In 1966 ten New York artists and thirty engineers and scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories collaborated on a series of innovative dance, music and theater performances, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, held at the 69th Regiment Armory, New York City, in October 1966. The artists included are John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Öyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor and Robert Whitman.
Archival material has been assembled into ten films, each of which reconstructs the artist’s original work and uses interviews with the artists, engineers and performers to illuminate the artistic, technical and historical aspects of the work. Open Score by Robert Rauschenberg is the first film to be released in a series that will bring to life a historic moment in contemporary art history.
Glenn Gould talking about his work for radio The Idea of the North. That recording speaks to me about the profound (and very beautiful at times) experience of isolation that I associate with my 34 years living in Canada. While Hugh McLennan wrote about “the two solitudes” of English and French Canada, Gould’s recording makes the case that it is a nation of many—perhaps infinite—solitudes. And Gould’s performance of Webern afterwards seems as defined by its silences as by the notes, a very Cagean notion.
