For the convenience of concertgoers 

the Garden Cafe remains open until 6:oo pm.

The use of cameras or recording equipment during the 

performance is not allowed. Please be sure that cell phone

pagers, and other electronic devices are turned off.

Please note that late entry or reentry of

the West Building after 6:30 pm is not permitted.

Music Department

National Gallery of Art

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

Mailing address

2000B South Club Drive

Landover, md 20785

www.nga.gov

The Sixty-fifth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery of Art

2,606th Concert

Contemporary Music Forum

Steve Antosca, music director

Lina Bahn, violinist, Lura Johnson, pianist

Thomas Jones and William Richards, percussionists

Presented in honor of

Jasper Johns: An Allegory ofPainting, 1955-1965

Third conceit ofthe Sixty-secondAmerican Music Festival

March 4, 2007

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

Music ofJohn Cage (1912-1992)

Amoves (1943)

For prepared piano and percussion

Solo

Trio

Trio

Solo

Credo in US (1942)

For piano, percussion, and radio or phonograph

Trio (1936)

For percussion

Allegro

March

Waltz

INTERMISSION

Nocturne (1947)

For violin and piano

Third Construction (1941)

For percussion

Randy Eyles and Michael Zell, guest percussionists

This concert is made possible in part by a grantfrom the

Randy Hostetler Living Room Music Fund ofWashington, DC.

The Exhibition and the Festival

Jasper Johns: An Allegory ofPainting, 1955-1965, on view at the National

Gallery through April 29, includes some ofJohns’ (b. 1930) most important

paintings, drawings, and prints, among them Target with Plaster Casts (1955)

and Diver (1962). Johns’ early work was devoted to examining and reinventing the premises of painting during an era when painting practice was

riddled with conceptual upheaval and doubt. Much ofthe music chosen for

the Sixty-second American Music Festival was also the result of conceptual 

upheaval, as composers in the same period reexamined their own practices.

From 1955 to 1965, contacts between painters and composers were

particularly fruitful in New York City. When the works of unorthodox

composers such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, Ralph Shapey, and Stefan

Wolpe were performed, artists faithfully attended. The era also saw the birth

of performance art, in which dance, drama, music, painting, poetry, and

sculpture might be brought together in one event. In his Lecture on Something (1959), John Cage said, “When starting to be abstract, artists referred to

musical practices to show that what they were doing was valid; so nowadays,

musicians, to explain what they are doing, say, ‘See, the painters and sculptors have been doing it for quite some time.’” Johns enjoyed a long and close

association with the world ofballet in particular, and in 1973 he designed the

set and costumes for Un Jour ou Deux, working with Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham.

By 1955, the National Gallery’s American Music Festival, an annual festival ofmusic by American composers, was in its eleventh year. In the decade

that followed, avant-garde composers such as Elliott Carter, David Diamond, 

Leon Kirchner, Walter Piston, Ralph Shapey, Virgil Thomson, and Stefan

Wolpe were among the dozens of composers whose works were performed

at the Gallery’s festivals.

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The Musicians

The Contemporary Music Forum is the new ensemble in residence at the 

Corcoran Gallery ofArt. Founded in 1973, the Forum is Washington’s oldest

ensemble ofits type, and the Washington Post recently wrote: “It is no small

achievement for a group uncompromisingly dedicated to contemporary 

chamber music to achieve such longevity.” The Contemporary Music Forum

has premiered hundreds of new works and performed pieces by more than

five hundred contemporary composers.

Enjoying wide critical acclaim, the Forum has received grants from the 

DC Commission on the Arts and Flumanities, the National Endowment

for the Arts, and the Cafritz, Copland, Dreyfus, Kiplinger, and Internationa] 

Humanities foundations. The ensemble has taken advantage ofthe international diversity in the District of Columbia by collaborating with twenty

embassies to perform works by composers oftheir countries’.

Concerts ofthe Contemporary Music Forum have been broadcast on

weta-fm and weta-tv, and internationally on the Voice of America. To

reach an even broader audience, the ensemble will present three concerts at

the Smithsonian’s National Museum ofthe American Indian, including

concerts for school children featuring music by Native American composers. 

In spring 2007 the Forum will travel to Paris to perform a series of collaborative concerts with Ensemble Aleph.

4

Program Notes

One ofthe leading figures ofthe postwar avant-garde, John Cage influenced

writers, artists, choreographers, and other composers through his music,

essays, lectures, and numerous interviews. It can safely be said that he had a

greater impact on music in the twentieth century than any other American 

composer. The 1950s were a period ofintense creativity for Cage, in which he 

experimented with notation in order to broaden the possibilities. In 1952 he 

created the work that has become his most famous and controversial, 4’33”,

which consists ofthree movements, each completely silent. During the late

1950s he began his collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, forming a relationship that continued through and beyond 1973, the

year in which Un Jour ou Deux was produced with set and costume designs 

by Jasper Johns.

For this concert in honor ofJasper Johns: An Allegory ofPainting,

2955-2965. the Contemporary Music Forum has chosen works that Cage

composed during his years in Seattle, Washington (1936-1942), and his 

first five years in New York City7 (1942-1947), when he worked primarily

with percussion ensembles. Since Jasper Johns and other artists became 

acquainted with Cage and his work in the early 1950s, this is the music they

would have encountered. In his essay The Future ofMusic: Credo, Cage wrote,

“Percussion music is a contemporary transition from keyboard-influenced 

music to the all-sound music ofthe future. Any sound is acceptable to

the composer of percussion music.”

Amores was written in 1943 and consists offour parts, the first and last 

ofwhich are for the prepared piano alone. The second part is performed on

nine tom-toms and a pod rattle, and the instrumentation for the third part 

is indicated by the title ofthe original version, Triofor Seven Woodblocks,

Not Chinese, which dates from 1936. Amores is Cage’s first concert work to

include prepared piano, an innovation that Cage said, “released [him] from 

the sonic predictability oftraditional notation.” The piano is prepared with
nine screws, eight bolts, two nuts, and three strips ofrubber. In this transformation, the instrument is used to express eroticism and tranquility. As

suggested by the title and stated by Cage, Amoves “is the quietness between

lovers,” a sentiment not often associated with his music.

Credo in US calls for four performers. In addition to the pianist, two percussionists play on muted gongs, tin cans, an electric buzzer, and tom-toms,

and one performer plays a radio or phonograph, usually replaced in modern

performances by a computer. The work was composed in the phraseology

ofthe eponymous dance by Merce Cunningham and Jean Erdman, and was 

Cage’s first collaboration with Cunningham. This was also the first time

Cage used a radio or phonograph, incorporating music by other composers

into his own work. For the premiere of Credo in US, a “tack-piano” was used

(a piano with thumbtacks inserted into the felt ofthe hammers). In subsequent performances, pianists have also muted the strings at times or tapped

the piano body as a percussion instrument.

In the score for Trio, Cage gave the following specifications: “Instruments

include: ist player: 3 woodblocks, 3 small tom-toms (wire brushes), bamboo

sticks; 2nd player: tom-tom (wire brushes), bass drum; 3rd player: 3 woodblocks, tom-tom, bamboo sticks.” Some historians cite Trio as Cage’s debut

as an experimental composer.

About his Nocturne Cage wrote: “In Nocturne, an attempt is made to 

dissolve the difference between string and piano sounds, [although] the

convention ofmelody and accompaniment is maintained. The character

ofthe piece is atmospheric and depends for its performance on a constant

rubato and the sustaining ofresonances.”

Cage’s Constructions are aptly named, as their structures are highly mathematical. In his Third Construction, Cage created twenty-four parts oftwentyfour measures each. The four percussionists are assigned different phrase

structures, each ofwhich follows a proportion series that is a rotation of one 

ofthe others. The musicians perform on claves, a cricket caller, a conch shell,

cowbells, a cymbal, drums, an instrument that imitates a lion’s roar, quijadas

(originally a jawbone), a ratchet, rattles, a teponaxtle (a wooden drum of Mayan

origin), and tin cans.

6

An excerpt from an interview conducted late in Cage’s life may help

the listener appreciate this music: “I think it is true that sounds are, oftheir

nature, harmonious, and I would extend that to noise. There is no noise, only

sound. I haven’t heard any sounds that I consider something I don’t want to 

hear again, with the exception ofsounds that frighten us or make us aware of

pain. I don’t like meaningful sound. Ifsound is meaningless, I’m all for it.”

Program notes based on material provided by Steve Antosca

Next Week at the National Gallery ofArt

National Gallery Orchestra

Dalia Adas, guest conductor

Ingrid Fliter, pianist

Music by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Saint-Saens, and Schubert

Presented in conjunction with the

National Museum of Women in the Arts

and in honor ofWomen’s History Month

March n, 2007

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court