AV Festival 08 announces the UK premiere of John Cage 1960's legendary Variations VII
AT BALTIC CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
Friday, February 29th 2008
One of the highlights of AV Festival 08 will be at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art on Friday February 29th. It is the first ever restaging in the UK of John Cage's Variations VII, a work rarely heard since it was first performed at 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, held in October 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City.
"My project is simple to describe. It is a piece of music, indeterminate in form and detail ..........using as sound sources only those sounds which are in the air at the moment of performance, picked up via the communication bands, telephone lines, microphones together with, instead of musical instruments, a variety of household appliances and frequency generators....... they produce a situation different than anyone could have pre-imagined."
(John Cage on Variations VII, 1966)
Variations VII is one of Cage's key works of the 1960s which has gained an almost mythical, legendary status.
This new performance of Variations VII at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art will extend the Cage legacy by combining the equipment used in the 60's version with what is available now in telecommunications and audio technology. The performers will be Japanese American composer, Atau Tanaka, who has just taken up the post of Chair of Digital Media at Newcastle University, and Newcastle-based experimental music ensemble, :zoviet*france: (Ben Ponton & Mark Warren).
Tickets
Tickets for this event are priced at £6 and are very limited. Tickets will go on sale in January. If you would like to be informed when tickets go on sale, or be put on a waiting list for tickets, please email info@avfestival.co.uk with "Variations VII Tickets" in the subject line.
EXHIBITION & FILM SCREENING
Friday 29 February - Sunday 2 March 10:00 - 18:00 Exhibition & Film, Variations VII BALTIC/Free
To accompany the special performance of Variations VII, the documentary film John Cage Variations VII from the 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering series will be screened in BALTIC's cinema and an audio recording from the original performance in 1966 will be presented in the Cube space at BALTIC.
The film was produced by Billy Klüver and Julie Martin for Experiments in Art and Technology and directed by Barbro Schultz Lundestam. A DVD of the film, which also has an audio recording of the full 1966 recording, will be available for sale.
Background
9 Evenings, organised by the foundation Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), were a series of performances by ten New York artists working with engineers from Bell Telephone Laboratories, to create works which incorporated new technology. The artists included Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, Robert Whitman, Steve Paxton, Alex Hay, Lucinda Childs and Öyvind Fahlström.
Cage's Variations VII was an attempt to turn the entire 69th Regiment Armory into a reception and broadcast space.
"Variations VII along with two preceding works, Variations V and VI, are unique in the extensive use of electronics and in particular use of photocells as a trigger device for activating and distributing sound."
The work is a highly unusual composition in that it does not have the meticulous instructions and scoring concepts he used in his earlier Variations works.
E.A.T. engineer Billy Klüver describes the original performance:
"For "Variations VII" John Cage wanted to "use sounds available at the time of the performance". 10 telephone lines were installed in the Armory by New York Telephone Company. He had lines open in various places in New York City including Luchow's, the Aviary, the 14th Street Con Edison electric power station, the ASPCA lost dog kennel, The New York Times press room, and Merce Cunningham's studio. Magnetic pickups on the telephone receivers fed these sound sources into the sound manipulation system. Cage also had 6 contact microphones on the performing platform itself and 12 contact microphones on household appliances such as a blender, a juicer, a toaster, a fan, etc. He also had 20 radio bands, 2 television bands, and 2 Geiger counters. Oscillators and a pulse generator completed the sound sources. Thirty photocells and lights were mounted at ankle level around the performance area, which activated the different sound sources as the performers moved around. Cage invited the audience to move around freely and many stood near the performance area."
A DVD of Variations VII is being produced by E.A.T. and Artpix and will be available for the first time at the Festival.
Variations VII by John Cage: Presentation of October 15, 1966 / produced by Billy Klüver, 32 min., 19 s is an audio recording of a performance of "Variations VII," presented within the framework of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering at the 69th Regiment Armory (New York, N.Y.), October 15 and 16, 1966. Courtesy The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering fonds.