Chance Encounters with John Cage: ED McKEON on CURATORIAL COMPOSING

Join us for a discussion on "curatorial composing," focusing on works by John Cage, Heiner Goebbels, Pauline Oliveros, and others.

“Curatorial composing” is curatorial producer and researcher Ed McKeon’s term for the way John Cage shifts attention from musical works to musical encounters, and the consequences that follow. Rather than follow the hierarchical flow of composer, then performer, then listener, curatorial composition distributes the responsibility from that model to a situation in which all are equally present and responsible for the meaning of an encounter. This means that these compositions are neither anchored in historical time nor suited to “Historically Informed Performance” in the sense of a reconstruction.

These pieces (and we as listener-observers) are always undergoing change. Curatorial composing is post-canonic. It invites us to experience and understand historical time and historical significance differently.

Exemplified in many ways by Cage, this approach means that musical composition need no longer be limited to organizing sound, but can extend to text, typography, movement, visual elements ,etc. Contrary to visual art histories in which visual art loses its “medium specificity” to become “post-conceptual,” Cage shows that music can occur in and across any medium.

Cage was not alone in this. We’ll chat about the work of Heiner Goebbels, and perhaps as well about Pauline Oliveros and Jani Christou, among others. Curatorial composing marks a shift in historical ontology, and of how we might understand historical time (and the relation of "history" and "temporality").

[Pictured above, top to bottom, images of Heiner Goebbels' stagings of Cage's "Europeras" and Louis Andriessen's "Die Materie,"]

We’ll discuss how the art world has been belatedly catching up with composers. Cage’s anarchic exhibition pieces — such as Museumcircle from 1991 — opened the possibility of a curatorial rapprochement between the arts, no longer separated by the history of "medium specificity."

Ed McKeon is a curatorial producer and researcher concerned with rewiring relations between gallery arts and post-experimental musics. His work addresses the meaningful articulation of time in artistic practice and production, and how musical and more-than-musical practices create time-bound public spheres or communities of relative strangers. He operates in the zone where music indisciplines others—theatre, book, installation, or performance—collaborating with artists from Pauline Oliveros to Tin Men and the Telephone, and Elaine Mitchener to Brian Eno. His book Heiner Goebbels and Curatorial Composing After Cage was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. He lectures on Music Management and Curation at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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The John Cage Trust furthers the legacy of late American composer John Cage by gathering together, organizing, preserving, and disseminating his work. The John Cage Trust ensures that Cage’s voice remains vibrant, and toward that provides access to our archives, gives information about his life, guides how his works might best be performed or exhibited, and presents, organizes, and collaborates on programs, performances, exhibitions, and scholarship.

We are guided not so much by what Cage has done but, rather, by what Cage’s legacy is doing now.

John Cage (1912–1992) is routinely hailed as one of the most influential and generative artists of the 20th century, a creator of groundbreaking music compositions, artworks, and works of literature. We believe that Cage’s life and work continue to expand how we might experience and think about music, art, poetry, performance, philosophy, and the ways we live our lives.