This is a John Cage Event, Milano, Adi Design Museum, 09.30.2023

With the end of the summer one hopes for more live appointments and in a city like Milano there is plenty of occasions if you’re a classic or pop/trap music lover. There’s also an intriguing JazzMi Festival that features live performances of Ibrahim Maalouf – I got tickets for him so you’ll read a review as soon as I get there – and of unreachable, if you live outside the town and need to take a train ride late at night, concerts by the likes of a trio led by Hamid Drake, another trio with Andrew Cyrille and William Parker, plus a Halloween exhibition of the Sun Ra Arkestra at around 10.30 pm.

Obviously I will not attend such venues, and I’m really sad about that, but the God of music, if any, decided to leave me the opportunity to follow, for some saturday afternoons, a beautiful and intriguing marathon of contemporary music live performances titled “Back to New York: Downtown Music Sketches”. This way, this saturday I had the opportunity to attend to a performance by pianist Franco Venturini and dancer Giacomo De Luca, centered around three beautiful pieces by John Cage: The Seasons, Ophelia and In A Landscape.

We don’t need to introduce the multi-faceted figure of John Cage with more or less quick prefaces, also because here in my country the Milanese publishing company Shake Edizioni Underground is issuing all the writings by the Maestro – the second volume is just ready to be printed and it will be presented to the audience next Tuesday. If you’re curious about the piano performer, Franco Venturini, you can find an incisive bio at the following link. 

More interesting is the performance in itself, inspired by the longtime collaboration between Cage and Merce Cunningham, one of the most important dancers and coreographers of the last century. Between the creators of the postmodern dance, Cunningham was a long time friend of Cage, sharing his concerns about formal rules in the art world. Also contemporaneously both started studying the possibilities of chance and I-Ching in particular, events that led to pieces like Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three (1951) where the nine emotions (or rasas) of the Indian aesthetic were presented in an order determined by chance.

The performance we attended this afternoon started with recordings of Cunningham’s voice diffused through an old analogic tape recorder, positioned over a metal box in which a transparent plastic bag was containing the music sheet for the performance. The most interesting part of it, to tell the truth, were the ones where the two, pianist and dancer, were percussing or crawling the strings of the piano because the chance generating the sounds was cagean in all its effects.

If I have to find out a defect in the piano performance, I would find two. The first one: too much emotion and melancholic coat in part of the performance, the one where the piano arpeggioed a music that, more than Cage, was resembling the one by a sentimental composer. The second one: too much will and power in the overall performance, as if the composer was Beethoven and not Cage. Unluckily the pianist were dealing with music composed by a Zen composer, that means surprise for the listener, not deep emotion by the performer.

At a certain point I remember vividly I was bored by the arpeggios, but at a certain point I was shaked by some attack, and so I thought “mmmh ... dynamics, you know what to do, right?”, but even if Venturini knows his work better than Thom Yorke – The Smile is a futile project, badly orchestrated and cooked worse – for sure the effect was that of a Romantic piece of music, full of drama and sense of resistance to a fall, which is far from the feelings Cage wanted to transmit to the audience through music.

As far as the dancer, I can’t criticize it since I’m training as an actor since a couple of years and if it weren’t for my feet – I broke the left in the last months – I would have trained myself yet into the contemporary dance world not to become a dancer myself but to know better what to do with my own body onstage, so the only thing I can say is that I couldn’t find so much postmodernism in De Luca, whose attitude is overtly sentimental as the one by the pianist. The circles he was drawing in the air with his own body after playing with small compass over a blue book is an example of what I’m saying.

I can’t tell who influenced who, but the mix between the two performers is as far as results interesting enough if you want to see two artists interacting together with a common goal, but unsatisfying as far as an attempt to take Cage and Cunningham attitude back to us. I know it is a way long discussion in the world of classical music, the diatribe between conservatorship and will to innovate, but as far as myself I want to point out that first you have to undestand what you’re handling and only after that you can do something new if this is your path to glory.

Frankly, this afternoon I missed the part in which the performers were elaborating all the spurs coming from the music sheet, the possible old recordings of the pieces, the videos if any of Cunningham performing with Cage, in order to give us something more contemporary than the music and the dance of 70 years before; as far as it seems, they passed over all of it with no that much grace and gave to the audience an essay about their sensitivity, and what is wrong to me is that your sensitivity need always to grow and face with what you’re handling, instead of being like a tank.