Composing by Knucklebone

Manhattan's Kaufmann Concert Hall, where the studious audiences are frequently shell-shocked by modern scores, last week resounded to the bombastic New York premiere of Music Walk with Dancer by avant-garde U.S. Composer John Cage. Composer Cage's electronic nightmare lasted ten minutes and required the services of Cage himself, Pianist David Tudor and Dancer Jill Johnston. Occasionally reading directions from slips of paper, they scurried from one short-wave radio to another, twiddling dials and assaulting the audience with a drumfire of rattles, bangs, pops and nonsense syllables roared into a microphone. Occasionally they turned on an electric blender or belabored the piano. Commented the unpleased New York Times: "Mayhem."

The confusion onstage was loudly reminiscent of a 1961 broadcast during which the BBC startled England with a perform ance of Mobile for Tape and Percussion, identified as the work of young, avant-garde Polish Composer Piotr Zak (TIME, Aug. n). Composer Zak's cacophonous creation lasted twelve minutes and left the London Times complaining desperately: "It was certainly difficult to grasp more than the music's broad outlines, partly be cause of the high proportion of unpitched sounds and partly because of their extreme diversity." Zak's Mobile proved to be the handi work of two pranksters who banged away haphazardly at "all the instruments we could find" in an effort to discover just how much the public would endure. The station received not a single complaint.

Composer Cage, a real person as Zak was not, works in much the same way. Before Music Walk began, he had no idea how it would sound, had determined only that it would last ten minutes, involve certain props and three performers doing more or less as they pleased. It was a prime sample of what students of the avant-garde call "indeterminate" music, i.e., music that is based on almost pure chance.

Yawns & Sneezes. In Europe, indeterminate music is now all the rage. Some composers refer to it in its milder forms as "aleatory," a term based on the Latin word "alea" (a game of dice), once thought to be derived from the word for knucklebone, out of which primitive dice were made. Although Composer Cage was preaching the aleatory doctrine eleven years' ago (in his Imaginary Landscape No. 4, he conducted an ensemble that played twelve radios simultaneously), the big boom in music-by-chance has come only recently; summer festivals at Donaueschingen and Darmstadt perform it with enthusiasm.

One theory behind chance compositions is that they make members of the audience participants in the music. Modern audiences, points out Italian Composer Luciano Berio. too often regard music "as escape from reality." Because aleatory music is designed to surprise everybody--including the performers and the composer himself--it "gives doubt to the public," making the audience "part of the composition." Cage carried this concept to its illogical conclusion in his 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds, in which a pianist sat with a stop watch for four minutes and 33 seconds without playing a note, while the audience provided the "music" in the form of coughs, yawns and sneezes.

Playing the Raisins. No two aleatory composers get their random results in quite the same way. Cage, who is regarded as particularly ingenious, determined the notes for his Music for Piano by following the pattern of the "imperfections in the paper on which the music was written." Germany's Karlheinz Stockhausen, who is perhaps the most influential of Europe's aleatory composers, instructs performers to play any portion of his music that their eyes first fall on. His Cycle, for one percussionist, has spirally bound pages to make it simpler for the performer to begin or end wherever he wants, play back-to-front, or even turn the score upside down. Pianist David Tudor, leading performer of aleatory scores, is so accustomed to their weird notation systems that, according to Polish-born Composer Roman Haubenstock-Ramati. he can "play the raisins in a slice of fruitcake." The heaviest concentration of aleatory composers is in Germany, where--in addition to Stockhausen--South Korean Composer Nam June Paik (Homage to John Cage), and the German Hans Otte (Tropism I, II) and Austrian Friedrich Cerha (Movements) all preach the gospel of chance. France has Greek-born Composer lannis Xenakis and Italy Composer Sylvano Bussotti. who has written, among other things, a piano piece in which the keys are to be touched but not depressed.

The word has even spread to Eastern Europe, where some real live Polish composers named Witold Lutoslawski and Wlodzimierz Kotonski produced chance pieces for last fall's Warsaw festival.

Although more young composers join the aleatory ranks every year, most critics denounce the movement as fraudulent, or misguided, or both. Staying one step ahead of his critics. Senior Statesman Cage is already proclaiming aleatory music passe --he prefers to think that his own brand of "indeterminacy" is the ultimate in pure chance. But he will have to go some to surpass English Composer Cornelius Cardew, 26, who in his Octet '61 for Jasper Johns* includes a vague injunction to "Do something completely different," or Argentine-born Mauricio Kagel, 30, who in his Sonant, made himself obsolete.

His opening advice to performers: "The player may mimic his part, or rebel against it entirely." Happy to oblige.

* An American painter with a certain avant-garde reputation for his repetitious painting of three subjects: targets, arabic numerals and the American flag.

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