"If I had to Live my Life Over Again, I would Be a Botanist": John Cage’s Mycology Collection

From the Sights and Sounds of San Francisco to the Scene in Santa Cruz: The Cage and Cunningham Company’s Northern California Tour (1968)

“Isn’t that beautiful? It’s just gorgeous. That’s perfect.” exclaimed John Cage when he listened to the sound of a boat whistling in an uncomfortably high tessitura. [1] Cage, Gordon Mumma, David Tudor, and the Merce Cunningham dance company were in San Francisco for a residency between October 14 and November 3, 1968. Their aim was to create a new multimedia work titled Assemblage, which investigates new possibilities between dance and music in the virtual spaces of film. The grant came from the National Endowment for the Arts and Ford Foundation while the local public media outlet and television station KQED commissioned the film under the direction of Richard Moore. The film combined two different ideas. The first was to capture the newly gentrified manufacturing environment of Ghirardelli Square, and the second was to document the dance company exploring the “restored, prettified,” and “mall-like precinct with restaurants, boutiques, galleries, and promenades.” [2] 


John Cage (top left) Gordon Mumma (bottom left) and David Tudor (bottom right) enjoying the collaboration on the Assemblage score at their provisional San Francisco studio. Photos taken by James Klosty, 1968. 

Cage, Mumma, and Tudor collaborated on the music. They used samples recorded around San Francisco using six sound categories including, “sounds near sea level, at high altitude (transformed through Tudor’s Rainforest equipment that literally passes the sound through other substances, sheets of metal, wood, etc., changing its quality accordingly), animal life (‘untransformed because they are poetic by themselves’), any sound materials modulated electronically to pulse and sound percussive, speech, and Cage's thunder recording.” [3] Although the recordings were mostly provided by Mumma and the transformations of the sounds can be heard by Tudor, another aspect of the score that is apparent are the blatant silences–a compositional tool most commonly associated with Cage. When visiting their studio, the art critic Robert Commanday observed Mumma asking, “Should we fade this gradually into the seagull thing or should we have a break?” Naturally Cage replied, “A break. We should regain our sense of time” [4] The dance and music were asynchronously created, which was a typical method of the Cage and Cunningham collaboration during this period, but the final product was less than pleasing to the company. KQED spliced and fragmented the score and dance, implementing their own artistic freedoms to the project. The company enjoyed their time in the nice weather during the late fall months of October and November and the composers appreciated each other’s companionship while creating a new sound collage. [5]   

After the filming ended on November 3, the company had taken a two–week tour and performed in mostly coastal California cities including Berkeley, Los Angeles, and La Jolla. Santa Cruz was the ensemble's first stop and where this story begins. [6] The company embarked on their voyage of the Bay Area following a two–day break and prepared for a performance at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium on November 7, 1968. This two–thousand seat 1940s mission-style and Art Deco inspired venue, provided the setting for the company’s production of their new repertoire. They staged three works, Winterbranch (1964), Rainforest (1968), and Walkaround Time (1968). The audience observed a wide variety of activities which included live and recorded musical improvisations, eccentric ballet dancing, and stage designs conceived by well-known visual artists of the day.


The program for the Merce Cunningham and Dance Company at Civic Auditorium November 7, 1968. The same group that collaborated on Assemblage (Cage, Mumma, and Tudor) performed as the music ensemble for the Cunningham Dance Company. The John Cage Mycology Collection. Special Collections and Archives, University Library, University of California, Santa Cruz. UA 39 Box 3.  


A poster advertisment featuring a Jasper Johns iconic Target painting for the Merce Cunningham and Dance Company at Civic Auditorium November 7, 1968. The John Cage Mycology Collection. Special Collections and Archives, University Library, University of California, Santa Cruz. UA 39 Box 3.  

Winterbranch was the first work on the program and was based on the act of bodies falling. The staging represents pitch black night with the occasional flashing of lights capturing the moves of the dancers dressed in black. Robert Rauschenberg created a “monster” which was drug across the stage while the track that accompanied the work was La Monte Young’s early sonic experiment 2 Sounds (1960). This compositions first sound is made by scraping a tin can against a pane of glass and the second sound is made by abrading a gong with a drumstick. Combined and amplified at a high volume as the piece is instructed to be performed, the effect can be truly horrifying. The controversial work provoked eschatological discourse from diverse audiences including in London where they thought it was about bombed out cities; in Germany audiences likened the work to concentration camps; and in Tokyo, the atom bomb. [7]

Described as a “creature dance set in an otherworldly jungle, inhabited by untamed solitary beings who meet in strange, sensual, inexplicable, mysterious, sometimes hostile encounters and part, much as animals might do in the wild,” the second piece on the program was Rainforest. [8] The work’s influences included Colin Turnbull’s 1961 book, The Forest People, an ethnographic study of the Mbuti pygmies of the then-Belgian Congo. Cunningham related this to the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest he had known growing up as a young child. The set design featured Andy Warhol’s “Silver Clouds,” or helium-filled Mylar pillows, that floated freely around the stage as the dancers moved around cupping their hands as if they were thirsty for water. [9] Tudor provided the sound score which was his first piece for the Cunningham company. [10]  In this work, he used his newly developed rainforest equipment to explore the resonance characteristics of physical objects. He also investigated sound by amplifying specific materials with contact mics. The piece takes its name from the Cunningham work but any correlation between the music and dance is coincidental although the sounds sources do resemble jungle noises. [11]

Perhaps the most metaphysical and elaborate work presented by the company was Walkaround Time. The choreography was influenced by digital technology. Jasper Johns created the intricate stage design modeled after Marcel Duchamp’s well-known work, “Large Glass” (The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even; 1915–23). The company moved transparent plastic boxes filled with replicated materials from the Duchamp glass art work around the stage until they reproduced the same arrangement as the original composition. The music ... for nearly an hour... (1968) was composed by David Behrman. He used another of Duchamp’s glass paintings titled, “To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour” (1918) as an inspiration for his own title (Vaughn, 164). Further, Behrman overlapped spoken texts from the writings in Duchamp’s “Green Box diaries” for the compositional basis. [12]

Although Cage remains somewhat absent from this account during the November 7, 1968 Cunningham exhibition at the Civic Auditorium, his ideas impacted many of these composers and performers. On tour, he was involved in many activities including performing works as improvising musician for the Cunningham Ensemble. He gave lectures at universities and explored local cultures and landscapes. In the following sections I will detail his residency at the University of California, Santa Cruz and explore his experiences which led to his donation of this major collection.

References:

Beal, Amy C. ““A Short Stop Along the Way”: Each-Thingness and Music for Merce.” Liner notes to Music for Merce 1952–2009. New York: New World Records, 2009.

Brown, Carolyn. Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

Commanday, Robert. “Composing With the Camera.” In San Francisco Examiner. November 10, 1968, 31–32.

Driscoll, John and Matt Rogalsky. “David Tudor's "Rainforest": An Evolving Exploration of Resonance.” In Leonardo Music Journal, 14 (2004): 25–30.

The Merce Cunningham Trust. 

Mumma, Gordon. Email correspondence: “Assemblage work-photos.” September 5, 2020.

Slayton, Jeff. Email correspondence: “Cage and Cunningham 1968 Northern California Winter Tour” August 21, 2020.

Unpublished Press Release. “Three Public Events Scheduled Next Week, for Santa Cruz: Performance of Avant-Garde Dance Troupe 10-22-1968.” November 5, 1968. 

I would like to thank the founder and former head of special collections at the University of California, Santa Cruz Rita Bottoms for sending me the unpublished program of Cage’s 1968 visit to the campus. This program helped me piece together a specific timeline of the Santa Cruz tour. One of the other major events that happened was a screening of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s two–hour film, 498 Third Avenue in the Natural Science Lecture Hall on November 5, 1968. 

Vaughn, David. Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, Melissa Harris ed. New York: Aperture, 1997.
 

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