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Indeterminacy (2010-12)

A series of one-minute ‘lectures’ by John Cage, read by comedian Stewart Lee. At the same time, Beresford and the pianist Tania Chen improvise music that reflects upon, supports, challenges or ignores Cage’s spoken word material. The performance lasts 30 to 40 minutes, with the pair playing inside and outside piano and other instruments and objects. The music ends with – or shortly after – the final lecture.

Please see portfolio for further documentation of research dimensions.

Originally recorded in 1959 by Cage and David Tudor, 'Indeterminacy' had not been captured on disc for more than 40 years. Beresford saw in it great potential for a project that would reveal lesser-known aspects of the composer and invited Lee and Chen to collaborate on a performance. For the piece, Cage had extracted 90 of his more aphoristic anecdotes from works such as Silence and A Year From Monday, with Tudor (in another room) realising parts of Cage’s Fontana Mix on the recording. This new realisation carries forward Beresford’s 30-year-long investigation into the ways in which the quotidian becomes memorable, the flippant profound, and the predictably unpredictable, unpredictably predictable. For Cage, word and music were equal: it was vital that the music not be seen as an accompaniment. So in the new 'Indeterminacy', Lee selects and delivers the lectures, while Beresford and Chen, situated nearby, explore keyboards and other objects. There is a natural synergy in the choice of lecturer: Lee’s defiantly contrarian stand-up routines explore the creative possibilities of repetition, boredom, and the magic of the everyday – themes at the epicentre of Cage’s political aesthetic. Thus, the potential for humour arising unpredictably from the quiet Zen profundity of the material emerges implicitly from the material and the improvisation around it. In addition, Cage’s constant challenge to his own compositional and philosophical ethos informs the present performance research: simultaneity, periods of silence and unique juxtapositions characterise the music, though the reflexive nature of the pair’s influence on each other and on the lecturer, emerges continually. These strategies signal new approaches to Cage’s work, in which improvisation and implicit humour are acknowledged as foregrounded elements, rather than as unwanted byproducts of the interaction with listeners – a truly Cageian research philosophy.