The musical equivalent of Mark Rothko’s polarizing color field paintings might be a series of notes thrown on the floor.
Because for everyone who ponders if Rothko’s washes of luminescent color on canvas merit the word “art,” there’s someone who similarly wonders if John Cage’s randomized sequences of notes muster themselves into music.
“You can’t believe you’re sitting there,” says Ryan Cockerham, one of two musicians who will present several of Cage’s Variations at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art during the museum’s Art Night Out program on Saturday night. “This is about a challenge.”
Cockerham and fellow musician Er-Gene Kahng both believe this is the first time any of of Variations has been performed in Arkansas. It ties directly into the challenges presented by many of the artists featured in “Van Gogh to Rothko: Masterworks from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.” The temporary exhibit, also containing works by Dali, Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo, is scheduled to remain at the museum through June 1.
Saturday’s program at the museum, subtitled “These Times They Are a’Changin,” explores the confluence of artistic interpretations during the peak of abstract expressionism in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Musically, that sometimes means hearing works from more traditional acts such as Bob Dylan and The Grateful Dead. Those performers will be represented at the Art Night Out event by Voxana and The Schwag, respectively. The latter band, from St. Louis, exclusively works to preserve the music of The Dead.
As for other era- and theme-appropriate musical works, Cockerham and Kahng will at two different times present the first three of Cage’s Variations. Most famous for his work called “4’33” — with four minutes and 33 seconds of prescribed silence — Cage also wrote pieces assigned structure only through chance. That element was present in “4’33” as well, Kahng says. The piece wasn’t just silence. It incorporated the sounds of audience members coughing or perhaps unwrapping candy. Likewise, Variations will also be influenced by outside factors. The sounds created in Variations I and Variations II are made only after a series of transparencies are dropped on the floor. How the lines and points on those transparencies intersect on the floor guides the musicians in creating the accompanying sounds. It should be noted that “sounds” are all that is required of the players, even though Cockerham and Kahng are highly trained musicians. The second Variation, for instance, was composed “for any number of players and any sound producing means,” Cage said. Among the many instruments Cockerham and Kahng will use are kitchen utensils.
The randomness means that even if someone has heard one of the Cage pieces before, the factors of chance and varied instrumentation dictate a unique experience each time.
“There can be 20 recordings, and they all sound different,” Cockerham says.
Kahng says Cage poked fun at convention by calling these works Variations, considering most composers utilized elements of previous works when creating a “variation.”
Even so, there’s likely to be a hint of familiarity in Saturday’s performance, Kahng says. Cage was known as a philosopher as much as a composer, and he talked of how all art forms shared nourishment from their predecessors.
“He shocked a lot of people with a deep exploration of music,” she says.
Other explorations offered during Art Night Out include Northwest Arkansas Community College poetry students reading selections from works by beat writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. There will also be an opportunity to make collaborative art using found objects in the style of Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg.