John Cage - Variations VII - 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering (1966)

via Built, not born :-/

bananimalistic | Jan 24, 2010 

In 1966 ten New York artists and thirty engineers and scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories collaborated on a series of innovative dance, music and theater performances, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, held in October at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City. 

In the souvenir program for the first performance Cage writes a statement about the piece: "My project is simple to describe. It is a piece of music, Variation VII,indeterminate in form and detail, making use of the sound system which has been devised collectively for this festival, further making use of modulation means organized by David Tudor, using as sound sources only those sounds which are in the air at the moment of performance, picked up via the communication bands, telephone lines, microphones together with, instead of musical isntruments, a variety of household appliances and frequency generators.
The technical problems involved in any single project tend to reduce the impact of the original idea, but in being solved they produce a situation different than anyone could have pre-imagined.

Variations VII, performed at 9 Evenings, was the next to last in John Cage's series of indeterminate works that he had begun in 1958, which made increasing use of electronic equipment and systems.

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Variations VII by John Cage

microcinema | Jul 19, 2010 

"Variations VII by John Cage" EXCLUSIVELY DISTRIBUTED by Microcinema DVD. To order this DVD and/or other Microcinema titles, go to: www.microcinemadvd.com.

In 1966 ten New York artists and thirty engineers and scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories collaborated on a series of innovative dance, music and theater performances, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, held in October at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City. The artists were John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Öyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor and Robert Whitman. Archival material has been assembled into ten films, each of which reconstructs the artist's original work and uses interviews with the artists, engineers and performers to illuminate the artistic, technical and historical aspects of the work. 

Variations VII, performed at 9 Evenings, was the next to last in John Cage's series of indeterminate works that he had begun in 1958, which made increasing use of electronic equipment and systems. This DVD documents the only complete performance of Variations VII and also presents a stereo audio recording of the full 85 minutes of the performance. 

This rare and historical film is the second in the 9 Evenings series from E.A.T. and ARTPIX and was produced by Billy Klüver and Julie Martin of E.A.T. and directed by Barbro Schultz Lundestam.

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