Composition v Performance

This is a lecture on composition which is indeterminate with respect to its performance. That composition is necessarily experimental. An experimental action is one the outcome of which is not forseen. Being unforseen, this action is not concerned with its excuse. Like the land, like the air, it needs none. A performance of a composition which is indeterminate of its performance is necessarily unique. It cannot be repeated. When performed for a second time, the outcome is other than what it was. Nothing therefore is accomplished by such a performance, since that performance cannot be grasped as an object in time. A recording of such a work has no more value that a postcard; it provides a knowledge of something that happened, whereas the action was a non-knowledge of something that had not yet happened.

This from a John Cage lecture “Composition as Process.” The lecture itself is a composition indeterminate of its performance; the length of the speech, the timing of its pauses, and the ordering of the paragraphs themselves were the result of chance operations.

“When performed for a second time, the outcome is other than what it was.” Cage has sort of a mad scientist’s take on experimentation here. A proper experiment ought to yield the same results every time.

What sticks out to me is the bit about performance as postcard. If we tweak and extend the comparison, a composition is like a picture frame, and a performance is the stock photo that comes with it. One is encouraged to discard the stock photo and insert his own (thereby becoming a composer/performer).

I know this is not nonsense but I am also not convinced it matters. Maybe I care about performance v. composition because I am insecure about my own writing. I’m always dismissing the performance as incidental to the poem; dismissing the poem as incidental to the process. (Dismissing the process as incidental to…?)

In object-oriented programming, a class is like a cookie-cutter and an object is a cookie. But: a class is also an object. Somewhere there’s a cutter for cookie cutters.

Every composition is itself a performance. This makes everything more interesting and also less so.

Take Charles Bernstein’s poem “The most frequent words in Girly Man” (a previous book of his):

This poem is a composition that can be performed in multiple ways. One might read it to an audience, in a stitled manner or conversationally. One might not read it at all but rather project the words on a wall. The composition itself is also a performance, an instance of the composition encoded within it. The encoded composition is “The most frequent words in X,” where X is any source text and the output a frequency distribution conducted on that source text.

Some composers — Gertude Stein is one — inspire me to compose. Other writers — Henry James is one — inspire me not to compose. I wonder if this doesn’t have to do with postcards and picture frames.