Word: cage
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...return to the circus takes Lola backstage to her dressing room, a cage behind which pass actors staging her childhood. The camera follows them back and forth, passing in the middle of each are the sick, static Lola, and provoking a second flashback. In it Lola, a child still mourning her father's death, accompanies her mother aboard ship only to discover her affair with an officer. The sweeping camera movements which follow this child through the ship and express her curiosity and longing, ironically stress the objects and walls that confine her movement through the cramped lower deck...
Nevertheless, the return to the circus finds her in her ultimate imprisonment, at the top of the circus in a cage. Her dive into a tiny net is the last necessary step in the circus act (which is also the act of re-creating her life)' the audience demands it as part of the romantic spectacle. Since it might cause her death, Lola's dive is also a potential act of suicide and escape, the most desperate of all romantic acts. At the same time the ringmaster is forcing her to jump. As he counts to three, the frame tilts...
...went last week at the premiere of Cage's latest musical production, Hpschd. Scored for one electronic harpsichord, six conventional harpsichords, eight movie projectors, 52 tape recorders and 64 slide projectors, Hpschd is an eye-and ear-boggling kinetic phantasmagoria that turned out, in one sense at least, to be Cage's most durable work - 41 hours durable, to be exact. As usual, his operating premise is that art is more of a manifestation of nature than an expression of man. This means, to Cage, that a work ideally should be as based on random chance...
...Experience of Things. Cage patterned six of the harpsichord solos after a 200-year-old romp known as Dice Music. Attributed to Mozart, who liked a joke as much as anyone else, Dice Music consists of a waltz theme and a set of variations that are determined in a Cage-like manner, by rolling dice. In Hpschd, Cage embroidered the variations with snippets from works by Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni-even Cage. Each player had seven 20-minute chunks of music to choose from. Once having played, he was free to chat for a while with the listeners...
That it certainly did. An idea of the din can be obtained from a new Nonesuch LP, for which Cage and Hiller prepared a special 21-minute version of Hpschd. To Cage's credit, he makes no claims for beauty in his compositions. In fact, he regards notions like beauty as mere value judgments that have no place in art. "When I produce a happening," he says, "I try my best to remove intention in order that what is done will not oblige the listener in any one way. I don't think we're really interested...