Behind the Iron Curtain with John Cage, Part 2

My Aeroflot flight to the Soviet Union began in Rome with a layover in Moscow. The plane was half full, and I noticed several love-bug couples holding hands and snuggling together in their seats. I later learned that Moscow was a favorite honeymoon destination for young Italian Communists who would be entranced by the idea of standing in a long line in Red Square to view the pickled corpse of Lenin.

I was met at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport by Ludmilla, a tall, youngish Russian woman with melancholy eyes who took me to the VIP lounge and sat patiently with me for nearly three hours, making small talk. She had been assigned to me by the Soviet Composers Union, the organizers of the festival, but it was obvious she hadn’t a clue about contemporary music. Nonetheless she was pleasant, and I appreciated how hard she worked to conceal her boredom. Once she realized that I was neither a businessman trying to finagle licensing for Pepsi Cola nor a CIA double agent, she relaxed a bit and began to make wry comments about the other men in the lounge, several of whom she apparently knew from past experiences. I got the feeling that she found me a bizarre choice for a supposed “VIP” celebrity. There I was, seated in our banquette in my open collar cotton shirt, jeans and white Reeboks with a funky backpack, while all around us were stiffly attired businessmen carrying on clandestine conversations in hushed voices.

Finally it was time for my flight, and I reached out to give Ludmilla a traditional big California-style hug. She backed away with a nervous gesture, her eyes anxiously scanning the room. “Please—no…” she said in a quick whisper, and instead stiffly extended a formal hand to me. It suddenly dawned on me that the VIP lounge was under extreme surveillance, and that my three hours of chit chat and wolfing down a stale hamburger and cups of bad coffee had been duly recorded by agents of the latter day NKVD.

The plane to Leningrad was a different affair from the international honeymoon flight from Rome. This one was a smaller jet full of Russians of all stripes, everyone from toothless ancient grandmothers in kerchiefs to retired Red Army officers and young soldiers in fatigues. Behind me sat several chubby, baby-faced young men with thin moustaches who I took to be Mongols or members of some far eastern Soviet republic. Several people had even brought their dogs onboard, and the dogs all barked in unison at takeoff.

It was late May in Leningrad, and the city was bathed in a gentle, glowing light that remained until after midnight. The center of the city was enchanting, and it was evident that the Soviets had taken care to rebuild the city after the war and restore many of its classic older buildings, some of which dated back to the eighteenth century. My first impression was one of profound, almost unsettling déjà-vu. There were pictures of Marx and Lenin and hammer-and-sickles on most street corners, although, this being 1988 and Perestroika well underway, some signs had been defaced by graffiti while others just looked old and in disrepair. Nonetheless, the imagery brought a shock to my system, transporting me back thirty-five years to my earliest childhood during the darkest period of the Cold War. And when I went into my hotel and saw people talking on large, ungainly hard rubber telephones with felt-covered electrical cables I thought I was in a time-warp.

I can’t recall when I ran into John Cage. It was probably at the Leningrad Hotel, a huge modernistic structure built exclusively to house foreign visitors and situated on an isolated spit of land across the Neva from the main city. I had known John from six years earlier when I had invited him to San Francisco for a concert of his music at Davies Hall. To decide on repertoire and plan the event I’d visited him on West 18th Street in New York for an hour in the large, light-filled loft (formerly a floor of an old department store) that he shared with Merce Cunningham. What I recall from that particular visit was how the loft was as clean and ordered as a Zen monastery and that there must have been several hundred (if not more) bonsai trees in perfect health thriving on all the windowsills and other flat surfaces. The other thing I recalled from that visit was how, when Cage and I went through a long list of his compositions that his publisher had provided, he often had to stare at a title for a long time to remember what the piece was. This was understandable, given his age (over seventy) and the enormous number of compositions listed. In the end we decided on the Concert for Piano & Orchestra, which I would conduct, some early percussion pieces and MUOYCE, to be read by Cage.

I am not certain if Cage had been in the Soviet Union before this trip. If he had it would have probably been as part of a Cunningham Company tour and very likely carefully circumscribed by Soviet handlers. But by 1988 things were changing there. I was with him on my second day in Leningrad when we were both greeted by a large group of Russian composers. These Russian composers came in two flavors. The first was the official bureaucrats, some of whom held powerful positions in the Composers Union and presumably had the kind of clout that could promote or prevent a performance. We were later to suffer through a number of tedious orchestral and cantata-like works by several of these guys, most of which had political themes attached. “The Battleship Potemkin: Suite from the Ballet” seems to stick in my mind, although I am not entirely certain that was one of them, but you get the idea.

The other group of composers was younger, more earnest. Some even dressed like beatniks with goatees and dark glasses. These were the ones who never seemed to be invited along to the various official restaurant and banquet meals we attended. They however greeted John Cage like a god. It was obvious that his music and his books for some time had been underground favorites. Now, with Gorbachev rapidly loosening the reins on cultural life in the USSR, these progressive composers (and presumably their friends who were writers, poets and artists) were coming out of their foxholes. No one from the West could have been more ideally representative of their thirst for liberty, anarchic freedom and unconventionality than John Cage.

Later in the day I sat with him for a concert by an avant garde instrumental ensemble from Leningrad. They played on traditional orchestral instruments (sort of a “Pierrot-plus” ensemble) and performed a piece of Cage’s that I didn’t know and never did get the name of. It was a post-1950 piece that had been composed with I Ching operations. Rendered by this ensemble on a violin, clarinet, trumpet, cello and double bass, and without the charm of Cage’s typically unconventional sound sources such as prepared piano, toy instruments, kitchen appliances or electronic circuitry, the piece sounded dishearteningly drab. I thought of Cornelius Cardew’s savage attack on Cage in the essay “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism,” a twisted, hurtful condemnation of what this Maoist convert felt was the vacuous uselessness of Cage’s chance-controlled aesthetic. I wondered in what state of mind Cage received performances such as the one we were hearing.

But the Russian players were utterly jazzed to be performing this piece for the famous composer himself, and they all but outdid each other with the antic athleticism of their playing.

Cage generously beamed his classic smile at them and everyone in the crowded small concert hall broke out into sustained applause, even the sour-looking bureaucrats.

Later in the evening, back in the immense, anonymous lobby of the Leningrad Hotel, he looked around and, spying the “cash-only bar” in a distant corner, said in his familiar singsong voice, “Well, shall we have some vodka?” And as we ordered a bottle (paying in American dollars because the hotel would not accept Russian rubles), he laughed and said, “My doctor says I should not drink, if I must, I should drink only the very best…”

Part 3 to follow.

Note: several comments have asked—demanded!— to see that “passport” photo of Adams, père et fils, mentioned in the previous Hell Mouth post. The photo, alas, is lost to the ages.