Overview
Introduction
John Cage's 1958 title Fontana Mix is attached to two related, but historically distinctly separate, entities, the score published by C.F. Peters (1960) and the four multi-channel tapes Cage prepared from it at the Studio di Fonologia in Milan. The score Cage created for Fontana Mix consists of 20 sheets, ten transparencies inscribed with points (or dots), a single transparency bearing a straight line and ten plain white sheets with squiggly lines. By means of an included graph and a straight line, the performer uses the sheets in combination as a "tool" to assemble a realization of Fontana Mix. In executing the tape, Cage divided his sound sources into six classes; city sounds, country sounds, electronic sounds, manually produced (meaning "instrumental") sounds, wind-produced sounds (such as singing), and small sounds that require amplification, such as crickets chirping. Coordinate points drawn from the transparencies determine the class of each tape sound, inches of tape used, its volume, timbre, mixing, and other elements. Cage once described the score of Fontana Mix as "a camera from which anyone can take a photograph."
The creation of the four audio tapes comprising Fontana Mix were not created without some difficulty. The tapes were not coming out to the same coordinates as the score, and the problem wasn't solved until Cage realized that he was editing with both eyes open and that his Italian second engineer was cutting with one eye closed. The difference in tape inches proved sufficient to throw the whole work off the plan.
Both the score and tape of Fontana Mix provided Cage with a rich source of variables from which to garner new pieces. A cycle of Cage works emerged in the years 1958-1960 that either draw information from the Fontana Mix score or make use of the tapes; Aria and Music Walk (both 1958), Sounds of Venice and Walter Walk (both 1959) and Theater Piece (1960). A 1960 Time 2000 series recording of soprano Cathy Berberian combining Aria with Fontana Mix is a frequently cited example, chosen to exemplify Cage's compositional efforts in this period. Likewise celebrated is Cage's 1959 Folkways recording of Indeterminacy, where David Tudor once again pressed the Fontana Mix tapes into service behind Cage's droll narration of 90 short stories. Cage has also suggested that Fontana Mix may be used in conjunction with Solo for Voice 2 (1960) and Songbooks (1970).
Long after their creation, the Fontana Mix tapes continue to inspire audio artists within the field of electronica. There is a group called Fontana Mix in honor of Cage's creation and the group the Tape-Beatles has recorded a "Euro-pop dance mix" of the work. Other significant realizations of the score as published include the 1964 Max Neuhaus version for electronic percussion entitled Feed, a later (1967) Tudor/Cage version scored for piano and electronic circuits and an audio-architectonic environment (1998) created in Stuttgart, Germany by artist David Wendland.
