John Cage’s Ryoanji at the Japan Society

Above: John Cage in Japan; photo by Yasuhiro Yoshioka, Courtesy of Sogetsu Foundation

Author: Shoshana Klein

Sunday October 22nd, 2023 – The Japan Society is doing a John Cage’s Japan series, of which this was the second installment. It was directed by Tomomi Adachi and played by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble.

The premise is very interesting – the performers play John Cage’s Ryoanji, and there is a video with reactive elements. After intermission, the video is played back and the performers use it as a score to perform again. I was left with many questions – though I read most of the program, I think it could have benefited from explanations of some sort.

First of all, some musicians were here, and some were in Japan, supposedly. There was a vocalist and a Hichiriki (according to the program) coming from speakers, but we never saw these performers or were introduced to them. It was also 300 AM in Japan, so I’m not sure how likely it was that they were performing live in this performance. They were not present for the second half. Instead, Adachi (I think) performed with the original trio. 

It was unclear to me how the video was reactive to the musicians – it was a sort of constellation visual with points of light moving around, and brightly colored lines and shapes would appear, connecting these star-like dots. If the lines and shapes were related to the audio being played, I couldn’t figure out how – my best guess for the video reactivity had to do with the perspective and the amount of movement. For instance, for a while it seemed like the perspective, zoom, and amount of movement of the start may be affected by the musicians, but if so, it seemed to change throughout the performance. It was interesting to try to figure out and they were cool visuals, but relatively static throughout the 20 or 30 minute performance.

The piece, musically, was pretty sparse and I had trouble finding structure or latching on to anything, but the musicians obviously played well together and there were moments of responsiveness that were nice. Reading about the score is helpful – it’s not really notated and the performers are basically playing graphic scores of drawings of rocks. It should be noted that I do like John Cage, at least theoretically – I think his ideas and philosophical concepts are very interesting, but sometimes I find it hard to translate that to an enjoyable auditory experience.

The second half had significantly more musical movement, though it wasn’t clear how they were using the video as a score, and it appeared that they were also reading music (maybe the original score in combination?). It seemed shorter than the first half but I’m not sure that it was, it could have been my perception since there was so much more to listen for. All in all, an interesting experience that I would have liked to know more about. 

~ Shoshana Klein