Everybody’s Cage

The polyphonic arpeggio of children’s voices from the playground across the street, impatient machines blowing their horns in a traffic jam a few blocks down. As wheels are rumbling and buzzing on the pavement, every once in a while a street musician lets his bebop tune sail along. And all around, yet hard to catch, the continuous atmosphere of the city – a deep hum resembling the string bass in Wagner’s Rheingold overture: This is the acoustic setting at Washington Square Park, New York, starting point of the musical test assembly of the movie “Everybody’s Cage”.

This manifold music shows itself so well proportioned; it seems hard to believe coincidence shall have been its composer. In his 1963 “Variations IV”, John Cage builds a framework to let us rediscover hearing. As we join the Luxembourgian pianist Francesco Tristano walking along a complex network of places and references in Brooklyn and Manhattan, we see the traditional idea of the division of work between composer, interpreter and audience being put upside down. In doing so, the greatest creative force in the process lies within the listener’s imagination.

In “Everybody’s Cage”, German film artist Sandra Trostel turns John Cage and his approach to art into a tangible fascination, without giving in to explain just a single bit of it. Following the young European Francesco Tristano, who facilely walks the line between classic, modern and pop music, they meet Bruce Brubaker, US avantgarde luminary from New York, or team up with the German techno trio Brand Brauer Frick to search for John Cage’s footmark in club music beats. And yet, this meticulously designed film project gets the closest to John Cage when it is adrift, just to meet and catch the most important protagonist by chance: A New York cab driver, who never heard the name “Cage” before, but is convinced that the sound of the universe awaits him in the bright centre of meditation anyway.

It is easy to immerse oneself in this cinematic composition of coincidence, in which the camera provides the framework to understand John Cage’s approach to space, sound and silence. A music picture where everything magically falls into place, intentionally following curiosity to gently guide us towards a new sense of hearing.