Images of the Ryoanjis Drawing Plans
When is Ryōan-ji non Ryōan-ji? At what point does representation become brainchild, or does ane thing morph into something totally dissimilar? John Cage loved stones, and collected them from all over the world. He besides loved Ryōan-ji from the moment he saw it during his kickoff trip to Japan in 1962. In 1983 Cage began producing a serial of drawings entitled, Where R = Ryoanji, based on the sketched outlines of fifteen small stones from his collection. Run a risk operations using the I Ching determined each choice of stone and its position on the paper, the type of pencil used, the number of times each stone was outlined, and the total number of outlines fatigued. This is a lesson in the limits of representation, for the only aspects of the garden that remain in the drawings are the two invariables: the proportions of the newspaper (which roughly approximate those of the garden) and the count of fifteen stones that were used for the tracing (though the final result e'er contains a greater number of rock outlines than the fifteen stones of the garden). It is every bit if the drawings represented the most bones schematic groundplan of the karesansui garden of Ryōan-ji, in potentially infinite abstract variations. The reduction of the garden to its schematic representation in Cage's drawings radically reduces the figurative sense of the garden (the stones set on raked sand representing mountains arising from the waves of the ocean), and indeed it is but by reference to the title that we know these forms somehow represent the garden, or fifty-fifty stones. With Where R = Ryoanji, we are at the limits of metaphor and representation, due to the transformation of medium and the reduction of form. It would seem that Cage identified with the creators of Ryōan-ji rather than its spectators, valuing creative gesture over spectatorship, process over product, image over icon, presentation over representation.
Cage later produced, beginning in 1983, a series of musical compositions simply entitled Ryoanji. The graphic score is separated into 2 parts to be played simultaneously: percussion (changeless through all versions) and instrumental (different scores for various solo instruments, vox, and pocket-size ensemble). The different instrumental versions were composed past using the outlines of the aforementioned 15 stones utilized for the templates of Where R = Ryoanji. We might surmise that Cage produced these templates rather than redrawing the stones for each new musical composition so as to eliminate the variations that would result from the vagueries of draftsmanship, thus standardizing the series. In each case, the outline of the stone is divide horizontally, and simply one-half or less is used.
These templates are randomly placed upon facing pages, with the pitches at the outset and end of each line randomly determined, and the full pitch range of the piece fixed past the specfic register of the instrument in question. The result is a series of either microtonal steps or glissandi (a continuously rising or falling tone) sounding either independantly or concatenated to course uncomplicated melodies. (In the case of overlapping lines in solo scores, one of the glissandi is pre-recorded.) Since the same limited number of curves are reused, the form is vaguely that of a fugue.
Perhaps the near interesting question concerning this score is why Cage didn't simply have a schematic drawing of Ryōan-ji, with the stones represented either in overhead outline or frontal silhouette, using their bodily forms and relative positions in the garden to indicate pitch, duration and counterpoint. Such an instrumentalization of the garden would accept certainly accorded with Muzzle's duchampianism, with the garden serving as a readymade musical score. The shapes that would be generated by the actual stones of the garden – whether drawn from to a higher place or frontally – reveal diverse curves, steps, and fifty-fifty flat lines, which would variously translate into glissandi, with whole tone, one-half-tone, or microtonal steps, and occasional almost constant pitches. One might fence that while the visual touch of this hypothetical score might exist more than engrossing than that of Cage's actual score, its musical manifestation would be less compelling, even somewhat inchoate. Nevertheless, inside a system of hazard operations and aesthetic indifference such as Cage's, this critique would be moot.
I have long wondered why Muzzle did not practice this. I, notwithstanding, find this possibility intriguing, and thus propose in homage a sketch of my miniature Opus No. 1 (Ryōan-ji for John Cage), scored for any glissando producing instrument (including vocalization), to be played without vibrato, lanto, mezzo-pianoforte, with pitch to be determined by any preferred random method, according to the range of the instrument.
Source: https://www.writersinkyoto.com/2019/06/versions-of-ryoan-ji-allen-s-weiss/
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