In 2006, Trogen, a Swiss town, began hosting a series of performances of the complete choral works by Bach, with their sequence determined by the liturgical calendar for which they were written. According to the Swiss J. S. Bach Foundation, which is behind the project, the series will have covered all of his cantatas, masses, oratorios and motets by 2030.
On Saturday, in the small auditorium of Wild Project in the East Village, the Avant Music Festival presented the complete choral works of John Cage. The program consisted of five pieces and it took the contemporary vocal music ensemble Ekmeles all of 70 minutes to perform them. Given Cage’s predilection for nonconventional “found” instruments like bathtubs, seashells and amplified cactuses, it may surprise that he wrote works for vocal ensemble at all — let alone one with so quaint a title as the 1979 “Hymns and Variations,” which closed the program. That work is based on two hymns by the 18th-century New England composer William Billings, but for Cage these become merely another container of found sounds, which he gently, playfully prises out of their melodic textual context until all that remains are pure floating harmonic particles.
The 12 performers, all amplified, are instructed to sing without vibrato, quietly, and often in isolation. Billings’s texts are condensed to mere sound colors with vowels almost entirely untethered from consonants. The Ekmeles members performed with precision and a great deal of personal courage in acoustics that were mercilessly dry and revealing.
A fragile, sometimes tentative beauty characterized the first two pieces: “Ear for EAR,” an antiphonal work for solo and offstage ensemble, and “Four2”, a meditative piece interspersed by yawning silences. On Saturday — Cage would have loved this — a harsh car horn interrupted one of the silences.
In “Five,” the harmonies were a touch more daring but the overriding quality, as in the other works, was one of stasis and calm. The odd one out on the program was “Four Solos for Voice (93-96).” Here, all of a sudden, was full-on vocal virtuosity, explosive wit and an overabundance of text, languages, ideas and techniques. Four singers — two women and two men — engaged in protracted vocal gymnastics, imitating the high-pitched squeak of a Disney character one moment, holding long sustained trills the next. Electronic processing altered some of the shrieks and throaty inhalations, dusky jazz vocals and snippets of bel canto, stifled groans and rhythmic panting.
In the other works, one vocal part, such as a tenor, was typically shared among singers in small, isolated and self-effacing gestures. In “Four Solos” any given singer produced a wild bouquet of sounds and voices that clashed, meshed and sparred with those of the others. As over the top as the other works were minimalist, this was the product of a maverick composer whose music continues to delight, surprise and challenge the listener.
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