Cage's Roaratorio was performed at the Proms for his seventy-fifth birthday in 1987. Those in the Royal Albert Hall were entranced by the multiplicity of acoustical activity on to which was superimposed the visual exhilaration of Merce Cunningham's dance group. Some merely listening to the radio at home wrote to the BBC to complain of a concert which sounded like crossed wavelengths with liberal helpings of static and feedback. But, like some of Cage's other omnium gatherum pieces—Musicircus (1967) for superimposed concerts under one roof, or HPSCHD (1969) for masses of harpsichords playing Mozart (Elektra Nonesuch, 3/70—nla), or the variations pieces—Roaratorio is a rich assembly of involvements all stemming from James Joyce's last so-called novel.
Cage started by making a text—a special kind of abridgement of the original—called Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake. (This is published in its own right and is recorded here on its own by Cage, who also speaks it as the continuous element in Roaratorio.) Then Klaus Schoning of West German Radio in Cologne asked him if he would like to put music to it to make a kind of radio play. So Cage decided to superimpose on to the text specially recorded sounds referred to in Finnegans Wake, as well as a live group of Irish folk musicians. These genuine folk artists were surprised to find that they were expected to perform, like Merce Cunningham's dancers, regardless of whatever else happened to be going on at the time, but they soon got the hang of it and told me that it was the experience of a lifetime. The traditional pieces they played are listed in the magnificent CD booklet, which has full texts of Cage's Joyce rewrite (still indestructibly Joycean) plus the text of the recorded interview between him and Schoning.
Roaratorio was a great success in Schoning's radio series and won the Carl Sozuka Prize, with international broadcasts and performances to follow. All this took place in 1979 and what Mode have now released is the original production from West German Radio, which was supported by a variety of other organizations and required a large cast of technicians.
Roaratorio is one of Cage's most attractive larger assemblages, completely logical if one approaches it, as he did, through the philosophy and sound-world of Joyce. Anyone interested in Joyce is bound to find it illuminating and, more than some of the smaller Cage works I have covered, the piece is a landmark in the composer's later output, and a credit to all involved in its elaborate realization.'