Inlets

One of Cage’s many collaborations with dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, Inlets was originally meant to accompany Cunningham’s choreographed piece of the same name, and was used again for the appropriately titled choreographed piece Inlets 2. It is written for four musicians, the first three of which each play four of a variety of conch shells, all of which are amplified and filled with water, by tipping the shells and producing gurgling sounds with the water inside them. The fourth plays the sound of pinecones burning- preferably live, but a recording is adequate as well- following a silence that begins halfway throughout the piece, and later uses circular breathing to blow a single tone on a thirteenth, waterless conch shell. The piece can be of any length; however a length must be agreed upon by the musicians before the piece is played so that they will know when to go silent and let the sound of pinecones burning come in.

This piece is an example of Cage’s growing interest in improvisation during the late 1970s despite his having expressed disdain for the term in the past. (It should be noted that the subtitle of this piece is Improvisation II.) By having the musicians use unconventional and unfamiliar instrumentation, he wanted to strip them of any experience-based advantage. While the piece does feature a number of predetermined events, such as the entrance of the burning pinecone sound and the return of the conch water gurgling once the musicians hear said sound, many of the details of said events are controlled more by physics than they are by the musicians. In the aforementioned examples, the musician who starts the burning pinecone sound has little to no control of the exact events that constitute the burning of the pinecones, while the gurglers must rely on how well their ears work in order to resume gurgling rather than their own decision making. This isn’t to say the musicians have no control over the piece- they decide many of the durations of the events, which shells they use, when to start the burning pinecone sound etc. However, the use of unconventional instruments that give their players little control over the sounds they produce results in nature deciding much of the piece’s, well, nature, rather than the musicians themselves. The resulting sheer unpredictability is in line with Cage’s own definition of improvisation, one that revolves around “just letting the sound be”.

It should also be noted that the very instructions for this piece were seemingly created with the same kind of impulsiveness and disorganization one would associate with improvisation. The instructions begin somewhere above middle of the page and take up most of the right side before continuing on the left side perpendicular to the original instructions and eventually colliding with the beginning of the instructions and squeezing in the top of the page. Additionally, there are multiple visible edits, from crossed-out terms (most notably the request for “percussion” and “wind” players) and added terms awkwardly inserted above the original text. To top it off, the handwriting of the instructions is very messy, with words like “burning” and “gurgling” being barely readable. Given how the score for Child of Tree, the first in Cage’s Improvisation series, features a similarly messy and nearly incomprehensible appearance, it is likely that the seemingly haphazard design of that of Inlets was intentional, as if Cage was trying to make the creation of the piece itself look like an improvisation. Additionally, the difficulty in reading the score suggests an element of chance at play, as readers would have to guess the identity of its less legible words.

While Cage was not known to have expressed an interest in any of the various sets of classical elements- the physical ones- during his lifetime, one could easily think so because of this piece. The four most well-known of the five Western classical elements- fire, water, air and earth- are prevalent throughout the piece via the act of burning pinecones, the water in the conch shells, the act of blowing a shell and the materials of the piece themselves, respectively. Alternatively, given Cage’s own interest in the Yìjīng (better known as the I Ching), it is possible that he was influenced by the concept of the Wǔ Xíng (the Chinese set of classical elements) while writing this- going by this, one might link the pinecones to the element of wood and the microphones that amplify the water-filled conch shells to the element of metal.

(Brandon Chang)

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For the recording I picked this one since it has good audio quality and it shows all of the players; unfortunately they don’t follow the score exactly.