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John Cage's Song Books Score (1995)

While appreciative of Cage’s work as both a visual artist and a maker of esthetically special books (such as Notations [1968]), I’d not until recently come to consider Cage’s scores apart from their initial purposes as instructions for performance. In this respect, the masterpiece, which is really one of the most extraordinary books of its kind produced by any composer ever, is Song Books. Published in 1970 in three volumes (the first subtitled “Solos for Voice 3-58,” the second “Solos for Voice 59-92,” and a third of “Instructions”), 8 1/2” high and 11” wide, spiral-bound, it is available from Cage’s principal music publisher C. F. Peters for the curious sum of $207.05 (which does not include the fees required should it ever be recorded or performed before a paying audience).

What the score contains is a wealth of inventive instructions that can be read apart from musical realization, which is to say that the Song Books can be appreciated as a book. The instructions fall into four groups: “1) song; 2) song using electronics; 3) theater; 4) theater using electronics.” By “electronics” Cage means “wireless throat microphones [that] permit the amplification and transformation of vocal sounds. Contact microphones amplify non-vocal sounds, e.g. activities on a table of a typewriter, etc.” Imagine it. Typically, Cage does not require that the entire score be performed. “Given a total performance time-length, each singer may make a program that will fill it.”

Some of the instructions depend upon the clear template provided in the third volume. For instance, “Solo for Voice 3” opens with this instruction for the singer: “Using the map of Concord given, go from Fair Haven Hill (H7) down the river by boat and then inland to the house beyond Blood’s (B8). Turn the map so that the path you take suggests a melodic line (read up and down from left to right). The relation of this line to voice range is free and this relation may be varied. The tempo is free.” In other words, the performer is asked to sing approximate lines on a map; the reader can hear such lines in his or her own head.

For texts, Cage provides sequences of words drawn from primarily Henry David Thoreau’s Journal but also from Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, Buckminster Fuller, Marcel Duchamp, and (for the penultimate song) himself. Sometimes the words are calligraphed and attached to notes; other times, they appear set horizontally across the large pages. Sometimes changing Letraset typography in style and size mid-sentence, Cage advises, “The different type-faces may be interpreted as changes in intensity, quality, dynamics. Space on the page is left for the performer to inscribe the vocal path chosen from the map.” For all the deviance from traditional notations (beginning with the absence of musical staves), these instructions are nonetheless clear.

Other sections have conventional staves, sometimes with lines of familiar notes (in the G-clef), and other times with words from the sources noted before. “Solo for Voice 45” has eighteen pages of separate clusters of only notes which “may be used separately from the other solos by a singer or shared by two to eighteen singers to provide a program of an agreed upon length.” If the latter, one recurring favorite holds that “the best form of government is no government at all.” When the words are inscribed into staves, as in “Solo for Voice 12,” Cage writes phrases meant to be spoken in a rough time-line prefaced with this advice:

Any amount of the material may be sung (including none). No part once sung is to be repeated. Each page has six systems [staves]. The time-length of each system is free. . . . Notes are of different sizes: generally small, medium, and large. A small note is either ppp, pp, p in the dynamic range or short in duration or both. A medium note is either mp, mf in the dynamic range or medium in duration or both. A large note is either f, ff, fff in the dynamic range or long in duration or both. The possible interpretations are many.

What Cage made are parts that are infinitely combinable.

Another form of Song Books scoring has dots appearing in four channels between five horizontal lines, running from end to end for successive pages. In “Solo for Voice 11,” the dots within these channels congregate toward the top of the crosswise channels. “The vertical space gives voice range. Therefore, the notes are all in the upper range. Use free vocalise.” Above the horizontal lines are numerals that govern the use of electronic accompaniments. “Large numbers (1-64) are to be related to the number of available dials. . . . Smaller numbers (1-12) indicate dial positions as on a chronometer.” Therefore, the appearance of a new number in the continuing horizontal sequence requires some sort of decisive change in sound amplification. You can almost imagine it.

Some pages have just numerals in various typefaces, each preceded by a plus or minus sign. Cage instructs:

To prepare for a performance, the actor will make a numbered list of verbs (actions) and/or nouns (things) not to exceed 64 with which he or she is willing to be involved and which are theatrically feasible (those may include stage properties, clothes, etc.; actions may be “real” or mimed, etc.).

If the performers make less than 64 options, they should interpret the scored numbers by consulting I Ching tables that Cage provides in the third volume. He continues: “The minus and plus signs may be given any significance that the performer finds useful. For instance, a minus sign may mean “beginning with” or “taking off,” etc.; a plus sign may mean “going on” or putting on, etc.” For all the allowance of variation, the indeterminate instructions are designed to produce musical results that will strike sophisticated ears as uniquely Cagean.

In another scored structure, the top half is the mirror image of its bottom half. In the middle of one of these, “Solo for Voice 33,” is a text in French (from Erik Satie). The shape functions as a prescription for the production of sound. “Let the upper and lower extremes for the symmetrical shape relate to the upper and lower extremes of voice register. Let horizontal space relate to time.” This solo, unlike most others, has a prescribed duration, in this case of two minutes and thirty seconds. Some solos depend upon breath inhaled and exhaled (and thus electronically amplified). As some depend upon the map of Concord noted before, others must be seen with a line portrait of Thoreau that is bound into the third volume. From time to time Cage even encourages performers to draw upon such earlier scores of his as Atlas Eclipticalis (1961-62) or Winter Music (1957). “Solo for Voice 32” has a strictly theatrical instruction that is simply written: “Go off-stage at a normal speed, hurrying back somewhat later.” You need not read music to appreciate this book, though you must be willing to follow directions and cross-references.

He concludes specific suggestions with the advice that “a virtuoso performance will include a wide variety of styles of singing and vocal production,” the counter-conventional form of each part thus contributing to the counter-conventional theme of the whole, both of which are designed to encourage not one vocal possibility but many. Produced in the wake of Notations, which was also an anthology of possibilities, Song Books becomes the richest introduction to Cage’s creative inventions of the 1950s and 1960s. Lest his politics be mistaken, he proposes early in the piece posting not the red flag of Communism but the equally traditional “black flag of Anarchy.”

Some version of the Song Books should be made available in a more economical edition, much as classical scores are reprinted in bookstore “trade” editions. It is historically important, not only because no one was writing scores like this before Cage began, but also because many have done so since. One reason for ignorance of this score is that recordings of it are scarce. Joan La Barbara taped only three sections, while the Schola Cantorum Stuttgart’s realizations of a few other parts accompany a Wergo recording of Cage’s declaiming Empty Words. American Music/Theater Group’s (Neely Bruce’s) evening-length Song Books production, which I saw at Wesleyan University early in 1988, ranks in my mind among the great Cage performances; I’d love to have a recording along with a videotape.

My general sense is that the greatest Cagean compositions are the maximal pieces. Especially compared to other scores of his, which often follow only a single structural line, Song Books is a wealth of uniquely Cagean processes that page by page offer a succession of surprises. That is one reason why it can be read with pleasure.