Aria for voice

The allure of nature for radical 20th-century American composer John Cage (1912-92) was certainly more philosophical than religious. Cage helped promote Dadaist anti-art tendencies in the stuffy realm of classical art music in the post-WWII era. His works pushed the boundaries of what could be called music.
Cage’s Aria does not specify voice type or range, and performances have featured everything from one to a dozen voices. Striking sound effects go hand-in-hand with the experimental, graphic notation. Rather than indicating exact pitches or rhythms, Cage notate Aria with a series of colored gestural shapes whose general contours and lengths can be variously interpreted by performers. It is one way that Cage reinforces the uniqueness of every live performance. Each color is to be equated to a different vocal technique or style determined by the performer in advance. For instance, blue could be jazzy, orange could be sprechstimme, red is nasal, yellow bluegrass, etc. A further estranging device is Cage’s use of multiple languages: English, French, Italian, Russian, and Armenian. The last-mentioned stems from the influence of Cathy Berberian, an Armenian-American soprano and pioneering advocate of new music. Aria was written for Berberian, whose premiere of the work in Rome in 1958 caused a sensation.

(c) Jason Stell