Alexei Lubimov speaks to me about John Cage in a way one rarely speaks of a composer: not primarily in terms of concepts, but in terms of presence. He performed his music for the first time in 1969, in the Soviet Union, and often thereafter. He did not meet him until after Perestroika, when Cage was invited to take part in a chamber music festival in Leningrad. The meeting took place at the airport. Lubimov tells me that Cage was exactly as he’d imagined him: ‘joking, with his heart and eyes wide open, very positive’. They then went for a drink and a meal at a friend’s flat. Lubimov suggested that Cage meet his students from the Moscow Conservatoire. “It was my dream to meet him, as I regarded him as one of the most important composers of the 20th century.”
He met him again later in New York, at his flat, in 1991. Cage spoke of plants, flowers and Erik Satie. There was undoubtedly nothing merely anecdotal about this way of moving from a plant to a French composer with the same ease. Lubimov took from him a fairly simple lesson, yet one that shapes an artist’s entire life: to be independent, daring, free from preconceptions, and to remain at the forefront of discovery. On that occasion, he tried to play some of his older works for him. Cage was not particularly pleased. Lubimov almost smiles at this memory: for Cage, novelty was all that mattered. The past, even his own, was not to become a monument.
When it comes to Four Walls, Lubimov begins with the obvious meaning of the title: ‘Four walls are, of course, a cage.’ But the work is not merely a play on words. It is a drama, he adds. “A psychological drama, with dance and a voice. In my view, it is one of John Cage’s most personal works.” The piece comprises thirteen episodes. Silences occur in the midst of the action, in the midst of the dance, as if the movement were suddenly to come up against something. Lubimov tells me that these silences probably represent “the state of mind of someone who is about to crash into a wall”. They are not merely decorative pauses. They act, they interrupt, they shift the focus. “If you’re interrupted, it makes you question things. Or it drives you mad.”
What strikes Lubimov about this work is that the silences become more expressive than the music. Especially on stage. The movement builds, then comes to a halt. Something gives way, veers off course, loses its bearings. He speaks of a ‘change of mindset’, an ‘unexpected turning point’. Cage, whom we sometimes too conveniently associate with neutrality, with the apparatus or with pure idea, emerges here as a composer of an almost theatrical inner intensity. The dynamics range from quadruple piano to quadruple forte. The piece weeps, falls silent, stirs, rages, then dissolves into tranquillity. Lubimov emphasises: ‘It is a deeply moving piece, which is not always the case with Cage’s works.’ Then comes this sentence, which I note down immediately: ‘It is music that weeps, music that falls silent, that is hyperactive, enraged or completely dissolved into tranquillity.’
He finds a tragic aura in it, even though he says he never knows the plot until he has performed it. Four Walls dates from 1944, the year of his birth. Looking back, Lubimov hears in it something that foreshadows certain works of the minimalist avant-garde, such as those by Arvo Pärt or Philip Glass. But he always returns to silence. ‘It’s difficult to talk about the meaning of silence. Everyone experiences silence in a deeply personal way.’ His perception of it, he says, depends on the individual. He then refers to Valentin Silvestrov: ‘The only thing that remains of twentieth-century music is silence.’ The phrase does not reduce silence to mere absence. It almost makes it a legacy.
In Four Walls, the silences are precisely marked out. Not in seconds, but in bars. Lubimov therefore does not inhabit them as a vague, meditative space. He counts them. Very precisely. ‘I simply count these bars, very precisely. That’s what you hear on the recording.’ This precision strikes a chord with me. One might think of the void as free; here, it is measured. One might think silence is left to inspiration; here, it is counted. And yet, there is nothing mechanical about this counting. Lubimov explains that he remains focused on the music whilst trying to clear his mind of anything unnecessary. He also sees in it ‘signs of emptiness’, in a Buddhist sense that he associates with Cage’s thinking.
He tells me that he normally thinks of nothing but the music. Of the sounds. Of their logic, their form, their development, their release. Then he uses a magnificent image: ‘That is why I conceive of sounds as living beings.’ Sound is no longer an object produced by the musician, but an event that is born, flows, pauses and transforms. It is a question of asking where the music is going, including in the way it comes to a halt. Lubimov tries to view sound both as an acoustic event and as a musical idea born of his imagination, in keeping with the composer’s intentions. All of this, he points out, changes with every concert. “Playing Beethoven is not the same as playing Cage.” ”
He has very vivid memories of the recording made in Lockenhaus during the Gidon Kremer Festival. He had proposed performing Four Walls with the Belgian singer and actress Marianne Pousseur. The festival organisers decided to schedule their performance for midnight. “It was fabulous.” The church bell rang at the start; as the piece lasts fifty-five minutes, the concert ended just before the next bell toll. In the middle of the piece, there is a long silence lasting a minute and a half. Lubimov was lying on the floor, whilst the soprano sang Merce Cunningham’s poem about the nightingale from the balcony. “Nobody clapped.” He simply adds: “It was ideal for the recording.”
I then ask him whether the disappearance of silence frightens him. His reply is immediate: “Yes, unfortunately.” Everyone needs silence, he says. Yet the world has become noisy and dirty. Not just the outside world: the inner world too. He hates going into shops because there’s music playing constantly. “Peace and quiet no longer exists.” He lists the wars, the roar of traffic, the news flying in all directions. All of this prevents us from forming an inner image. We are bombarded, disturbed, affected right down to the very fabric of our physical being.
Lubimov therefore actively seeks silence. He sometimes finds it whilst travelling. Not just at the destination, but during the journey itself. ‘When I’m sitting on the train, I’m alone; I can think and read.’ He also finds it at home. These moments of silence, he says, become embedded somewhere in the subconscious and bear fruit when he performs. They cannot be summoned directly. They work beneath the surface. Perhaps that is why his thoughts on Cage bear no resemblance to a theoretical discourse. He does not speak of silence as a concept. He speaks of an inner substance, a vital space.
Listening to him, I realise that, for him, Cage is not merely the man of chance, devices and radical modernity. He is the one who enables us to hear differently. Lubimov loves music in which sounds transcend the very concept of sound. He acknowledges that this idea does not apply to all music; he doubts, for example, that it really applies to Romantic music. But this is what he strives for when he chooses what to play: music in which sound ceases to be merely a sound and becomes a presence, a trace, an opening, perhaps even a way of life.
As I listen to him, I get the feeling that he is not speaking solely of John Cage. He is talking about a way of inhabiting the world amidst sounds without possessing them. A way of making room for emptiness without immediately filling it. A form of resistance to clamour that involves neither haughty withdrawal nor silence as a matter of principle, but rather a more fragile kind of fidelity: preserving within oneself a place where something can still resonate. Cage laughed, spoke of flowers and Satie, and refused to dwell on his earlier works. Lubimov, for his part, counts the bars of silence. Between the two, perhaps, lies this: not music as a monument, but as an open space. A place where a sound can be born, be interrupted, disappear, and leave us more attentive than before.
