Anarchy With a Beat

"I," says Composer John Cage, "am a hunter." Last week White Hunter Cage's latest quarry was on display at Manhattan's avant-garde off-Broadway theater, Circle in the Square. Even to the battle-scarred ears of the beard-and-ponytail set, it seemed one of the queerest beasts ever found in captivity.

Cage's self-styled "anarchistic situation" lasted for 30 minutes and was titled Theatre Piece. The composer himself stood in a corner with his back to the flimsy curtain. On the badminton-court-sized stage were eight performers confronting a weird assortment of props: a grand piano, a tuba, a trombone, a cluster of plastic bags hanging by a thin wire and dripping colored water into a washtub, a swing, a string of balloons, a pair of bridge tables littered with the debris of some nightmarish New Year's Eve--champagne bottle in bucket, movie projector, alarm clock, broom, toys. After looking about to see that the performers were in their places, Cage somberly raised his left arm. "Zero!" he cried.

Enter, Indeterminancy. A man in sneakers and grey-flannel slacks walked over to the balloons and started popping them with a pin. A contralto in a sickly green satin cocktail suit began singing St. Louis Blues. A dancer in a black leotard skipped rope while the pianist slammed the keyboard with his elbows. "Five!" cried Cage, his arm descending like the second hand of a clock. Sneakers hit the piano strings with a dead fish. Black Leotard read a newspaper while marking time to the wail of the trombone by flipping a garbage can lid with her foot. The men at the bridge tables popped the champagne bottle, set off the alarm clock, threw streamers and lighted sparklers. "Fifteen!" cried Cage, and Sneakers (Dancer Merce Cunningham) rushed forth petulantly snipping at his hair with scissors while the pianist (David Tudor) polished the piano strings with a buffer and the tuba player (Don Butterfield) stripped to the waist, slipped on a jacket and had a drink.

At 29, a black-cloaked figure stalked across the stage bearing an American flag.

The whole thing, explains 47-year-old Composer Cage, was a simple exercise in "indeterminancy." Back in his relatively traditionalist period, Cage composed pieces for percussion orchestras, featuring prepared pianos and weird electronic effects. But now, he says, he has no further interest in "expressing myself. I have no desire to improve on creation." The new object is to surprise not only the audience but the performers and the composer himself. When he was asked to write a piece for the Circle in the Square Composers' Showcase series, Cage sat down and worked out his basic time scheme according to the haphazard intersection of curves on a piece of graph paper. Then he asked the performers to write on 20 cards "a noun or verb or combination of both with which they would care to associate themselves." When a performer shuffles the cards and finds himself confronted with "carry fish" and "hit piano strings," what would be more natural than to whop the piano with a frozen carp?

Also, Mushrooms. These days Composer Cage rarely writes a piece unless a concert is coming up. He lives in a $24-a-month apartment in nearby Haverstraw, N.Y., bolsters his income by teaching two courses at Manhattan's New School: Experimental Composition of Music and Mushroom Identification (with field trips when the mushrooms are flourishing in summer and fall).

Cage concedes that the principle of "indeterminancy" implies a move "away from art," and he believes that is a good thing. Nothing delights John Cage more than a concert at which the participants, instead of performing, "do exactly what they are doing."

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