BY CAECILIA TRIPP
2012
A participatory performance celebrating the 100th Birthday of John Cage in the streets.
Music for (Prepared) Bicycles translates John Cage’s work for ‘prepared piano’ into three ’sonic bicycle processions,’ creating a ’music of change’ that transcends geographic boundaries to thrive across two global metropolises.
“Since the theory of conventional music is a set of laws exclusively concerned with ‘musical’ sounds, having nothing to say about noises, it had been clear from the beginning that what was needed was a music based on noise, on noise’s lawlessness. Having made such an anarchic music, we were able later to include in its performance even so-called musical sounds. We need first of all a music in which not only are sounds just sounds, but in which people are just people, not subject, that is, to laws established by any one of them, even if he is ‘the composer’ or ‘the conductor.’ Finally we need a music which no longer prompts talk of audience participation, for in it the division between performers and audience no longer exists: a music made by everyone.” —John Cage
Music for (Prepared) Bicycles aims at connecting community, culture, historic memory and research, as well as the performance act in which the public becomes a participant. It is a way to create new dynamics between these different spaces & people, taking arts to the streets and taking the streets to the museum.
‘Music is an ecology’ John Cage
Music for (Prepared) Bicycles | Score Two is co-produced by Muriel Quancard, Shelley Vidia Worrell (caribBeing) and Ram Devineni (Rattapallax).
Score Two involves the building of a sonic bicycle with the Schwinn Bike Club, a Puerto Rican bicycle club in New York. A bicycle ride is performed and filmed in Brooklyn, Spanish Harlem and the Bronx.
Music for (Prepared) Bicycles | Score Two is a sort of ‘freedom ride’ relating to ‘Music of Change’ by John Cage.
A publication accompanying the project presents a research about the history of Caribbean custom bike vernacular techniques and features interviews with Puerto Rican activists such as former members of the Puerto Rican civil rights group, the ‘Young Lords.’
The project was realized during Caecila Tripp’s artist residency at Brooklyn College. Students participated in the production process of the sonic bicycle, its procession through the city, and the filming of the performance.
‘A music made by everyone’
Music for (Prepared) Bicycles | Score one is co-produced by Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma of Clark House Initiative Bombay, a curatorial practice interested in ideas of freedom; and Ram Devineni (Rattapallax). Associate curator: Veerangana Solanki. Curatorial advisor: Claire Tancons.
Wanting to take John Cage to the streets, artist Caecilia Tripp finds ways to democratize the many individuals involved—conductor, composer, performer, spectator, onlooker, bystander, passerby—engaging them all as equals within her participatory score.
To create her music—and an accompanying film—Tripp first built a sonic bicycle, a kind of moving instrument kitted out with electric guitar strings. This captures the sounds of the street—and the sounds of strings hitting playing cards—as it is pedaled through significant parts of the city.
Tripp’s insertion of playing cards between the bicycle’s spokes remakes John Cage’s ‘prepared piano’ (1938), on which he wrote many compositions, as a bicycle. Cage once said that the future of music was electronic sound. Inspired by Cage’s writing, Tripp applies his ideas to a form of vernacular culture devised and practiced by teenagers in obscure suburbs worldwide.
In Bombay, Music for (Prepared) Bicycles also confronts Cage’s involvement with David Thoreau’s anarchistic philosophy of civil disobedience, a radical appeal to people power that also inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. – Zasha Colah