John Cage recommends a cactus with wooden spines - not plastic spines - as one instrument for his piece, "Child of Tree."
The other instruments are pod rattles, the four or five-inch brown oblong things with seeds inside, and plant materials performers find on their own.
Music Professor Chris Shultis will perform the piece in the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe on Friday.
Shultis said he does not have a green thumb.
"I have a very hard time keeping plants alive," Shultis said. "I buy cactuses to play the pieces, and over a 12 or 15 year period, not all of them are still alive."
He buys his cactuses at Rowland's and puts a contact mic on one spine that amplifies the whole instrument.
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"I have hundreds of spines with all different pitches," he said.
The specific pod rattles Cage requests are from Mexico and are much larger than the ones found in New Mexico. In 1987, Shultis asked a friend to bring him a bushel of the plant and had a hard time getting them past customs at the airport.
"I had to convince the airport security that they were like maracas," Shultis said. "I used to give them away to graduating seniors, but I had to stop that because I'm almost out of them."
Cage, an experimental composer,
began using plant materials in his work because of an interest in ecology. He was motivated by the idea that plants are musical, Shultis said, and he was thrilled technology made it possible to hear the music of the plant.
"He was probably pretty surprised - just like I was - that cactus would be a great instrument," Shultis said.
Shultis played the piece for the first time in 1988 at one of UNM's composer's symposiums. Cage was the featured guest that year.
In a book of conversations Cage had with French musicologist Daniel Charles called For the Birds, Cage said objects have a spirit.
"All we need to liberate that spirit is to brush past the object and to draw forth its sound, " he said. "I never stop touching things, making them sound to discover what they produce."
A similar theory of exploration underlies "Child of Tree." The piece calls for improvisation free of the performers memory or taste, meaning the performer is not supposed to practice. Instead, they are directed to find new things each time they play it.
"What I try to do is stay open to the discovery of new sounds," Shultis said. "I never know what's going to happen next."
He said Cage would talk about music as a model for society.
"Think about a band," Shultis said. "You get together. You have to try to get along, because if you get in a fight, you break up. Music is a very social thing."
He said most improvisers continually practice to develop licks, and if you come up with good ones, you're good, and if you don't, you're bad. It becomes about the mastery of an instrument, Shultis said, and Cage thought there were negative social implications involved in that.
"It's not about performing for you to display my great virtuosity - how great I am - but instead I'm a conduit for hearing new and interesting sounds," he said. "Music doesn't have to be about mastery, it has to be about exploration."
COMING ATTRACTION
Chris Shultis
Museum of Fine Arts 107 West Palace Avenue
Friday at 6 p.m.
www.mfasantafe.org
