The Perilous Night is a 1944 composition for prepared piano by the American avant-garde composer John Cage. It is in six untitled movements, and a performance of the whole piece should last about thirteen to fourteen minutes. He said of the piece that it is expressive of “the loneliness and terror that comes to one when love becomes unhappy.”
In 1982, Jasper Johns, a longtime friend of Cage, created a mixed-media diptych also called “Perilous Night,” which includes a silkscreen of the score of Cage’s composition.
Being a piece for prepared piano, The Perilous Night is an example of the radically experimental nature of Cage’s music. I’ll go into what a prepared piano is below, but for now, I want to go into the avant-gardism of his music more generally.
His music teachers were, in the 1930s, Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, both radical innovators in music who would have a strong influence on Cage. (Another major influence was Edgard Varèse, who also influenced Frank Zappa.) Schoenberg, Cage’s teacher in UCLA, famously said that his student wasn’t a composer, but rather an innovator…of genius.
As Schoenberg’s pupil at the time, Cage (writing in a version of musical serialism then) said that he had no feeling for harmony, for which Schoenberg had insisted a composer must have a feeling. Without that feeling, Cage would find himself at a wall he could not pass, as his teacher insisted; so Cage said that he would dedicate his life to beating his head against that wall.
Apart from the prepared piano–which I promise I’ll go into detail about soon enough–he also composed such works for percussion as the Constructions (the first being in Metal) and the Imaginary Landscapes (the first of which was for records of constant and variable frequency, large Chinese cymbal, and string piano), Williams Mix for magnetic tapes, and by the 1950s, he started to incorporate chance into his music, which as part of the influence of Far Eastern philosophy, used the I Ching. Part of this foray into aleatory music was a recording Cage made with David Tudor in 1959 called Indeterminacy: New Aspects of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music.
Particularly radical ideas of Cage’s included the use of silence, as in 4’33”, for any instrument or combination of instruments, and is just four and a half minutes of silence, or whatever ambient sounds are heard during that time; then there is 0’00”, for any performer. Such ‘compositions,’ influenced by Zen Buddhism, Indian traditions, and Dadaism, are meant to challenge our most basic ideas as to what music is.
As for the prepared piano, its origins lie in the composition of Bacchanale, a dance piece for Syvilla Fort back in the late 1930s. Cage had been writing a lot of pieces for percussion ensembles then, but the place where the dance was to be performed wasn’t large enough to fit in a percussion ensemble (there was only a grand piano in the room); so Cage, influenced by Cowell’s use of extended piano techniques (e.g., playing the strings inside, instead of with the keyboard, as with The Banshee), started to experiment with the interior of the piano.
Cage used mostly weather strippings on the piano strings for Bacchanale, but as for his prepared piano compositions in general, he would also put such objects as bolts, screws, mutes, or other objects between or on the strings, effectively turning the piano into a one-man percussion instrument, changing the lyrical piano tones into metallic, percussive ones. This one-man percussion instrument, or one-man gamelan ensemble, was the solution to his problem with the small room in which Bacchanale was performed.
Here are links to recordings of The Perilous Night, the last of them including the score (with instructions on how to prepare the piano at the end). The first of these shows the pieces of weather stripping and screws put between or on the strings.
Twenty-six notes of the piano are prepared with rubber, weather stripping, screws, bolts, nuts, bamboo, wood, and cloth, and Cage provides very exacting instructions for the preparation, even specifying certain Steinway piano models to create the sound he wanted.
The piece’s title is a reference to the Perilous Bed that Gawain, of Arthurian legend, had to lie on to rid a castle of its enchantments and curses, and thus free it of its captives. For Cage, the ordeal that Gawain went through on the bed is symbolic of a painful moment in Cage’s life, when he was separating from his wife, Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff, to be with Merce Cunningham, who would be Cage’s partner for the rest of his life.
According to the legend, Gawain entered the chamber of the castle where he saw the enchanted bed moving about, hurtling all around the room and smashing against the walls. He jumped on it.
The bed stopped moving, then slingstones and bolts were launched at him; after that, lions or other beasts attacked him (there are several works of art showing him on the bed, with nearby lions). With his bravery and armour, he managed to survive the ordeal and rid the castle of its evil magic.
Since Cage’s relationship with Xenia and Cunningham was a sexual one, a legend about a perilous bed was an effective way to express the emotional turmoil he was going through. Changing the title from “Perilous Bed” to “Perilous Night” sounds to me like a kind of censoring of the homoerotic aspect of this relationship, especially given how the piece was composed and first performed in the mid-1940s, when attitudes toward divorce and homosexuality would have obviously been far more condemnatory than they are today.
The dark, tense nature of the prepared piano music vividly expresses the tension that must have been felt as Cage saw the heartbreak in Xenia’s eyes when she knew she was losing him to Merce. Initially, she’d actually suggested that she and Cage have an open relationship with Merce, a ménage à trois; but the two men drew together more and more, leaving her out and leading to her divorce with Cage.
So it’s easy to see how a legend about a bed that flies around a room, smashing into its walls, then launches bolts and slingstones at the man lying on it, then attacks him with wild beasts, is a perfect metaphor for what was going on in Cage’s bed at the time. Even after it was just him and Merce, Cage kept the intimate aspects of their relationship as private as possible, famously quipping that he did the cooking, while Merce did the dishes.
It’s interesting how the time signatures for all six movements of The Perilous Night are either 4/4 or 2/2, when one considers how complex the rhythms are throughout; one would expect constantly changing, asymmetric time signatures. Cage’s music in the 1940s made use of rhythmic structures called “nested proportions,” in which the total structure of each movement reflects the same proportions for the length of the smaller phrases of the movement.
I would like to imagine a narrative of six chapters, so to speak, that are expressed in the music of these six movements. It’s a narrative of the Cage/Xenia/Cunningham love triangle, with the Gawain narrative paralleling and allegorizing it.
In the first movement, Gawain is approaching the enchanted castle, just as Cage heard Xenia’s suggestion that they have a ménage à trois with Cunningham, since she found him attractive. As for the prepared piano music, it’s mostly variations on, for the left hand, bass notes a major sixth (or a tenth) apart from each other (F and D), and for the right hand, three adjacent notes in the middle of the treble clef (F-sharp, G, and A-flat). One senses in the music a tentative approach to the castle…and to the coming threesome.
In the second movement, I hear Gawain going through the door inside the castle. Cage, Xenia, and Cunningham are having their first sexual encounter together and deciding they like it. As for the music, the left hand does a lot of minor thirds of D-flat and F-flat, back and forth (or they would sound that way, if not for the altering of tones by the piano preparations). The right hand plays a repeatedly ascending and descending arpeggiated chord of E-flat, G-flat, B-flat, and upper E-flat (again, except for the tone alterations). Permutations of these patterns occur largely throughout the rest of the movement.
The energetic nature of this music suggests the passion of the three lovers enjoying their thrilling first time in bed together.
In the third movement, we can imagine Gawain walking through the halls of the castle, looking for and finding the chamber with the Perilous Bed. Cage, Xenia, and Cunningham are experiencing the life of a threesome, but the beginnings of the two men’s desire just to be a couple are being felt. A lot of different musical ideas are going on here, but a few towards the end stand out. Both hands here are at first in the treble register, the right playing mostly A-flats and B-flats, back and forth; then the left hand returns to the bass register, and there’s a back-and-forth of D and F there, with a back-and-forth of D-flat and G/E in the right hand, to end the movement. There’s a sense in this music of an itch in Cage and Cunningham just to be a couple, without her.
In the fourth movement, I imagine Gawain going into the chamber and seeing the Perilous Bed flying around the room, bumping into the walls (each knock against a wall being musically represented, though heard softly, in the left hand of the piano hitting bass Fs, Ds, and Fs two octaves lower). Xenia is having suspicions that Cage and Cunningham are excluding her. This feeling is expressed in the haunting ostinato played on the right hand, with back-and-forth notes of G-flat and E-flat.
In the fifth movement, Gawain has jumped on the bed, and the bolts and slingstones are being launched at him. Xenia has caught Cage and Cunningham in bed together. The tension of such an encounter is musically felt throughout this movement, especially at the end, with six bars of tied, dotted half notes that are accented and played fortississimo with the left hand, and F/D/G with the right hand alternating with low Ds with the left hand.
The sixth and final movement is climactic. Now, beasts and lions attack Gawain on the bed. This violence is symbolic of the hostility that must have grown between rejected Xenia on the one side, and Cage and Cunningham on the other, with fighting that led ultimately to divorce between her and Cage.
The music reflects this tension and fighting with variations on a motif of high eighth notes of mostly D and E, but also some high Bs and other notes played with the right hand, the piano preparation making them sound almost like xylophone notes. The left hand tends to play an extremely low, ascending, arpeggio-like motif of mostly eighth notes rising up to a D and F just below the staff of the bass clef. Though it’s all notated in 4/4 time, the left and right hand motifs are very irregular rhythmically, adding to the sense of an emotionally unstable situation.
Other permutations of these patterns are heard in the middle section, until we get to the end, where things slow down, and the left hand is playing its motif in descending half and whole notes. The right hand will be alternating between eighth and half notes near the end, while the left hand is playing an extremely low F in tied half and whole notes; then the right hand will switch from the alternations I just described to dotted half notes, played on the second beat of each bar, in an extremely high E.
Then, as the music gets softer, and eerier, the low F goes down to an E, and the high E goes down to a B, which soon, instead of being played on the second beat of each bar, is played on the first, with the low E of the left hand. The piece ends thus in pianissimo, expressive of the loneliness and desolation that Xenia must have felt, and for which Cage, in his regret over the relationship’s debacle, must have felt a painful empathy.
In conclusion, I can imagine this piece to be allegorical of the strain felt between the gay and straight communities, the latter’s struggle between tolerance and intolerance of the former, which as we know can be quite perilous for the former.
Infinite Ocean 