John Cage (1912-92)

[Gurn Blanston]

There are lots of scammers out there that try to pass off complete bullshit as art ..

Man, you are so, so right!



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Now playing:
Pinnock, Trevor/English Concert - Hob 07e 1 Concerto in Eb for Trumpet 1st mvmt - Allegro

[petrarch]

Cheap Imitation (1977), for solo violin

[asin]B00073K85W[/asin]

Cheap Imitation was the first work that Cage composed via transformation of other music. As the story goes, it was the result of circumstances, an expedient solution to an annoying problem. It all started with Merce Cunningham's desire, in 1947, to use the first part of Erik Satie's dramatic masterwork Socrate as the music for a dance. Socrate is scored for full orchestra and voices, resources well beyond Cunningham's means at that time. Cage's solution was to make a transcription of Socrate for two pianos, and it was this transcription that served as the score for Cunningham's solo Idyllic Song.

In 1968, Cage went on to complete his transcription of the other two movements of Socrate, and encouraged Cunningham to extend his dance, as well, which he did. However, Cage had never received permission from Satie's publisher to make the transcription. In 1947, Cage and Cunningham were relatively unknown, and their small performance was able to fly under the radar of publishers; by 1970 they were very famous artists, and their plan was permanently grounded. The publisher refused to allow the transcription, and so Cage and Cunningham were faced with the problem of a scheduled dance premiere with no music that could be legally performed.

Cage's inventive solution was to compose a new piece that exactly matched the phrase structure of Satie's music, and hence of Cunningham's dance. His technique was a simple one: He took only the vocal line of Socrate (or occasionally the prominent orchestral melody) and systematically transposed it up or down and into different modes. In the first movement, every pitch is transposed separately, but in the second and third the transpositions occur every half-bar. The result is a music that has the phrasing, rhythms and even some of the general contours of Satie's music, but which is otherwise completely different. This solved Cage's copyright problem, and he named the work Cheap Imitation (Cunningham responded by calling his new dance Second Hand).

Cheap Imitation is one of my favorite of Cage's compositions. Not just for its beauty (which is astonishing in itself), but for many other reasons, as well. I love its incongruity (a fully traditional, modal, monophonic score appearing in the chaos of Cage's work of the late 1960s) and its indefensibleness; its stubborn ability to remain untrammeled by any avant-garde theory, philosophy, or expectation; its subversiveness, although not what you expect from Cage, but rather the subversiveness of love. For this piece is completely, fully, and wholeheartedly about Cage's simple love of the beauty of Satie's music.

Even Cage himself found it unexpected--perhaps he more than anyone else. By his own admission he was sucker-punched by his love of Satie and of the beautiful solo work he had made from Socrate. His delight in the result of his clever evasion of intellectual property law led him to transcribe it for orchestra in 1972, and then again for violin in 1977.

--James Pritchett

[petrarch]

Freeman Etudes, Books 1 and 2, for violin (1977-80)



http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000000NYM/?tag=goodmusicguideco

John Cage's Freeman Etudes for violin are extremely difficult pieces of music--one might go so far as to declare them "impossible". Even a brief and casual listening to Irvine Arditti's performance of the etudes on this recording is enough to convey to the listener a sense of their formidable complexity. But to appreciate the extent and unusual nature of the difficulties of these pieces, one really needs to look at the score, in which every nuance--the position of every note in time, every dip and slide in pitch, every change of bowing style--is clearly and precisely notated. If one were to turn to the score for help in understanding these pieces (which can be as challenging for the audience as for the performer), it would be of little use: It is nothing but details, giving no clue as to the source of the dense knots of notes with their impossible number of qualifications.

The profusion of details in this score presents unique challenges to the performer. In most virtuoso music, the primary physical requirements are speed and agility. One might compare the situation of the performer to that of a track-and-field athlete who must run, jump, and throw the shotput, javelin or discus. In the Freeman Etudes, the performer faces hurdles of fast playing and tricky fingerings, but there are two further dimensions to the virtuosity required here. First, the violinist must have the ability to make instantaneous changes of loudness and playing style--to be able to play a fortissimo col legno triple-stop immediately after a pianissimo pizzicato note, for example. And secondly, the Freeman Etudes demand that, in the middle of this bewildering activity, the violinist must pay attention to the most minute detail of each and every note. Many notes are marked to be played slightly out of tune. There are eleven different types of pitch inflections, four types of martellato (literally, "hammered") bowing, and five types of pizzicato. Cage does not just indicate ricochet bowing (in which the bow bounces off the string), but he goes on to say exactly how many times the bow should bounce--six times on this note, eight on that, and so on. To return to the analogy of the athletics, it is as if our track-and-field star had not only to run, jump, and throw, but to do so in rapid succession, and, at the same time, to have a dancer's control of the body, so that the feet always land in precise locations, the arms and legs bent at precise angles.

While it is easy to recognize the accomplishment of the violinist in performing the Freeman Etudes, one should not overlook John Cage's accomplishment in composing them. Consider the origin of a single event in one of these etudes. It began as a point traced onto paper from a star atlas: This tracing determined the positions in pitch and time of the note. Cage then made separate chance determinations to compose every other aspect of the note: Will it be detached or legato? Will it possess any unusual characteristics? If so, what kind? Unusual timbre or bowing? A pitch slide? A chord? An overlapping of another note? Each answer generated more questions to be asked. If this is to be a pizzicato note, will it be normal, done with the fingernail, "snapped", or damped? If damped, will it be damped with the finger or the fingernail? For chords, Cage used the star tracings to determine the first pitch, but subsequent pitches were the result of questions asked of the violinist Paul Zukofsky. Cage would ask him: "If this particular note is played on this particular string, what are all the possible pitches that can be played on this other string?" Zukofsky's answer would then be subjected to chance operations to determine the second note, and the process would be repeated to determine the third and fourth notes, as necessary. Each note of each etude is thus the product of hundreds of different chance operations.

The elaborate--one might even say extravagant--compositional method of the Freeman Etudes was not unusual for Cage. Time and time again, from Music of Changes (1951) through Roaratorio (1979) and beyond, Cage composed music that required an enormous amount of labor on his part. This kind of discipline, devotion, and commitment was central to his life and music. "People frequently ask me what my definition of music is," Cage stated in 1979. "This is it. It is work. That is my conclusion." In the Freeman Etudes, he offers the performer a chance to join in the self-altering experience of such work.

One way to view the Freeman Etudes, then, is as a celebration of the ability to do hard work. Cage saw this as having implications not just for musicians, but for society as a whole. Cage, in composing the Freeman Etudes, and the violinist, in performing them, are models for society--they show that no project is too difficult to pursue, provided that one is committed to "work, hard work, and no end to it." Cage described the larger implications of the etudes in an interview in 1983:

"These are intentionally as difficult as I can make them, because I think we're now surrounded by very serious problems in society, and we tend to think that the situation is hopeless and that it's just impossible to do something that will make everything turn out properly. So I think that this music, which is almost impossible, gives an instance of the practicality of the impossible."

The difficulties of the Freeman Etudes are thus not a perverse torture for the violinist, nor are they just an opportunity for showing-off. They are a kind of fable about the ability to do the impossible. Cage's etudes are optimistic and joyful.

Where does that leave the listener? Considering what was said about the difficulty of these pieces for both the performer and the composer, it comes as no surprise that they pose problems for the audience as well. They are challenging to listen to. Even knowing their history and knowing what to expect, they are bewildering at first listen. In searching for a way to grasp the Freeman Etudes, one just has to recall the task of the violinist: To make sudden and dramatic changes from one note to the next. In these pieces, perhaps more than in any other work by John Cage, there is a sense that anything can happen next: There are no boundaries, no connecting thread. Realizing that every note is completely separate from every other note, we need to try to listen in such a way that attends only to the note being played at the moment--to forget a sound as soon as it stops and not to anticipate what will happen next. This kind of focused, disciplined listening is exhilarating and transforming.

The 32 Freeman Etudes (named for their dedicatee, Betty Freeman) are divided into four books of eight pieces each. The first two books (Etudes I-XVI), were composed between 1977 and 1980. Cage went on in 1980 to compose the seventeenth etude, but with the eighteenth he was stymied. It took over a decade for him to overcome the final compositional difficulties: He did not complete and remaining fifteen etudes until 1990. The ten year hiatus in composition was due to Cage's belief that the remaining etudes were, even in the context of this "almost impossible" music, too difficult to ask a performer to attempt. It was Irvine Arditti's remarkable rendition of the first sixteen etudes that convinced Cage that he should complete the set.

--James Pritchett

[petrarch]

Yea ... I've subjected myself to those .. just terrible, you actually like it? 

I do. If I had to pick half a dozen Cage CDs from my collection and throw away the rest, the two CDs with the four books of the Freeman Etudes would be in that set.

I would very much like to know what "long-winded Pritchett bullshit" you are referring to, since little of the text is opinion or propaganda, most of it being a factual account of the content and genesis of the work.

And yes, it is possible to really like Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, Ligeti, Xenakis... and Cage.

[petrarch]

Freeman Etudes, Books 3 and 4, for violin (1980, 1989-90)



http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000000NYR/?tag=goodmusicguideco

This recording presents the second half of John Cage's Freeman Etudes for violin. Like in Books 1 and 2, one can expect bewildering complexity and intricacy, and the astonishing virtuosity of Irvine Arditti's performance. This music is so difficult for composer, performer, and listener alike because every note is completely isolated from every other note, with each detail--dynamic, bowing, microtonal inflection, duration--determined separately for each of the thousands of events in the piece.

Cage wanted to make a music that was almost impossible to play, so that the overcoming of these difficulties could serve as a demonstration of "the practicality of the impossible". The violinist is thus a model for society by showing that no project is too difficult to pursue, provided that one is committed to the hard work necessary for its completion.

Arditti's mastery of the Freeman Etudes is the product of such hard work. But he goes further: He is continuously improving on his performance, playing faster and faster at each performance. This treatment of the etudes as an ongoing project played a pivotal role in the history of the work.

Cage was commissioned in 1977 by Betty Freeman to compose the etudes for the violinist Paul Zukofsky. Cage, following the example of his earlier Etudes Australes for piano, planned a set of thirty-two etudes divided into four books of eight etudes each. Tracings of star maps would determine the rhythms and pitches, and then I Ching chance operations would determine every other aspect of every note--bowing style, dynamic, duration, microtonal inflections, and so on.

Zukofsky had asked Cage to write violin music that was precisely notated, but he surely had not expected the bewildering profusion of details in the music that Cage was composing. He began to have doubts about the entire project. "While every event was in and of itself completely playable," he noted, "a quick succession of events was something else again, and in many instances was quite unplayable due to constraints of time." Zukofsky pressed Cage to change the etudes, asserting that they were impossible to play as they were. Cage, who saw the "practicality of the impossible" as the theme of all his etude sets, was unreceptive to this suggestion. Ultimately, he changed nothing, only suggesting in his performance note that the duration of each measure of the music was flexible. The duration of a measure "should be short rather than long," he instructed, "as short a timelength as the violinist's virtuosity permits, circa three seconds."

Because of the elaborate compositional system and the back-and-forth consultations with Zukofsky that it entailed, it took Cage three years to complete the first seventeen etudes. With the eighteenth etude, however, a serious problem emerged. The densities of notes had been determined by the coincidence of three random factors: A series of I Ching hexagram numbers which gave the number of notes in a given section of the piece, the number of star colors to trace in that section, and the density of stars in that part of the sky covered by the particular star map used. In the eighteenth etude, these factors conspired to produce outrageous numbers of notes in relatively tiny spaces of time. In the middle of the etude, for example, there is a passage of thirty-seven attacks within one measure, each of these having a unique dynamic, the pitches jumping wildly and unpredictably over a four-and-a-half-octave range. In the published score, this passage and others like it are notated simply as a series of closely-spaced lines: Too tightly-spaced to be printed, the notes themselves are given in nearby "blow-ups".

If Zukofsky felt that the first two books of the Freeman Etudes were unplayable, then there was no possibility that he would even attempt the eighteenth etude. Cage, reluctant to press the matter, simply stopped composing right in the middle of the piece. Now even he was convinced that he had gone too far, that his compositional process had run amok and created music that could never possibly be performed. Zukofsky thought that since the more difficult etudes could not be played live, they would have to be created artificially on tape and released in recorded format only. Cage, clinging to his vision of the solution of impossible problems, disliked this plan. Reluctantly, he had to admit his inability to continue. He packed up the unfinished manuscripts of the last fifteen etudes and went on to other projects.

This was the state of things from 1980 until 1989. In the meantime, the first sixteen etudes were published and performed. In particular, Irvine Arditti was drawn to these pieces. He not only refuted Zukofsky's claim that they were unplayable, but played them even faster than the three-second-per-measure tempo given as a probable maximum in the score. In the summer of 1988, he played the sixteen etudes in fifty-six minutes, hence at a tempo of two-and-a-half seconds per measure. He continued working diligently at them, trying, like a track-and-field athlete, to improve his times. By the end of that same year, he had taken ten minutes off his total performance time--down to a tempo of only two seconds per measure. Cage, hearing Arditti's performances, was impressed and baffled at the same time: He did not understand why Arditti continued to play them faster and faster. In directing the performer to play a measure in "as short a time-length as his virtuosity permits," Cage was thinking of this duration as a fixed quantity, different for each performer. Arditti, however, had interpreted Cage's directions in an open-ended way: He thought that it meant to play "as fast as possible." Hearing this, Cage realized the solution to his problem: In those passages of the eighteenth etude where there are an impossible number of notes, the performer would be instructed to play "as many as possible."

So it was that, after having let them sit in a drawer for nine years, Cage again took up the unfinished Freeman Etudes. But now a new difficulty arose: After such a long break, he did not recall the details of the complex system he had used to compose the pieces. Even worse, the etudes were at different stages of that process, and within the troublesome eighteenth etude, the state of completion varied from measure to measure. His working notes were of little use: The long lists of pitches, numbers and cryptic abbreviations were practically indecipherable. From the distance of nine years' time, the Freeman Etudes might as well have been composed by a stranger.

It was at this junction that I entered the picture. I met John Cage in 1984 when I began working on my doctoral dissertation in musicology. My subject was his chance compositions of the 1950s: I took his manuscripts and reconstructed the precise systems of composition used to create each work. In a few cases these systems have been described by Cage in his writings, but in others the procedures used were a complete mystery to me--and, after a thirty-year interval, to Cage himself. Over the next few years I spent many hours at his home poring over his old papers; I completed my dissertation in 1988. The problems I had addressed in my work were identical to those that Cage was facing in completing the Freeman Etudes, and so in 1989 he called me up to ask for my help. I was delighted, since I had been trying to find some way to repay him for his kindness and openness during the course of my dissertation research. In September he gave me all the manuscripts for the last etudes and asked me to tell him what he needed to do to finish them. I delivered a report to him a few weeks later, and he began composing again. The Freeman Etudes were finally completed in early 1990, thirteen years after they were begun.

Considering his role in the history of the final sixteen Freeman Etudes, it is fitting that Irvine Arditti should be the first to record them. Hearing his playing, one can easily imagine how Cage would be inspired by it to resume work on his impossible violin music.

--James Pritchett

[lescamil]

The only pieces by Cage that have really piqued my interest are the works that use elements of world music in them, namely the percussion works and the works for prepared piano. The works that use an extreme amount of difficulty and complexity seem to bore me, and the aleatoric works leave me thinking "what's the point of this music". Then again, I haven't done as much listening to Cage's music as I would like to. Anyone have a good idea where I should go from here?

[petrarch]

Anyone have a good idea where I should go from here?

You could try a cross section of the various "styles": Fourteen; the Concerto for prepared piano and chamber orchestra; the Concert for piano and orchestra; Four for string quartet; Roaratorio; 44 Harmonies; The Seasons.

[petrarch]

One⁸, for violoncello solo (1991)

[asin]B0002XL2HA[/asin]

The title page of John Cage's composition One⁸ reads:

ONE⁸
violoncello solo

to be played with or without 108 (for orchestra)

for Michael Bach

John Cage
April 1991
New York City

The notation of the piece is very detailed, and yet at the same time enigmatic ("it's doubtful whether a cellist looking at this piece would even know what to do", Cage later remarked about it). In keeping with the manner of his later "number pieces", the score consists of a series of musical fragments with variable timings. In this case the notation shows one to four notes in each segment, with precise indications of which strings are to be used for which notes, which fingers are to be used to play them, and the exact manner in which harmonics are to be played. Despite the intricacy of the notation of the music, the instructions to the performer are just two simple statements:

"53 flexible time brackets with single sounds produced on 1, 2, 3 or 4 strings. Durations, dynamics and bow positions are free."

Besides the musical notation itself, perhaps the most informative part of the score, the key to its understanding is the phrase "for Michael Bach". I am reminded here of the composer Sylvano Bussotti's 5 Piano Pieces for David Tudor: That the title was not so much a dedication as an instrumental designation. The same is true of Cage's score, since Michael Bach is not just a cellist, but an inventor of playing techniques.

That One⁸ was composed for him tells us much about the way the music is to be played. First, there is the use of his unique curved bow--the BACH.Bogen. This bow, first developed by Michael Bach in 1989, not only has a curved shape, but also has a mechanism for adjusting the tension on the bow hairs. These two features together allow the cellist to play three or even all four strings of the instrument simultaneously, something which is impossible with a traditional straight bow.

That Cage intended One⁸ to be played using the curved bow--and hence that the various sonorities in the piece were each meant to be played with a single attack--is stated in the performance notes ("single sounds"), but is also clear from his own comments about the work. In an interview, Cage tells the story of a "very good" Juilliard student who wished to play the piece. "It doesn't matter how good she is", Cage said, "if she doesn't have the right bow to play the music." He had originally thought of leaving open the option of playing One⁸ with a straight bow and arpeggiating the chords; after hearing Bach play it, however, he found that he so enjoyed Bach's playing that he changed his mind and left it as is.

But the curved bow was only one of the technical innovations that Bach brought to Cage's attention. The other was his astonishing exploration and extension of the use of harmonics. Bach has written a comprehensive study on the playing of harmonics on the cello, titled Fingerboards & Overtones: Pictures, Basics, and Model for a New Way of Cello Playing. The "Fingerboards" are drawings that Bach made on cardboard placed under the strings of the cello, using black ink on his own fingers. He made a simple set of these for Cage in 1990, shortly after the composer had decided to write One⁸ for him, in response to Cage's question "what can you finger on the cello?"

His intention at that time was to provide Cage with a graphic guide to the hand stretches of which he was capable. However, shortly after this, Bach began to consider more and more the complexities of the situation--what he could play on any given string depended to a large degree on what other notes he was playing on the other strings--and he subsequently made many more of these drawings; to date he has made over a hundred of them.

The book goes on to methodically work through all the possibilities of playing partial tones on the cello: Natural harmonics, artificial harmonics, or combinations of both; harmonics on a single string, on two strings, three strings, or four strings simultaneously. There are tables of all the intervals possible in various situations, discussions of playing in the rarefied atmospheres of the 32nd partial, the difference tones that occur when two simultaneous harmonics are slightly detuned, and the effects possible with pizzicato and glissando playing.

Bristling with abbreviations that resemble mathematical formulas, numbers, charts, and diagrams, it is a formidable treatise. It is also exactly the kind of rigorous treatment of the fundamental variables of music--the systematic exploration of the edges of the possible--that is at the core of Cage's compositional methods; it is not hard to see why John Cage was compelled to write for Michael Bach.

Thus, One⁸ is truly a work "for Michael Bach," both personally and technically. But One⁸ is more than this: It is a work "with Michael Bach", in that he was an integral part of its actual composition. The fingerboard drawings that Bach provided did not give Cage all the information he needed to compose the piece. The possibilities were too vast to be neatly summarized in even a very large number of diagrams and charts. And so, when it came time to compose the piece, Cage found it necessary to have Bach there as well.

The process for composing each event was relatively simple: First, decide how many tones the event would have (one to four), and then, for each tone, select one pitch from the entire range of possibilities on the given string. Bach's role was to provide the information on the extent of the "range of possibilities" for each tone of each event. For a three-note chord, for example, Cage would select the first string and the first tone, based on Bach's range on that particular string. Then Cage would choose the next string to use, and Bach would experiment with his cello to see what he could finger on that string while playing the first tone. Cage would select a pitch from that range, and then they would move to the last string in the same manner: Bach experimenting to determine what he should be able to reach while holding the other two tones, and Cage selecting from that range.

They thus proceeded through the fifty-three events in the piece, the two together acting as a kind of living cello oracle: Bach framing the boundaries of the questions, Cage using chance to provide specific answers within these boundaries. It was a process of discovery, slowly working to find the individual components of each sound, one tone at a time.

Knowing this while listening to Bach's performance, it makes one realize that One⁸ clearly contradicts the "common knowledge" that Cage's compositional processes are largely inaudible to the audience and hence are irrelevant to our experience as listeners. In fact, the piece sounds almost exactly like the way it was composed, and our role as listeners is to discover these sounds exactly as Cage and Bach did: One at a time, carefully, slowly, and with delight.

The sounds themselves are, of course, varied--simple, complex, ordinary, extraordinary, robust, fragile, etc. Michael Bach recalls a particularly memorable moment: The sound of three simultaneous harmonics that takes place about 33:45 into this recording. "Each harmonic, played separately, would be very complicated for cellists and almost impossible," Bach says, "but here all three pitches sound together!" Bach recalls that he and Cage paused after having achieved that particular sound. I like to think that they sat there in Cage's loft, surrounded by his many plants and flowers, considered the beauty of what they had discovered, and just smiled silently for a while.

--James Pritchett

[petrarch]

Music Walk, for one or more pianists at a single piano using also radio and/or recordings (1958)
One, for piano solo (1987)
One⁵, for piano solo (1991)
Music for Two, for two pianos (1985)

[asin]B000000NZ0[/asin]

Music Walk, for one or more pianists at a single piano using also radio and/or recordings (1958)

Music Walk has a concern, as many other Cage works, with allowing individual sounds to occur free from any imposed continuity or line while overlapping several layers of such sounds.

Music Walk is for any number of pianists, using a single piano, several radios and unspecified auxiliary noise-making devices. Materials are provided by the composer--a transparent sheet of plastic with five parallel lines drawn on it, ten unnumbered pages with different numbers of single points, several transparent squares with intersecting lines drawn at various angles. The performers, using these materials and following Cage's instructions, independently create parts which call for sounds to be produced at various points in and around the piano, on radios, or with the auxiliary instruments, including their own voices.

One, for piano solo (1987)
One⁵, for piano solo (1991)

One and One⁵ are most striking in their unprecedented incorporation of huge amounts of silence, another feature common to many of Cage's late compositions. Here again, Cage uses time-brackets to provide windows in which the given tones and chords may appear.

In One, two sets of chords (containing three to five chords each) share a single window. The order of each set if maintained but the relationship between the two sets is free, creating a variety of possible interpenetrations, simultaneities and overlapping. There are ten such windows in One, roughly one per minute, with the eighth window fixed at 8'15" to 8'45" and the others flexible. Each chord has its own dynamic marking.

In One⁵, there are two parallel sequences of chords and single notes which run the length of the piece, with each chord or note given its own window. Dynamics are free. Each sound is to be sustained as long as possible either manually or with the pedal, and the number of sounds in terrifyingly low (only forty-five chords and single notes are heard over the course of a twenty-one minute piece).

Music for Two, for two pianos (1985)

Music for _ is a group of pieces written to be played simultaneously by an ensemble of soloists. The number of parts eventually reached seventeen, and although Cage said at one point that he expected to continue adding parts to the piece for the rest of his life (with the goal of creating a chamber music for full orchestra), the last part was written in 1987.

Any number of these parts may be used in a given performance of Music for _; the title is completed by the number of players. Each player's part consists of "pieces" and "interludes". The interludes are short phrases which provide specific articulations but leave dynamics and rhythm free for the performer to determine. The pieces contain two kinds of music: Passages with detailed notations for dynamics, rhythm, and articulation given for each pitch, and single notes to be softly sustained and repeated any number of times. In the two parts for piano which make up this recording of Music for Two, the sustained pitches are produced by bowing the piano strings with a length of rosined nylon fishing line.

Each of the pieces and interludes is to be placed within a certain "window" of time. For the interludes these windows are fixed (for example, from 1'45" to 1'55" in Piano I). The frames for the windows of the pieces, however, are given to varying degrees of flexibility, and often may overlap each other, so that a given piece may be quite short or quite long (played quickly or slowly) and may or may not be surrounded by silence.

Two other features mark Music for _ with signs of Cage's late maturity: The use of restricted pitch ranges and the frequent occurrence of sustained, repeated tones. Each of the pieces in Music for Two explores a certain pitch range of the piano. Occasionally, this range encompasses the entire keyboard, but often it can be quite narrow. In a way, this restriction of range reaches its extreme manifestation in the repeated droning of a single tone. The various pitch ranges, the actual notes used within those ranges, and the drone notes, were selected through chance operations, as has been the case with all of Cage's music from the 1950s on. Here, the composer's task is the asking of questions--what range is to be used, which note is to be sustained--rather than the making of choices.

From his earliest works, John Cage searched for ways to free sounds to be themselves and exist independently of each other. His emphasis on the uniqueness of every sound and his struggle to avoid the idea of "relationship", which places the comparison of two sounds before the experience of the sounds themselves, led Cage away from the idea of melody, in which the sounds are subordinate to the relationships they describe and the expression those relationships evoke. But listening to Music Walk, One and Music for Two, one is reminded of Christian Wolff's comment to Cage that "no matter what we do, it ends up being melodic." The various and unrelated sounds in these pieces really do subversively conspire to create a new kind of melody.

[petrarch]

The Seasons, Ballet in one act (1947)
ASLSP (1985)
Cheap Imitation (1969)

[asin]B000005ZK9[/asin]

The three very different solo piano works on this recording reveal three distinct ways John Cage dealt with the question of melody. Cheap Imitation is clearly a single melodic line; but so in its way is The Seasons, and ASLSP is in effect two simultaneous melodic lines, each played by a single hand. In both The Seasons and ASLSP the melodies consist not only of single notes, but also of chords and, in The Seasons, the quick runs or flurries Cage called aggregates.

Coming out of his experience with the prepared piano, where the striking of a single key on the keyboard can produce a number of clearly distinguishable pitches and timbres at once, Cage developed the technique of selecting a collection of notes, chords, and aggregates prior to the actual composing of a piece. This "gamut" of sounds gives pieces such as the String Quartet, the Concerto for Prepared Piano, and The Seasons each a special flavor, in spite of the fact that all of these pieces are in effect monophonic--melodies made up of combinations of single notes, chords, and aggregates. Collecting the sounds to be used was a crucial compositional action.

The Seasons, Ballet in one act (1947)

The Seasons was created in response to a commission from The Ballet Society of New York (alongside choreography by Merce Cunningham and  decor by Isamu Noguchi) during a period when Cage was beginning to explore a number of philosophical traditions, mostly Eastern. In traditional Indian philosophy, the annual rotation of the seasons is viewed as a metaphor for the larger cycle of dormancy (winter), birth or creation (spring), continuing life (summer), and death or destruction (fall). In Cage's music (which was eventually orchestrated), each season is preceded by a prelude, and the whole piece concludes with a repeat of the opening prelude to winter. The Seasons is also an example of Cage's idiosyncratic use of a self-reflecting rhythmic structure, in which the construction of the entire piece is mirrored in the phraseology of the individual movements. For example, the overall rhythmic structure of 2, 2, 1, 3, 2, 4, 1, 3, 1 is expressed by the relative lengths of the nine individual movements (counting the preludes). Winter, the second movement, has two large sections, each of which is made up of nine subdivisions varying in length according to the above rhythmic structure (two bars, two bars, one bar, three bars, and so on). Summer (apparently a very tropical, sultry summer), the sixth and longest of the movements, has four such sections (the number of bars is changed in some of the movements to reflect shifting tempi and keep the absolute durations in the proper proportion). The final prelude recapitulates the opening movement without the original repeats.

Cheap Imitation (1969)

Cheap Imitation, like The Seasons, was written for the dance by Merce Cunningham, but with a more convoluted history. After many years of Cage's gentle urging, Cunningham created a dance to the music of Erik Satie's "symphonic drama," Socrate. Satie's cryptic comment best describes his own composition: "How white it is! no painting ornaments it; it is all of a piece." In three movements, Satie's music creates a portrait of the most famous of Western philosophers, using as text selected fragments of Plato, including (in the final movement) the famous death scene.

The original plan to use Cage's transcription of Socrate for two pianos was thwarted when, at nearly the last minute, the French publisher of Socrate refused to grant permission for the performance. Since the invention of the prepared piano, Cage had responded to difficult compositional problems with ingenuity, discovering creative and unorthodox solutions (perhaps this is why his teacher Arnold Schönberg once referred to Cage as "not a composer, but an inventor--of genius").

Taking the rhythm of Satie's vocal lines as a basis (and occasionally using the rhythm of the orchestral accompaniment as well), Cage created new melodic shapes which, through the use of chance operations, deconstructed, distorted, refracted and reassembled in an almost Cubist fashion Satie's music (Cage had by this time been using chance operations for many years as a compositional tool to free his music from expressing the intention or will of the composer). The result was a single line in three movements, rhythmically identical to the original Socrate, which could then be used to accompany Cunningham's unaltered choreography. The wandering melodic line of Cheap Imitation, while remaining absolutely true to the spirit of the original Socrate (which Satie himself called "an act of piety, an artist's dream, a humble homage") locates itself firmly within Cage's aesthetic of non-intention. This newly discovered technique of imitation was to prove fruitful for the composer, employed in the Songbooks and modified for compositions such as Apartment House 1776 and the Chorals for solo violin.

ASLSP (1985)

ASLSP, written sixteen years after Cheap Imitation, was the result of a commission from the University of Maryland International Piano Competition. One can only shake one's head in wonder and merriment at the thought of the semi-finalists, drilled to the point of obsessiveness in the standard way of reproducing all the "old classics" at lightning speed and top volume, trying one after the other to make sense of Cage's pointillistic, chance-generated melodies (one for each hand, unrelated but played simultaneously) and his oblique reference: "The title is an abbreviation of 'as slow as possible.' It also refers to 'Soft morning, city! Lsp!" the first exclamations in the last paragraph of Finnegans Wake (James Joyce)." The concession granted by Cage to the nature of the competition was to allow each performer to create his or her own version of the piece by leaving out any one of the eight movements and inserting at some point a repeat performance of any of the other movements. Cage included this "open form" aspect in the piece partly out of an expressed concern for the judges, who would be confronted with fifty or sixty performances of the music in the course of the competition.

One of Cage's most striking keyboard effects, used throughout The Seasons (especially in Fall) and again in a radically different context in ASLSP, is a staccato chord out of which a single pitch is sustained. This technique also has its roots in the sound of the prepared piano, where (like certain percussion instruments) certain sounds will begin with a brief rattle, buzz, or metallic pop which is then followed by a long, sustained tone. In ASLSP the chance operations used by Cage's compositional method frequently yield tones which are held for so long that they die away to the level of complete inaudibility. These open strings, sustained by the fingers of the pianist and free to resonate sympathetically with newly sounded pitches, often produce a gentle cloud of harmonics and overtones which give a faint halo to the music. In its tendency towards extreme slowness, sparse texture, and great delicacy, ASLSP looks forward to the visionary and lonely works of Cage's last period.

--Stephen Drury

[Luke]

Just to say I am really appreciating all these posts, Petrarch. There's some beautiful writing here, making me salivate at the thought of some of these discs! Thank you for posting them.

[some guy]

James, are you seriously incredulous that people are not all exactly the same? My God!!

[petrarch]

James, are you seriously incredulous that people are not all exactly the same? My God!!

I accept proposals for the next composer survey I shall conduct after I finish this one on Cage; composers that James derides are strongly encouraged.

[petrarch]

You're a dork ..

Just trying to keep my quota of utility service posts as high as yours.

[bhodges]

Just to say I am really appreciating all these posts, Petrarch. There's some beautiful writing here, making me salivate at the thought of some of these discs! Thank you for posting them.

Yes, my appreciation, too. I have heard some of the individual works on some of these discs at concerts, but don't think I have any of these recordings.

So yes, thanks for the posts.

--Bruce

[petrarch]

Thanks for the kind words, Luke and Bruce. From my part, I think Cage was in need of some love in this forum, lest any newcomer face the barrage of 'advice' coming from certain quarters and be forever turned off from a very worthwhile and inspiring corpus of music and ideas.

Going over these CDs lately has rekindled my interest in composition; in the early nineties, when I started dabbling on it, Cage, by way of the Peter Greenaway documentary, was very inspiring and thought-provoking, even if at the time what I wanted to compose was a mix of Stockhausen, Boulez and Xenakis. What was with that composer that absolutely did not share the seriousness and heavy-set demeanor--after all, he spends most of the time laughing in the documentary--of his german and french counterparts?

"Mr Cage, by mixing all those pieces together, don't you fear you'll get white noise?"
"Oh, I am sure it'll be noise, but I doubt it'll be white!"

[petrarch]

... Cage, by way of the Peter Greenaway documentary, was very inspiring and thought-provoking ...

This documentary can now be watched online, here:

http://www.ubu.com/film/cage_greenaway.html

Enjoy!

[petrarch]

Music of Changes, for piano (1951)

[asin]B0009JG1MS[/asin]

The Concerto for prepared piano had been the point of entry to Cage's new musical world of sounds in silence. It is therefore understandable that the first new compositional systems he devised following the concerto should be variants of its chart technique. The use of chance within the chart technique of the concerto was something of an afterthought; Cage realized that the technique of materials organized into charts and ordered by chance was capable of a much greater flexibility and range than the concerto had demonstrated. After completing the concerto, he immediately began work on a more extensive and consistent chart system, first used in the monumental Music of Changes for piano (1951), and then subsequently applied to a number of different media in works dating from 1951 and 1952.

That Cage's next work was to be for piano solo was largely the result of his new association with the pianist David Tudor, whom he had met in 1950 through Morton Feldman. Cage was tremendously impressed with Tudor's virtuosity and meticulous approach to the challenges his music offered. It was Tudor's unique abilities that made Music of Changes possible for Cage; without them, such a work would have been a mere compositional exercise. Music of Changes became a sort of collaboration between Cage and Tudor, who would learn each part of the score as soon as it was completed. "At that time," says Cage, "he was the Music of Changes."

In his new chart system, the first modification Cage made was to the structure of the charts themselves. In the concerto, he had used the I Ching in an indirect way, largely because the 14x16 structure of its sound charts did not allow them to be easily related to the 64 hexagrams. In Music of Changes, he simplified the system: all of the charts contain 64 cells (arranged into eight rows of eight columns each), so that the cells could be related one-to-one with the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. To select an element from a chart, Cage would simply need to obtain a hexagram by tossing coins, find its number in the I Ching, and then look up the corresponding cell in the chart. This new approach, therefore, did away with the patterned moves on the charts used in the concerto; as a result, each element in each chart was equally possible at every moment.

The next extension of the chart technique--and perhaps the most significant--was the application of the chart idea to all aspects of sound. Every event in Music of Changes was the combination of one element from each of three charts individually referring to sonority, duration and dynamics. Thus in these new chart pieces, the individuality of each event would not be compromised by the conscious choice of dynamics or of rhythm. The use of multiple charts--even though their contents might be arrived at deliberately--would insure combinations that Cage would neve have considered himself, thus widening the scope of the piece.

The charts of sounds for Music of Changes--as with all the related chart works--contain sounds only in the odd-numbered cells, with the even-numbered cells representing silences. The equal division of the sixty-four cells between sounds and silences is clearly derived from the similar arrangements used for the third movement of the Concerto for prepared piano. The result here is the same as well: The equivalence and interchangeability of sound and silence, thus producing a spaciousness and isolation of individual events in time. The sounds used are sonorities of varied complexity and not just simple single pitches. Cage categorized these sounds as single notes, intervals (two-note sounds), aggregates (chords), and "constellations" (more complex arrangements of notes, flourishes, chords and trills). Although the piano is not prepared, a number of unusual timbral effects are used. Tones are produced by plucking the strings of the piano, by muting the strings with the finger, and by using various sticks or beaters on the strings. In some sounds, keys are depressed silently (notated as diamond-shaped notes) while others are struck sharply, creating resonances by sympathetic vibration. The sound charts also include noises produced on or in the piano, such as by slamming the keyboard lid. In some sounds, the use of the sustaining pedal is indicated as an integral part of the sound.

The duration charts differed from the sound charts in that they were completely filled with sixty-four different durations, since duration applied to both sounds and silences. The durations themselves are described by Cage as being "segmented." Rather than being only simple metrical values (such as quarter or eighth notes), the durations used in Music of Changes and similar chart works are the result of adding several different simple durations. The individual components of these durations consist of values ranging from one thirty-second note to a whole note, and include sevenths and fifths of beats as well as the common binary and ternary divisions. Although the durations are measured using traditional rhythmic notation, they are not used within any metrical framework. No attempt was made to fill out whole units of duration (e.g. a sixteenth note can exist all by itself), or to relate all the segments of a duration to a simple common denominator. In order to facilitate both the composition and performance of the odd fractional durations, Cage applied a simple procedure: he standardized the horizontal distance between notes with the same rhythmic value. In the score of Music for Changes, one quarter note is equal to two and a half centimeters of length. All other rhythmic values are related to this scale, so that an eighth note takes up one and a quarter centimeters, while a half note takes up five centimeters. Using this system, Cage was able to display easily the ametrical durations within the framework of the metrical structure.

The charts of dynamics operate in a slightly different manner from those for either sounds or durations. In these, only every fourth cell contains an entry. If, in the course of composing, Cage selected one of the sixteen filled cells, the dynamic marking contained therein would be used. If, on the other hand, he selected one of the forty-eight blank cells, the dynamic used for the previous sound would continue to apply. The dynamics used are notated traditionally and range from pppp to ffff. In addition to simple (single) dynamics, Cage also used combinations of two, such as f > pp, which could be used as accents, crescendos, or diminuendos. The dotted lines beneath some of the dynamics in the charts indicate that the una corda pedal was to be used.

Each event in Music of Changes was thus a product of consulting not one, but three charts. First, an I Ching hexagram number was used to select one of the sixty-four rhythmic patterns of a duration chart. A second hexagram number was then applied to the chart of sounds: If it was an even number, a silence was indicated, and the duration chased was filled with rests. If an odd number turned up, then the sound from that cells of the chart was coordinated with the duration chosen. Finally, if the event was a sound and not a silence, a dynamic marking was chosen from a chart using a third hexagram number: In most cases this number indicated a maintenance of the previous dynamic, as noted above.

The strength of the multi-chart approach is the production of unforeseen possibilities, and this is the usefulness that Cage found in chance operations: To take his own musical ideas and alter them, producing a fresh and spontaneous world of sound.

Both the great diversity of sounds, durations and dynamics and the unusual combinations of these generated by chance operations contributed to a sense of the Music of Changes taking place in a wider musical space than that of the concerto. But even this space would seem cramped if the charts had remained fixed in their content, and if the same elements had thus appeared and reappeared over and over during the forty-five minutes of the piece. For this reason, Cage devised a replacement technique  which operated continuously throughout the work. Each chart alternated between states of mobility and immobility, this alternation controlled by the I Ching. As long as a chart was immobile, its contents did not change. While a chart was mobile, however, any sound, duration or dynamic in it was replaced as soon as it was used. This system assured that the available pool of sounds, durations and dynamics would continually be refreshed with new elements as the composition progressed.

This constitutes the basis of the new chart technique. The remaining changes in Cage's compositional methods were more structural in nature. He continued to use rhythmic structures created as in the past. In the case of Music of Changes, proportions are large: 3; 5, 6 3/4; 6 3/4; 5, 3 1/8. The overall structure of 29 5/8 x 29 5/8 is divided into four large parts of one, two, one, and two sections respectively, and the whole work lasts well over half an hour. In order to make the structure more flexible, Cage decided to have the tempo vary during the course of the piece, with these tempo changes determined randomly by means of a chart and the I Ching.

While the structure in time remained relatively unchanged, the vertical structure of Music of Changes was quite different. Cage's previous works, such as the String Quartet or the concerto, were conceived of as essentially monophonic in texture. In them, he had composed a single series of sounds that followed one after the other. Beginning with Music of Changes, he created a polyphony by simply adding several of these layers--what he called "superimposed parts"--to one another. In Music of Changes, for example, he decided that at any given point in the piece there would be anywhere from one to eight of these layers. The number of layers changed with each phrase unit of the rhythmic structure, the precise numbers being determined by the I Ching and a density chart. Each layer of a given phrase would be composed independently, event by event, in the manner outlined above; each layer had its own unique set of sounds, duration, and dynamic charts.

A large portion of the compositional effort involved here was the arrangement of rhythms in the denser sections so that all the sounds of all the layers could be played and heard. The extent of the strategy and patience necessary to fit the various layers together becomes clear when such a disentangling of the polyphonic structure is studied.

Changes in density are among the most prominent musical features of Music of Changes. When density is low, silences in the layers overlap, producing gaping holes in the texture; the sounds that do occur take up their entire assigned durations, since there are few other sounds to interfere with their rhythmic expression. The result is a spacious sound akin to the last movement of the Concerto for prepared piano. When the density is high, on the other hand, even though each layer individually is half silences, the silences are rarely aligned, so that there is more continuous sound. In sections of very high density, the texture becomes saturated: so many sounds must be expressed within a relatively short time that Cage tends to abbreviate durations to mere attacks. These changes affect the perception of the music. During phrases of low density, the listener attends to the contours of the individual events; during periods of high density, the ears are overloaded, the events become unfocused, and the impression is predominantly textural.

It is the composition of the materials--the charts of sounds, durations, and dynamics--that most strongly determines the effect of Music of Changes and that gives it its unique and unmistakable voice. In this work, perhaps more clearly than in any other, chance appears as a means and not an end in itself. It was necessary for Cage to use the chart technique in order to have his musical materials--which are completely products of his compositional choice and judgment--speak by themselves, without being forced into a particular sort of continuity. Chance here is the mechanism by which materials can assert their dominance of the composition: Cage's primary role as composer is to create the collection of materials that will, through the offices of the chance system, then become the sole identity of the work.

Virgil Thomson, in reviewing the premiere of Music of Changes, compared it to a kaleidoscope, and this seems a perfect analogy: the world of Music of Changes is one of abrupt juxtapositions of a variety of transparent, brightly-colored, and incisive materials.

(from The Music of John Cage, by James Pritchett)

[Luke]

So....you mean you don't like it James? Who'd have thought it!

[not edward]

Not only that Luke - I mock and have total disdain for those who do. 

How nice for you. I think it's good when a person has a hobby.