PROGRAM NOTE

Last modified 27 April 2023

PASSAGE 7
Intermedia Performance by Roger Reynolds

PASSAGE 7: "John Cage – incidents, texts, conversations, and music"

The seventh in the series involved:
Roger Reynolds, Speaker
Jenny Lin, Guest Pianist
Jaime Oliver, Technical assistance
9 September 2012

PASSAGE is a Performed Event: a non-linear aggregation of original texts read aloud, projected visual images, video clips, live performances, and computer sound spatialization.

Each PASSAGE event is unique, a new combination of selected texts and images from existing repertoires, and each depends upon the nature of the occasion. In 2009, I began a series of such presentations, offering an engaging way of sharing observations, images, sounds, and the unpredictable resonances across them. PASSAGE is not a “lecture about something”, from which an audience member carries away a particular (and uniform) message. It is rather that each individual finds his or her own connections between the elements presented. The intent is associative and inferential, not illustrative or explanatory. My texts – some are read live and others pre-recorded – interpenetrate. They are spatialized in real time by a computer algorithm carefully tuned to allow a textual choreography where lines of thought intersect and challenge one another.

The first PASSAGE occurred in the newly opened Experimental Theater at the Conrad Prebys Music Center in La Jolla, 1 December 2009. Subsequent PASSAGE events have occurred in Darmstadt, Buffalo, Cambridge, Ann Arbor, Washington, D.C., at Columbia University, and UCSD. I am indebted to Paul Hembree and Jaime Oliver for their supportive interaction with me in this ongoing project, both logistical and performative. In the summer of 2017, C.F. Peters published PASSAGE in book form, a publication which mingles ideas and images so that they become a communicative amalgam pulling the observer sometimes towards the specificity of idea and at others towards the inferential space of image.

PASSAGE 7 was performed on 9 September 2012 at the National Gallery of Art, East Building Auditorium, as ILLUMINATIONs 5, Intermedia Lecture Event at the John Cage Centennial Festival Washington, DC.

From the Oxford English Dictionary on “passage”: 

The action of going or moving onward, across, or past; movement from one place or point to another, or over or through a space or medium; transit … Migratory flight of a bird. … Transition from one state or condition to another… That by which a person or thing may pass: a road, a path, a route, a channel, etc. A (narrow) way giving access … A thing that passes or takes place; an occurrence; an event; a proceeding … an exchange of words, actions, etc. … A usually short part or section of a book, speech, etc., considered by itself for a specific reason.

– Roger Reynolds