John Cage Reunion

John Cage – Reunion
Joel Chadabe | Donald Gillies

Electronic Realizations by William Blakeney

Reunion (1968) has been described as “a concert of electronic music using sound systems activated by moves on an electrified chessboard constructed by Lowell Cross on March 5^th, 1968, at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto, under the auspices of the Sightsoundsystems Festival of Art and Technology.”

The concert was notable for the participation of both John Cage, who was present and conceived the work, and the surrealist Marcel Duchamp, whose love and proficiency at chess had led him to achieve international competitive status. 

Excerpt from the Reunion CD booklet:

. . . In recent years, Laura Kuhn, Executive Director of the John Cage Trust, has approached interested composers and writers to consider a new way to present and perform Reunion.  Numerous performances have followed, utilizing laptops and compositions from new music composers around the world. Digital Reunion now has a permanent home at johncage.org.
   In 2018, before what would have been the 50th anniversary of the original performance, we decided that since the cat was already out of the bag, we would try to lift the pall that hung over the original event and come up with our own joyful realization of the piece.
   We booked into the original suite of the Windsor Arms Hotel, where the final game had finished, with a custom-made chessboard of our own. We located a vintage board with a reproduction of one of Duchamp’s 1911 Ebony/Boxwood chess sets.  We also employed a bottle of Château Kirwan that was discovered in the warehouse of the LCBO on Cooper Street.  
   We moved forward. A computer-based tactile controller called the “LinnStrument” was set up by Roger Linn, specifically for the purposes of entering the moves on the board. 
   Here is the way we worked with a computer: Proceeding through a pantheon of composers from A to Z, we created a collection of deconstructed classical works representing the 64 possible spaces on a chessboard, as well as a “castle” position for both the white and black pieces. 
   In total, the database of digital compositions encompassed a sound for every space on the board. When a white piece took a black piece or vise versa, a new unique composition would play.
   Each position on the board had its own designated composer and there was no duplication. In total, there were 130 original loops employed in the performance.
   As with the original performance, when a chess piece was taken off the board, or when a different colored piece claimed its position, the sample would be muted but continue playing. If the square was retaken, the composition would resume playing as though a mute had been lifted.
   These generally unrecognizable compositions were realized with acoustic and electronic instruments and designed to form 10-minute loops that would play for the duration of the game.
   We played a number of games that generated remarkably different musical architectures. 
   For this recording, we attempted to recreate three classic games by Marcel Duchamp:  Duchamp v. Eduard Glass (1933), Duchamp v. George Koltanowski (1929), and Duchamp v. Leon Szwarcman (1929).
   The first thing that will become apparent to the listener is the fact that experienced chess players will typically generate a similar offensive or defensive opening pattern that expands as the game goes on.  As an example, Duchamp often employed a Nimzo Indian opening which would naturally result in a certain emerging musical score.
   Duchamp once wrote that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.   He also instructed Cage that you must not just play your side of the game, but play both sides.
   We hope that the potential of Reunion as an expression of both chess and art will continue to inspire both players and composers for centuries to come.

Joel Chadabe / William Blakeney