Ithaca College

For more information about conference, log onto:  HPSCHD@50: http://www.nonopera.org/WP2/event/hpschd50-colloquium/

As John Cage and his collaborators (Lejaren Hiller, Calvin Sumsion, and Ron Nameth) prepared for the May 1969 performance of HPSCHD at the University of Illinois, they were creating a one-time, unrepeatable, multimedia, participatory, site-specific Happening. And yet, Cage was simultaneously planning future performances and creating materials for his publisher. This talk teases out differences between HPSCHD as a Happening and its “afterlife” as a Work and subsequent issues relating to Cage’s anarchic politics, authorial control, and the creator as “genius.”

Sara Haefeli is author of the monograph John Cage: A Research and Information Guide (Routledge, 2018), and her work on Cage has been published in the journal American Music. Haefeli is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Music History Pedagogy, and will be Scholar-in-Residence at the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice in Boston this June. Her current project is a book called John Cage in the Summer of Love.