OUT OF CAGE

Simone Beneventi: percussion

Flavio Virzì: electric Guitar

Created: Festival Aperto Reggio Emilia 2011

Of the myriad certainties sedimented in the good sense and fairness of the West – in music as in worldviews – there is not one that John Cage has not turned on its head, seraphically undermined in its very foundations, forced to a complete reconsideration. This quiet subversive left an inescapable legacy that continues to inspire current generations of experimental artists of every sphere.” The performances of Beneventi and Virzì respond to the Cageian philosophy which calls on the performer to co-participate in the completion of the work, even using their own specific instruments for pieces destined otherwise – such as the Suite for Toy Piano played on a set of gongs, or pieces for prepared piano entrusted to electric guitar and a varied range of percussion instruments. These choices bring to the surface the enormous timbric and evocative potential implicit in the original pieces. Other authors, in successive generations, have walked alongside Cage. Though different from each other, and from Cage himself, we see in them the imprint of those are cage destroyers. Finnish composer and visual artist Jukka-Pekka Kervinen (1961) is the author of music of the most diverse currents, an explorer with prejudices, who also works on electronic and techno music projects. So Often Quoted was composed using software that employs an algorithm to analyse the different combination possibilities of a melodic and rhythmic cell and its accents. Warren Burt (1949) is one of the most interesting and creative composers in Australia, and the piece is a tribute to the group of mathematicians who in the early twentieth century went by the pseudonym “Nicolas Bourbuki” and is itself an example of clever use of musical writing employing computer software and mathematical operations. The piece by Larry Polansky (1954), a multifaceted American composer and musicologist, is halfway between randomness and repetitiveness.