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John Cage I​-​VI (2023)

by Thomas Oboe Lee

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PadraigC
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PadraigC I love the pairing of Sarah Yanovitch,
& Tae Kim and reading about John Cage. The lyrics/layout reminds me of experimental poetry Favorite track: As an apple tree or an oak shall he turn his ....
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1.
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2.
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3.
Amount ... 05:44
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4.
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5.
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6.
Etcetera ... 03:36
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about

John Cage and I share the same birthday: September 5th. He was born in 1912 and my birth year is 1945. There must be some cosmological link between us because he has always intrigued me - philosophically and musically.

Recently I was in my colleague Prof. Jeremiah McGrann's office waiting for him to join me for a martini lunch after a day of teaching. I noticed on his desk a hardcover copy of "John Cage I-VI." I asked him what it was and he said it is John Cage's Charles Elliot Norton Lectures he gave at Harvard University in 1988-89. I looked inside and there were these "mesostics." Very sparsely distributed on each page, and it looked fascinating, like some hieroglyphic art. I was immediately intrigued by it and thought right on the spot that I should buy a copy and maybe create a song cycle from the texts.

Upon further research, I found out that John Cage compiled the content for his lecture using excerpts from works by Thoreau, Emerson, Wittgenstein, McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, plus passages from The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times. He then created the final text for his lecture by using chance operations with the assistance of a computer program that he created.

And so I did the unthinkable, and created a song cycle of words that have no meaning nor a narrative in the traditional sense. Quoting John Cage: I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.

John Cage I-VI (2023) is in six movements, scored for soprano and piano.

credits

released April 10, 2023

Sarah Yanovitch, soprano
Tae Kim, piano

Recorded in Fraser Studio @ WGBH
March 22, 2023
Antonio Oliart, audio engineer and editor

Music by Thomas Oboe Lee
Texts from John Cage's Norton Lectures @ Harvard University, 1988-89.

Permission to use texts granted by Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Copyright © 1990 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

© Departed Feathers Music, Inc. - BMI - 2023

Photo credit: Thomas Oboe Lee
MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma, Italia
January 6, 2020

YouTube link: youtu.be/eKTWV8Y0EPY

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Thomas Oboe Lee Cambridge, Massachusetts

Thomas Oboe Lee was born in China in 1945. He lived in São Paulo, Brazil, for six years before coming to the United States in 1966. After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh, he studied composition at the New England Conservatory and Harvard University. He has been a member of the music faculty at Boston College since 1990. ... more

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