This music balances on a thin vibrating line, stretching through the rendezvous of noses & necks in curved space. It makes me think of Malcolm Goldstein’s tense violin strings in ”Sounding the Fragility of Line”, or Alvin Lucier’s much longer cords in ”Music on a Long Thin Wire”. Maybe even the desolate telegraph wires of the sunburnt Australian outback can be associated with Christina Fong’s spartan, ascetically extended, anorectic strokes of the bow. This music insists, gives a darn damn, in a stubborn desertlike tour de force of a sparsely heard kind, in a rare erotic tension. Again I come to think about Malcolm Goldstein and a motto he attached to one of his violin pieces on an LP called ”Vision Soundings”: ”Go to a lonely place and rub a stone in a circle on a rock for hours and days on end”
Christina Fong - a young woman of southern Chinese descent from Grand Rapids, Michigan - has made a name for herself performing modern music on the violin and the viola. This is her first commercial issue, and the release was preceded by it’s rumours, and the rumours were truthful, which I can establish with the promotion CD in the laserbox.Here is a Cage interpreter of God’s liking.
There is a shimmer before my eyes when refractory ringings of the dawn pry open the crack between sky and sea, letting the pale light of day well forth and spread out in a thin level film of daylight gray across the topographies. Fall clouds rustle cautiously along the pine forests of the mountain slopes. Out of the green sharp pine needle masses the pitiable chirps of the goldcrests rise, edgy in the bitter winds of the gray of day.
It’s fall in front of the loud-speakers, and already winter in the amplifier, and the Morra (a Finnish fairy-tale being from the Moomin Valley, causing everything to freeze to ice where ever she goes, making everybody flee her, which makes her very lonely, because she hungers for company in her desolation) of the future hovers in the cramp cold stream of the electron flows through the monster cables. And sure enough it’s a gang of reed mace whisking back and forth in front of my face, like hazardous samurai swords through the shivering unanswered telephone calls of the morning frost. It’s rusty, sprawling, growlingly pleasent!
During his last five years John Cage wrote approximatively forty-five compositions all bearing a number - sometimes with an attached sub-number - as their only title; the Number Pieces. The first number indicates the number of executers, while the sub-number establishes the cronological order. Cage liked the numbers for their inherent simplicity and self evidence - their self-sufficiency. Here Cage’s sounds are shaped in the same manner and spirit as the ancient Asian strokes of the brush on rice paper. An air of immensely cultivated thought carries these anarchistic audio-anorexies.
In Cage East & West really do meet. He is the learned Asian Zen Buddhist and the American ingenious mechanic in one person, sporting a crew-cut and a chequered cotton shirt, leaning over his compositions as if he was working under the hood of an old Dodge outside a Seven-Eleven in Texas! And it goes to show that a South Chinese American woman in Grand Rapids is an uncommonly well suited interpreter of his works - and it really is all about interpretation when it comes to these and many other of the works of John Cage, since the instructions supplied for ”One6” (1990) and ”One10” (1992) are barren and spartan. Some parameters are strict, precise, while the executer in other realms of the music is left to herself and her instrument. For sure it’s a transparent, humble, still Cage we meet here, in the asceticism of his last years.
This is the first complete release of the Number Pieces for violin.
The graphic apparition of the issue is an adventure all by itself. The front cover, tinted in an old fashioned style, offers a sensually naked Christina Fong, in a close-up of her face in the foreground, as well as in a number of smaller filmstrip pictures where she appears sitting on the floor, seen from behind. All text is printed on the CD itself, in a spiral that makes you turn and turn the CD to be able to read!
This CD is leaving nobody untouched, neither by it’s musical expression nor by it’s graphic design!
The word beauty has taken on some new shades. I am moved, touched - happy!
