John Cage’s Water Walk
November 14th, 2008 | Piano Works | No Response | By Pierre-Arnaud
Today, a video of a great American composer, who already left us for 16 years. This document dates from January 1960 and shows us John Cage playing his Water Walk during the TV show “I’ve got a secret”.
At this time, John Cage was an extremely controversial character in the music world and taught experimental composition in New-York. In this musical piece dating from 1959, Cage uses 34 different instruments, all in relation with water (for example: the bathtub, a toy fish, a pressure-cooker…). The score shows a plan explaining the placement of instruments with a timeline of three pages including descriptions and a pictographic notation indicating the occurrence of events.
Two things to note: contrary to the original version, Cage smacks and tosses radios instead of simply turning them on and off. Also note the ambiguity of the behavior towards Cage: at the same time, the regular game show is canceled to let him play the whole piece, but is treated as a kind of weird.
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