This is an unlikely story about an unlikely opera, when one of America's leading composers of experimental music was commissioned to create a work in honor of the United States Bicentennial in 1976.
John Cage who died in 1992, remains best known for his 1952 minimalist masterpiece, "4'33," where a pianist sits before an instrument in silence for four minutes and 33 seconds.
His opera Apartment House 1776 is at once simple and complex. Four singers, each representing an American of 1776, simultaneously perform music inspired by their heritage and experience. One is identified as white and Protestant, one is Black, one is Native American and one is a Sephardic Jew.
"And it's supposed to be completely independent and without paying any regard to how the other singers are singing," notes Alexander Sulen Gedeon, currently directing Apartment House 1776 for the Detroit Opera. There's no narrative, just the four singers layering their voices with an orchestra. The result sounds like a dissonant mishmash at times, but there are also moments of unexpected harmony — not unlike America.
Although the score is only a page long, Cage left hundreds of pages of material for singers to draw from, including early American hymns, spirituals, fiddle tunes and Revolutionary War-era fife and drum cadences. A devoted student of Buddhism and East Asian philosophy, Cage drew upon the I Ching and the idea of chance as guiding principles for much of his work.
"There's an aspect of liberation in that," Gedeon said. "In terms of liberating your perception… hearing things a little bit differently."
Cage believed in freeing sound from the constraints of the composer's will. Apartment 1776 was a co-commission from six major American orchestras with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Critics were respectful. But many of its first audience members in Boston and New York City hated it, as one of the original singers recalled on NPR in 1977.
"Boston, very courteously, walked out at various intervals and reserved their booing for the intermissions, which is the proper time to boo," Helen Schneyer said. "New York growled and grumbled throughout, and there were even some physical altercations here and there.
But since its premiere, Apartment House 1776 has become something of an avant garde classic. Singers at the Detroit Opera were encouraged to reinterpret the categories John Cage first imagined for them.
"All of my music is by Black composers. I'm singing an aria from Joseph Bologne's 'Anonymous Lover,'" said Brianna J. Robinson. Her predetermined role, singing spirituals, she said, became an artistic springboard. "It's not all spirituals. It's music that I love and am connected to, and it's also operatic. I am a Black opera singer, and so I sing opera."
All of the singers, she said, discussed what 1776 means to them as the project evolved. They were encouraged to imagine their ancestors as they sang, and to tap into the spiritual traditions and legacies of oppression that created some of the music they performed.
Director Alexander Sulen Gedeon said that to him, experimental music feels profoundly American.
"I mean, it was George Washington that called America 'The Great Experiment,'" he said. "That's in the DNA of the country, that you would have ideas that are different, that are separate and that are seemingly in contradiction with each other. But it's not about all of us agreeing. It's about all of us buying into the synthesis and the project, the experiment together."
Even if this music sounds like nothing George Washington would recognize, Gedeon thinks the founding fathers would recognize experimental art as embedded in great American traditions. "What happens," he asked. "when we sing together separately but together? What can we hear when we listen to each other in a different way?"
Edited for radio and the web by Rose Friedman.
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