S.E.M. ENSEMBLE - Spoken Music Concert At Paula Cooper Gallery

"The S.E.M. Ensemble's Spoken Music Concert took place on Tuesday, February 6, 1990, at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. The S.E.M. Ensemble (director Petr Kotik, Joseph Kubera, Chris Nappi, and Ben Neill) performed a series of text works with a number of guest performers, including John Cage, Dick Higgens, Jackson Mac Low, and Anne Tardos. John Cage's "Empty Words," written in 1973-1974, is arguably the most musical of his texts, and a rare recording of John Cage performing his own text pieces. Made up of fragments from the journals of Henry David Thoreau, it consists of four parts. The first is a chance-derived mix of phrases, words, syllables, and single letters; subsequent parts each eliminate one of these textual elements from the mix. By the fourth part (performed here), there is nothing left but single letters. As the text becomes simpler and simpler, silences become more and more prominent. Includes a 12-page booklet with texts by Jackson Mac Low and James Pritchett, and originally issued in 2002 on Dog W/A Bone." -  Dog W/A Bone.