July 21, 2013
Location: Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock New York
Set up: In the maple forest just beyond the concert hall, score placed on a large slate rock.
Score: hand drawn from the Peters Edition, 3 sections Tacet: 33″, 2’40”, 1’20”, Copied from digitized image of Cage’s handwritten score from 1960
Conditions: Very hot, moderate breeze. A string quartet is practicing for the evening concert.
Audience: staff at the Maverick, people walking in the forest, some with dogs.
Perceptions: I had been looking forward with a lot of anticipation to this edition of the piece, since it was the location of the premiere performance of 4’33” by David Tudor. Following my intuition, I let my feet find a location near the concert hall, which was open to the outdoors. A string quintet was rehearsing for a 4 pm concert. I started to feel sad for some reason. I found myself drifting further and further away from the hall, toward the maple forest and up a rock cliff behind it – where the hall was facing. I walked on the crisp leaves, many long-legged spiders on the ground, shale rock underneath. I likely would have gone further into the forest but my intentions for documenting the piece made me want to have the Maverick Hall in the photographs, and I was getting pretty deep into the trees and up the hill already. I placed the score on a large flat rock slightly sloping down the hill. Preparing for the listening, I again felt a distance from social constructs, sad, a little alienated; not from any circumstance with people on site but in general. The sounds and listening felt muted somehow, with the string quartet wafting in and out, intermittently, planes overhead, traffic. It was very still and hot. An anti-climax, but a poignant one. Later, while discussing the experience with the visual artist Julie Hedrick, she recalled reading that Cage was not in the happiest frame of mind when he was spending time in the Woodstock area. And that the audience was not happy with the piece. She thought that perhaps the mood I felt there was thus in tune somehow. Driving back on a long wonderful tour with Lisa Barnard Kelly, we talked about Maverick Concerts being very far removed from any semblance of a “maverick” context. The music programming choices there are very safe, with no apparent inquiry about the relationship with the environment in which the hall exists. Listening to all of this.
A Year of 4'33" 