COMING UP!

Chance Encounters with John Cage: CURATORIAL COMPOSING with ED McKEON

May 21, 3–4pm ET

Free, on Zoom

Join us for a discussion on "curatorial composing," focusing on works by John Cage, Heiner Goebbels, Pauline Oliveros, and others.

“Curatorial composing” is curatorial producer and researcher Ed McKeon’s term for the way John Cage shifts attention from musical works to musical encounters, and the consequences that follow. Rather than follow the hierarchical flow of composer, then performer, then listener, curatorial composition distributes the responsibility from that model to a situation in which all are equally present and responsible for the meaning of an encounter. This means that these compositions are neither anchored in historical time nor suited to “Historically Informed Performance” in the sense of a reconstruction.

These pieces (and we as listener-observers) are always undergoing change. Curatorial composing is post-canonic. It invites us to experience and understand historical time and historical significance differently.

Exemplified in many ways by Cage, this approach means that musical composition need no longer be limited to organizing sound, but can extend to text, typography, movement, visual elements ,etc. Contrary to visual art histories in which visual art loses its “medium specificity” to become “post-conceptual,” Cage shows that music can occur in and across any medium.

Cage was not alone in this. We’ll chat about the work of Heiner Goebbels, and perhaps as well about Pauline Oliveros and Jani Christou, among others. Curatorial composing marks a shift in historical ontology, and of how we might understand historical time (and the relation of "history" and "temporality").

Cage / Joyce: Finnegans Wake

Thursday, June 11, 7pm

In person at Time & Space Limited, Hudson, NY

Tickets: $15 general admission / $12.50 TSL members / $8 students

Join us for an evening featuring film excerpts of One Little Goat Theatre's FINNEGANS WAKE project, plus a performance of Joyce songs by John Cage.

Joyce is good. He is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him.

—Gertrude Stein

This special event comes just in time for Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce! . . .

Since 2023, ”Toronto’s enterprising One Little Goat Theatre Company" (The New York Times) has been filming all 17 chapters (30 Hours) of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake before live audiences in various cities and locations, screening and releasing each chapter as completed, marking this as the first "audio-video book" of Joyce’s extraordinary novel. They will complete the film project in time for the 90th anniversary of the book’s publication, May 4, 2029.

John Cage loved Finnegans Wake and created multiple works engaging with it, from what became a beloved staple of the Cunningham Dance Company, Roaratorio, to his several “writings through” of Finnegans Wake performance texts, to individual songs.

The John Cage Trustinvites you to an evening at Time & Space Limitedfeaturing excerpts from the first five filmed chapters of One Little Goat Theatre’s monumental Finnegans Wake project, presented by Director Adam Seelig and featuring virtuousic peformances by Irish-Canadian actor Richard Harte. Intended to be heard as much as read, Joyce’s 628-page novel is essentially impossible to read, and yet Dublin-born actor Richard Harte has a remarkable knack for it. The evening will also include a performance of a set of John Cage songs related to Finnegans Wake, performed by soprano Jaclyn Hopping,accompanied by John Cage Trust Executive Director Jeffrey Lependorf, who will also join Adam Seelig in conversation.

Finnegans Wake (1939) is that very incomprehensibility that anyone can understand because Joyce’s notoriously gnarly dream-novel is oddly, absurdly, obsessively funny. It is, in short, a comedy, a comedy that, in Joyce’s words, “is all so simple. If anyone doesn’t understand a passage, all [they] need do is read it aloud.

Tickets