Amores. Music by John Cage. Choreography by Konstantin Grouss

Contemporary Dance. Contemporary Music Rachmaninov Hall of Moscow Conservatory Alexei Lubimov music festival September 16, 2004 Choreography Konstantin Grouss Dance Konstantin Grouss, Tatyana Fateeva Vladimir Sturov, Lika Shevchenko Prepared piano Alexei Lubimov Percussion Mark Pekarsky Ensemble Music John Cage «Amores» (1943) is a suite in four movements for piano and a trio of percussion instruments. According to Cage, the music depicts states of love, following the traditional Indian aesthetics. Alexei Lubimov, pianist: "When in July 1969 together with Mark Pekarsky and other participating performers we have performed for the first time in Moscow (and the USSR) Cage’s “Amores”, the only score by the composer, available in the library of Moscow Conservatory, nobody could tell yet how important for us the legacy of this composer will become and what an immense and dynamic influence will be exerted by his personality on the music and the thinking of the second half of the 20th century. Overcoming the governmental prohibitions, we continuously brought Cage’s compositions into the concert repertoire, both separate compositions and large programs of his music: concert-actions, entirely devoted to his music, took place in 1975, 1988, 1992, 1999, 2002 and 2004, not to mention the monographic programs, performed by Pekarsky in the 1990’s. Why does his musical legacy still arouse interest? Obviously, not only because it attracts by its novelty or paradoxical qualities. What is most important, as it seems to me, is that this novelty, the articulation of its forms of manifestation, possess such a broad spectrum of connection with the various forms of art other than music, so implanted into the context of life, that they are always experienced in the most direct manner, even if the compositional process had an intricately intellectual character. This implanted, actual and concrete qualities of practically any composition of Cage, the existence of a “text” (even if it is “silent”) on many semantic levels at once is what makes up this presupposition of the vivacity and the influencing qualities of this “ingenuous inventor” (as Schoenberg had called him). When playing Cage’s music, one becomes drawn into the game on stage – a light, joyful, sociable, expelling all psychological isolation and arousing a feeling of a certain type of “free soaring”. Cage had never been surrounded by a wall of his own sounds, and the theater was always that scene (or the scene turned into a theater), where his most well-known “inventions” had begun: the prepared piano, the genre of theater music, the utilization of noises along with musical sounds, the usage of chance. In the 1940’s Cage, at that time being still a young, almost entirely unknown avant-gardist, actively collaborated with Merce Cunningham’s group as well as other dancers, composing music for them which was performed on percussion instruments and the prepared piano, which sounded as an ensemble of Eastern gongs and drums under the fingers of a single performer – the pianist. The non-European philosophy, the avant-garde aesthetics and the complete artistic unpredictability quickly made Cage’s name into a synonym of “independent and total discovery”. Dance and sound mutually complement each other in what turn out to be phantasmagorical pieces, meditation compositions and absurdistic pieces. The composer described them as landscapes. Notwithstanding all the rhythmical and timbral variety of these compositions, their ritualistic, invocative aspect manifest themselves most strikingly." ZERO Dance Gallery, 2004