Victoria Jordanova + Pamela Z

Twenty harps on a stage

The harpists are plucking or bowing the harp strings. Some of the performers are humming while they play. This imaginary ensemble is painting in sound the image of a vast sky. The sound takes over. Like the clouds in the sky, various sound textures appear and disappear. They create an impression of stillness, yet they abide by the flow. The heaven’s depth is defined by many different layers and patterns and the colors of clouds. Like clouds in the sky, some sounds are very far away, some a little closer, and some very close and clear. The sounds are coming from the various parts and sides of the stage.

The ensemble is performing without a conductor. As in any orchestral piece, and this is an orchestra of twenty harps, one can hear all instruments playing simultaneously or divide the sound into smaller groups. Sometimes one can listen to a soloist. The performers are using a single page as the score. Each performer has three lines of printed music text as the individual part. Each is improvising on one of the twenty ragas written out for them by the composer. They are playing Postcard from Heaven by John Cage.

It was written and premiered at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1982, and has rarely been performed since. It had never been commercially recorded. Few have seen the score, including the Cage scholars. Cage fans and many contemporary composers seem to have heard about the piece. In my experience, mentioning its name always brought out sunny smiles on people’s faces.

Cage’s instructions

Although clear and comprehensive, Cage’s notes still leave the performer with several creative musical and technical challenges. What does he mean by raga and tala? Cage writes a series of pitches in the form of diatonic presets and calls them ragas. They deserve that name because, like those in Indian classical music, they are neither scales nor melodies but rather a combination of the two. Cage’s ragas are, however, void of the poetic or religious connotation of the Indian ragas, and they do not involve any microtonal pitch bends.

Cage’s melodic sequences are at the same time varied: one sequence is similar to but clearly different from the other. They are different because each has a precise order of steps, half steps, and smaller or larger skips locked within each raga as its proper tonal structure. Improvising on each of the ragas means creating a metamelody based on the raga itself. In this metamelody, the diatonic sequence of the pitches of the raga must be preserved while playing chords, glissandi, scales, trills, patterns and so on. I made a point of emphasizing specific note patterns characteristic of each of Cage’s ragas. This, according to Indian classical practice, brings out the mode, or the flavour, of each raga.

The other improvisational aspect of the piece is the rhythmic cycle, the analogue of the tala in Indian practice. Cage writes a series of numbers under the staff with each of the ragas. Each number indicates the number of beats that form a rhythmic cycle. These cycles are to be applied to the improvisational metamelodies on the ragas and, more importantly, to the silences that separate them. Unlike the classic Indian tala, however, the composer does not insist on establishing a specific tempo, only on the number of pulses within each beat cycle. The frequency of the pulses is up to each musician. When playing together, this allows the chance element to determine the rhythmic texture of the piece, more a layered fabric than a rhythm.

Cage directed that the sustained sound be produced by an EBow, a small hand-held electromagnetic device used by electric guitar players to sustain the vibration of a string. However, to my grave disappointment, I found the EBow did not work well on the harp, because the harp strings are spaced more widely than those on the electric guitar and the composition of the strings is different. So instead of having one custom made to fit the harp, I created the equivalent by employing live sound processing. I used the volume pedal and a plastic violin bow to create and record sustained sound layers. The volume pedal amplifies the sound after the attack, so that the attack of the note can be avoided altogether. At the same time, the main technical challenge is the most inspirational: creating the body of sound at the beginning and conclusion of the piece, and the single sustained pitches by individual performers throughout.

Realizing the music

The realization of Cage’s instructions, detailed as they are, nevertheless confronted me with many possibilities, from the recording of the separate parts to final mixing and editing. After some self-debate, I accepted the fact that just as translating poetry depends on the translator’s language, cultural background, style, and skill, so does the transformation of score to sound. I decided to be myself. I knew I had to be guided by inspiration to bring out the whole meaning and scope of the piece’s poetic and musical aspects, and of Cage’s music in general.

I recorded each of the twenty harp parts as a separate track straight into a computer. By looking at the score while recording, I avoided mistakes in pitches and in the transfer points from one side of the raga to the other. Then I listened to the previously recorded ragas while recording each new one.

Pamela Z’s voice was a significant contribution to this project. From my first study of Cage’s score, I heard the hums as a salient rather than an optional part of the piece. I asked the composer and singer Pamela Z to record the raga’s pitches as non-vibrato, pianissimo, as long as the breath holds, in very high and very low tessitura utterances. Apart from her exceptional vocal technique, Pamela’s extraordinary musicality shone in improvising the humming notes. I liked those solo harp and solo voice tracks so much that I could not help including six of them as separate sub-tracks.

I think that listeners of this CD should be able to get a taste of what an individual raga improvisation sounds like, just as buyers of DVDs can first watch the film and then enjoy the extras. In the great mix of all twenty harp ragas, the first track on this CD, one can never hear each solo raga as a complete melody. I felt it was worthwhile to include six solo ragas as samples of the building blocks in their own right, as the second track. This way you can hear Cage’s Postcard from Heaven both thick and thin.

I want to thank Glenn Freeman, an outstanding musician, percussionist, and producer of Cage’s music on the OgreOgress label, who inspired me to begin working on this piece.

— Victoria Jordanova

As a precocious student of piano, harp, and composition at the Belgrade Conservatory of Music, and of philosophy at the University of Belgrade, the young Victoria Jordanova became acquainted with the work of John Cage at the American Cultural Center and Library in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

As a matter of policy at the time, American cultural institutions in socialist countries focused on the most innovative, avant-garde, daring, experimental, liberating, and creative in contemporary American art, to showcase freedom of expression in American society. That approach inspired a somewhat different American dream from the commonly known ones. Young artists and intellectuals were dreaming about a cultural climate that gave birth to Abstract Expressionism, Happenings, Fluxus, Pop Art, Beat poetry, and other wonders they discovered at these libraries, rather than about the economic prosperity of the American middle class. They believed the whole United States was Black Mountain College, the New School for Social Research, or lower Manhattan.

For the adolescent Victoria Jordanova, it was a fateful day. Her American dream was born, although her iconic American hero was John Cage, not John Wayne. The man who changed forever the way her beloved piano sounded. Who asked audiences to listen to silence, perfectly appropriate for a friend and chess partner of Marcel Duchamp. And finally, the man who described his music as a play that is an affirmation of life, not an attempt to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we are living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out of the way and lets it act of its own accord. Hence his favourite Japanese Zen Buddhist saying, nichi nichi kore ko nichi, every day is a good day. Yes, he was a prince in that dream.

Nevertheless, Victoria Jordanova wanted to become a virtuoso harp player. Although she took the opportunity to go to the United States and study music at Michigan State University, she didn’t look for her youthful dream there. She pursued virtuosity as a harpist on a French government fellowship at the Paris Conservatory and later at the Moscow Conservatory. She studied with the best teachers in the world, and her skills were getting more amazing every day, yet something was missing. She decided it was time to change her approach to music. She moved to Manhattan after winning a fellowship from NYU for graduate studies in musicology. She played contemporary music with the NYU Chamber Music Society and taught music. She completed her master’s degree and settled into the routine of a music teacher’s life.

Then, a few years later, her youthful dream reappeared in San Francisco by chance, and according to Cage that is how most excellent things in life happen. She was attending an informal lecture and presentation by the new music composer Donald Swearingen at the loft of the composer and media artist Randall Packer. Pamela Z was there, and a few other future friends. Their enthusiasm for the use of electronics and emerging digital technologies in music making reminded her of when her young imagination had been set on fire by John Cage. As if trying to make up for lost time, she rushed to attach pickup microphones, digital sound processing devices, digital delay, and the whole gamut of rock and roll pedals to her harp. Her imagination and creativity were fully awakened, and with her extraordinary musicianship and virtuosity intact, her harp became alive. A whole spectrum of sounds never heard before was being born. She would use all kinds of objects to squeeze new sounds from her instruments. She was suddenly living her dream.

Unfortunately, as often happens in life, as Victoria recaptured her dream her former country was living a nightmare, dying in a cruel, bloody civil war. The Yugoslav Federal Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was the site of the worst horrors of that war. At the same time, an accident happened at the French American School in San Francisco where she was teaching. The piano movers dropped a piano. It fell through two flights of stairs and lay broken in the lowest hallway of the school. Trying to see if there was any life left in the instrument, Jordanova played a few notes. The sounds coming out of the piano intrigued her; they were different and dark, in line with her feelings. She became obsessed with the sound and decided to record an improvisation dedicated to her beloved, now dying, old country. She mixed in a layer of harp improvisation and, by chance, not exactly Cagean chance but chance nonetheless, recorded a child’s voice singing an innocent tune during her broken piano performance.

The result was published a year later by the CRI label of New York as Requiem for Bosnia and Other Works; in addition to the Requiem, it included several solo harp pieces. Critics were raving about the CD. Jordanova was compared to Mozart, Verdi, Britten, and Elliott Carter. Tim Page of New York Newsday selected her CD as one of the ten best classical recordings of the year. Since that time, Jordanova has performed in most of the iconic new music venues. Her music has been performed by ensembles such as the Bang on a Can All Stars, the California EAR Unit, and Zeitgeist. She published several CDs of her music that won the acclaim of critics and audiences alike. She mastered the techniques of digital recording and editing and the craft of the music producer.

In 2005 Jordanova received an email from Glenn Freeman, the producer for OgreOgress productions. He asked whether she would be interested in recording John Cage’s Postcard from Heaven for one to twenty harps. The piece had been performed only once, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1982, and had never been published as a recording. She was recommended as a person uniquely qualified to accomplish this recording by herself. As she discussed technical details of production, studied the score, and experimented with the techniques Cage recommended, such as the use of the EBow on harp strings, she didn’t recognize the obvious signs immediately. It was Cage, it was a harp, better yet twenty harps, it was a postcard from the prince of her youth, only seemingly arriving more than twenty years late, but finding her exactly when she was ready. It was destiny. Fortunately it didn’t take too long for an intuitive person like Victoria Jordanova to realize that.

Jordanova called Glenn Freeman and told him she had to do this on her own terms, and publish it as the first CD on her new Arpaviva label, dedicated to celebrating the new life of old instruments. The new life Cage gave the piano by preparing it, or the new life Jordanova gave her harp by liberating its sound potential with new technologies. Mr Freeman was delighted. As a true admirer of Cage’s work, he didn’t care who got the credit as long as Postcard was recorded and published.

After almost a year of work, Postcard from Heaven was ready for release. This label and this CD are the result of a lifelong dream of one Victoria Jordanova, and a homage to the one and only John Cage. Jordanova recorded all of the harp parts, and her friend Pamela Z contributed all the vocal parts. Jordanova edited and mixed everything herself, controlling every aspect of the production from beginning to end. This is the first published recording of the work, CD 001 in the catalogue of Arpaviva Foundation Inc.

The story would end here if something else hadn’t happened. One night not too long ago, I had to drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Victoria gave me the CD of the just-finished final mix of Postcard from Heaven and Six Solo Ragas to listen to while I drove, since I hadn’t had a chance to hear it before. Once on the open road, I pushed play. The sounds, projecting a unique sense of space and color, filled the car. The beauty of it surpassed everything I had heard before. A certain spiritual power that sublimated the mysticism of Jordanova’s Eastern Orthodox heritage, John Cage’s Zen Buddhist beliefs, and Pamela Z’s spiritual background turned the car into a cathedral floating over Highway 5 through a night sky illuminated by millions of stars. I played the CD five more times before I reached Los Angeles. The music only got more luminous, the spiritual power more overwhelming, and I was in real danger of finding God that night for the first time.

Now I know you think I have got it all wrong. It’s all about the aesthetics of chance. Cage determined the number of possibilities for each aspect and then used chance to select a particular possibility: the number of possibilities would be related to one or a series of numbers corresponding to the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, or something like that. Or it is just Cage’s tongue-in-cheek cultural reference to the harp as an instrument, since twenty harps had to be heavenly. Or he was experimenting with the possibilities of a raga as a form.

— Relja Penezic