In the so-called “parody” masses of the 16th century, fragments of popular patriotic, romantic, and bawdy songs, were rearranged into religious masses; pop tunes of the day would be reworked into lattices of sacred counterpoint. My own Mass also reworks pop tunes I’ve heard over the last 30 years, creating a kind of secular service based on remembered ephemera of U.S. pop culture. I’m often amazed at how top-40 pop could double as religious incantations; the phrase “I believe” echoes from American Idol to Cher, and the “you” in U2 alternately means God or some romantic other. The mass tonight is conceived somewhat like the mass we’d really sing, at home, as Americans, quilted together from the pop songs that identify us more than religion.

If there’s any scripture to this Mass, it’s John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing, a text that is spoken throughout the piece. Cage was probably America’s most infamous musical maverick, best known for his silent piece, 4’33”. Cage originally called this piece “Silent Prayer”, and saw it as a commentary on radio, given that its length slightly exceeds the standard plug-in length of most muzak and pop tunes of the 1950s (4’30”). Cage’s later Lecture on Nothing most elegantly expounds his philosophy of sound and silence; this text performance piece goes against most ideas of musical and even national progress saying that “more and more, we are getting nowhere”; the lecture climaxes in an enormous silence—symbolized, in Cage’s writings, by the symbol M.

Cage was inspired, in his Lecture and elsewhere, with the radio stations of the 1950s and 1960s. His first piece, Imaginary Landscape #1 was for 12 radios, each tuned to different stations. Cage seemed fascinated with the ways the radio could become a peculiarly American way of both identifying oneself in terms of location—but oddly one, that was far off, invisible, far across the distance. One of those locations that echoes throughout Cage’s work is Kansas. He refers to the big M, the center of the Lecture, as a “bit like passing through Kansas”—it’s the eye of hurricane, Dorothy’s home, somewhere, and maybe also the point one’s car radio, driving across the State, reaches the point of zero reception.

In Jasper Johns’ famous encaustic map of the United States, the state of Kansas looks like a black smudge, an explosion at ground zero. My Mass is structured somewhat like Cage’s Lecture and Johns’ map—as an analogy to the space the U.S. inhabits, and the different “somewheres” Dorothy might go if she just taps her ruby slippers. The performers walk, run, and crawl across the stage, towards a frontier, or collapse into the center like a critical mass; their directions are inspired by ideas of manifest destiny, technological progress, and the American dream so often symbolized in contests such as American Idol. The stage becomes at points a map, a battlefield, a four-channel mixer, or a reality show.

My Mass was originally inspired by Indonesian composer Djadug Ferianto’s musical performance piece Ngeng. Ngeng is the Javanese word for the background noise that is always there, the buzz from which all sounds emerge. For Cage, silence never truly exists, for you can always hear the incidental noises of the audience, or your heartbeat, or the background fuzz of the radio. In Ferianto’s Ngeng, four performers stand on stage, buzzing, chirping, and singing; halfway through the piece one performer shouts the only word in the piece—“Mundur!”. In Indonesian, “mundur” means to retreat in a line, or to step down as a president. That one word got the performance banned after its first night. I follow the original four-voice idea of his piece, as well as create a piece quilted together from so many pop samples that I will never be able to legally perform the piece, or release it on CD.