John Cage 1912-1992
49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs (1995)
Dir. Roberta Friedman and Don Gillespie
Cage constructed his "waltzes" through chance operations as a series of 49 multi-colored triangles superimposed on the Hagstrom map of New York City. Later, he published a score for "performer(s) or listener(s) or record maker(s)" with the exact street locations depicted by each point of the triangle.
Cage was an inveterate New Yorker. After Cage's death in 1992, Don Gillespie, his long time colleague, decided to celebrate his memory by videotaping each of the 147 locations indicated in the score. An impartial rotating camera was used to capture every location, the durations of each determined by the I-Ching.
The result is a joyful, Cagean celebration of the sounds and the, sometimes unexpected, sights of New York City - and a time capsule travelog of how it appeared in the years 1994-95. It is a combination of spirited and zen-like visuals accompanied by the dynamic and musical soundtrack of the city's natural environment.