Original subtitles

“Water Music” by John Cage, the score.

You can see it isn’t a traditional score

but it’s far more exact than you’d think.

You use a stopwatch.

This is like a timeline.

Here are the times and here it says what’s to happen when, when it starts

and when it ends. There are piano chords,

sometimes strange things, like playing a duck whistle in water,

here’s a water warbler,

here you have to shut the keyboard lid, and a radio should play at all times.

It has to be set to a specific frequency and you’ll just have to see what comes out.

What mattered to him was that everything has its own sound.

Not just the conventional musical instruments that you know,

but every single object and also water, of course.

Pouring water into different receptacles has its own sound.

He wanted to mix the artificial instrument that is a grand piano,

though slightly altered,

with the natural sound of water, which plays an equal part in the music,

and the technical sound from the radio.

That’s how he created a collage

from these three completely different worlds of sound.

To prepare a piano is nothing more than setting it up.

You put objects in between the strings to change the sound.

Cage wrote it all down

in a very exact way: screws, eraser,

a coin, a bit of plastic and God knows what else.

And he didn’t just write down what, but also where.

This is the one-cent sound.

I don’t use an American cent, but a European one.

Nowadays you can rely on the Euro at least in this respect.

Earlier preparers had it easier. If you bought the score

you got a plastic bag from the publisher containing all the materials.

I don’t suppose it was worth their while,

so nowadays you only get the score, and with that

you go to the hardware store.

Originally he invented it as a stopgap.

He’d prepared a work for percussion ensemble

to accompany a choreography,

but at the rehearsals it turned out the hall was too small.

There was no room for a percussion ensemble which was a real problem.

So as a kind of stopgap he prepared a small piano with elastics

to imitate percussion instruments. Then he got a taste for it

and composed several, 20 pieces of music for prepared piano,

sometimes more, sometimes less prepared,

but always in connection with dance and choreography,

usually done by Merce Cunningham.

The photograph of John Cage looking out over the rock garden

is one you see very often.

What do you think he heard here?

He would have been listening

to the sounds of nature, I think.

The sound of the rain is beautiful today.

It’s like you’re becoming more and more immersed in the world of sound.

When you play Cage I feel the same way. Beside the sounds

many moments of silence emerge

until, ultimately, you hear sound itself.

The sounds are not so insistent

as to rob you of air.

Every single one of them seems to start existing in free space.

Just like every single stone here exists

separate from one another,

and every rock has its own sound.

Cage once said

he wasn’t a composer, didn’t he?

He didn’t want to be a composer but a listener.

He said he wanted to point his antennas at the sounds of the world

and listen to them.

“Composer” is a modern-age term invented in Europe.

I suppose he wanted to free himself of that.

We Japanese have always admired Western contemporary music

and Western modernity, and have even tried to emulate it.

If all of this is turned upside down...

...that’s pretty heavy.

But there’s an entire world you can only hear if you do just that.

If you look at it that way, he is someone who opened up a new world to us

and reminded us of an old world at the same time.