4 American Composers

In 1985, director Peter Greenaway (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, Drowning By Numbers, Prospero's Books) filmed four contemporary American composers decidedly out of the mainstream in modern music: Robert Ashley, John Cage, Philip Glass, and Meredith Monk. Each tape interweaves performance footage with interviews of the composers and musicians. Philip Glass, who has the widest commercial appeal of the quartet, plays selections from "Glassworks" and his opera "Einstein at the Beach," and talks about his experiences with concerts. He says that people have actually brought eggs to throw (which Glass finds disturbing because it's obviously not a spontaneous reaction to the performance). His best anecdote is about one man who walked down the aisle at a concert screaming: "Why are you doing this to me?" If Glass put this guy into conniption fits, one can only guess what his reaction to Ashley, Cage, and Monk might be (instant insanity, I would suspect). John Cage, the imp of the modern music world for many decades now, offers some of his "musical" compositions, such as "27 Sounds Manufactured in a Kitchen" (which is precisely what it says it is); "Branches," an interesting (I'm being slightly facetious here) composition played on pine cones and other "plant materials;" and several stories from a series called "Indeterminacy," whose main attributes are discordant piano music coupled with Cage's non sequitur mini-stories. Meredith Monk is perhaps the most interesting of the quartet, because of the wide range of creative media she works in: voice, dance, mime, film, etc. Monk's "Dolmen Music" an almost indescribable choral piece performed by Monk and her vocal group, is a strange and fascinating use of vocal sounds (as opposed to words) to convey meaning (for example, we may not hear any actual words being spoken between two of the singers, yet we instinctively understand by the tones that they are engaged in gossip). In addition, Monk performs a good chunk of "Turtle Dreams," a vocal/dance piece that is intermittently interesting, but unlikely to have viewers clapping their hands or stomping their feet (if you know what I mean). Sections of her 16mm films Quarry and 16mm Earrings are strange, but not necessarily enjoyable, to watch--although clips from her acclaimed film piece Ellis Island are quite striking. The last composer, Robert Ashley, offers his opera "Perfect Lives," a work created exclusively for television. Ashley, himself, calls the work a "comic opera about reincarnation." I'll accept that, but then again I'd accept any definition of what this "opera" is about. Made up of seven episodes ("The Park," "The Supermarket," "The Bank," "The Bar," "The Living Room," "The Church," and "The Backyard"), the performance is staged at The Kitchen, and features a man and woman singing in various stage settings while Ashley provides voiceover on a microphone. Whether it's due to the acoustics or to the electronic dinking around with the voices, it seems like only about 20% of what is said is actually intelligible. The other 80% sounds, quite frankly, like gibberish. Production-wise, the Ashley tape is the weakest of the quartet. I'm recommending 4 American Composers for two reasons: first of all, with the exception of the sound in the Ashley tape, all four programs are equally well produced. And secondly, musical preference is a matter of taste (although I'm fairly confident that most people will find all four of these composers beyond their tolerance)--I really enjoyed the Philip Glass tape; someone else might really like the Meredith Monk program. Just be aware of what you're in for here--something that only vaguely resembles music. Recommended. (Available from most distributors.)