Cast
Yoko Ono
Christian Wolff
Irvine Arditti
Steffen Schleiermacher
Toshio Hosokawa
Mayumi Miyata
Calvin Tomkins
Salome Kammer
Program notes
A tribute to John Cage, on the occasion of the American composer's 100th birthday.
John Cage was a composer, a musician, a wordsmith, a poet, a musical philosopher, a Zen Buddhist, a collector of mushrooms. Yet, to enumerate the different fields for which he was passionate about does not suffice to grasp the originality and impact John Cage had on his pairs during the 20th century. He developped an aleatory method of composition, invented the prepared piano (i.e. a piano that has had its sound altered by placing objects onto the strings), explored compositional technics based upon the shifting of rythmical phases, introduced the audience to the sound of silence with his well-known piece 4'33''...
Allan Miller and Paul Smaczny directed a fascinating documentary which includes interviews with the master, with Cage's friends, musicologists, fellow composers, musicians, along with excerpts from musical performances and miscellaneous archive footages in order to get closer to the incredible personality of the American composer, whose openness to the unexplored and his brilliant creativity still invits us to push back the limits of possibility.
