Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Péter Egri: (Per)chance: Joyce and Cage
musical ambition. Bartók's integrated model is a far cry from this polarization. The difference between the Modern and the Postmodern is also conspicuous in Cage's life-long bent on, and application of, universal caricature. Already in Britten's Purcell Variations (The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, first performed in 1946) caricature is not a mere occasional prick or a trend-like thrust, but the means of universal irony. Yet Purcell's ironic presence is obvious in all the variations - as is Homer's in Ulysses or Vico's in Finnegans Wake. Britten bore no personal grudge against Purcell: he admired, played, conducted and edited his great predecessor's music, and all his irony expressed was his historical distance from Baroque grandeur, sublimity and passion. Ulysses can also be viewed as a set of ironic variations on a Homeric theme, and Finnegans Wake can also be considered as a cyclic series of ironic variations on a Viconian subject. Purcell's hornpipe (Rondeau) from Abdelazer , even in its utterly ironized transformation by the percussion section of Britten's orchestra, remains the organizing principle and structural pattern of Britten's Modernist variations, just as Homer's Odyssey and Vico's Principles of a New Science of Nations —even in their most double-edged, multiplelayered and twisted transmutations —provide a firm framework for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Britten's set of witty variations start in D minor and end in a clear and bright D major. In Cage's Credo in Us (1942), however, a composition for percussion quartet, tin cans, piano, radio and phonograph/recordplayer, the situation is quite different. In the first part, the choice of theme is left to chance: it can be the work of any "traditional" composer from Beethoven to Dvofák, Sibelius or Shostakovich, whom Cage held in low esteem. In its first, highly acclaimed Hungarian performance at the Hungarian Academy of Music on 30 December, 1999, by Zoltán Kocsis and the Amadinda percussion ensemble, the opening theme was "The Waltz of Flowers" in D major from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker. In the sarcastic middle part, the percussion group and the piano (here also used as a percussion instrument) beat and break the theme into splinters with extraordinary energy and rhythmic variety. The actual target of irony is once again 82
