Burmese Days: Caged
by Bob Moses
Being open to chance places unusual demands on the other band members: in Burma songs, the melody line is often advanced by the bass, and drums aren’t simply timekeeping but fully expressive — and sometimes hold the entire endeavor together as it promises to descend into incoherence. Hence, the early complaint that Burma would be a great band if all three members played the same song at the same time. In Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azerrad quotes Peter Prescott as saying, “… Roger’s stuff was much more sort of analytical — angular parts and quick changes… It was almost, not John Cage, but almost that kind of a look at rock.” The reference to Cage wasn’t offhand or ill-considered. From Roger's time as a music composition student in Michigan, Cage had long been an influence and a guide whose mark was felt in his later work for prepared and looped piano, in his drawings, as well as his playing in Burma. And the man did name his son Chance, after all.
In 1988, Roger, Martin and I attended John Cage’s Norton lectures at Harvard, an event we greatly anticipated. Roger and Martin were both involved in Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, a post-rock, keyboard-based ensemble (Martin played guitar – and, unlike in Burma, appeared onstage, though never entirely comfortably). Birdsongs was informed by minimalist composition, Brian Eno in both his ambient and prog rock guises, and percussive rhythms. (Birdsongs’s Ace of Hearts recordings will be re-released by Cuneiform Records this fall.) Roger had also pursued his solo Maximum Electric Piano performances, bringing prepared piano (a Cage invention), and his looping, spiraling playing to rock clubs, galleries and concert halls. I was working out my own response to the bounds of rock bands, writing music with a World War II portable army pump organ on loan from Roger (he had used it to busk in the Boston subways), and inspired by sharing Martin’s reading and listening. In 1984, as he was finding his post-Burma footing, Roger and I collaborated on a video/music composition using Cage’s "Fontana Mix." We used Cage’s graphs and strategy to plot image and sound: from a set universe of images and possible sounds, the grid dictated the order, the length, volume, and other variables. The piece, which we called Forhuna Vich (the result of chance procedures applied to the name Fontana Mix), was shown at Roger’s first solo piano performance at Boston’s Basement Gallery on June 16, 1984. Suffice it to say the Harvard lecture series was a chance to see a real hero.
Miller and Moses at Basement Gallery opening, June 1984
Cage anticipated the emergence of amplified rock, particularly the cacophony of bands on Burma’s wavelength. In The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross quotes a 1937 Cage manifesto: “I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.” Cage’s most famous accomplishment, the breakthrough of 4’ 33” that enshrined silence as a platform for experience, is merely the logical extension of his central idea of ceding control. That openness, and bravery, was on display at Harvard.
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