In the fall of 2000, three members of the teaching faculty and one undergraduate music student at Louisiana Tech University where I serve as Director, School of the Performing Arts, became involved with the development of the sound track for the world premiere of John Cage’s composition, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet.  These individuals, led by Michael Rasbury, Assistant Professor of Performing Arts, assisted Mikel Rouse, Composer-in-Residence at Louisiana Tech University, in developing over two hundred prescribed and random sounds as dictated by Cage’s scenario.
It was through the efforts of these individuals that I became aware of the Alphabet project and its potential for the legacy of John Cage and the development of the School of the Performing Arts.  Michael Rasbury, principle player in the project, gained significantly in the area of music technology, digital recording, and touring as he accompanied the production to Scotland, Germany, Ireland, Illinois, and Australia.  Mel Mobley, Acting Assistant Professor of Music, is using the production as his doctoral dissertation as he seeks his terminal degree from the University of Illinois in Urbana.  And Greg Hennigan, undergraduate student in music, not only assisted his professors in securing and recording the complex sound track, but he also was given the opportunity to serve as Sound Technician during the production on the campus of the University of California in Berkeley.Through these individuals’ efforts, the entire School was enriched enormously, providing all of us an opportunity to gain greater understanding not only of the potential for contemporary technology but also of the significance of John Cage, composer and innovator.

John Cage and Mikel Rouse, two composers

John Cage, who died in 1991, was a singularly inventive and much loved American composer, writer, philosopher, and visual artist, whose influence has yet to be fully felt.  Beginning around 1950, and throughout the years following, he departed from pragmatism of precise musical notation and circumscribed ways of performance.  His principal contribution to the history of music is his systematic establishment of the principle of indeterminacy: by adapting Zen Buddhist practices to composition and performance, Cage succeeded in bringing both authentic spiritual ideas and a liberating attitude of play to the enterprise of Western art.
Mikel Rouse is a formidably original American composer who is best known to international audiences for his operatic trilogy, Failing Kansas (1994), inspired by the same events which led Truman Capote to write In Cold Blood; Dennis Cleveland (1996), the first ever talk show opera; and The End of Cinematics (1999), based on four “retro-songs” and, in collaboration with video artist John Jesurun, involving the use of real-time film.
Rouse is engaged for the next year and a half with Louisiana Tech University, the Lincoln Parish School Board, and the North Central Louisiana Arts Council through a residency provided through the Meet the Composer Program.  John Cage’s Alphabet, a never before performed composition, was a project Rouse brought with him to our campus.  The Cage Foundation commissioned Rouse along with stage director Laura Kuhn, CEO of the John Cage Foundation, to realize the sound collage for a planned international tour.  Rouse involved a number of us to assist with some refinements in the composition held in the Arthur W. Stone University Theatre on the Tech campus.  He warned: “don’t worry if you don’t understand what Cage is doing.  You’re not alone.”

Alphabet

James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: an Alphabet is a ghost piece of sorts.  Of Alphabet, John Cage wrote: “It is possible to imagine that the artists whose work we live with constitute not a vocabulary but an alphabet by means of which we spell our lives.” Its cast of characters include the ghosts of Erik Satie (performed by Merce Cunningham), Marcel Duchamp, and James Joyce, the role that Rouse played.  Cage knew the three artists well.  In fact, at one point in his life, he had shared living quarters with Mr. Cunningham; thus that remarkable individual’s involvement in the project as an actor rather than as a dancer.  Others with smaller ghost appearances include Henry David Thoreau, Mao Tse Tung, Rrose Selavy (performed by way of audio tape by Jasper Johns), Buckminster Fuller, Thorstein Veblen, and Brigham Young.  The cast also included John Kelley, noted performance artist, as the ever-present narrator.  These famous individuals are brought together and as ghosts seek to gain a modicum of understanding about the lives they had lived.  The text is rich with tongue-in-cheek humor, convoluted language (ala James Joyce), and vivid imagery that informs not only the sound collage that Rouse with the assistance of Tech professor Michael Rasbury created but in the scene design as well.  The production not only challenges audiences in ways unique to Cage, it also challenges the designers, producers, directors, and performers.  One such challenge emerged when it was discovered that Merce Cunningham, perhaps showing his eighty-plus years, could not remember his lines.  This was accommodated by taping Cunningham’s dialogue and playing the tape during performances with the famous dancer interpreting his lines through movement.
There were two aspects of the composition, originally intended for radio broadcast, made available to Rouse: the list of over 200 recorded sounds and the written text presented in poetry and prose.  Cage, in the poetic segments, used the poetic form called mesostics and arranged the text on the page to spell the name of one of the three principle characters as exemplified by the following opening lines, spoken by the narrator:
 
 

what a Joy
    to hAve
     theM
   on thE
           Same stage same time

even though the subJect
       Of
         the plaY
          is the Curtain
that sEparates them!
 

John Cage on James Joyce

Part of my personal attraction to the Alphabet project comes from the fact that it puts James Joyce and his remarkable words on stage.  My wife completed her PhD dissertation which included a major segment on Joyce and his short fiction; as a result, I have become somewhat connected to the Irish author and his continued influence on the post modern world.  The composition was my first introduction to Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie, and others in the list of famous persons.  By including Joyce as Cage does in his work in the same “breath” as Duchamp and Satie implies that these individuals are of the same stature of the novelist.  In fact, my personal respect for Marcel Duchamp and Erik Satie was significantly increased due exclusively to their being equated to James Joyce.  I am convinced that Cage recognized this potential and used it to the fullest.  He allows those who are familiar only with Satie to do what I did with Joyce: allow residual respect to be produced.  Subsequently, I discovered that what Joyce did for literature (revolutionized it), Duchamp did for visual art and Satie did for musical composition.  As a result, it is easy to understand Cage’s attraction to the three principle ghosts in his composition.  Alphabet is a meeting place for these three arts: music, visual art, and literature.  It is only fitting, then, that Cage set out to “spell our lives” by giving these three characters’ ghosts opportunities to examine themselves.
Of the three revolutionists named in his title, it is James Joyce who holds a special place for Cage.  At the beginning of the text for Alphabet, Cage offers what he refers to as a “lecture.”  The text of this preface of sorts was taped by Cage when the piece was aired for radio and was subsequently used in tact by the producers of the live stage version at each of the venues already noted.  In this “lecture,” Cage makes some revealing statements about James Joyce.  Here is what he had to say.
 

“When I was young I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and was not enthusiastic.  At that time I loved the parts of Finnegans Wake that were published in transition and I often read them to entertain my friends.  When the finished Wake was published I bought it but didn’t think I had the time to read it. I was too busy writing music.Recently I have been punished.  I have gone to Joyce as to a jail.  I have recently finished Writing for the Third Time Through Finnegans Wake and I plan two more such writings.  I have made an hour long radio play called Roaratorio, and Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake.  As with Duchamp’s work, so with Joyce’s.  And this goes for Dubliners and Ulysses too.  I don’t understand any of it.  Nor do I understand the night sky with the stars and moon in it.  The fact we travel to the moon has given me no explanation of it. I would be delighted to retrace Basho’s steps in Japan where as an old man he made a special tour on foot to enjoy particular views of the moon.  When I was in Ireland for a month last summer (‘79) with John and Monika Fullemann collecting sounds for Roaratorio, many Irishmen told me they couldn’t understand Finnegans Wake and so didn’t read it.  I asked them if they understood their own dreams.  They confessed they didn’t.  I have the feeling some of them may now be reading Joyce or at least dreaming they’re reading Joyce.  Adaline Glasheen says: ‘I hold to my old opinion.  Finnegans Wake is a model of a mysterious universe made mysterious by Joyce for the purpose of striking with polished irony at the hot vanity of divine and human wishes.’  And she says: ‘Joyce himself told Arthur Power - what is clear and concise can’t deal with reality, for to be real is to be surrounded by mystery.’  Human kind, it is clear, can’t stand much reality.  We so fiercely hate and fear our cloud of unknowing that we can’t believe sincere and unaffected, Joyce’s love of the clear darkBit has got to be a paradox. . . . an eccentricity of genius.”

James Joyce ‘s voice in  Alphabet

Throughout the composition, Cage allows Joyce’s ghost to speak.  The text that Joyce is given comes directly from Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s most challenging work.  A professor friend of mine once suggested that if I wanted to read the book, I should strive to devour it a page a day.  At the end of the year, I would find that I had accomplished the task.  The secret, he said, was to read the text at random.  There was no need to begin at the beginning.  The reader could just as easily begin in the middle or on page eighteen.  It made no difference.  Following is an example of Joyce’s text as used by John Cage in Alphabet:

JOYCE

           Do you like that, silenzioso? Are you enjoying, this same little me, my life, my love? Why do you like my whisping?  Is it not divinely deluscious?  But in’t it bafforyou? Misi, misi! Tell me till me thrillme comes!  I will not break the seal.  I am enjoying it still, I swear I am!  Why do you prefer it in these dark nets, if why may ask, my sweetkins? Sh sh! Longears is flying.  No, sweetissest, why would that ennoy me? But don’t!  You want to be slap well slapped for that. Your delighted lips, love, be careful!  Mind my duvetyne dress above all!  It’s golded silvy, the newest sextones with princess effect. (From Finnegans Wake, pp. 147-148)

Joyce’s final moment in the play is again lifted directly from Finnegans Wake, p. 556:
 

JOYCE

            night by silentsiling night while infantina Isobel (who will be blushing all day to be, when she growed up one Sunday, Saint Holy and Saint Ivory, when she took the veil, the beautiful presentation nun, so barely twenty, in her pure coif, sister Isobel, and next Sunday, Mistlemas, when she looked a peach, the beautiful Samaritan, still as beautiful and still in her teens, nurse Saintette Isabelle, with stiffstarched cuffs but on Holiday, Christmas, Easter mornings when she wore a wreath, the wonderful widow of eighteen springs, Madame Isa Veuve La Belle, so sad but lucksome in her boyblue’s long black with orange blossoming weeper’s veil) for she was the only girl they loved, as she is the queenly pearl you prize, because of the way the night that first we met she is bound to be, methinks, and not in vain, the darling of my heart, sleeping in her April cot, within her sinachamer, with her greengage-flavoured candywhistle duetted to the crazyquilt, Isobel, she is so pretty, truth to tell, wildwood’s eyes and primarose hair, quietly, all the woods so wild, in mauves of moss and daphedews, how all so still she lay, neath the whitehorn, child of tree, like some losthappy leaf, like blowing flower stilled, as fain wold she anon, for soon again >twill be, win me, woo me, wed me, ah weary me!  Deeply, now evencalm lay sleeping; nowth upon nacht, while in his tumbril Wachtman Havelook seequearscenes, from yonsides of the choppy, punkt by his curserbog, when long the grassgross bumpinstrss that henders the pubbel to pass, stowing his bottle in a hole for at whet his whuskle to stretch ecrooksman, sequestering for lovers’ lost propertied offices the leavethings from allpurgers’ night, og gneiss ogas gnasty, kikkers, brillers, knappers and bands, handsboon and strumpers, sminkysticks and eddiketsflaskers;

“it’s like noting on eaRth i feel as i did
                 before beComing a ghost
                        i havE no regrets
                         i weLcome whatever happens next”