival this weekend and continue next week), Grandage has reserved some of the works that are closest to his heart for this phase of the festival, when most of the big-ticket items have already landed (and mostly sold out).

 

The Cage Project is a collaboration between French pianist Cédric Tiberghien and Melbourne-based percussionist and sound artist Matthias Schack-Arnott, whose companion piece Everywhen was performed at PICA last week. Both are solo performance works for a bespoke form of percussion orchestra which is also a composite visual art object. The works can thus be seen (and heard) as inventing a new genre of musical and visual assemblage, which adds the fourth (and performative) dimension of time to the usual three dimensions of sculpture. As such, Schack-Arnott follows in the footsteps of Cage himself, who was also deeply interested in visual and performance art, and who accepted his former teacher Schönberg’s description of him as an inventor rather than a composer (though like Schönberg he was surely both).

 

In the case of The Cage Project, the musical and material substratum for Schack-Arnott’s visual-sonic assemblage is Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano. The original work was composed between 1946 and 1948, and Cage’s invention involved inserting found objects like screws, bolts and pieces of rubber or plastic onto or between the piano strings, so that some notes still sound like a piano while others sound more like plucked strings, bells, chimes, or gongs, or even lose their original frequency and sound like unidentifiable and untuned objects being tapped, rattled or struck. 

 

As for the music itself: at this stage in his career, Cage had not yet fully embraced his later aleatory aesthetic (although there’s still a crucial element of chance involved in the choice and positioning of the objects inserted into the piano, notwithstanding Cage’s detailed instructions). Each of the twenty pieces – sixteen ‘sonatas’ and four ‘interludes’ – is highly structured (the interludes are a little freer), with the musical proportions of each piece (both internally and in relation to the whole work) having a complex mathematical pattern based on randomly chosen numbers and fractions.

 

All this might sound rather cerebral, but the effect is engagingly playful, richly emotional and deeply meditative. Cage was inspired by the Indian philosophy of eight emotional rasa ‘flavours’ in art, ranging from the more ‘negative’ or ‘black’ emotions to the more ‘positive’ or ‘white’ ones, and leading to a ninth navarasa or state of tranquility. In terms of Western music, one hears echoes of Debussy and Ravel, Bartók and Stravinksy, Schönberg and Webern, as well as modern jazz – all played on what sounds like a Balinese gamelan orchestra with a conventionally tuned (if somewhat note-restricted) Western piano as part of the mix – and the more one surrenders to the experience, the more one is transported on a musical and spiritual journey. 

 

In this case, the experience was heightened by Schack-Arnott’s appropriately inventive addition to Cage’s original instrumentation. As with Everywhen, this took the form of a visual and sonic object that hung suspended above the performer and the piano, rotating slowly and randomly in response to currents of air generated by fans, and looking a bit like a huge chandelier or Alexander Calder mobile – or perhaps a revolving space station from Kubrick’s 2001. The structure consisted of horizontal metal bars connected by wires, with various sound-objects attached like bronze plates, metal tubes, wooden planks and granite tiles; these were individually struck by mysterious robotic devices that were invisibly connected to and activated by the prepared piano keys (don’t ask me how). The entire apparatus was touch-sensitive in relation to Tiberghien’s playing and resonated without amplification in the characteristically warm yet detailed acoustics of the Perth Concert Hall. An additional layer of visual dynamics was provided by the lighting, which slowly shifted from overheads to floor lights and back again as the performance progressed, variously illuminating the revolving structure, the performer and piano, and the walls and ceiling – as well as resonating with the Festival theme of Djinda (stars) – until the final sonata saw Tiberghien’s face framed by a single light and surrounded by darkness. 

 

Every aspect of The Cage Project reflected a deep sense of collaboration and mutual trust between Tiberghien and Schack-Arnott, as well as their shared love and understanding of Cage’s original work. The sense of dialogue between artists and across artforms as well as across time and space reminded me of Rilke’s poem ‘Lovesong’ about souls ‘swaying in time’ and ‘vibrating in sympathy’. We need such works in troubled times, and I applaud both the artists and Grandage for having faith in them.

 

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Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he wasthe lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.