CD REVIEW
Sounds of Silence
Theater of Voices' new recording finds surprising musicality in the songs of John Cage.

BY JAMES McQUILLEN
jmcquillen@wweek.com

John Cage's Litany for the Whale
Paul Hillier and Theater of Voices
(Harmonia Mundi)

It is a central paradox of music in the 20th century that one of its most influential figures is best known for silence--one famous silence in particular, lasting four minutes and 33 seconds, which is the title of John Cage's best-known work. 4'33", first heard on Aug. 29, 1952, consists of three movements. Cage's direction read "tacet [silent] for any instrument/instruments"; pianist David Tudor gave its première. Meant to open the listener to ambient noise, which is by nature aleatoric, the performance was one of many in which Cage disavowed a role in shaping and organizing sound in favor of finding music in chance operations. It is from such work, and the "happenings" he inaugurated with his colleagues at Black Mountain College, that he acquired a reputation as a non-composer, a conceptual artist in noise.

Though percussive instrumental works (including those for prepared piano) and mixed-media pieces (often incorporating tapes and radio broadcasts) make up the bulk of his compositions, Cage wrote a number of vocal works as well. Nine of these, composed over more than four decades, make up Litany for the Whale, a remarkable new recording by Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices. That Hillier should take on Cage may come as a surprise; he is one of the foremost figures in early music, with a lengthy discography of medieval and Renaissance works. (Local audiences know him from appearances with Cappella Romana.) He has also engaged modern music, most notably that of Estonian "mystical minimalist" Arvo Pärt, who is vastly different from Cage: Pärt, in slowly progressing, spare polyphony, hearkens back to the birth of harmony; Cage wanted to write its obituary and move on. But as this disc proves, not only does Hillier sing and direct mesmerizing renditions of these widely varied pieces, but in doing so he also makes a convincing case for Cage as a composer.

A current of simplicity courses through the disc; Hillier's selection and interpretation echoes Cage's admiration for Thoreau. An early work, Experiences No. 2, a setting of a sonnet by E.E. Cummings, was written for a dance by Merce Cunningham, Cage's artistic and domestic partner for decades. It has a beautifully simple melody broken by long pauses, like a Shaker hymn led by Harold Pinter; its oblique yet personal lyric in singer Andrea Fullington's plain, pure rendering wouldn't be out of place at the Lilith Fair.

Purists may disagree with Hillier's arrangement of Aria for six singers--the work was originally written for solo voice and is now an integral part of the modern repertoire--but it remains a brilliant piece. Its text is in five languages, with many extra-linguistic sounds, and the score is written in an array of colors, dots and wavy lines denoting a variety of pitches and vocal styles. Adding more voices, especially voices as good as these, only broadens Aria's wildly random scope. The similar Aria No. 2 remains a solo.

The disc's title piece is a late work in which Cage assigned tones to each of the letters of the word "whale" and devised variations on it in a call-and-response form; the result is a kind of cetacean plainchant, a slow, graceful legato immersed in oceans of silence. A spirit of chant, which is by now perhaps a permanent fixture of Hillier's voice, also visits the sung portions of 36 Mesostics Re and Not Re Marcel Duchamp. The spoken portions are read by Terry Riley, and the liner notes include the text, written in a form that resembles a collision of acrostics with concrete poetry.

Critics may argue that a disc such as this--an ultra-clean recording of highly disciplined, carefully measured and uniform voices--is fundamentally un-Cageian, attempting to eliminate the uncontrollable sonic diversity, the noise in which music, and ultimately silence, is found. But such are the pitfalls of recorded performance: To incorporate irregular and ambient sounds on the recording would be to strip them of chance and turn them into permanent artifacts. Listeners are better off treating the disc's abundant silences as excerpts of 4'33".