John Cages Song Books – Music for Nervous Systems

Concert

The four musicians of the Micro Oper Munich have selected pieces from John Cage’s famous collection of experimental concept works between music and theater and follow four individual paths through this large building.

The singer Cornelia Melián, the pianist Masako Ohta, the noise and video artist Anton Kaun, and the composer and electronic musician Ernst Bechert each have very different approaches to interpretation. Yet their paths constantly intersect. What rules apply? What role does chance play? Cage effortlessly combines complex experimentation with surprise and humor.

John Cage’s Song Books
John Cage’s Song Books, written in 1970, are a collection of 90 “Solos for Voice.” The pieces are songs, theatrical actions, or a mixture of both, often incorporating electronics. The scores are experimental: conventional notation is rare; mostly they are graphic scores, arrangements of numbers, various typographies, or verbal instructions for specific actions. Each piece comes with rules on how the score should be interpreted, but a playable version must always be created first. The rules and notations function more as concepts than as scores—they do not produce a definitive musical version. The performers must make their own decisions regarding sound, timing, and the musical or theatrical action itself. They can incorporate their own associations, fantasies, and improvisations. Thus, the roles of composer and performers are redefined. And because everything seems possible, the relationship between rules and freedom is renegotiated. The performers take responsibility—toward the composer, who deliberately left them these freedoms, and toward themselves.

Cage, Satie, and Thoreau
A recurring theme runs through the Song Books: “We connect Satie with Thoreau,” it says on page 1 of the score. Erik Satie, the unconventional outsider, wrote both popular chansons and experimental pieces (e.g., the Vexations, to be repeated 840 times), and some of his ironic remarks serve as texts for the Song Books. Many other texts come from Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden and a pioneer of nonviolent civil disobedience, who valued individual responsibility highly. Here too, the focus is on the relationship between rules and freedom.

Individual, Intersecting Paths
The four musicians of Micro Oper take very different approaches to interpreting Cage’s pieces. Yet their paths constantly intersect. The microphone cables, leading into electronic devices, connect the musicians like neural pathways. Chance plays a major role. Surprises are guaranteed.

Micro Oper Munich sees itself as a laboratory for staged music, interdisciplinary musical experiments, and as a melting pot of different arts. It creates contemporary music theater without a multimillion-dollar budget and far from the mainstream. It finds performance spaces on renowned platforms for new music, festival stages, in the off-scene, and in major venues, in Munich, across Germany, and internationally.

Cornelia Melián loves exploring musical boundaries, sings old and new music, and moves between musical experimentation and music theater. As the heart and mind of Micro Oper Munich, she is idea generator, producer, organizer, and performing artist all in one, forming the epicenter of a small but fine apparatus with different guests that revitalizes a centuries-old genre with theatrical-acoustic crosscurrents, always at the pulse of the times.

Masako Ohta grew up in Tokyo and has lived in Germany since 1985. The pianist and composer works in classical and new music, improvisation, and film and theater music. She engages with poetry, sound, and world music and creates intercultural and interdisciplinary projects. Her solo piano albums Poetry Album (2018), My Japanese Heart (2020, Winter & Winter), and the duo album Mmmmh with trumpeter Matthias Lindermayr (2022, Squama Recordings) received international acclaim.

Ernst Bechert composes orchestral works, music theater, experimental chamber music with electronics, theater music for over 100 productions, and film music. He has collaborated with Heiner Goebbels, Marc Ribot, Riccardo Chailly, Christian Wolff, and many others. He co-directed the Hamburg festival for experimental music, klub katarakt. Since 2018, together with Congolese colleagues, he has been building a youth orchestra in Brazzaville, Congo.

Anton Kaun is a video and noise artist who has produced audiovisual live performances, releases, and installation works under his pseudonym “Rumpeln” for over 20 years. As a visual artist, he maintains long-term collaborations with musicians such as The Notwist, Tied and Tickled Trio, and Slut/Juli Zeh. He produces music videos for numerous bands. He is part of the Rohtheater collective and works as a sound and video artist for theater productions in the independent scene as well as at municipal and state theaters.