Archives
Rare posters on exhibition in UB Music Library
By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor
The Music Library currently is exhibiting three rare, original and extraordinary silk-screened posters from the 1969 premiere of HPSCHD, a groundbreaking and amazingly complex multimedia event staged by distinguished composers John Cage and computer music pioneer Lejaren Hiller.
The exhibit will run in the library, located in Baird Hall, North Campus, through Sept. 6. Library hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
The library is holding a concurrent exhibition dedicated to Hiller, a member of the UB music faculty from 1968-1989. In addition to HPSCHD, the exhibit highlights Hiller's String Quartet No. 4, also known as Illiac Suite, co-written with Leonard Isaacson.
John Bewley, Music Library archivist, says that only about 100 copies of the handmade HPSCHD posters were made to announce the premiere of this notoriously avant-garde work. They offer a good example of Cage's notable graphic art, which consists primarily of etchings and monoprints produced in collaboration with visual artists.
"These posters were the result of a fruitful collaboration between Cage and Calvin Sumsion," Bewley says. "Only 100 were produced and when put up around the university to promote the concert, most were almost immediately stolen, even from behind glass cases. So they are quite rare."
Although complete sets of posters are preserved in the John Cage Archive at Northwestern University; the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, Champaign; UB's Lejaren Hiller Archive, and the collection of the Getty Museum, they rarely have been exhibited together since the premiere.
One poster depicts Cage as a dragon slayer and was of a somewhat conventional design, but the other two are novel compositions, employing a variety of chance operations—among them use of the I Ching—to select the images themselves and then determine their size, color and placement. As a result, for instance, randomly selected graphics of bars of music, a mushroom, a conductor, a woman burning books, an armadillo and the seal of the State of Indiana are arranged in a size and place determined by the role of the dice or the flip of a coin. Such operations are more commonly used in the development of artwork now, but were considered exceedingly odd at the time.
The posters deliberately reflect the complexity and performance difficulty of the piece they promote—HPSCHD is one of the composers' most ambitious compositions. It is what Johanne Rivest called a "curious piece" for 20-minute solos featuring seven amplified harpsichords and tapes for one to 52 amplified monaural machines to be used in whole or in part in any combination—with or without interruption—to make an indeterminate concert of any agreed-upon length.
Information on these and other music library exhibits can be found at http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/music/exhibits/index.html.
Downloadable images of the posters can be found at http://theodoregray.com/DavidEisenman/.