Fingersnaps & Footstomps

At California's Mills College last week, summer-school students filed on to a stage before a Picasso-like background of musical scales, picked up an assortment of bells, whistles and drums, and let go with everything they had. With ordered gusto they banged, rattled, beat, blew, stomped and rang their way through Henry Cowell's Pulse, John Cage's Second Construction, William Russell's Chicago Sketches, Lou Harrison's Canticle, Amadeo Roldan's Ritmicas V and VI. When they had finished, the audience gave percussive approval. Wrote Musicritic Alfred Frankenstein in San Francisco's Chronicle: ". . . Endlessly fascinating. I suspect the future of this experiment lies in assimilating itself ultimately to other types of instrumental resource. . . . There was something epical ... in seeing William Russell pound on a suitcase in his Chicago Sketches for the delicious thud that only a suitcase can provide."

Percussion orchestras mean little in the life of the man in the street. For Maestro John, Cage they are the medium of a rich and exciting fine art, shot through with potentialities. Purpose of his music, explains Cage, is the exploration of sounds and rhythms which were previously considered nonmusical. He hopes some day to make use of electrical instruments capable of playing sliding tones, get any desired sounds in any desired rhythm. For the present, Percussionist Cage contents himself with "dragons' mouths," wood blocks, rice bowls hit with chopsticks, temple gongs, pipe lengths, secondhand brake drums, baby rattles, maracas, wind glass, thunder sheets, washboards, cowbells, "fin-gersnaps & footstomps," flower pots, gueiro, sirens (for the use of which he had to get police permission), claves, police whistles, the jawbone of an ass.

Close-cropped, 28-year-old John Cage once studied for the ministry, looks like a Westerner's idea of a typical Yale boy. His percussion group is made up of pupils from the Mills summer session, where he teaches, but there are exceptions: suitcase-slapping Russell, a hot-jazz authority, composer and member of the Red Gate Chinese Shadow Players; Lou Harrison, 23-year-old composer and Mills faculty member; Russian-born Xenia Cage, his wife. Asked how long they had been wed, Cage quipped: "Five years, but I didn't begin practicing percussion on her until after we married."

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