Anton Batagov
1. 6th Avenue & West 18th Street 2. Just One
Total time: 25:04
Alexander Korenkov - baritone
Composed by Anton Batagov, 2017
_________ BOOKLET _________ _________
This composition was commissioned by Baryshnikov Arts Center / Cage Cunningham fellowship. The purpose of this commission was to create new works that somehow reflect John Cage's ideas and spirit. The first movement is a combination of an instrumental score and audio recording of street sounds. This recording was made in 2012 (a year of John Cage's centenary) on the corner of 6th Avenue and West 18th Street near the building where he had lived for many years. This audio has no overdubs and no effects. John Cage himself could have heard these sounds from the window of his apartment… The score for strings and piano is an interplay of the notes C-A-G-E and the numbers – the date of his birth: day, month, year, century (5 September, 1912). The second movement is a song to the text from Thirteen and three-fourths mesostics on John Cage by anonymous author. A mesostic is an unrhymed poem that has letters within the lines that form a word or phrase when read vertically. Cage wrote numerous texts in this technique. This song is based on the same four notes: C-A-G-E. A very Cagean story happened to me when I was searching for a text for the song. I thought: it would be great to use some of John Cage's mesostics. I started to google, and I found the above-mentioned text: Thirteen and three-fourths mesostics on John Cage. It was in the form of four pictures looking like scanned pages from a book. I have never seen a mesostic written by Cage and based on his own name, so I was very happy to find this text. I wrote a song. Just before the premiere at Baryshnikov Arts Center in January 2018 I sent an email to Laura Kuhn, a director of John Cage trust. I wanted to invite her to the performance, so I attached a description of my composition, and also this poem. She replied: "This text isn't written by Cage. Believe me, I know every single word ever written by him. I guarantee that this in not a text created by Cage. I guess someone wrote it using this technique as a dedication to Cage. Where did you find it?" – I explained. – "Okay, you can use it but please figure out who wrote it." …I did my best to find the name of the author but I didn't find it. The text was available only on these four scanned pages with no name on it. And I thought: Isn't that amazing? It's exactly in the spirit of John Cage: a text based on his name and written in his style exists but the name of its author doesn't. AB
(C) FANCYMUSIC 2025 ___________________
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