different editions of 4'33''

[Jim Morrison <jim_morrison@sprynet.com>]

Hi List,

Yesterday a  little confusion arouse between Bradley and myself concerning
the score to Cage's 4'33''.  It turns out that according to one Cage expert
there are at least six different versions of the score.   What follows is an
excerpt from Solomon's paper on 4'33'', found at

http://www.azstarnet.com/~solo/4min33se.htm

Please forgive the lack of Gould content.



Composition

"I think perhaps my own best piece, at least the one I like the most, is the
silent piece. It has three movements and in all of the movements there are
no (intentional) sounds. I wanted my work to be free of my own likes and
dislikes, because I think music should be free of the feelings and ideas of
the composer. I have felt and hoped to have led other people to feel that
the sounds of their environment constitute a music which is more interesting
than the music which they would hear if they went into a concert hall."

"They (the audience) missed the point. There's no such thing as silence.
What they thought was silence (in 4'33"), because they didn't know how to
listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring
outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began
pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all
kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out."

4'33" was written in the summer of 1952 just after Cage returned to New York
City from Black Mountain College, where he had been invited to participate
as a teacher and composer in this rural, private-school environment, and
worked with other important figures in the art world. It was here that
Rauschenberg did his White Paintings (1951) and Cage first saw them,
provoking 4'33". It was here that the first multimedia "happening" occurred,
Cage's Theater Piece No. 1, in which many of the faculty participated. It
was also here that Cage planned work on Williams Mix and first used the time
bracket notation that became so prevalent in his later music.

4'33" is written for any instrument or combination of instruments. It is,
however, usually done as a piano piece. This is probably because of the
precedent set by the premiere performance, since the score does not specify
a piano or any other instrument. The score is in three movements. Curiously,
it has existed in at least six different versions (two different manuscripts
and four different editions), although only two of these are different in
performance.

The original Woodstock manuscript, dated August 1952, is now lost and was
written in conventional grand staff notation, containing measures of
silence. It is here referred to as the Woodstock ms. It was this score that
David Tudor used for the premiere performance. Tudor made at least two
reconstructions of this score for his own performances.

The original was on music paper, with staffs, and it was laid out in
measures like the Music of Changes except there were no notes. But the time
was there, notated exactly like the Music of Changes except that the tempo
never changed, and there were no occurrences -- just blank measures, no
rests -- and the time was easy to compute. The tempo was 60.47

The second manuscript (1953) was a birthday gift to Cage's friend, Irwin
Kremen, and is here referred to as the Kremen ms (Kremen manuscript). It was
written in graphic, space-time notation, where each movement was drawn as a
time line in which each second is equal to an eighth of an inch. This is one
of Cage's earliest graphic scores. It specifies the movement lengths as:
30", 2'23", and 1'40". In 1993, it was reproduced in Peters edition 6777a.

A third version, here designated First Tacet Edition, is the one that is
most well known and used by performers and is now out of print, Peters No.
6777 (1960). The author has not seen a manuscript version of this edition.
It is a typewritten score that simply lists the three movements with Roman
numbers with the word "TACET" (silent) below each. Below that is the
following statement:

NOTE: The title of this work is the total length in minutes and seconds of
its performance. At Woodstock, N.Y., August 29, 1952, the title was 4'33"
and the three parts were 33", 2'40", and 1'20". It was performed by David
Tudor, pianist, who indicated the beginnings of parts by closing, the
endings by opening, the keyboard lid. However, the work may be performed by
(any) instrumentalist or combination of instrumentalists and last any length
of time.

FOR IRWIN KREMEN                               JOHN CAGE

This statement is very curious. The timings Cage gave here for the Woodstock
performance are not correct, because the original printed program shows that
the timings were not 33", 2'40", and 1'20", but 30", 2'23", and 1'40". This
raises an important question: Why would he give incorrect timings for the
Woodstock performance? (A proposition is given below.)

A fourth version was a facsimile of the Kremen ms, but reduced in size, and
was printed in Source in July, 1967. In performance it is the same as the
original Kremen ms. It is here referred to as the Source Edition.

A fifth version, published by Henmar Press in 1986 curiously carries the
same Peters listing (No. 6777). Here referred to as the Second Tacet
Edition, it is nearly the same as the first, with the important exception
that it was printed in Cage's own calligraphy, with the following statement
added before the last sentence of the above:

After the Woodstock performance, a copy in proportional notation was made
for Irwin Kremen. In it the timelengths of the movements were 30", 2'23",
and 1'40".

This is a puzzling statement. How could one have been a copy of the other
when the timings were different? (The timings are the essence of the piece.)
Of what is the Kremen edition a copy? It could not have been a copy of the
original, since the original was lost. Additionally, the original timings
were not 33", 2'40", and 1'20" but the ones Cage made for the Kremen ms. It
is also significant that Cage does not state that the piece was recomposed.
One possible hypothesis is that the Tacet Editions were secondary, and that
they were made in error.

A sixth version is Peters No. 6777a (1993), which is an exact reproduction
of the Kremen ms. It is referred to here as the Kremen Edition.


Jim here,

what follows comes from the Silence list and it gives the total page number
to one of the scores as 7.  It was written years ago in response to a post
by Solomon.

"the score is seven pages  in length not six as
Larry Solomon says. That is, I think Solomon is either not counting as part
of the score the page on which is written the space by time notation: 1
page = 7 inches = 56";  or he is not counting the second page of the second
movement, which is entirely blank. Whichever, with the  page that carries
the space by time notation -- and, by the way, without that notation  the
other six pages  would be meaningless and the great significance of this
score  would be rendered null -- and  those of the three movements, the
total comes to seven."