In the spring of 1972 I was an aspiring composer, out almost every night to hear new music. These were years of experimentation—music constructed by chance, music improvised, serialized, and randomized, music in search of new notational systems. And so I was among those first in line for the concert celebrating John Cage’s sixtieth birthday.
I distinctly remember the last piece on the program—the “happy birthday” number—and how the longer the ensemble of musicians played, the more I found it impossible to have any sense of where I was in the score or when, or how, the piece would end. After about thirty minutes, I could see that others in the audience were, like me, looking at their watches. And after what seemed like another thirty interminable minutes, I snuck out a side door.
I came to learn later that the ensemble had continued playing until the very last person had left the concert hall, and that this was Cage’s birthday gift to us, the audience—a gift predicated on the assumption that if you were still seated, you were still enjoying the music and wanted to be there. And that if you weren’t enjoying the music, you owed it to yourself to leave, good manners be damned. A gift? Maybe. To me it felt more like a prank.
But a sign of the times. There were visual artists trying to free their works from the constraint of frames and from gallery walls, there were playwrights breaking the barrier between actor and audience, and there were composers trying to blur, if not entirely destroy, the whole idea of what a beginning or ending is in a piece of music. The best example I can think of is Edgard Varèse’s Poème Electronique, commissioned by the Philips Corporation for its pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair. Varèse recorded electronic sounds that were played back as a continuous loop over four hundred loudspeakers strategically placed so that no single physical location was acoustically better than any other. The “beginning” of the piece was what one first heard upon entering the pavilion and the “ending” was the last sound one heard when leaving. A different beginning and ending for every listener.
Still, playing with how a piece of music begins and ends wasn’t a new idea. In a 1748 portrait of Bach, he’s holding a sheet of music paper onto which are written three lines of music. Not only can those three lines sound together (think of a trio of some kind), but each line can be inverted, as if held up to a mirror, so that the three lines become six, all sounding at the same time. And each line can be repeated over and over, with no written ending. The music ends only when the players decide to stop. (Or maybe when the audience has all left, as at Cage’s birthday concert.)
And four hundred years before Bach, Guillaume de Machaut wrote his gorgeous Ma fin est mon commencement (“My end is my beginning”), also for three voices. But when each voice reaches the end, instead of starting over again from the beginning, the way the piece does in Bach’s portrait, the voice starts singing the notes in reverse order, backwards, eventually arriving again at the beginning. The result is a composition where the beginning becomes indistinguishable from its ending.
Learning how to construct music that can go forward and backward at the same time is a trick of the trade. Anyone can learn to do it. Harder to learn, and even harder to master (I’m thinking Beethoven), is how to create a beginning and end that are different from each other but sound related in a meaningful way: an ending in which we hear a vestige, or an echo, of the beginning; an ending that, through some undefinable but unassailable musical logic unfolding measure by measure, could not have become anything other than what it is. An ending that is unique to this work and an ending that is, as in life itself, inevitable.
Michael Dellaira is a composer. A recording of his most recent opera, Arctic Explorations, will be released this summer on the Naxos label.
