Percussionist

"My composition Amores" tall, earnest John Cage has remarked, "is intended to arouse, shall we say, the feelings of love." Last week Composer Cage offered this quartet for drums, rattle, woodblocks, and specially prepared piano, at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. The piano strings had been damped with rubber wedges and the interior strewn with nuts & bolts. The instrument gave forth a subdued whacking sound. While Composer Cage produced these percussive clunks, his assistants obliged with their own gentle taps and wallops.

John Cage is the latest of a number of esthetes, including the Italian Futurists, who have concentrated on the possibilities of percussion music.* Part of the small percussion repertory, by such experimental composers as Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, was played last week by John Cage's orchestra of eleven, dressed in tails or black evening gowns. They used thundersheets, oxen bells, cowbells, cymbals, anvils, gongs, woodblocks, rice bowls, button gongs, rattles, claves, maracas, drums, flowerpots, tin cans, automobile brake drums. They not only tapped and beat their instruments, but shook and rubbed them and sometimes even immersed them in water.

Percussionist Cage, 30, is firmly convinced that percussive noise poems will bulk large in the musical future. Says he: "People may leave my concerts thinking they have heard 'noise,' but will then hear unsuspected beauty in their everyday life. This music has a therapeutic value for city dwellers. . . ." Born in Los Angeles, Cage was trained for the ministry, gave up the Church to study the piano in Europe. His steadfast fellow percussionist is his blonde wife Xenia Cage, surrealist sculptress, daughter of a Russian Orthodox priest. She helps Cage find his instruments of "unsuspected beauty" in junk yards and hardware stores.

He considers her the deftest of all living flowerpot and gong whackers.

* The type of music produced by instruments that are struck with sticks or hammers, i.e. drums, cymbals, gongs.

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