Altflöte in G (An interview with John Cage at 67th)

“An interview with John Cage at 67th” is a commission by the ensemble Enigma linked to the theme of artistic manifestos.

For the realization of the work “An interview with John Cage at 67th” I have used two basic materials. On the one hand, an extract of the interview conducted by Miroslav Sebestik to John Cage for the documentary “Écoute” (Listen), in his studio in New York in 1991. It is a fragment of an interview whose interviewer is neither seen nor heard, so we could say that it is more of a monologue than a dialogue. The speech is improvised and disorganized. But paradoxically, if the substratum seems chaotic, the essence of the interview is purely Cagian and therefore coherent. If one closes one's eyes and listens to the silences, the noise (or sound) of the street, the pauses between sentences, the loose words floating in the air and the laughter, it seems that we are before one more of his performances recalling the famous “Conference on nothing”.

On the other hand, the second material I have used are the first four frequencies (notes) of a Bonang Barung of the Gamelan Kyai Kaduk Manis that follows the Pelog tuning system (604Hz, 682Hz, 732Hz, 840Hz), Cage's fetish instrument both for its use of cyclic time and for its timbral derivative in the prepared pianos. These four untempered notes (arranged in five distinct octaves) are the only harmonic material in the piece and will be used by both the electronics and the four instruments. The four sounds are permuted throughout the piece in 24 different ways without ever repeating themselves. We hear the same sound object in 24 different ways as if it were a polyhedron.