© Henri Vogt

100 CYMBALS / BUT WHAT ABOUT THE NOISE OF CRUMPLING PAPER… – RYOJI IKEDA / JOHN CAGE

With 100 Cymbals, Ryoji Ikeda plunges us into the abyss of vibration. A unique listening experience.
Created in 2019 at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in the sumptuous hall designed by architect Frank Gehry, 100 Cymbals is both a stage performance and an audiovisual installation. Ryoji Ikeda highlights the rich potential of cymbals by following the thin line between noise and harmonic resonance. The seemingly rudimentary instrument, a convex disc made of an alloy of copper, brass and bronze, more commonly used to accentuate certain beats of the bar, is transformed into a powerful polyphonic resource. The different modes of playing, more or less conventional, maintain a fusional – almost choral – sonority and allow harmonic strata and other acoustic results to emerge within a process that a single line could represent: an infinite crescendo, leading from an almost imperceptible murmur to the brilliance of the final fortissimo.

John Cage’s “But what about the noise of crumpling paper” celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dada co-founder Hans Arp, and was composed in 1986 for Les Percussions de Strasbourg. But Cage did not specify the number of players, the durations, the tempo or the repetitions. There is only a system of five different punctuation marks that must be reinterpreted for each performance. The Japanese sound and video artist Ryoji Ikeda designed a new version of this conceptual score, which premiered at the KunstFestSpiele in Hanover in June 2021.

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