Toni Morrison isn’t a figure one would typically associate with John Cage, but her 1993 Paris Review interview echoed Cage’s sentiments about “wastefulness” in art: “You must practice thrift in order to achieve that luxurious quality of wastefulness... I’ve always felt that that peculiar sense of hunger at the end of a piece of art – a yearning for more – is really very, very powerful.” Cage himself, quoted in the 2015 Avant Music Festival’s program, hoped that the change from “pinch-penny mental attitudes to courageous wastefulness” would become as prevalent in the arts as it is in nature. Along those lines, his late choral music is spare, seemingly simple: quiet, almost fragile sounds scattered over silences (and vice versa). When rendered by Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble this past weekend, the choral works were all-enveloping yet frail and vulnerable, like a beloved blanket fraying at the seams.
The concert consisted of choral music written during the last 13 years of Cage’s life, starting with the two short works Ear for EAR (antiphonies) of 1983 and Four² of 1990. In the first, countertenor Patrick Fennig stood alone on the stage and eked out the softest of syllables made from the letters in the word “ear” (“ra”, “re”) while the other vocalists, hidden backstage and behind the audience, echoed and answered him, in the traditional Roman Catholic antiphonal style. Afterwards, they all migrated to the stage for Four², during which they sang combinations of letters from the word “Oregon”, once again in delicate overlapping tones. And in the fourth piece – Five – the layers were even more spread out, as there were five vocalists performing rather than twelve, as before. Scored for five musicians on any instrument or voice, this piece is also brief (five minutes long, consisting of five lines for each part), with austere harmonies and expansive gaps in sound.
Hymns & Variations was composed in 1979 using subtractive techniques and chance operations on two hymns by William Billings, an early American choral composer. In Ekmeles’s performance, baritone Jeffrey Gavett conducted the other eleven vocalists through the 20 minute work at a brisk tempo, through the stark vertical stacks of pitches (and subsequent sharp bursts of silence) to the miraculous consonant finish. The ten “variations” – five on Billings’s “Old North”; five on his “Heath” – melted together into a beautiful strain of sounds and silences that came across as accidentally (yet stunningly) sacred. Throughout this and the other four works of the program, the vocalists struck tuning forks against their bodies and held them to their ears, reminding the audience of how randomized and difficult the music must be no matter how pretty or playful it sounded.