Variations IV

John Cage's Variations IV - Recorded live at the 2014 Avant Music Festival This recording of Variations IV was assembled by Randy Gibson from the 8-hour performance at Wild Project on February 22, 2014 as part of the fifth annual Avant Music Festival. The assembly of these recordings was done completely using chance operations. The score to Variations IV dictates where in the space sounds should be made, but not what those sounds are. We performed multiple layered readings of the work in chance determined blocks of time, performers were invited to perform whatever they like, provided they did so at the spot the score determined. The intention of the work is to bring sounds from outside the performance space into the performance space, and in that spirit, the lines created by the score, where amplification was permitted, were extended dramatically, bringing in radio stations from around the work, using chance operations for their on or off points. Microphones were placed around the performance space and the lobby amplifying sounds from the street and lobby, bringing the sounds of the audience into the composition, and the audience was further encouraged to explore the entire space and to interact with the sound. To mark time throughout the day, recordings of John Cage reading from his mesostics I–VI: MethodStructureIntentionDisciplineNotationIndeterminacy InterpenetrationImitationDevotionCircumstancesVariableStructure NonunderstandingContingencyInconsistencyPerformance (© 1990 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College used courtesy of The John Cage Trust and The Harvard University Press) and Art Is Either A Complaint Or Do Something Else (© 1993 by The John Cage Trust, released on Mode Records #84/85 used courtesy of Mode Records) were played back into the space marking the end of one reading and the beginning of another.