This was written specifically to be performed on television - it premiered on an Italian TV show, and then later was performed on the American show I've Got a Secret. There's a recording of the latter performance on youtube that's well worth checking out. As a recording of the composition, it's not great - it's fairly bad quality, and it isn't even a faithful performance since it should have involved radios, but Cage was unable to play these due to a union dispute. But as a piece of television, it's wonderfully bizarre, and there are couple of things about it that are notable. First, the interview before the performance contains one of my favourite Cage quotes. After the host points out that some people are going to laugh at his music, Cage responds, "I consider laughter preferable to tears." Second, more notably, people do laugh. But their laughter strikes me as perfectly good-natured. It really sounds like the audience is enjoying Cage's performance.
A lot of people are very dismissive of experimental music. Cage, unsurprisingly, tends to receive a great deal of criticism from these folks. I've long tried - thus far completely unsuccessfully - to persuade my girlfriend that he wasn't just a pretentious charlatan. He was a sincere composer, and some people genuinely enjoy his music. (No doubt that some people inspired by Cage are pretentious charlatans, but that's hardly his fault.) It's very difficult to shake the impression some people have that only "serious arty types" enjoy it, and really even they are only pretending to enjoy it. However, the reaction of the audience of I've Got a Secret suggests another way of approaching Cage's work: as something amusing, humorous, and fun. I don't think Cage ever encouraged people to see his work this way. But he didn't discourage this, either.
In fact, I think modern art in general would be far better received by the public if more people involved with it dropped the pretension, affectation, and dreariness and just embraced the fact that a lot of what they're doing is really very silly. One of my favourite contemporary artists is Jonathon Keats, largely because he clearly has a good sense of humour.
Anyway, I'm listening to a recording of Water Walk by a couple of fellas called "Duo Conradi-Gehlen". It's a really easy listen - only three minutes long, and much more active than usual for Cage: there's no silence, and loads of interesting sounds. Despite that this was composed to be both seen and heard, I think it works much better just hearing it. Aside from the fact that watching someone fill up a bathtub or turn on a radio is kinda boring, the sounds are bound to seem much more mundane if you can see them being produced. It removes the mystery and the sense of exploration.
Thursday 18 December 2014
Monday 8 December 2014
Four Solos for Voice (93-96) (1988)
This one does exactly what it says on the tin: it's four solos for voice! In fact, each solo contains various different parts, which don't seem to have any relation to each other. We might veer from opera, to religious choral vocals, to spoken word, to weird experimental stuff. Similarly, none of the parts for one voice seem to have any relation to the parts for other voices; and since all the solos are played simultaneously, the result is rather a mess. A lovely mess, but a mess all the same. Some of the parts are actually fairly conventional - in fact, there were even a few times when I thought I heard snatches of tunes that I recognized, though these were possibly coincidences - but the bass might be doing some traditional religious thing, while the tenor is doing some kooky screaming, etc.
In a way, with all the different styles, and different things happening at the same time, this recalls the extreme multiplicity in Cage's work from the 60s - pieces like HPSCHD and 33 1/3 that play various unrelated things simultaneously. But where those pieces were chaotic walls of noise, this is notable for its simplicity. We have a bare-bones arrangement: only four voices, not manipulated in any way (aside from the basics like a bit of reverb). It's actually quite restful overall, even when the singers get more dramatic and energetic.
Just to place this in context: Solos for Voice 1 and 2 were composed in 1958 and 1960 respectively, to be performed with the Concert for Piano and Orchestra. Solos for Voice 3 to 92 were composed in 1970 as part of the Song Books. Then we have this final set of four solos in 1988, which comprise an independent piece.
In a way, with all the different styles, and different things happening at the same time, this recalls the extreme multiplicity in Cage's work from the 60s - pieces like HPSCHD and 33 1/3 that play various unrelated things simultaneously. But where those pieces were chaotic walls of noise, this is notable for its simplicity. We have a bare-bones arrangement: only four voices, not manipulated in any way (aside from the basics like a bit of reverb). It's actually quite restful overall, even when the singers get more dramatic and energetic.
Just to place this in context: Solos for Voice 1 and 2 were composed in 1958 and 1960 respectively, to be performed with the Concert for Piano and Orchestra. Solos for Voice 3 to 92 were composed in 1970 as part of the Song Books. Then we have this final set of four solos in 1988, which comprise an independent piece.
Monday 1 December 2014
Quartets I-VIII (1976)
Wait - what's going on? Have I selected the wrong track? Did they put the wrong CD in the "John Cage" case?
... well, no: this is John Cage. It's one of his "imitations", and it's possibly the most conventional of a surprisingly conventional bunch of compositions. Here, Cage worked with eight pieces by a few obscure 18th-century American composers, such as William Billings, Jacob French, and Andrew Law. Just what he did with those pieces, I'm not sure. One wonders at times: did he make any changes at all? The only hint that there actually is some Cage in this is that over its 37 minute running time, it doesn't really go anywhere; there's never any sense of building towards anything: it sets a pastoral, contemplative mood in the first few seconds and then just sticks with it till the end.
So I suppose this is somewhere between ambient, minimalism, and more standard classical - but make no mistake, it's far more standard classical than it is ambient or minimalism, and it retains a distinctive eighteenth-century American flavour. It conjures up images of open prairies, wagons crossing rolling hills, and dead Indians. Even the instrumentation is traditional, involving a standard orchestra, mostly strings. The one cool twist is that since this is written for an orchestra, and since each quartet contains (obviously) only four players, the players in each quartet are different, resulting in gradual, subtle timbral changes throughout the piece.
A very easy listen. Even including his earlier years, I don't think Cage ever wrote a composition quite as emotive and as traditionally melodic as this. It's John Cage for people who don't like John Cage. When I played two minutes of this to my girlfriend, she merely found it boring, rather than completely unlistenable, so a big improvement on the norm!
... well, no: this is John Cage. It's one of his "imitations", and it's possibly the most conventional of a surprisingly conventional bunch of compositions. Here, Cage worked with eight pieces by a few obscure 18th-century American composers, such as William Billings, Jacob French, and Andrew Law. Just what he did with those pieces, I'm not sure. One wonders at times: did he make any changes at all? The only hint that there actually is some Cage in this is that over its 37 minute running time, it doesn't really go anywhere; there's never any sense of building towards anything: it sets a pastoral, contemplative mood in the first few seconds and then just sticks with it till the end.
So I suppose this is somewhere between ambient, minimalism, and more standard classical - but make no mistake, it's far more standard classical than it is ambient or minimalism, and it retains a distinctive eighteenth-century American flavour. It conjures up images of open prairies, wagons crossing rolling hills, and dead Indians. Even the instrumentation is traditional, involving a standard orchestra, mostly strings. The one cool twist is that since this is written for an orchestra, and since each quartet contains (obviously) only four players, the players in each quartet are different, resulting in gradual, subtle timbral changes throughout the piece.
A very easy listen. Even including his earlier years, I don't think Cage ever wrote a composition quite as emotive and as traditionally melodic as this. It's John Cage for people who don't like John Cage. When I played two minutes of this to my girlfriend, she merely found it boring, rather than completely unlistenable, so a big improvement on the norm!
Monday 24 November 2014
A Dip in the Lake (1978)
A large composition consisting of hundreds of recordings from a city, assembled together according to chance operations. A complete realization, recorded in various places in Chicago, is available for free on ubuweb: http://www.ubu.com/sound/cage_dip.html - 2 hours 20 minutes, so that's basically a double album of free Cage.
The city setting reminds me of a somewhat Cagean story. A few years ago, when I was out in a local city, I could hear what I thought was some sort of avant-garde noise/industrial band busking on a street nearby. I thought it sounded pretty good, but was surprised that a band like that would bother busking, as surely most people would hate it. Anyway, when I turned the corner, I saw that it wasn't a band at all, but construction workers doing some roadworks.
Anyway, unsurprisingly, we mostly hear some of the standard sounds of the city: a lot of traffic noise; snatches of music from car radios; trains chugging along; people talking; birds tweeting; construction work - etc etc. There are however a few surprises. There's the sound of what seemed like people playing golf at one point. In part 3 (Waltes 32-61), there's an odd buzzing noise, which is somewhat reminiscent of crickets chirping. One of my favourite noises occurs in part 4 (Marches 1-28): a beautiful, ethereal, high-pitched drone; it has a "glassy" timbre and seems to seep in from the distance. I have no idea what it is, but it's absolutely lovely. Occasionally some of the recordings are played backwards.
There's a lot of repetition. We might have, say, a two second clip of traffic noise, which is then repeated several times over a short space of time. It gives the impression of a record stuck on a loop (or several records stuck on a loop, since there's often more than one recording played at once), and creates an almost hypnotic rhythm. Similarly, many of the recordings start and stop, start and stop, start and stop.
So there's a fairly wide variety of sounds - mostly standard city sounds, but a few strange ones and a few more "organic" ones (birds and water), all intercut with each other in an often hypnotic way to build a rich soundscape. It's all recognizably Earthly - but just with something slightly off. And actually, after listening to nearly 2 and half hours of this, even the more normal sounds become disconnected from their usual sources. I stop hearing the traffic drone as traffic and hear it instead hear it as just one interesting noise among many. All of these sounds are in their usual context - city sounds among city sounds - but the context is completely scrambled, so we hear even the most apparently mundane sounds in a new light.
Overall it evokes compositions like Rozart Mix, Variations IV, etc, but it's much calmer. Most of the sounds here are quiet and/or droney - traffic noise, wind, and so on - and there are long stretches of near-silence. A fairly easy listen, then, despite the mammoth length.
The city setting reminds me of a somewhat Cagean story. A few years ago, when I was out in a local city, I could hear what I thought was some sort of avant-garde noise/industrial band busking on a street nearby. I thought it sounded pretty good, but was surprised that a band like that would bother busking, as surely most people would hate it. Anyway, when I turned the corner, I saw that it wasn't a band at all, but construction workers doing some roadworks.
Anyway, unsurprisingly, we mostly hear some of the standard sounds of the city: a lot of traffic noise; snatches of music from car radios; trains chugging along; people talking; birds tweeting; construction work - etc etc. There are however a few surprises. There's the sound of what seemed like people playing golf at one point. In part 3 (Waltes 32-61), there's an odd buzzing noise, which is somewhat reminiscent of crickets chirping. One of my favourite noises occurs in part 4 (Marches 1-28): a beautiful, ethereal, high-pitched drone; it has a "glassy" timbre and seems to seep in from the distance. I have no idea what it is, but it's absolutely lovely. Occasionally some of the recordings are played backwards.
There's a lot of repetition. We might have, say, a two second clip of traffic noise, which is then repeated several times over a short space of time. It gives the impression of a record stuck on a loop (or several records stuck on a loop, since there's often more than one recording played at once), and creates an almost hypnotic rhythm. Similarly, many of the recordings start and stop, start and stop, start and stop.
So there's a fairly wide variety of sounds - mostly standard city sounds, but a few strange ones and a few more "organic" ones (birds and water), all intercut with each other in an often hypnotic way to build a rich soundscape. It's all recognizably Earthly - but just with something slightly off. And actually, after listening to nearly 2 and half hours of this, even the more normal sounds become disconnected from their usual sources. I stop hearing the traffic drone as traffic and hear it instead hear it as just one interesting noise among many. All of these sounds are in their usual context - city sounds among city sounds - but the context is completely scrambled, so we hear even the most apparently mundane sounds in a new light.
Overall it evokes compositions like Rozart Mix, Variations IV, etc, but it's much calmer. Most of the sounds here are quiet and/or droney - traffic noise, wind, and so on - and there are long stretches of near-silence. A fairly easy listen, then, despite the mammoth length.
Saturday 8 November 2014
Two (1987)
This is a special one: it's the very first Number Piece! And with that in mind, it's... well, fairly inconsequential. 10 minutes long, for piano and flute. Actually, it might as well be One for piano, because at least on my recording, you can barely hear the flute - even when turning the volume up to the point that the piano becomes slightly uncomfortably loud (and this semms to be faithful to Cage's instructions, as he specified that the flute was to be played very quietly). It's a very quite wheeze in the distance, maybe like a soft wind. You might not even realize that it's playing until it stops.
The piano is surprisingly melodic, and unsurprisingly played slowly and softly. It brings to mind some of Cage's Satie-influened work. There's no indication here of the extreme, sustained dissonance that would become characteristic of later Number Pieces. It does however have the same mood of tranquility and stillness.
Nice enough I suppose, though it seems a bit like two instruments playing different pieces. Imagine the piano playing some Satie at a snail's pace tempo, with the flute playing some sort of extreme, minimal ambient.
The piano is surprisingly melodic, and unsurprisingly played slowly and softly. It brings to mind some of Cage's Satie-influened work. There's no indication here of the extreme, sustained dissonance that would become characteristic of later Number Pieces. It does however have the same mood of tranquility and stillness.
Nice enough I suppose, though it seems a bit like two instruments playing different pieces. Imagine the piano playing some Satie at a snail's pace tempo, with the flute playing some sort of extreme, minimal ambient.
Tuesday 4 November 2014
Fifty-Eight (1992)
I mentioned in the last review that one of the problems with listening to Cage's music is that he often put a lot of emphasis on space - where the audience sits, where the performers are situated, the kind of place it's performed, etc - which, obviously, cannot be preserved in a recording. In few Cage compositions is the problem as acute as it is here, as this was designed for one specific courtyard! (The courtyard had fifty-eight arches; hence fifty-eight players: one for each arch.) Perhaps this explains why this is oddly neglected as far as Number Pieces go - my recording by Pannonisches Blasorchester is the only one that I'm aware of. Which is a pity, because this is a really wonderful piece of music. One of Cage's best, in my opinion.
Also, this particular recording is perhaps not ideal. There is a lot of audience noise. Mostly coughing, a few people shuffling around, and at one point I even heard what sounded like a baby crying out. That last one was probably just one of the instruments. But the audience certainly make themselves known. I suppose it's not very Cagean to complain about that. And I'm not really complaining; I wouldn't say it detracts from the music at all, but it would be interesting to hear a "pure" recording.
To be fair, the courtyard it was written for - Landhaushof in Graz - is, just going by the images on Google, very open and even appears to be right next to a road. It's to be expected, then, that a good deal of ambient sound will intrude into the piece. Indeed, it could be argued that this recording doesn't really go far enough on that end. Maybe during a normal performance of this, you could expect to hear a lot of people talking, and even cars driving by. Again, it would be interesting to hear that kind of recording, too.
Like most Number Pieces, it consists mostly of slow, long-held notes with a few short notes. However, it differs from most Number Pieces in that the dynamics are about the same for both long and short notes. So, don't be worried about drifting off to sleep to this one! (It's 45 minutes long, so falling asleep is a possibility.) You won't be jolted awake by a sudden, loud honk on a saxophone. Instead, this is pretty much ambient; and the music generally has a fairly soft timbre, being composed only for wind instruments. It drones away slowly and softly - gradually getting louder and quieter, as though it's breathing.
With so many instruments, it's often difficult to distinguish one from another, creating fuzzy mass of sound from which various specific sounds are brushed in and out. Overall it brings to mind rolling clouds, maybe a gathering storm. There are plenty of lovely low, deep notes. And it is, of course, unrelenting dissonant. The stormy mood is emphasized somewhat about half-way through this recording, where people start shuffling about so much that they make a sound like rain pattering down (I'm not sure exactly how that sound arises - from clothes crinkling perhaps?). A fantastic piece!
Also, this particular recording is perhaps not ideal. There is a lot of audience noise. Mostly coughing, a few people shuffling around, and at one point I even heard what sounded like a baby crying out. That last one was probably just one of the instruments. But the audience certainly make themselves known. I suppose it's not very Cagean to complain about that. And I'm not really complaining; I wouldn't say it detracts from the music at all, but it would be interesting to hear a "pure" recording.
To be fair, the courtyard it was written for - Landhaushof in Graz - is, just going by the images on Google, very open and even appears to be right next to a road. It's to be expected, then, that a good deal of ambient sound will intrude into the piece. Indeed, it could be argued that this recording doesn't really go far enough on that end. Maybe during a normal performance of this, you could expect to hear a lot of people talking, and even cars driving by. Again, it would be interesting to hear that kind of recording, too.
Like most Number Pieces, it consists mostly of slow, long-held notes with a few short notes. However, it differs from most Number Pieces in that the dynamics are about the same for both long and short notes. So, don't be worried about drifting off to sleep to this one! (It's 45 minutes long, so falling asleep is a possibility.) You won't be jolted awake by a sudden, loud honk on a saxophone. Instead, this is pretty much ambient; and the music generally has a fairly soft timbre, being composed only for wind instruments. It drones away slowly and softly - gradually getting louder and quieter, as though it's breathing.
With so many instruments, it's often difficult to distinguish one from another, creating fuzzy mass of sound from which various specific sounds are brushed in and out. Overall it brings to mind rolling clouds, maybe a gathering storm. There are plenty of lovely low, deep notes. And it is, of course, unrelenting dissonant. The stormy mood is emphasized somewhat about half-way through this recording, where people start shuffling about so much that they make a sound like rain pattering down (I'm not sure exactly how that sound arises - from clothes crinkling perhaps?). A fantastic piece!
Tuesday 28 October 2014
Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras (1981)
There are a couple of interesting points about this piece. First, it's an important milestone in Cage's work as, supposedly, it's his first use of time-bracket notation. I say "supposedly" because I'm unclear what those timings were in For Paul Taylor and Anita Dencks if not time brackets. But I've read in a few places that time brackets proper started here.
With the use of time-brackets, it's immediately tempting to connect this to the Number Pieces. Personally, I would be wary of that temptation. I'm not sure there's all that much continuity between this and the Number Pieces. You can see an important difference in the title alone. Thirty pieces. Five orchestras. Whereas the main feature of most Number Pieces, even the ones involving large numbers of musicians, is simplicity and stillness, the focus here is on multiplicity, complexity, extravagance. This is as related to something like HPSCHD as it is to the Number Pieces (in both cases, not much).
Another notable difference is its use of repetition. In almost all the pieces, there is at least one instrument repeating a single note. None of these seem to be following any particular rhythm. It reminds me a little of Hymnkus, though the music here feels much more organic, and because of the short length of each piece (there are thirty pieces in about thirty minutes), none of them have a chance to develop gradually like Hymnkus does. Just as you're feeling tempted to describe it as "minimalist", the music is cut short and some new part starts. Again, Cage's focus here seems to be multiplicity. Cram in as much as possible. Quantity creates quality. Don't be afraid of waste. (I should note that Cage crams in plenty of silence and quiet parts, too. This is not nearly as loud and chaotic as HPSCHD.)
Second, I think, though I may be wrong about this, that this was also the first time Cage derived his compositional method from his visual art, here the series of paintings On the Surface. I'm not sure if I've ever seen On the Surface. I have a few collections on Cage's visual art, but not on me where I am right now; and I couldn't find anything on a brief search on Google. So I can't say whether the music feels similar to the artwork.
Nevertheless there is something more generally interesting to note about the use of paintings here. Visual art is, of course, a medium that necessarily exists in space; music, on the other hand, is generally seen as being an art of time rather than space. Cage felt that any strict division here would be a mistake. Granted, time is essential to music; but space need not be neglected. Indeed, it's impossible to neglect space entirely: where the musicians are placed, where you are in relation to them, what kinds of room is used, etc, will make a difference to the sounds you experience no matter what composition is being played. Even so, very few composers have shown much concern with space. Questions such as "where to place the musicians?", "what kind of room should this be performed?" are not traditionally ones with which composers have concerned themselves. Cage, however, was deeply concerned with space, especially during his later career. He tried to erode the boundaries between time-art and space-art. And I think that his use of paintings in his music composition was very much an expression of this concern.
(Re space and music in general: here's an interesting talk by David Byrne about the significant influence that venue - space - has on music. Cage's interest in space had some justification.)
Importantly, the use of space extends to the music itself. The five orchestras are placed apart from each other and arranged in a pentagon around the audience. Unfortunately, I can't really comment on this aspect of the piece, as it's obviously impossible to preserve it in a recording. It's one of the things that makes being a fan of Cage somewhat frustrating. Much of his work is not really suited to recordings (which is one of the main reasons why Cage himself was fairly hostile to recordings). I will probably never hear anything more than a cheap imitation of Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras.
With the use of time-brackets, it's immediately tempting to connect this to the Number Pieces. Personally, I would be wary of that temptation. I'm not sure there's all that much continuity between this and the Number Pieces. You can see an important difference in the title alone. Thirty pieces. Five orchestras. Whereas the main feature of most Number Pieces, even the ones involving large numbers of musicians, is simplicity and stillness, the focus here is on multiplicity, complexity, extravagance. This is as related to something like HPSCHD as it is to the Number Pieces (in both cases, not much).
Another notable difference is its use of repetition. In almost all the pieces, there is at least one instrument repeating a single note. None of these seem to be following any particular rhythm. It reminds me a little of Hymnkus, though the music here feels much more organic, and because of the short length of each piece (there are thirty pieces in about thirty minutes), none of them have a chance to develop gradually like Hymnkus does. Just as you're feeling tempted to describe it as "minimalist", the music is cut short and some new part starts. Again, Cage's focus here seems to be multiplicity. Cram in as much as possible. Quantity creates quality. Don't be afraid of waste. (I should note that Cage crams in plenty of silence and quiet parts, too. This is not nearly as loud and chaotic as HPSCHD.)
Second, I think, though I may be wrong about this, that this was also the first time Cage derived his compositional method from his visual art, here the series of paintings On the Surface. I'm not sure if I've ever seen On the Surface. I have a few collections on Cage's visual art, but not on me where I am right now; and I couldn't find anything on a brief search on Google. So I can't say whether the music feels similar to the artwork.
Nevertheless there is something more generally interesting to note about the use of paintings here. Visual art is, of course, a medium that necessarily exists in space; music, on the other hand, is generally seen as being an art of time rather than space. Cage felt that any strict division here would be a mistake. Granted, time is essential to music; but space need not be neglected. Indeed, it's impossible to neglect space entirely: where the musicians are placed, where you are in relation to them, what kinds of room is used, etc, will make a difference to the sounds you experience no matter what composition is being played. Even so, very few composers have shown much concern with space. Questions such as "where to place the musicians?", "what kind of room should this be performed?" are not traditionally ones with which composers have concerned themselves. Cage, however, was deeply concerned with space, especially during his later career. He tried to erode the boundaries between time-art and space-art. And I think that his use of paintings in his music composition was very much an expression of this concern.
(Re space and music in general: here's an interesting talk by David Byrne about the significant influence that venue - space - has on music. Cage's interest in space had some justification.)
Importantly, the use of space extends to the music itself. The five orchestras are placed apart from each other and arranged in a pentagon around the audience. Unfortunately, I can't really comment on this aspect of the piece, as it's obviously impossible to preserve it in a recording. It's one of the things that makes being a fan of Cage somewhat frustrating. Much of his work is not really suited to recordings (which is one of the main reasons why Cage himself was fairly hostile to recordings). I will probably never hear anything more than a cheap imitation of Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras.
Tuesday 21 October 2014
One10 (1992)
This makes an interesting contrast to the piece I heard last time, the Freeman Etudes. Like those Etudes, One10 is for solo violin. Beyond this, the pieces could not be more different. The Freeman Etudes is a composition of extraordinary complexity, which jumps rapidly across the whole field of possible notes. One10 is a late Number Piece, and - well, you probably know the drill by now: it's extremely minimal, consisting simply of long drones separated by silences, played in a uniform way without vibrato, without plucking, without any other extended techniques. It's 24 minutes long and contains maybe 40-something notes overall.
I must say that listening to this is a thoroughly refreshing experience after 100 minutes of the Freeman Etudes! Maybe this is the best way to appreciate Cage's more extreme Number Pieces. But what's notable about it is that it shows Cage's skill as a composer, particularly his ability to use chance as a tool for achieving all sorts of different ends. When listening to Cage, it's important to remember that though chance is an important part of his aesthetic, it is only one part. Chance is Cage's way of removing his own voice and emotions. It's what allows him to explore and discover. But that doesn't mean he has no destination in mind: he reaches a determinate place in an unpredictable way. This fact is really brought home when listening to radically different pieces like the Freeman Etudes and One10: the different ideas they embody, and the different sounds that we hear.
Turning to the sounds in question, it is definitely sound that is the focus here. The drones are very long, so silence has a fairly minor role, unlike with most of the other Ones and Twos. Interestingly, the drones often don't seem so much like a violin. I believe that most of it was played on harmonics, resulting in lots of high-pitched, screeching notes, occasionally quite reminiscent of whistling wind. At first, the mood seems agitated, tense - certainly, the drones are too harsh to be ambient, so it demands attention, forcing us to focus on the tiniest variations in the sound. And as the piece continues, without building up or going anywhere, without piling on more tension or releasing it, you soon come to accept the sounds as they are. I don't really know of any listening experience quite like this (well, aside from a few other Number Pieces). But I love it.
I must say that listening to this is a thoroughly refreshing experience after 100 minutes of the Freeman Etudes! Maybe this is the best way to appreciate Cage's more extreme Number Pieces. But what's notable about it is that it shows Cage's skill as a composer, particularly his ability to use chance as a tool for achieving all sorts of different ends. When listening to Cage, it's important to remember that though chance is an important part of his aesthetic, it is only one part. Chance is Cage's way of removing his own voice and emotions. It's what allows him to explore and discover. But that doesn't mean he has no destination in mind: he reaches a determinate place in an unpredictable way. This fact is really brought home when listening to radically different pieces like the Freeman Etudes and One10: the different ideas they embody, and the different sounds that we hear.
Turning to the sounds in question, it is definitely sound that is the focus here. The drones are very long, so silence has a fairly minor role, unlike with most of the other Ones and Twos. Interestingly, the drones often don't seem so much like a violin. I believe that most of it was played on harmonics, resulting in lots of high-pitched, screeching notes, occasionally quite reminiscent of whistling wind. At first, the mood seems agitated, tense - certainly, the drones are too harsh to be ambient, so it demands attention, forcing us to focus on the tiniest variations in the sound. And as the piece continues, without building up or going anywhere, without piling on more tension or releasing it, you soon come to accept the sounds as they are. I don't really know of any listening experience quite like this (well, aside from a few other Number Pieces). But I love it.
Tuesday 14 October 2014
Freeman Etudes (1980/1990)
The Freeman Etudes for solo violin is one of Cage's most notorious compositions: a contender for his most devilishly difficult to perform, and this from a composer notable for his many devilishly difficult pieces. The dates he wrote it tell part of the story. Cage originally began this in the late 70s for Paul Zukofsky. As far as I understand it, Cage's basic method was that after writing a note, he would ask Zukofsky what notes (and with what playing styles) it would be possible to perform right away after it, then used chance operations to determine which of those notes would be next. The piece is written with extreme precision. For each note, Cage determines exactly the duration, the amplitude, the position of the bow on the string, the style of bowing (or fingering); slight microtonal variations in pitch, etc; and since all of these are determined for each note, all of these properties can change from note to note. Worse, it is to be played extremely fast.
Cage completed books 1 and 2, comprising etudes I-XVI, in 1980. But even Paul Zukofsky, an extremely skilled violinist, was complaining that the pieces were in some cases simply impossible to perform. Rather than compromise his vision for the composition and find a way to make it a little easier, Cage simply gave up the project.
Until, that is, he met Irvine Arditti, who not only could perform the first two books, but played them even faster than Cage had directed. This inspired Cage to return to the Etudes, completing books 3 and 4, etudes XVII-XXXII, in 1990. So thankfully we have a full set, but that hiatus is certainly telling. As far as I know, there is no other case of Cage writing a composition that even he concedes is too difficult to perform (and as I noted, he has plenty of very difficult compositions).
Anyway, I'm listening to the recordings by mode records, with Arditti on violin. There's probably nobody else in the world who can play this as well as Arditti. It's not that we lack skilled violinists, but there aren't many of them who are willing to spend years obsessively practising a composition that sounds more like a squeaky door than violin music. This point also brings me to the difficulties that confront any potential listeners. I'm not joking about this sounding like a squeaky door; and even with with Arditti's speedy playing, we still have about 100 minutes of this stuff.
Listening to it carefully, what immediately struck me was, unsurprisingly, its extreme complexity. This stands out from Cage's other impossible compositions in being so obviously impossible. For example, take the Etudes Australes for piano, which I reviewed in my first review on this blog. As I mentioned in that review, just listening to the Etudes Australes, it doesn't sound particularly difficult. Of course, I'm no pianist, so what would I know about that? But with the Freeman Etudes, though I'm no violinist either, it's immediately obvious that this must be an absolute bastard to play. And this, of course, was Cage's point. The Freeman Etudes, for Cage, has an important political message: in the face of an apparently impossible world situation, this composition demonstrates the possibility of the apparently impossible.
Fair enough, but that idea is communicated as well in twenty seconds as in 100 minutes. The impression I have listening to the whole thing is not so much an inspiring political message; it's more like watching an Olympic event. And the mere fact that it requires so much virtuosity is a novelty that sustains interest only for so long.
It doesn't help that really, once you've heard one etude, you've heard them all. Despite the complexity of these pieces, they end up seeming very uniform. None of them develop or go anywhere, and there's no variation in arrangement; it's just an onslaught of completely unrelated notes. The wonderful free improv guitarist Derek Bailey once described his style as "playing without a memory". What Bailey meant was "playing without a memory of previous musical traditions*. But we could interpret that phrase to mean "playing without a memory of the other notes I have just played". This is the impression conveyed by the Freeman Etudes. Each sound connects to no past, and points to no future. Eventually, it all just becomes a fuzzy mass of scrapes and squeaks (there's not even any variation in length of the etudes, all being about three minutes). Consider changing patterns of static on a television screen: there is little to differentiate one from another.
What's sad, given the difficulty of performing this, is that I'm guessing that the response 99% of people would have to it is simply: look disgusted and say "my 3-year-old kid could play better than that!" Of course, that's a really stupid criticism. But it does hint at something important. This piece could be far easier, and the experience for the listener would not be much different. (That's not to say, of course, that you can't tell how difficult this is. Just that similar overall sounds and similar complexity could be produced far more easily.)
The above comments probably make me come across as much more negative about this piece than I actually feel. Don't get me wrong; I just wonder about Cage's intentions for the piece. In fact, I absolutely love the Freeman Etudes. Bear in mind, however, that if you gave your 3-year-old kid a violin and recorded whatever sounds they bashed out, I'd probably love that too.
Cage completed books 1 and 2, comprising etudes I-XVI, in 1980. But even Paul Zukofsky, an extremely skilled violinist, was complaining that the pieces were in some cases simply impossible to perform. Rather than compromise his vision for the composition and find a way to make it a little easier, Cage simply gave up the project.
Until, that is, he met Irvine Arditti, who not only could perform the first two books, but played them even faster than Cage had directed. This inspired Cage to return to the Etudes, completing books 3 and 4, etudes XVII-XXXII, in 1990. So thankfully we have a full set, but that hiatus is certainly telling. As far as I know, there is no other case of Cage writing a composition that even he concedes is too difficult to perform (and as I noted, he has plenty of very difficult compositions).
Anyway, I'm listening to the recordings by mode records, with Arditti on violin. There's probably nobody else in the world who can play this as well as Arditti. It's not that we lack skilled violinists, but there aren't many of them who are willing to spend years obsessively practising a composition that sounds more like a squeaky door than violin music. This point also brings me to the difficulties that confront any potential listeners. I'm not joking about this sounding like a squeaky door; and even with with Arditti's speedy playing, we still have about 100 minutes of this stuff.
Listening to it carefully, what immediately struck me was, unsurprisingly, its extreme complexity. This stands out from Cage's other impossible compositions in being so obviously impossible. For example, take the Etudes Australes for piano, which I reviewed in my first review on this blog. As I mentioned in that review, just listening to the Etudes Australes, it doesn't sound particularly difficult. Of course, I'm no pianist, so what would I know about that? But with the Freeman Etudes, though I'm no violinist either, it's immediately obvious that this must be an absolute bastard to play. And this, of course, was Cage's point. The Freeman Etudes, for Cage, has an important political message: in the face of an apparently impossible world situation, this composition demonstrates the possibility of the apparently impossible.
Fair enough, but that idea is communicated as well in twenty seconds as in 100 minutes. The impression I have listening to the whole thing is not so much an inspiring political message; it's more like watching an Olympic event. And the mere fact that it requires so much virtuosity is a novelty that sustains interest only for so long.
It doesn't help that really, once you've heard one etude, you've heard them all. Despite the complexity of these pieces, they end up seeming very uniform. None of them develop or go anywhere, and there's no variation in arrangement; it's just an onslaught of completely unrelated notes. The wonderful free improv guitarist Derek Bailey once described his style as "playing without a memory". What Bailey meant was "playing without a memory of previous musical traditions*. But we could interpret that phrase to mean "playing without a memory of the other notes I have just played". This is the impression conveyed by the Freeman Etudes. Each sound connects to no past, and points to no future. Eventually, it all just becomes a fuzzy mass of scrapes and squeaks (there's not even any variation in length of the etudes, all being about three minutes). Consider changing patterns of static on a television screen: there is little to differentiate one from another.
What's sad, given the difficulty of performing this, is that I'm guessing that the response 99% of people would have to it is simply: look disgusted and say "my 3-year-old kid could play better than that!" Of course, that's a really stupid criticism. But it does hint at something important. This piece could be far easier, and the experience for the listener would not be much different. (That's not to say, of course, that you can't tell how difficult this is. Just that similar overall sounds and similar complexity could be produced far more easily.)
The above comments probably make me come across as much more negative about this piece than I actually feel. Don't get me wrong; I just wonder about Cage's intentions for the piece. In fact, I absolutely love the Freeman Etudes. Bear in mind, however, that if you gave your 3-year-old kid a violin and recorded whatever sounds they bashed out, I'd probably love that too.
Tuesday 7 October 2014
Two6 (1992)
A twenty-minute Number Piece for piano and violin; as you can probably guess, its most distinctive features are its slow pace and minimal arrangement.
It does however have a few distinctive features. Notably, some of the piano parts are derived from Cage's piece Extended Lullaby (1991), which itself is one Cage's Satie pieces, derived from Satie's Vexations. Unfortunately I've never heard Extended Lullaby. But the parts excerpted here clearly show the strong Satie influence: consonant, delicate, meandering melodies. The rest of the piano parts, penned by Cage, are just ascending scales. Again, they're consonant, and played softly, so merge well with the Extended Lullaby excerpts (indeed, without careful listening, it probably won't be obvious which parts are derived from Satie and which aren't). They do stand out in a way, though, since a simple move up a scale leaves you with the distinct impression that the music is going somewhere; in contrast to the meandering mood of the piece overall.
At first, for about two minutes, the violin plays a high-pitch, airy drone - it's more reminiscent of whistling wind than a violin, very atmospheric, and makes for an interesting contrast with the piano. It would have been cool if this kind of thing had gone on longer. After this, however, the violin becomes relatively active. Passages contain a number of notes, that get higher and lower and higher and lower in a narrow pitch range, like the kind of style used in Ten, and as in that piece, the music here evokes a rocking motion (imagine a person saying "ee-oo-ee-oo-ee-oo"; that's sort of what it sounds like). The mood of these parts is surprisingly plaintive. Maybe it's something about the particular timbre of the violin combined with that kind of playing, but the result definitely seems more emotive than usual for Cage. Anyway, these passages alternate with the quiet drones (though unfortunately, the lovely wind-like sound of the first drone never makes another appearance).
So this is Two in two ways: two instruments, the piano and violin; and each instrument plays two kinds of things: the piano alternates between Satie and Cage, the violin, between quiet drones and more active, emotive parts. Very interesting listening, and often very beautiful. (When I listened to this yesterday, I wasn't quite so keen on it. The violin and piano seemed kinda incongruous, they didn't fit together well. I think I felt that the sad mood of the violin clashed with the extreme tranquility of the piano. And indeed I still think that they seem incongruous. But that tension between the two moods has very much grown on me. There's a famous Zen story that Cage liked to tell about a monk who achieves Enlightenment and, when he's asked how it feels, responds: "I'm just as miserable as ever." This piece, with its contradictory moods, reminds me of that.)
It does however have a few distinctive features. Notably, some of the piano parts are derived from Cage's piece Extended Lullaby (1991), which itself is one Cage's Satie pieces, derived from Satie's Vexations. Unfortunately I've never heard Extended Lullaby. But the parts excerpted here clearly show the strong Satie influence: consonant, delicate, meandering melodies. The rest of the piano parts, penned by Cage, are just ascending scales. Again, they're consonant, and played softly, so merge well with the Extended Lullaby excerpts (indeed, without careful listening, it probably won't be obvious which parts are derived from Satie and which aren't). They do stand out in a way, though, since a simple move up a scale leaves you with the distinct impression that the music is going somewhere; in contrast to the meandering mood of the piece overall.
At first, for about two minutes, the violin plays a high-pitch, airy drone - it's more reminiscent of whistling wind than a violin, very atmospheric, and makes for an interesting contrast with the piano. It would have been cool if this kind of thing had gone on longer. After this, however, the violin becomes relatively active. Passages contain a number of notes, that get higher and lower and higher and lower in a narrow pitch range, like the kind of style used in Ten, and as in that piece, the music here evokes a rocking motion (imagine a person saying "ee-oo-ee-oo-ee-oo"; that's sort of what it sounds like). The mood of these parts is surprisingly plaintive. Maybe it's something about the particular timbre of the violin combined with that kind of playing, but the result definitely seems more emotive than usual for Cage. Anyway, these passages alternate with the quiet drones (though unfortunately, the lovely wind-like sound of the first drone never makes another appearance).
So this is Two in two ways: two instruments, the piano and violin; and each instrument plays two kinds of things: the piano alternates between Satie and Cage, the violin, between quiet drones and more active, emotive parts. Very interesting listening, and often very beautiful. (When I listened to this yesterday, I wasn't quite so keen on it. The violin and piano seemed kinda incongruous, they didn't fit together well. I think I felt that the sad mood of the violin clashed with the extreme tranquility of the piano. And indeed I still think that they seem incongruous. But that tension between the two moods has very much grown on me. There's a famous Zen story that Cage liked to tell about a monk who achieves Enlightenment and, when he's asked how it feels, responds: "I'm just as miserable as ever." This piece, with its contradictory moods, reminds me of that.)
Tuesday 30 September 2014
Fontana Mix (1958)
As you know, my goal with this blog is to listen to and comment on all of John Cage's indeterminate music. But what exactly do I mean by "indeterminate music"? It may be worth saying something about how this is defined. Broadly, there are two basic types of indeterminacy: (1) music in which chance operations are used to write the composition, and (2) music in which relevant parts of the composition are left in some ways vague. In the case of (1), two performances of the same composition should sound pretty much the same: the composer might use chance to generate e.g. the pitches, but once the composition is written, the performers will play the same pitches every time it's performed. In the case of (2), however, two performances of the same composition might sound radically different, because e.g. exactly which pitches to play is simply left unspecified.
I mention this here because Fontana Mix is a wonderful example of indeterminacy in the second sense (and in the first, actually, but of course Cage had been using chance operations for years by this point). Part of this indeterminacy arises from its use of graphic notation: its score consists wholly of transparent sheets of grids, dots, and lines that are placed on top of each other. Ignoring the music for a moment, the score, like many Cage scores, is just a beautiful piece of visual art in itself:
A tangent: when Cage was younger he studied under Arnold Schoenberg, who supposedly agreed to teach him on the condition that he devote himself entirely to music. However, Cage had always been interested in visual art - perhaps he saw graphic notation as giving him a way to explore this interest while keeping his promise? (Of course, Cage would eventually flagrantly break the promise anyway, producing pure visual art at places like Crown Point Press (and I'm very thankful this, since much of his visual art is stunningly beautiful).)
Anyway, Fontana Mix pushes indeterminacy of type (2) to an extreme. First, the way that all the sheets are put together is determined by chance operations before each performance, so in fact no two performers of Fontana Mix will use the same score. Nor need they use the same sound sources, since it's for any number of performers using any kinds of instruments. Further, Cage says nothing about how the grids, dots, or lines are to be interpreted, so all of the elements are left undefined. The same dot might represent a one-second long violin note in one performance, and a ten-second sound of tearing paper in another. A line might represent a note rising in pitch in one performance; in another, it might be taken as a visual guide for how the performers are to be placed on the stage. Etc. All of this is to be determined by the performers.
It should go without saying that different performances of this may sound radically different. Indeed, literally none of the sounds you hear in a performance of Fontana Mix have been specified by Cage. With compositions like this, indeterminacy is so great that it calls into question the very nature of composition. What, exactly, has Cage composed here? I read a lovely comment on a youtube video of Fontana Mix (I don't have the link, but I'm pretty sure this is verbatim): "The realization of the score is itself a new composition. In a way, Cage did not compose this - he composed the opportunity for it to exist."
The recording that I'm listening to is, I think, the original version created by Cage himself on magnetic tape. It's very reminiscent of Cage's earlier Williams Mix: it consists mostly of a lot of static noise that seems to have been electronically processed in various ways. There's harsh white noise, soft radio static, and some of the static stops and start quickly, giving it a kind of staccato rhythm. Throughout the piece, there are also quick snatches of music, voices, electronic beeps and tones, and found sounds. Imagine somebody rapidly flipping through radio channels, landing mostly on static, and then processing the result. It is wonderfully chaotic!
It's definitely worthwhile to check out other versions of the piece - there's a few on youtube, last time I looked.
I mention this here because Fontana Mix is a wonderful example of indeterminacy in the second sense (and in the first, actually, but of course Cage had been using chance operations for years by this point). Part of this indeterminacy arises from its use of graphic notation: its score consists wholly of transparent sheets of grids, dots, and lines that are placed on top of each other. Ignoring the music for a moment, the score, like many Cage scores, is just a beautiful piece of visual art in itself:
Anyway, Fontana Mix pushes indeterminacy of type (2) to an extreme. First, the way that all the sheets are put together is determined by chance operations before each performance, so in fact no two performers of Fontana Mix will use the same score. Nor need they use the same sound sources, since it's for any number of performers using any kinds of instruments. Further, Cage says nothing about how the grids, dots, or lines are to be interpreted, so all of the elements are left undefined. The same dot might represent a one-second long violin note in one performance, and a ten-second sound of tearing paper in another. A line might represent a note rising in pitch in one performance; in another, it might be taken as a visual guide for how the performers are to be placed on the stage. Etc. All of this is to be determined by the performers.
It should go without saying that different performances of this may sound radically different. Indeed, literally none of the sounds you hear in a performance of Fontana Mix have been specified by Cage. With compositions like this, indeterminacy is so great that it calls into question the very nature of composition. What, exactly, has Cage composed here? I read a lovely comment on a youtube video of Fontana Mix (I don't have the link, but I'm pretty sure this is verbatim): "The realization of the score is itself a new composition. In a way, Cage did not compose this - he composed the opportunity for it to exist."
The recording that I'm listening to is, I think, the original version created by Cage himself on magnetic tape. It's very reminiscent of Cage's earlier Williams Mix: it consists mostly of a lot of static noise that seems to have been electronically processed in various ways. There's harsh white noise, soft radio static, and some of the static stops and start quickly, giving it a kind of staccato rhythm. Throughout the piece, there are also quick snatches of music, voices, electronic beeps and tones, and found sounds. Imagine somebody rapidly flipping through radio channels, landing mostly on static, and then processing the result. It is wonderfully chaotic!
It's definitely worthwhile to check out other versions of the piece - there's a few on youtube, last time I looked.
Tuesday 23 September 2014
HPSCHD (1969)
This was composed with Lejaren Hiller, a composer famous (well, maybe not so famous, but known among those who are into modern classical) for his work in computer music. Unfortunately I haven't heard much else by Hiller - just a few pieces on youtube, but I enjoyed them all, and I can see why he'd be a good match for Cage given his experimental approach to composition ("experimental" both in the sense that his music is very weird, and in the literal sense of doing experiments with new ways of producing sound).
It's worth noting that the original performance of HPSCHD involved a whole load of visual material as well; plus, it was spread out over a wide space so that the audience could hear and see different things as they walked around. Obviously, all of these elements are unfortunately lost in this recording. Still, perhaps this isn't such a bad thing, since the music alone provides more than enough to digest. HPSCHD is complete chaos. It's one of Cage's most noisy, complex, and abrasive works.
As far as I can tell, there are two basic types of music used here. The first thing we hear is the computer music. This consists of lots of atonal beeps and bloops, many of them with a scratchy timbre so it sounds rather like a primitive synthesizer. I find it reminiscent of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, though it's slower, less loud, and less industrial.
After about 10 seconds or so, a completely generic classical piece starts playing, possibly Mozart or something along those lines (Cage used a number of classical pieces in this, Mozart included), played on a harpsichord (hence HPSCHD). Classical harpsichord music continues throughout. Not much of it is particularly interesting in itself. It's all the sort of classical music that sounds familiar but that you can't place - the kind of thing you imagine being played on a film or TV show when the soundtrack calls for some generic classical. At first, the juxtaposition of this with the atonal computer music is kinda jarring and actually somewhat amusing. It's perhaps because this first piece has a jolly, carefree mood, as though it's blissfully oblivious to, or just doesn't give a shit about, all the terrible noise happening all around it. But ultimately, I think all the music meshes together well. As the piece continues, you soon become accustomed to the odd musical combinations; and it helps that the harpsichord has a very metallic, machine-like timbre, making a good complement to the computer music.
It would be interesting to hear the computer music on its own. Here, it functions more as a background to the harpsichord pieces. There's generally more than one harpsichord piece playing at once - and obviously there is no attempt to merge them together in any coherent way, just or two or three or however many tracks played simultaneously. Hence the complete chaos I mentioned earlier. In this context, all those uninteresting classical pieces becomes very interesting indeed. I love HPSCHD. It's a glorious, messy collision of future and past, with its odd clash of computerized sounds and generic classical melodies.
It's worth noting that the original performance of HPSCHD involved a whole load of visual material as well; plus, it was spread out over a wide space so that the audience could hear and see different things as they walked around. Obviously, all of these elements are unfortunately lost in this recording. Still, perhaps this isn't such a bad thing, since the music alone provides more than enough to digest. HPSCHD is complete chaos. It's one of Cage's most noisy, complex, and abrasive works.
As far as I can tell, there are two basic types of music used here. The first thing we hear is the computer music. This consists of lots of atonal beeps and bloops, many of them with a scratchy timbre so it sounds rather like a primitive synthesizer. I find it reminiscent of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, though it's slower, less loud, and less industrial.
After about 10 seconds or so, a completely generic classical piece starts playing, possibly Mozart or something along those lines (Cage used a number of classical pieces in this, Mozart included), played on a harpsichord (hence HPSCHD). Classical harpsichord music continues throughout. Not much of it is particularly interesting in itself. It's all the sort of classical music that sounds familiar but that you can't place - the kind of thing you imagine being played on a film or TV show when the soundtrack calls for some generic classical. At first, the juxtaposition of this with the atonal computer music is kinda jarring and actually somewhat amusing. It's perhaps because this first piece has a jolly, carefree mood, as though it's blissfully oblivious to, or just doesn't give a shit about, all the terrible noise happening all around it. But ultimately, I think all the music meshes together well. As the piece continues, you soon become accustomed to the odd musical combinations; and it helps that the harpsichord has a very metallic, machine-like timbre, making a good complement to the computer music.
It would be interesting to hear the computer music on its own. Here, it functions more as a background to the harpsichord pieces. There's generally more than one harpsichord piece playing at once - and obviously there is no attempt to merge them together in any coherent way, just or two or three or however many tracks played simultaneously. Hence the complete chaos I mentioned earlier. In this context, all those uninteresting classical pieces becomes very interesting indeed. I love HPSCHD. It's a glorious, messy collision of future and past, with its odd clash of computerized sounds and generic classical melodies.
Friday 19 September 2014
TV Köln (1958)
For a solo pianist, though this also includes percussive noises, which I assume were produced by hitting the piano, a radio, and in the middle of the piece there's a short, quiet creaking/groaning sort of sound. The radio is also quiet and produces snatches of foreign voices. Overall, it's reminiscent of Water Music - TV Köln has similar instrumentation, a similarly sparse arrangement, and the same night-time atmosphere.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to get much enjoyment out of this because it's so short: only 1'20", and really it's shorter than that since the last 20 seconds are silent. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly not bad: it has a nice mood and an interesting set of sounds, and at 1'20" it's hardly going to overstay its welcome. It all just seems rather inconsequential. It's a shame Cage didn't allow it to develop for a few more minutes... as it is, I'm left wondering what the point of it was (I guess the point was simply to make a few nice sounds, and to that extent I suppose it's successful).
Unfortunately, it's difficult to get much enjoyment out of this because it's so short: only 1'20", and really it's shorter than that since the last 20 seconds are silent. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly not bad: it has a nice mood and an interesting set of sounds, and at 1'20" it's hardly going to overstay its welcome. It all just seems rather inconsequential. It's a shame Cage didn't allow it to develop for a few more minutes... as it is, I'm left wondering what the point of it was (I guess the point was simply to make a few nice sounds, and to that extent I suppose it's successful).
Thursday 18 September 2014
Sixty-Eight (1992)
First of all, I apologise for my absence over the past week. I've been quite busy, mostly because I've just moved from home to university. My target when I started this blog was one review per day, and I'll try to get back to that - though of course it depends on how much work I have...
Anyway, onto one of my favourite Cage compositions: Sixty-Eight! Essentially, we begin with a number of instruments playing in unison. Then silence. Then, a number of instruments playing in unison, though this time on a different note. Another silence. Then a number of instruments playing in unison, again on a different note... and so on, to the end of the piece. Ultimately then this piece is a series of drones separated by silences, in which multiple instruments play a single note in unison. There are fifteen such drones, spread over half an hour.
Probably thanks to Cage's use of time-brackets, allowing the performers freedom over when to start and stop, the drones build up and recede gradually. They wax and wane in a cyclical manner; it's evocative of something like slow breathing, or perhaps the sea that washes in and out with each wave.
The "series of drones" structure is in itself quite interesting, but the style of playing is also notable. Unlike most Number Pieces, this is, of course, not especially dissonant (well, in fact, it doesn't sound quite as consonant as you'd expect from unison playing, so I wonder if this might have been one of the many Number Pieces in which Cage used slight imperfections of tuning, to produce imperfect unisons). It also features no sudden, loud sounds. So, this is as close as Cage comes to traditional ambient music - slow, not intrusive, doesn't demand attentive listening. This could easily fade into the background; you could even fall asleep to it, and it won't jolt you awake with sharp, loud bangs scattered randomly through it.
What I love most about Sixty-Eight is its fascinating exploration of timbre. Here, Cage has a full orchestra to play with, and he embellishes this with liberal use of non-standard instruments: for example, I heard something that sounded like a Tibetan singing bowl, evoking wind; then later, literally the sound of wind produced by a wind machine; one drone included an odd rattling noise; another, beautiful, sparkling chimes; another had something that sounded a bit like rainsticks (perhaps an appearance of the amplified cactus?); another included low, rumbling drums. Each drone has its own unique character. In fact, Cage could have probably taken each particular drone and extended it to, say, five minutes to form a stand-alone piece. This is definitely one of the most active and varied Number Pieces, despite its slow pace.
Anyway, onto one of my favourite Cage compositions: Sixty-Eight! Essentially, we begin with a number of instruments playing in unison. Then silence. Then, a number of instruments playing in unison, though this time on a different note. Another silence. Then a number of instruments playing in unison, again on a different note... and so on, to the end of the piece. Ultimately then this piece is a series of drones separated by silences, in which multiple instruments play a single note in unison. There are fifteen such drones, spread over half an hour.
Probably thanks to Cage's use of time-brackets, allowing the performers freedom over when to start and stop, the drones build up and recede gradually. They wax and wane in a cyclical manner; it's evocative of something like slow breathing, or perhaps the sea that washes in and out with each wave.
The "series of drones" structure is in itself quite interesting, but the style of playing is also notable. Unlike most Number Pieces, this is, of course, not especially dissonant (well, in fact, it doesn't sound quite as consonant as you'd expect from unison playing, so I wonder if this might have been one of the many Number Pieces in which Cage used slight imperfections of tuning, to produce imperfect unisons). It also features no sudden, loud sounds. So, this is as close as Cage comes to traditional ambient music - slow, not intrusive, doesn't demand attentive listening. This could easily fade into the background; you could even fall asleep to it, and it won't jolt you awake with sharp, loud bangs scattered randomly through it.
What I love most about Sixty-Eight is its fascinating exploration of timbre. Here, Cage has a full orchestra to play with, and he embellishes this with liberal use of non-standard instruments: for example, I heard something that sounded like a Tibetan singing bowl, evoking wind; then later, literally the sound of wind produced by a wind machine; one drone included an odd rattling noise; another, beautiful, sparkling chimes; another had something that sounded a bit like rainsticks (perhaps an appearance of the amplified cactus?); another included low, rumbling drums. Each drone has its own unique character. In fact, Cage could have probably taken each particular drone and extended it to, say, five minutes to form a stand-alone piece. This is definitely one of the most active and varied Number Pieces, despite its slow pace.
Thursday 11 September 2014
Five2 (1991)
A five minute piece for three clarinets, English horn, and timpani. The timpani is silent for the first two minutes, the English horn is silent for the last two, and the clarinets play throughout.
Anyway, there's not really much to say about this. It's a standard Number Piece: dissonant, slow, and with a few extended silences. Most of the notes are held for a long time, and the dynamics are consistently soft.
The horn seems to have much the same timbre as the clarinets - I couldn't really distinguish them - so the timpani provides some nice variety, in the form of a quiet, rumbling percussive sound, reminiscent of distant thunder. In contrast to the fairly bright sound of the clarinets and horn, it suggests anticipation and perhaps unease, giving the second half of the piece a somewhat darker tone. Not a particularly notable composition, but it's lovely as usual.
Anyway, there's not really much to say about this. It's a standard Number Piece: dissonant, slow, and with a few extended silences. Most of the notes are held for a long time, and the dynamics are consistently soft.
The horn seems to have much the same timbre as the clarinets - I couldn't really distinguish them - so the timpani provides some nice variety, in the form of a quiet, rumbling percussive sound, reminiscent of distant thunder. In contrast to the fairly bright sound of the clarinets and horn, it suggests anticipation and perhaps unease, giving the second half of the piece a somewhat darker tone. Not a particularly notable composition, but it's lovely as usual.
Monday 8 September 2014
Four2 (1990)
A stunningly beautiful and in many ways fairly surprising Number Piece for choir. As with most Cage pieces, the pace is slow: each person sings a single note, held for a long time - I mean a very long time, what sometimes seems like a superhuman length of time - and then rests. There is always at least one person singing, usually more; so this is built from a number of often overlapping, long, single notes.
So far, so good, nothing unusual there. What's surprising about it is its extreme consonance. This is, without any doubt, the most consonant Number Piece. It actually reminds me much more of Cage's "imitations" (Cheap Imitation, Hymns and Variations, Quartets I-VIII) than his Number Pieces. Now as far as I know, this is an entirely original work. I think it was composed for a high school choir, which might explain why Cage chose to work with more traditional material. Anyway, frankly, coming from a steady diet of Cage, this is almost overwhelmingly consonant, sort of like eating really sweet chocolate cake after having had a month off all junk food. I'm not complaining though. I love chocolate cake. And this composition is absolutely beautiful, in a traditional way.
Interestingly, over the last two minutes, standard Cage seems to reassert himself a little: the piece takes a darker turn as slightly more dissonant notes emerge, some of which are high-pitch nearly to the point of being shrill. The mood becomes rather more uneasy. It ends on an unresolved tension.
This leads us to another surprising thing about Four2: whereas most Number Pieces don't seem to progress or go anywhere, this has a clear structure - a simple structure, to be sure, but given the relatively short length (7 minutes), it's easy to pick up. The volume gradually increases over the first minute, then is stable until about three and a half minutes, at which point the music goes fairly quiet. This lasts until five minutes, when the somewhat more dissonant notes come in, and the volume increases. This section lasts till the end. Hence: 0'00" to 3'30": consonant loud - 3'30" to 5'00": consonant quiet - 5'00" to 7'00": dissonant loud. It is of course entirely possible that this structure arose entirely by chance. Perhaps if Cage had written 70 minutes rather than 7, we would have lots of random changes in volume and consonance/dissonance (or perhaps it would have the same general structure, but this would be unnoticeable when stretched to that length). But as it is, it's very difficult not to hear this as evincing some sort of overall development.
The mood throughout is one of yearning and devotion, with a religious/spiritual undertone. The use of the choir sets the religious atmosphere. Indeed, the choir sounds otherworldly, simply angelic (as I said, the notes are held for a superhuman length of time...). Part of this is that I'm listening to the recording by Mode, which boasts some incredible production. The voices are very resonant, and since there are no vocal acrobatics, no vibrato or whatever, each note rings out absolutely pure (this is probably partly why the consonance is so striking). I find it deeply moving. I don't know what prompted Cage to write this, but it really is an entrancing composition, well worth hearing.
So far, so good, nothing unusual there. What's surprising about it is its extreme consonance. This is, without any doubt, the most consonant Number Piece. It actually reminds me much more of Cage's "imitations" (Cheap Imitation, Hymns and Variations, Quartets I-VIII) than his Number Pieces. Now as far as I know, this is an entirely original work. I think it was composed for a high school choir, which might explain why Cage chose to work with more traditional material. Anyway, frankly, coming from a steady diet of Cage, this is almost overwhelmingly consonant, sort of like eating really sweet chocolate cake after having had a month off all junk food. I'm not complaining though. I love chocolate cake. And this composition is absolutely beautiful, in a traditional way.
Interestingly, over the last two minutes, standard Cage seems to reassert himself a little: the piece takes a darker turn as slightly more dissonant notes emerge, some of which are high-pitch nearly to the point of being shrill. The mood becomes rather more uneasy. It ends on an unresolved tension.
This leads us to another surprising thing about Four2: whereas most Number Pieces don't seem to progress or go anywhere, this has a clear structure - a simple structure, to be sure, but given the relatively short length (7 minutes), it's easy to pick up. The volume gradually increases over the first minute, then is stable until about three and a half minutes, at which point the music goes fairly quiet. This lasts until five minutes, when the somewhat more dissonant notes come in, and the volume increases. This section lasts till the end. Hence: 0'00" to 3'30": consonant loud - 3'30" to 5'00": consonant quiet - 5'00" to 7'00": dissonant loud. It is of course entirely possible that this structure arose entirely by chance. Perhaps if Cage had written 70 minutes rather than 7, we would have lots of random changes in volume and consonance/dissonance (or perhaps it would have the same general structure, but this would be unnoticeable when stretched to that length). But as it is, it's very difficult not to hear this as evincing some sort of overall development.
The mood throughout is one of yearning and devotion, with a religious/spiritual undertone. The use of the choir sets the religious atmosphere. Indeed, the choir sounds otherworldly, simply angelic (as I said, the notes are held for a superhuman length of time...). Part of this is that I'm listening to the recording by Mode, which boasts some incredible production. The voices are very resonant, and since there are no vocal acrobatics, no vibrato or whatever, each note rings out absolutely pure (this is probably partly why the consonance is so striking). I find it deeply moving. I don't know what prompted Cage to write this, but it really is an entrancing composition, well worth hearing.
Atlas Eclipticalis (1962)
One of the more infamous entries in Cage's catalogue, as it was the subject of a disastrous performance in 1964 by the New York Philharmonic, presented by Leonard Bernstein. The audience hated it, and so did the orchestra, who pretty much ignored Cage's score and just messed around. You can hear this performance here (Atlas Eclipticalis starts at about 11:30, but I'd recommend listening to the whole video as it includes an introduction by Bernstein and a free improvisation by the orchestra). Quite frankly, I really like it that performance. In fact I love it. It's right up my street, I think it sounds fantastic. I can see why Cage was annoyed though.
Beyond this disaster, Atlas Eclipticalis is notable for being the first composition that Cage wrote using star charts - I believe by simply copying the stars onto paper and placing staves over them, giving the notes (then using other properties of the stars, such as magnitude, to determine the volume and duration of the notes). Hence this is Cage's earliest composition in which natural phenomena plays a notable role. I'm not sure, however, whether there was any significance in the use of stars, or if it was simply a more expedient way of generating chance than the endless coin-tossing required for the I-Ching.
Certainly, at first blush, it doesn't really evoke starlight. Part of the reason for this is that it includes up to 86 instruments, of many different kinds, some of which seem to be nonstandard - for example, towards the beginning of the recording I'm listening to I heard what sounded like amplified rustling paper, then later, there was an occasional metallic rattling noise. With all of this variety, it's more evocative of, say, the complexity of the rainforest, than the minimal and austere image of the night sky.
That's at first blush. However, it soon becomes clear that the piece boasts extreme variation in dynamics. Scattered throughout it are a number of very short but very loud sounds, which force you to play it at a relatively low volume. Here is the waveform of the first 20 minutes in Audacity:
So you have to turn the volume down, and with that, most of the instruments fade into the background, barely perceptible or just plain imperceptible. There are occasionally fairly long stretches where I can't hear anything at all; and when I can hear the instruments, it's often difficult to distinguish them. They form a quiet but intricate canvas, with loud bangs suddenly and randomly popping out of it. And now, I very much have the impression of the night sky. (With the quiet music being the black background, and the short, loud sounds being specks of starlight. There are even a few drum rolls of mid-amplitude that remind me of clouds drifting across the sky.) In fact, if you amplify the quieter parts and the silences, you find that they are just as active as the louder parts - they even have similar extremes of dynamics - much as a telescope peering into apparently empty space will reveal lots of hidden stars and galaxies. It's a lot of fun to play around with the recording, and discover music hidden beneath its surface.
This piece allows for discoveries in more ways than one. The score is for 86 instruments, but a performance may use any combination of those. Eberhard Blum has a wonderful version for three flutes, which of course is a radically different take on the piece, very minimal and quiet. It doesn't evoke starlight, though... it doesn't really evoke anything, but it is lovely to listen to. So it's well worth checking out different recordings of this.
Beyond this disaster, Atlas Eclipticalis is notable for being the first composition that Cage wrote using star charts - I believe by simply copying the stars onto paper and placing staves over them, giving the notes (then using other properties of the stars, such as magnitude, to determine the volume and duration of the notes). Hence this is Cage's earliest composition in which natural phenomena plays a notable role. I'm not sure, however, whether there was any significance in the use of stars, or if it was simply a more expedient way of generating chance than the endless coin-tossing required for the I-Ching.
Certainly, at first blush, it doesn't really evoke starlight. Part of the reason for this is that it includes up to 86 instruments, of many different kinds, some of which seem to be nonstandard - for example, towards the beginning of the recording I'm listening to I heard what sounded like amplified rustling paper, then later, there was an occasional metallic rattling noise. With all of this variety, it's more evocative of, say, the complexity of the rainforest, than the minimal and austere image of the night sky.
That's at first blush. However, it soon becomes clear that the piece boasts extreme variation in dynamics. Scattered throughout it are a number of very short but very loud sounds, which force you to play it at a relatively low volume. Here is the waveform of the first 20 minutes in Audacity:
So you have to turn the volume down, and with that, most of the instruments fade into the background, barely perceptible or just plain imperceptible. There are occasionally fairly long stretches where I can't hear anything at all; and when I can hear the instruments, it's often difficult to distinguish them. They form a quiet but intricate canvas, with loud bangs suddenly and randomly popping out of it. And now, I very much have the impression of the night sky. (With the quiet music being the black background, and the short, loud sounds being specks of starlight. There are even a few drum rolls of mid-amplitude that remind me of clouds drifting across the sky.) In fact, if you amplify the quieter parts and the silences, you find that they are just as active as the louder parts - they even have similar extremes of dynamics - much as a telescope peering into apparently empty space will reveal lots of hidden stars and galaxies. It's a lot of fun to play around with the recording, and discover music hidden beneath its surface.
This piece allows for discoveries in more ways than one. The score is for 86 instruments, but a performance may use any combination of those. Eberhard Blum has a wonderful version for three flutes, which of course is a radically different take on the piece, very minimal and quiet. It doesn't evoke starlight, though... it doesn't really evoke anything, but it is lovely to listen to. So it's well worth checking out different recordings of this.
Saturday 6 September 2014
Some of "The Harmony of Maine" (1978)
This piece for solo organ is one of Cage's "imitations", this time based on The Harmony of Maine by Supply Belcher, hence its title. The Harmony of Maine is a collection of hymns from the late 1700s; Cage uses chance procedures to delete some notes, extend or shorten others, alter the registration of the organ, etc. So this is in the tradition of other imitations like Cheap Imitation, Hymns and Variations, and Quartets I-VIII. If you enjoy those, check this out, and vice versa.
As in those other pieces, the result of Cage's modifications is a composition whose melodic and harmonic content is surprisingly (for Cage) consonant and traditional, but that doesn't really go anywhere, doesn't develop musically. There is no tension and release, no emotional development, there are no cadences and no memorable melodies. If you've heard the first minute, you'll know exactly what to expect of the next forty minutes.
Cage's technique strips almost everything away, leaving only a ghost of the original: a collection of notes that seem to float in the ether, unconnected to each other, and an impression of its overall mood. Or at least what I guess is its overall mood: I have never actually heard The Harmony of Maine (I did look it up on youtube but couldn't find any videos), but this piece clearly retains the religious overtones. The melodies are solemn and hymn-like; and, of course, the use of the organ immediately brings a monastic atmosphere to the music. Indeed, I think that the organ was an excellent choice in general. Aside from being well-suited to the religious theme, the weighty, magisterial quality of its sound contrasts beautifully with the unrelenting stillness of the composition. I always feel like organs are saying something deep and important, about God, or marriage, or death. Yet here the organ says nothing. It goes nowhere.
I also love the different variety of timbres that the organ produces. Since each note is allowed to ring out for a fairly long time, you can really focus on the various colours of the sounds. (With Cage's more traditional pieces, instrumentation can make a big difference. It's interesting to compare the version of this piece for guitar, produced by Marc Ribot, which can be heard here. As much as I like Ribot, I think this works far better on organ.) A lovely piece. Big thumbs up from me.
As in those other pieces, the result of Cage's modifications is a composition whose melodic and harmonic content is surprisingly (for Cage) consonant and traditional, but that doesn't really go anywhere, doesn't develop musically. There is no tension and release, no emotional development, there are no cadences and no memorable melodies. If you've heard the first minute, you'll know exactly what to expect of the next forty minutes.
Cage's technique strips almost everything away, leaving only a ghost of the original: a collection of notes that seem to float in the ether, unconnected to each other, and an impression of its overall mood. Or at least what I guess is its overall mood: I have never actually heard The Harmony of Maine (I did look it up on youtube but couldn't find any videos), but this piece clearly retains the religious overtones. The melodies are solemn and hymn-like; and, of course, the use of the organ immediately brings a monastic atmosphere to the music. Indeed, I think that the organ was an excellent choice in general. Aside from being well-suited to the religious theme, the weighty, magisterial quality of its sound contrasts beautifully with the unrelenting stillness of the composition. I always feel like organs are saying something deep and important, about God, or marriage, or death. Yet here the organ says nothing. It goes nowhere.
I also love the different variety of timbres that the organ produces. Since each note is allowed to ring out for a fairly long time, you can really focus on the various colours of the sounds. (With Cage's more traditional pieces, instrumentation can make a big difference. It's interesting to compare the version of this piece for guitar, produced by Marc Ribot, which can be heard here. As much as I like Ribot, I think this works far better on organ.) A lovely piece. Big thumbs up from me.
Friday 5 September 2014
One5 (1990)
As is the norm for the smaller Number Pieces, this is extremely minimal and sparse. It's a twenty-minute piece for solo piano. The left hand is given 21 time brackets, the right hand is given 24; and each time bracket contains either a single note or chord. So we have just over two sound events per minute.
The instrumentation is stripped down to its basics: a completely standard piano, with no preparations or alterations, played in a completely standard way (i.e. pressing the keys). Cage specified that the notes are to be sustained for as long as possible, but since it's a piano, and since all the notes are played softly and quietly, they peter out pretty quickly regardless. Unsurprisingly, then, the most conspicuous element of this piece is the silence. Indeed I confess that when I listened to the whole thing earlier, it took me a little while to realize when it had finished! I guess that with a piece like this, it's pretty much impossible not to listen to the ambient sound (which for me, listening at 1a.m., was just the quiet drone of my laptop) as much as the music, and you don't immediately miss the music when it ends.
It's interesting that Cage chose to give each hand separate time brackets. I don't know what the reason for this was, but it calls to mind the Etudes Australes, which was conceived as a "duet for two hands". Now in fact, the Etudes did not seem much like a duet to me... similarly, in One5, I'm not sure what difference splitting the hands makes. It's just a load of notes scattered very sparsely on a canvas of silence. Perhaps somebody who actually plays the piano would be able to pick up more here.
In any case, I love One5. Its consistently soft dynamics, its slow pace, and its simple instrumentation with plenty of silence, make for a degree of tranquility and stillness that is extreme even by Cage's standards. It doesn't seem to matter whether it goes on for five minutes or five hours (yes, I could easily listen to five hours of this, at least as background music and with a few breaks).
The instrumentation is stripped down to its basics: a completely standard piano, with no preparations or alterations, played in a completely standard way (i.e. pressing the keys). Cage specified that the notes are to be sustained for as long as possible, but since it's a piano, and since all the notes are played softly and quietly, they peter out pretty quickly regardless. Unsurprisingly, then, the most conspicuous element of this piece is the silence. Indeed I confess that when I listened to the whole thing earlier, it took me a little while to realize when it had finished! I guess that with a piece like this, it's pretty much impossible not to listen to the ambient sound (which for me, listening at 1a.m., was just the quiet drone of my laptop) as much as the music, and you don't immediately miss the music when it ends.
It's interesting that Cage chose to give each hand separate time brackets. I don't know what the reason for this was, but it calls to mind the Etudes Australes, which was conceived as a "duet for two hands". Now in fact, the Etudes did not seem much like a duet to me... similarly, in One5, I'm not sure what difference splitting the hands makes. It's just a load of notes scattered very sparsely on a canvas of silence. Perhaps somebody who actually plays the piano would be able to pick up more here.
In any case, I love One5. Its consistently soft dynamics, its slow pace, and its simple instrumentation with plenty of silence, make for a degree of tranquility and stillness that is extreme even by Cage's standards. It doesn't seem to matter whether it goes on for five minutes or five hours (yes, I could easily listen to five hours of this, at least as background music and with a few breaks).
Thursday 4 September 2014
Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1951)
With this, we go right back to the beginning, at least as far as this blog is concerned, because this was the first composition by Cage in which chance operations played an important role. Well, in fact, they're not nearly as important here as they would become later. I was actually a bit unsure about whether to include this in this blog, as Cage was really only dipping his toes in the water of chance operations. It was not at this point the central element of his compositional methods. Still, this is undoubtedly an extremely important composition and a pivotal moment (the pivotal moment) in his career.
For writing the Concerto, he used a technique where he'd get charts of sounds, then he'd compose by moving through these charts. But he soon hit upon the novel idea that instead of choosing how to move through these charts, he could apply chance operations. The piece is split into three movements. In the first movement, the piano is entirely freely composed while the orchestra follows a chart, without chance. In the second, the piano and orchestra each follow different charts, again without chance. In the third, the piano and orchestra follow the same chart, and here Cage uses chance operations to determine how to move through it. So chance only appears in the third movement. It's also notable that the charts are only of the types of sound; the rhythms/durations are left to Cage's discretion. As you can see, then, chance does not play such a significant role.
The structure of the piece was intended to show a conflict and then reconciliation between the piano and the orchestra. Throughout, the orchestra embodies the ideas of non-expression, of Zen, of "letting sounds be sounds" and of removing the emotions of the artist, etc, that had taken centre stage in Cage's aesthetic by this time. On the other hand, the piano in the first movement is expressive and relatively (relative, that is, to the orchestra) conventional. It's much along the lines of Cage's earlier prepared piano work, particularly the Sonatas and Interludes. The second movement brings it somewhat closer to the orchestra, and diminishes its voice, by using the chart technique for it; then in the third, both the piano and orchestra are unified under the same chart, and the use of chance operations underscores the surrender of self-expression.
In fact, this narrative isn't particularly obvious to me. The opposition between the piano and orchestra in the first movement is clear enough, but the second and third movement don't seem notably different. The main difference is that the third movement is somewhat sparser, with sections of silence, though these only last a few seconds each so are not nearly as pronounced the silences in much of his later work. Beyond this there isn't much to tell them apart (which is perhaps a good indicator of how tentative Cage's use of chance in the third movement was). Perhaps those with more musical training would get more out of this than me.
The piano has extensive preparations, so of course it sounds utterly gorgeous, with some notes sounding more like percussion than piano. Apparently, some rather unusual instruments were used in the orchestra, including an amplified slinky and a radio - but unfortunately I couldn't hear either of these, except possibly a little radio static in the third movement. It seemed pretty much like a standard orchestra to my ears (this is not a criticism, just a comment; standard orchestras are fine too... it sure would be interesting to hear an amplified slinky, though).
The Concerto is not among my favourites of Cage - I prefer his full-blooded chance music - and maybe some of the ideas behind it don't quite work out, but it is in any case a beautiful piece, and an important part of his artistic development. Definitely one that anybody with the slightest interest in Cage should check out.
For writing the Concerto, he used a technique where he'd get charts of sounds, then he'd compose by moving through these charts. But he soon hit upon the novel idea that instead of choosing how to move through these charts, he could apply chance operations. The piece is split into three movements. In the first movement, the piano is entirely freely composed while the orchestra follows a chart, without chance. In the second, the piano and orchestra each follow different charts, again without chance. In the third, the piano and orchestra follow the same chart, and here Cage uses chance operations to determine how to move through it. So chance only appears in the third movement. It's also notable that the charts are only of the types of sound; the rhythms/durations are left to Cage's discretion. As you can see, then, chance does not play such a significant role.
The structure of the piece was intended to show a conflict and then reconciliation between the piano and the orchestra. Throughout, the orchestra embodies the ideas of non-expression, of Zen, of "letting sounds be sounds" and of removing the emotions of the artist, etc, that had taken centre stage in Cage's aesthetic by this time. On the other hand, the piano in the first movement is expressive and relatively (relative, that is, to the orchestra) conventional. It's much along the lines of Cage's earlier prepared piano work, particularly the Sonatas and Interludes. The second movement brings it somewhat closer to the orchestra, and diminishes its voice, by using the chart technique for it; then in the third, both the piano and orchestra are unified under the same chart, and the use of chance operations underscores the surrender of self-expression.
In fact, this narrative isn't particularly obvious to me. The opposition between the piano and orchestra in the first movement is clear enough, but the second and third movement don't seem notably different. The main difference is that the third movement is somewhat sparser, with sections of silence, though these only last a few seconds each so are not nearly as pronounced the silences in much of his later work. Beyond this there isn't much to tell them apart (which is perhaps a good indicator of how tentative Cage's use of chance in the third movement was). Perhaps those with more musical training would get more out of this than me.
The piano has extensive preparations, so of course it sounds utterly gorgeous, with some notes sounding more like percussion than piano. Apparently, some rather unusual instruments were used in the orchestra, including an amplified slinky and a radio - but unfortunately I couldn't hear either of these, except possibly a little radio static in the third movement. It seemed pretty much like a standard orchestra to my ears (this is not a criticism, just a comment; standard orchestras are fine too... it sure would be interesting to hear an amplified slinky, though).
The Concerto is not among my favourites of Cage - I prefer his full-blooded chance music - and maybe some of the ideas behind it don't quite work out, but it is in any case a beautiful piece, and an important part of his artistic development. Definitely one that anybody with the slightest interest in Cage should check out.
Wednesday 3 September 2014
Nowth Upon Nacht (1984)
This one is bizarre. In fact, it's frankly hilarious. It's a very short (just over a minute) composition for voice and piano, though the piano is more of a percussion instrument here since it's played by simply slamming down the piano lid a few times. The lyrics consist of text from Joyce's Finnegans Wake and are half-sung half-screamed using high-pitched notes in an extremely dramatic, operatic manner. The oddness and the unrelenting shrillness of the piece are really quite comical.
It's difficult to know how to make sense of it, but it helps to note that it was written to be performed right after Cage's 1942 The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, another composition for voice and piano based on Finnegans Wake. I suppose it doesn't help that much, though. Besides the instrumentation and the lyrics the songs aren't much alike - Wonderful Widow is far calmer, with a fairly straight vocal performance and some light tapping on the piano. I imagine that Nowth Upon Nacht would be something of a shock coming right after it.
One minute of shrill vocals with a few loud bangs. Hardly one of Cage's best compositions, but I think it might take the title of the most incongruous composition of the latter half of his career (and probably all his career). I can't really place it with anything else he was doing during this time. It almost seems like it might have been something of a joke. It's definitely amusing.
It's difficult to know how to make sense of it, but it helps to note that it was written to be performed right after Cage's 1942 The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, another composition for voice and piano based on Finnegans Wake. I suppose it doesn't help that much, though. Besides the instrumentation and the lyrics the songs aren't much alike - Wonderful Widow is far calmer, with a fairly straight vocal performance and some light tapping on the piano. I imagine that Nowth Upon Nacht would be something of a shock coming right after it.
One minute of shrill vocals with a few loud bangs. Hardly one of Cage's best compositions, but I think it might take the title of the most incongruous composition of the latter half of his career (and probably all his career). I can't really place it with anything else he was doing during this time. It almost seems like it might have been something of a joke. It's definitely amusing.
Monday 1 September 2014
Child of Tree (1975)
A solo piece for amplified plant materials, this is an extremely interesting and important composition, a pivotal moment in Cage's later artistic development. What's notable about it is that it allows the performer a massive degree of improvisation. As far as I know, all that's specified in the score are the instruments and time-lengths; within the time-lengths, the performer's job is simply to "clarify the time structure by means of the instruments" (johncage.org). How exactly the performer does this, the sounds and rhythms and so on that are used, is left entirely open.
The significance of this is that up until this point, Cage had been deeply averse to improvisation. It's easy to lump Cage in with improvisers; especially with regard to stuff like free jazz/free improvisation, it's easy to see it all as merely various kinds of chaotic noise. But in fact, Cage was worlds away from this genre. His resistance to improvisation had two sources. First, there was a purely practical worry: if you allow improvisation, people might just take that as a green light to mess around and do whatever they want in a totally undisclipined way. This is exactly what happened in an infamous 1964 performance of Atlas Eclipticalis, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, who allowed the orchestra to improvise (against Cage's wishes; there should be no improvisation in Atlas Eclipticalis). However, by the mid-70s, Cage was much more respected as a composer, so getting performers to take his music seriously was not such an issue.
The second source was a fundamental element of his aesthetic: his belief, inspired partially by the Zen idea of overcoming one's ego, that art should not be a form of communication or expression. For Cage, the artist should not try to express himself; art should not contain the voice or emotions of the artist, but should instead simply "imitate the operation of nature". But it's difficult to see how to make improvisation compatible with this. How could a person improvise without drawing on their personal tastes, memories, skills, and emotions? Improvisation always involves some sort of self-expression.
... or does it? Child of Tree was written for various amplified plant materials. Consider a plant. All plants, even plants of the same species, are different, and you can't become familiar with one - you can't learn how to play one - because if you practice on it too much, it will disintegrate. Hence, an improvisation on a plant simply can't be based on taste and memory, because you'll have little knowledge of how it sounds and you won't be able to develop a memory for it. Instead, the improvisation will involve discovery, exploration, and problem-solving. This is good. This is improvisation without ego. Some instruments are such that the problem of expression simply cannot arise, even during an improvisation.
In fact, I think that Cage was simply wrong about this. Listening to this recording of the piece by Simone Mancuso, it doesn't sound to me like there is no room for expression. Mancuso appears to know her way around these instruments perfectly well. In general, a skilled percussionist who has practised a little with various plants would probably have little difficulty expressing herself here. Still, whether or not we take Cage's expectations for the piece to be misguided, this marks the start of an increasing acceptance of improvisation, something that would become an important part of his work later work. He later developed the "time-bracket" technique to extend improvisation to all instruments; almost all of his Number Pieces use this to a significant degree. So Child of Tree is a real turning-point in his work.
What's more, it's a fascinating and beautiful composition simply on its own terms. What's immediately notable on actually listening to it is the instrumentation: amplified plant materials. This was in fact the first appearance of the famous amplified cactus. (What - amplified cacti aren't famous? well, they should be.) I love cacti in general; I have a lot of them and I've tried playing all of them (without amplification). The best species from what I've tried is echinocactus grusonii: they're big and round, which makes them fairly resonant; and since many of the spines do not touch each other, they can vibrate freely and hence produce clear notes that have a sort of watery "plop" sound. Where the spines do touch, the note is muted and becomes a percussive rattle or thud. It's actually kinda reminiscent of the prepared piano.
Cage doesn't specify a particular cactus, so you might not get those exact sounds. The performer does however use up to ten different kinds of plant materials, producing scrapes, shakes, rattles, thuds, notes, all sure to sound fairly unlike the instruments that are standardly used in Western music. The noises tend to have a watery, organic timbre to them. Being a solo performance, the arrangement is fairly sparse, but the wide variety of organic sounds calls to mind forests and nature. Particularly forests at night - whereas in the day, one might be surrounded by all sorts of noises, the sparseness and calmness of this piece gives it a nocturnal mood. Anyway, it's certainly one of the clearest examples of Cage drawing on the natural environment as a source of music. This wasn't the first time - Atlas Eclipticalis and the Etudes Australes, for example, were both composed using star charts. But nature became increasingly prominent in his later work, probably due to his readings of Henry David Thoreau, the 19th-century writer who lived alone in the woods for two years.
Child of Tree is absolutely essential for any fan of Cage's work. It heralds an acceptance of improvisation and a greater focus on ecology and natural phenomena. It also makes for a intriguing and beautiful listening experience, full of surprises and interesting sounds. Cage was wrong that the use of amplified plants would prevent expression. But he was right that they would lend a sense of discovery and exploration to the music. I'm not sure there was anything else quite like this at the time he wrote it. It's certainly a little bit silly (he's playing a cactus, for goodness' sake!), and it's fairly simple in its structure and execution - but it's also so much fun. I love this one.
The significance of this is that up until this point, Cage had been deeply averse to improvisation. It's easy to lump Cage in with improvisers; especially with regard to stuff like free jazz/free improvisation, it's easy to see it all as merely various kinds of chaotic noise. But in fact, Cage was worlds away from this genre. His resistance to improvisation had two sources. First, there was a purely practical worry: if you allow improvisation, people might just take that as a green light to mess around and do whatever they want in a totally undisclipined way. This is exactly what happened in an infamous 1964 performance of Atlas Eclipticalis, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, who allowed the orchestra to improvise (against Cage's wishes; there should be no improvisation in Atlas Eclipticalis). However, by the mid-70s, Cage was much more respected as a composer, so getting performers to take his music seriously was not such an issue.
The second source was a fundamental element of his aesthetic: his belief, inspired partially by the Zen idea of overcoming one's ego, that art should not be a form of communication or expression. For Cage, the artist should not try to express himself; art should not contain the voice or emotions of the artist, but should instead simply "imitate the operation of nature". But it's difficult to see how to make improvisation compatible with this. How could a person improvise without drawing on their personal tastes, memories, skills, and emotions? Improvisation always involves some sort of self-expression.
... or does it? Child of Tree was written for various amplified plant materials. Consider a plant. All plants, even plants of the same species, are different, and you can't become familiar with one - you can't learn how to play one - because if you practice on it too much, it will disintegrate. Hence, an improvisation on a plant simply can't be based on taste and memory, because you'll have little knowledge of how it sounds and you won't be able to develop a memory for it. Instead, the improvisation will involve discovery, exploration, and problem-solving. This is good. This is improvisation without ego. Some instruments are such that the problem of expression simply cannot arise, even during an improvisation.
In fact, I think that Cage was simply wrong about this. Listening to this recording of the piece by Simone Mancuso, it doesn't sound to me like there is no room for expression. Mancuso appears to know her way around these instruments perfectly well. In general, a skilled percussionist who has practised a little with various plants would probably have little difficulty expressing herself here. Still, whether or not we take Cage's expectations for the piece to be misguided, this marks the start of an increasing acceptance of improvisation, something that would become an important part of his work later work. He later developed the "time-bracket" technique to extend improvisation to all instruments; almost all of his Number Pieces use this to a significant degree. So Child of Tree is a real turning-point in his work.
What's more, it's a fascinating and beautiful composition simply on its own terms. What's immediately notable on actually listening to it is the instrumentation: amplified plant materials. This was in fact the first appearance of the famous amplified cactus. (What - amplified cacti aren't famous? well, they should be.) I love cacti in general; I have a lot of them and I've tried playing all of them (without amplification). The best species from what I've tried is echinocactus grusonii: they're big and round, which makes them fairly resonant; and since many of the spines do not touch each other, they can vibrate freely and hence produce clear notes that have a sort of watery "plop" sound. Where the spines do touch, the note is muted and becomes a percussive rattle or thud. It's actually kinda reminiscent of the prepared piano.
Cage doesn't specify a particular cactus, so you might not get those exact sounds. The performer does however use up to ten different kinds of plant materials, producing scrapes, shakes, rattles, thuds, notes, all sure to sound fairly unlike the instruments that are standardly used in Western music. The noises tend to have a watery, organic timbre to them. Being a solo performance, the arrangement is fairly sparse, but the wide variety of organic sounds calls to mind forests and nature. Particularly forests at night - whereas in the day, one might be surrounded by all sorts of noises, the sparseness and calmness of this piece gives it a nocturnal mood. Anyway, it's certainly one of the clearest examples of Cage drawing on the natural environment as a source of music. This wasn't the first time - Atlas Eclipticalis and the Etudes Australes, for example, were both composed using star charts. But nature became increasingly prominent in his later work, probably due to his readings of Henry David Thoreau, the 19th-century writer who lived alone in the woods for two years.
Child of Tree is absolutely essential for any fan of Cage's work. It heralds an acceptance of improvisation and a greater focus on ecology and natural phenomena. It also makes for a intriguing and beautiful listening experience, full of surprises and interesting sounds. Cage was wrong that the use of amplified plants would prevent expression. But he was right that they would lend a sense of discovery and exploration to the music. I'm not sure there was anything else quite like this at the time he wrote it. It's certainly a little bit silly (he's playing a cactus, for goodness' sake!), and it's fairly simple in its structure and execution - but it's also so much fun. I love this one.
Sunday 31 August 2014
Eight Whiskus (1984)
Eight Whiskus was originally written for solo voice, its lyrics comprising eight mesostics ("whiskus" is a lovely portmanteau of "whistling" and "haikus", and I think it captures the mood of the music quite well). In 1985, Cage wrote a version for solo violin, reworked, according to johncage.org, "such that the vowel and consonant qualities of the poem are transformed into various bowing positions, gradations of bowing pressure, and forms of articulation".
The most notable aspect of the piece is just how musically traditional it is; this is particularly clear to me with the violin version, though that's perhaps just because I'm more accustomed to solo violin than solo voice. Both versions however consist entirely of traditional, monophonic melodies, bringing to mind pieces like Cheap Imitation and Litany for the Whale. But whereas those were long pieces that didn't seem to go anywhere, this is short enough - only four to six minutes overall, and containing eight movements - that the impression of meandering aimlessness doesn't really arise, at least not with such force. I'm guessing that for most people, this would be a much easier listen.
Nevertheless, like those pieces, this certainly has a mood of stillness and tranquility. It is quiet - lonely, even - and the melody is reserved and cerebral, though perhaps with a tinge of sadness. Simple and low-key but beautiful in my opinion.
I don't know what the method was of converting vowels and consonants into violin sounds, but the result is that the violin version has plenty of subtle but interesting variations in timbre: some notes are scratchy, some smooth, some airy, some short and muted, there's a little vibrato here and there, etc. Occasionally, a high-pitched scraping sound, presumably the sound of the bow against the strings, occurs along with the note. All of this adds a lot of character to the music and makes it an intriguing listen despite its more traditional approach. The vocal version is of course rather more straightforward, though still lovely and it complements the violin version very well. Eight Whiskus is not a particularly important composition, but I find it quite impressive.
The most notable aspect of the piece is just how musically traditional it is; this is particularly clear to me with the violin version, though that's perhaps just because I'm more accustomed to solo violin than solo voice. Both versions however consist entirely of traditional, monophonic melodies, bringing to mind pieces like Cheap Imitation and Litany for the Whale. But whereas those were long pieces that didn't seem to go anywhere, this is short enough - only four to six minutes overall, and containing eight movements - that the impression of meandering aimlessness doesn't really arise, at least not with such force. I'm guessing that for most people, this would be a much easier listen.
Nevertheless, like those pieces, this certainly has a mood of stillness and tranquility. It is quiet - lonely, even - and the melody is reserved and cerebral, though perhaps with a tinge of sadness. Simple and low-key but beautiful in my opinion.
I don't know what the method was of converting vowels and consonants into violin sounds, but the result is that the violin version has plenty of subtle but interesting variations in timbre: some notes are scratchy, some smooth, some airy, some short and muted, there's a little vibrato here and there, etc. Occasionally, a high-pitched scraping sound, presumably the sound of the bow against the strings, occurs along with the note. All of this adds a lot of character to the music and makes it an intriguing listen despite its more traditional approach. The vocal version is of course rather more straightforward, though still lovely and it complements the violin version very well. Eight Whiskus is not a particularly important composition, but I find it quite impressive.
Saturday 30 August 2014
Four5 (1991)
A Number Piece for saxophone quartet. Here we have Cage at his most serene, as this one is particularly slow and quiet. Indeed, although this is overall fairly standard as far as the Number Pieces go, one of the things that stands out about it is that it doesn't appear to use any short sounds - the general format for a Number Piece is lots of long, quiet notes with a few short, loud ones; but here, all the notes are long, quiet, peaceful. The softness is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the notes are, as usual, fairly dissonant (although in fact, even the dissonance seems to be toned down here... maybe I'm just getting used to it because I've been listening to so many of these recently, though), but undoubtedly, Cage rarely came closer to ambient/drone music.
In this piece, Cage employs mostly higher-pitched notes - some of them would probably be quite shrill if they weren't played so slowly and quietly - and often the timbre is very smooth, more like strings than saxophones. So the music overall has a bright and warm texture. Because of this, and because it develops gradually without going anywhere - just getting louder and quieter and then louder and quieter - to me it calls to mind undulating desert sand dunes, or maybe idle clouds on a hot day.
In this piece, Cage employs mostly higher-pitched notes - some of them would probably be quite shrill if they weren't played so slowly and quietly - and often the timbre is very smooth, more like strings than saxophones. So the music overall has a bright and warm texture. Because of this, and because it develops gradually without going anywhere - just getting louder and quieter and then louder and quieter - to me it calls to mind undulating desert sand dunes, or maybe idle clouds on a hot day.
Friday 29 August 2014
Conventional Cage
Cheap Imitation is a rather notorious entry in Cage's later work because it's so traditional. However, in this project of methodically listening through Cage's indeterminate compositions, it's become clear that he wrote quite a few conventional pieces in his later years. Obviously, I'm using "conventional" fairly loosely - I'm not saying that you're likely to hear any of these on mainstream radio, or whatever. But you wouldn't hear Cheap Imitation there either. My point is simply that Cheap Imitation, rather than being a one-off, is perhaps better seen as the beginning of a trend of very occasional concessions to traditional melodic and harmonic content.
Here is the rest of that trend, in chronological order (possibly there are some omissions - I might be forgetting something, and in any case I haven't heard all of Cage's later works - but I think this is sufficient to establish that Cheap Imitation is not quite as incongruous as is sometimes supposed):
Cheap Imitation (1969) - transformation of Socrate by Satie
44 Harmonies from Apartment House 1776 (1976) - transformation of various musics from the time of the American revolution
Quartets I-VIII (1976) - transformation of various musics from the time of the American revolution
Some of the Harmony of Maine (1978) - transformation of The Harmony of Maine by Supply Belcher
Hymns and Variations (1979) - transformation of hymns by William Billings
Litany for the Whale (1980)
ear for EAR (Antiphonies) (1983)
Souvenir (1983) - composed on request for a work similar to Cage's Dream (1948)
Eight Whiskus (1984)
Perpetual Tango (1984) - transformation of a Satie piece
Sonnekus2 (1985) - transformation of a Satie piece
Swinging (1989) - transformation of a Satie piece
Four2 (1990)
Extended Lullaby (1991) - I assume that this is fairly conventional, as it's another transformation of Satie, but I haven't actually heard it, so perhaps it shouldn't be on this list
As you can see, most of the pieces are transformations of other works. I think Four2 was written for a high school choir, which perhaps explains why Cage used rather more traditional material. The one that stands out for me is Litany for the Whale, which is reminiscent of Gregorian chant and consists of very straightforward, traditional melodies. This piece really seemed to come out of nowhere (see my review of it for a bit more detail on it). ear for EAR obviously was inspired by Litany.
Here is the rest of that trend, in chronological order (possibly there are some omissions - I might be forgetting something, and in any case I haven't heard all of Cage's later works - but I think this is sufficient to establish that Cheap Imitation is not quite as incongruous as is sometimes supposed):
Cheap Imitation (1969) - transformation of Socrate by Satie
44 Harmonies from Apartment House 1776 (1976) - transformation of various musics from the time of the American revolution
Quartets I-VIII (1976) - transformation of various musics from the time of the American revolution
Some of the Harmony of Maine (1978) - transformation of The Harmony of Maine by Supply Belcher
Hymns and Variations (1979) - transformation of hymns by William Billings
Litany for the Whale (1980)
ear for EAR (Antiphonies) (1983)
Souvenir (1983) - composed on request for a work similar to Cage's Dream (1948)
Eight Whiskus (1984)
Perpetual Tango (1984) - transformation of a Satie piece
Sonnekus2 (1985) - transformation of a Satie piece
Swinging (1989) - transformation of a Satie piece
Four2 (1990)
Extended Lullaby (1991) - I assume that this is fairly conventional, as it's another transformation of Satie, but I haven't actually heard it, so perhaps it shouldn't be on this list
As you can see, most of the pieces are transformations of other works. I think Four2 was written for a high school choir, which perhaps explains why Cage used rather more traditional material. The one that stands out for me is Litany for the Whale, which is reminiscent of Gregorian chant and consists of very straightforward, traditional melodies. This piece really seemed to come out of nowhere (see my review of it for a bit more detail on it). ear for EAR obviously was inspired by Litany.
Thursday 28 August 2014
Water Music (1952)
It's worth noting that although this composition is called "Water Music", performances of it follow a rather frustrating naming convention, as they are titled after the place and time of the performance. Thus, the recording I'm listening to, from Schleiermacher's Complete Piano Music vol. 4, is called Arolsen, February 8, 1998. It took me a little while to figure out that I did actually have a recording of this piece.
This is a "performance piece", involving a lot of visual/theatrical elements. Simply to listen to it, then, is to experience only part of the piece. However, the theatrical elements are really just the visual counterpart to what we're hearing - it's things like seeing the pianist deal a deck of cards, seeing him tip water from one jug into another, etc - and frankly, none of that stuff is remotely interesting to me. I guess my ears are rather more experimental than my eyes. I don't much care about seeing a guy mess around with a radio, though I'll probably be fascinated by the sounds that result.
Anyway, the sounds we have here are: a piano, obviously; a radio; sounds of water; various whistles; a few percussive thuds; and one sound that is difficult to identify, a sort of quiet scraping during the first couple of minutes (possibly static from the radio?). As noted above, the performer also shuffles and deals a deck of cards, although I didn't catch that (unsurprisingly, as that's going to be very quiet). Despite the variety of different sounds, this piece is actually fairly sparse. There's a lot of silence, and a lot of times where we hear just the quiet noise of the radio. Everything is used sparingly: the water pouring, for example, occurs just a couple of times towards the end; the whistles are heard only four or five times.
Since it's a solo piece, and since there was probably more going on that what I could hear, the performer is presumably quite active. The music in itself, however, is soft and calm. To me it has a sort of night-time mood. I like that the radio produces either static or distorted voices, many of which seem to be in a foreign language (it might be English that sounds foreign due to the distortion), rather than music; it reminds me of shortwave radio. I've always felt that there is something a little eerie about shortwave radio, so that really adds to the mood. A fun listen.
This is a "performance piece", involving a lot of visual/theatrical elements. Simply to listen to it, then, is to experience only part of the piece. However, the theatrical elements are really just the visual counterpart to what we're hearing - it's things like seeing the pianist deal a deck of cards, seeing him tip water from one jug into another, etc - and frankly, none of that stuff is remotely interesting to me. I guess my ears are rather more experimental than my eyes. I don't much care about seeing a guy mess around with a radio, though I'll probably be fascinated by the sounds that result.
Anyway, the sounds we have here are: a piano, obviously; a radio; sounds of water; various whistles; a few percussive thuds; and one sound that is difficult to identify, a sort of quiet scraping during the first couple of minutes (possibly static from the radio?). As noted above, the performer also shuffles and deals a deck of cards, although I didn't catch that (unsurprisingly, as that's going to be very quiet). Despite the variety of different sounds, this piece is actually fairly sparse. There's a lot of silence, and a lot of times where we hear just the quiet noise of the radio. Everything is used sparingly: the water pouring, for example, occurs just a couple of times towards the end; the whistles are heard only four or five times.
Since it's a solo piece, and since there was probably more going on that what I could hear, the performer is presumably quite active. The music in itself, however, is soft and calm. To me it has a sort of night-time mood. I like that the radio produces either static or distorted voices, many of which seem to be in a foreign language (it might be English that sounds foreign due to the distortion), rather than music; it reminds me of shortwave radio. I've always felt that there is something a little eerie about shortwave radio, so that really adds to the mood. A fun listen.
Wednesday 27 August 2014
One7 (1990) and One13 (1992)
A number of Cage's compositions are "indeterminate of performance" - basically, this means that important aspects of the composition are left vague so that different performances might produce radically different sounds. One7 is an extremely minimal composition, being for a solo performer using only twelve different sounds; but since those can be any twelve sounds of the performer's choice, the different recordings of it are a fine example of indeterminacy of performance.
One version of it can be heard on the Mode release Cage Performs Cage. As the title suggests, this was performed by Cage himself, so this is maybe something of a canonical performance of the piece. Unfortunately, it also kinda sucks. Let me describe what we hear on this track. First, for about a minute, comes long stretch of silence. Then Cage very quietly hums for a second. Another long stretch of silence. Another short, quiet hum. Another long stretch of silence. Cage makes a snoring noise, then he shouts "um!". Okay, we're now about 3'30" into One7. This same thing continues for half an hour: about a minute of silence, followed by a quiet hum or a loud shout, or maybe a snoring noise. Also, note that because the hums are mixed so quietly, you probably won't even notice many of them, unless you put the volume up loud enough for the shouts to break your ears. Let's not beat around the bush here: as much as I love Cage, even for me this is pretty rubbish music.
A more interesting version can be found on OgreOgress's release One7 (from One13); One8. The sounds used in this performance were derived from One13, a composition for cello with curved bow that was unfinished when Cage died. It's since been completed by Michael Bach, but I can't find a recording of that, so this take of One7 is, for now, as close as I'm going to get to hearing One13.
Although One7 uses twelve different sounds, all the sounds here are (as in One13) actually just variations on a single note, so the music is extremely uniform throughout. Each play of the note is without vibrato and is sustained for a long time, and then followed by a stretch of silence. The piece as a whole, then, is essentially a succession of very minimal, very similar drones strung on silence like beads on a necklace. It is one of the most sparse and simple pieces of music you are ever likely to hear.
It is also, to me at least, an incredibly beautiful and moving experience. Indeed, I would even say that there is something spiritual about this, like the experience of seeing grand, expansive but minimal natural landscapes, such as large salt flats, say. A part of the reason for this is that the drones have a fairly plaintive mood - it's perhaps surprising that they have any mood at all given that only a single note is used; but I think the plaintiveness arises from the particular timbre of the cello with curved bow. In any case, it gives the music right from the start an emotional weight. Further, thanks to the fantastic production, and perhaps the use of the curved bow, the cello has a deep, resonant sound that becomes almost overwhelming when sustained for such long times.
But more significantly, there is so much more going on here than merely "one droning pitch". Like many of Cage's later compositions, this rewards - indeed, it forces - focused, attentive listening; and once we listen closely, a great deal of activity becomes clear. Most obvious are the variations in dynamics, as the drones gradually get louder or quieter. As the piece goes on and one's attention sharpens further, slight variations in timbre are heard. One then hears that the pitch does occasionally change subtly - ever so slightly higher or lower - and that it's sometimes accompanied by a quiet, airy scraping sound, produced by the bow against the strings. Throughout, the sound wobbles occasionally as a result of the imperfections of human playing. This music positively buzzes with life and feeling.
An analogue to this in the visual arts would be Yves Klein's monochromes, or Mark Rothko's more minimal "multiforms", especially the paintings of the Rothko Chapel. The Rothko comparison seems particularly apt here. Rothko rejected the idea that his paintings were abstract, and instead saw them as expressions of basic human emotions. Many of them, notably the Chapel paintings, also had an important spiritual element. Now for Cage, as you probably know, sound is just sound, and he certainly wasn't interested in expressing any emotions or spirituality - rather in merely "imitating the operation of nature". But, of course, many natural objects can provoke powerful emotional and spiritual responses. So it is with this version of One7. As mere music it is superb, drawing the listener's attention to the fascinating depth and textures of a single note. But it goes beyond mere music into the spiritually transcendent, and seems like an expression of pure, intense emotion: fear, wonder, ecstasy, anguish, awe. Perhaps these comments don't really make sense. It's difficult to put into words. In any case, there is very little art quite like it.
No doubt it's an acquired taste, not something I could recommend to many people. For me, however, there are few things in the world as beautiful as this piece of music. Obviously, then, it contrasts rather sharply with Cage's performance of One7. In two performances of one composition, we have one of Cage's worst, and one of his best. (Exactly how much the OgreOgress One7 owes to One13 is unclear, but given how fantastic their One7 is, I would love to hear Michael Bach's completed One13.)
One version of it can be heard on the Mode release Cage Performs Cage. As the title suggests, this was performed by Cage himself, so this is maybe something of a canonical performance of the piece. Unfortunately, it also kinda sucks. Let me describe what we hear on this track. First, for about a minute, comes long stretch of silence. Then Cage very quietly hums for a second. Another long stretch of silence. Another short, quiet hum. Another long stretch of silence. Cage makes a snoring noise, then he shouts "um!". Okay, we're now about 3'30" into One7. This same thing continues for half an hour: about a minute of silence, followed by a quiet hum or a loud shout, or maybe a snoring noise. Also, note that because the hums are mixed so quietly, you probably won't even notice many of them, unless you put the volume up loud enough for the shouts to break your ears. Let's not beat around the bush here: as much as I love Cage, even for me this is pretty rubbish music.
A more interesting version can be found on OgreOgress's release One7 (from One13); One8. The sounds used in this performance were derived from One13, a composition for cello with curved bow that was unfinished when Cage died. It's since been completed by Michael Bach, but I can't find a recording of that, so this take of One7 is, for now, as close as I'm going to get to hearing One13.
Although One7 uses twelve different sounds, all the sounds here are (as in One13) actually just variations on a single note, so the music is extremely uniform throughout. Each play of the note is without vibrato and is sustained for a long time, and then followed by a stretch of silence. The piece as a whole, then, is essentially a succession of very minimal, very similar drones strung on silence like beads on a necklace. It is one of the most sparse and simple pieces of music you are ever likely to hear.
It is also, to me at least, an incredibly beautiful and moving experience. Indeed, I would even say that there is something spiritual about this, like the experience of seeing grand, expansive but minimal natural landscapes, such as large salt flats, say. A part of the reason for this is that the drones have a fairly plaintive mood - it's perhaps surprising that they have any mood at all given that only a single note is used; but I think the plaintiveness arises from the particular timbre of the cello with curved bow. In any case, it gives the music right from the start an emotional weight. Further, thanks to the fantastic production, and perhaps the use of the curved bow, the cello has a deep, resonant sound that becomes almost overwhelming when sustained for such long times.
But more significantly, there is so much more going on here than merely "one droning pitch". Like many of Cage's later compositions, this rewards - indeed, it forces - focused, attentive listening; and once we listen closely, a great deal of activity becomes clear. Most obvious are the variations in dynamics, as the drones gradually get louder or quieter. As the piece goes on and one's attention sharpens further, slight variations in timbre are heard. One then hears that the pitch does occasionally change subtly - ever so slightly higher or lower - and that it's sometimes accompanied by a quiet, airy scraping sound, produced by the bow against the strings. Throughout, the sound wobbles occasionally as a result of the imperfections of human playing. This music positively buzzes with life and feeling.
An analogue to this in the visual arts would be Yves Klein's monochromes, or Mark Rothko's more minimal "multiforms", especially the paintings of the Rothko Chapel. The Rothko comparison seems particularly apt here. Rothko rejected the idea that his paintings were abstract, and instead saw them as expressions of basic human emotions. Many of them, notably the Chapel paintings, also had an important spiritual element. Now for Cage, as you probably know, sound is just sound, and he certainly wasn't interested in expressing any emotions or spirituality - rather in merely "imitating the operation of nature". But, of course, many natural objects can provoke powerful emotional and spiritual responses. So it is with this version of One7. As mere music it is superb, drawing the listener's attention to the fascinating depth and textures of a single note. But it goes beyond mere music into the spiritually transcendent, and seems like an expression of pure, intense emotion: fear, wonder, ecstasy, anguish, awe. Perhaps these comments don't really make sense. It's difficult to put into words. In any case, there is very little art quite like it.
No doubt it's an acquired taste, not something I could recommend to many people. For me, however, there are few things in the world as beautiful as this piece of music. Obviously, then, it contrasts rather sharply with Cage's performance of One7. In two performances of one composition, we have one of Cage's worst, and one of his best. (Exactly how much the OgreOgress One7 owes to One13 is unclear, but given how fantastic their One7 is, I would love to hear Michael Bach's completed One13.)
Tuesday 26 August 2014
Souvenir (1983)
This piece for solo organ was apparently composed to fulfil a request for a work similar to Dream, a tranquil and repetitive piano piece that Cage wrote in 1948. Unsurprisingly, then, this is one of the most traditional of Cage's indeterminate pieces, with probably the closest analogue to it being his Satie-based pieces. But this is more traditional even than those. Indeed, were indeterminate processes even used in the composition? It doesn't sound like it.
It consists of a number of different parts repeated a few times. As in Dream, most of these parts are fairly pretty, minimal melodies. However, I don't think that this has much of the tranquility of Dream: the large dynamic range, and the monastic sound of the organ, lend something more like an aura of majesty and drama to the music. It's also interesting for its greater variety of timbres: most of the notes on the organ are clean and ethereal, but the lower ones growl, and the higher ones have a scratchy, even quack-like sound. One of the parts draws attention to this by relatively rapidly (relative to the pace of the rest of it) switching between all three.
There is one rather odd, slightly more Cagean part, which consists solely of a deep, low, loud note booming out four times. It doesn't really seem to fit in with the rest of the music and as such is actually somewhat amusing.
Definitely not one of Cage's best, and utterly bizarre in the context of the rest of his work from this time, but it's nice enough I suppose. This would be one to check out if you're into Cage's earlier, pre-chance music (indeed, it's right at home on the fairly accessible collection of early Cage works, In a Landscape).
It consists of a number of different parts repeated a few times. As in Dream, most of these parts are fairly pretty, minimal melodies. However, I don't think that this has much of the tranquility of Dream: the large dynamic range, and the monastic sound of the organ, lend something more like an aura of majesty and drama to the music. It's also interesting for its greater variety of timbres: most of the notes on the organ are clean and ethereal, but the lower ones growl, and the higher ones have a scratchy, even quack-like sound. One of the parts draws attention to this by relatively rapidly (relative to the pace of the rest of it) switching between all three.
There is one rather odd, slightly more Cagean part, which consists solely of a deep, low, loud note booming out four times. It doesn't really seem to fit in with the rest of the music and as such is actually somewhat amusing.
Definitely not one of Cage's best, and utterly bizarre in the context of the rest of his work from this time, but it's nice enough I suppose. This would be one to check out if you're into Cage's earlier, pre-chance music (indeed, it's right at home on the fairly accessible collection of early Cage works, In a Landscape).
Monday 25 August 2014
Eight (1991)
For four woodwinds and four brass, and one of the longer Number Pieces at a few seconds short of an hour.
The standard form for a Number Piece like this is: lots of long, droney notes played very quietly, with a few short, loud bursts scattered among them. Here, the dynamics are far more varied, with a number of loud long notes and quiet short notes, and a number of notes that start quiet then grow very loud and vice versa. There are plenty of silences too - or at least there seem to be; since there are so many loud notes I had to listen to it at a low volume so may have missed some of the music. But certainly, in this more than perhaps any other Number Piece, the dynamics really come to the forefront. Hence, despite the long length and slow pace, there is nothing ambient about this; it absolutely demands attention.
Presumably, this was yet another Number Piece where Cage used exaggerated imperfections of tuning to create a microtonal feel. Indeed, there are even quite a few times when the music seemed to produce binaural beats - these are an illusion of rapid pulsing sounds created by playing two tones of slightly different frequencies in each ear. It would happen if two instruments play, say, an A, but they are tuned slightly differently. That the piece uses only winds with similar timbres probably makes the effect more noticeable.
I adore the longer Number Pieces because they really allow you to get lost in their gradually evolving landscapes. In this case, the variety of dynamics, the more equal use of both long and short notes, and the interesting note relationships make for a very diverse and intriguing vista (despite the more uniform timbres).
The standard form for a Number Piece like this is: lots of long, droney notes played very quietly, with a few short, loud bursts scattered among them. Here, the dynamics are far more varied, with a number of loud long notes and quiet short notes, and a number of notes that start quiet then grow very loud and vice versa. There are plenty of silences too - or at least there seem to be; since there are so many loud notes I had to listen to it at a low volume so may have missed some of the music. But certainly, in this more than perhaps any other Number Piece, the dynamics really come to the forefront. Hence, despite the long length and slow pace, there is nothing ambient about this; it absolutely demands attention.
Presumably, this was yet another Number Piece where Cage used exaggerated imperfections of tuning to create a microtonal feel. Indeed, there are even quite a few times when the music seemed to produce binaural beats - these are an illusion of rapid pulsing sounds created by playing two tones of slightly different frequencies in each ear. It would happen if two instruments play, say, an A, but they are tuned slightly differently. That the piece uses only winds with similar timbres probably makes the effect more noticeable.
I adore the longer Number Pieces because they really allow you to get lost in their gradually evolving landscapes. In this case, the variety of dynamics, the more equal use of both long and short notes, and the interesting note relationships make for a very diverse and intriguing vista (despite the more uniform timbres).
Sunday 24 August 2014
Seventy-Four (1992)
With seventy-four players, this is one of the largest Number Pieces, although this fact isn't really so obvious when listening to it. There are perhaps two reasons for this. First, possibly there were problems getting a good recording of it. One thing that leads me to suspect this is that the piece supposedly includes percussion and piano, neither of which I could hear on the recording I have; another is that, just speaking generally, it can't be easy to record seventy-four musicians, especially if they're playing fairly unconventional stuff like this (and especially since so much of Cage's later work focuses on tiny variations in sound). Second, more notably, the instruments here are played in unison. Cage splits the orchestra into two parts - high-pitch instruments and low-pitch instruments - and every instrument in each part plays in unison. Variation arises from the different timbres of the instruments, the use of flexible time-brackets allowing the performers some freedom of when to play the notes, and exaggerated imperfections of tuning that lend a microtonal sheen to the work.
Of all the Number Pieces, this is one of the closest to pure drone/ambient music. This is largely because unlike many Number Pieces, there are no short, sudden sounds, just the long-held notes; and though there are notable changes in the dynamics, these changes happen gradually (and at no point does it fade away completely to silence). The split between the two instruments creates two sets of drones; sometimes the split is obvious, sometimes they seem to merge together into one, interweaving and overlapping. At all times, the large number of instruments playing in unison gives a great deal of depth to the sound. Undoubtedly, a live performance would sound richer still, but many of the beautiful subtleties of the music are preserved here. For example, an interesting feature is the use of vibrato, something that Cage usually prohibited. It's never at the forefront, but occasionally it washes in very quietly in the background, giving the drones a sort of "shimmering" texture.
One thing that struck me as a little odd was this comment on the piece on johncage.org: "Orchestral parts without score to be played with video clock without conductor." I'm not sure what this means. There are parts without a score? If there's no score, what's the point of the clock? Surely Cage must have specified something about the music to be played.
The ECM release includes two performances of the piece. It's interesting to contrast them, but to be honest the difference between the two seemed quite minor to me. It's perhaps an odd choice for two versions (compared to something like, say, Four6, where the instrumentation is unspecified and thus may sound radically different each time it's played)?
Of all the Number Pieces, this is one of the closest to pure drone/ambient music. This is largely because unlike many Number Pieces, there are no short, sudden sounds, just the long-held notes; and though there are notable changes in the dynamics, these changes happen gradually (and at no point does it fade away completely to silence). The split between the two instruments creates two sets of drones; sometimes the split is obvious, sometimes they seem to merge together into one, interweaving and overlapping. At all times, the large number of instruments playing in unison gives a great deal of depth to the sound. Undoubtedly, a live performance would sound richer still, but many of the beautiful subtleties of the music are preserved here. For example, an interesting feature is the use of vibrato, something that Cage usually prohibited. It's never at the forefront, but occasionally it washes in very quietly in the background, giving the drones a sort of "shimmering" texture.
One thing that struck me as a little odd was this comment on the piece on johncage.org: "Orchestral parts without score to be played with video clock without conductor." I'm not sure what this means. There are parts without a score? If there's no score, what's the point of the clock? Surely Cage must have specified something about the music to be played.
The ECM release includes two performances of the piece. It's interesting to contrast them, but to be honest the difference between the two seemed quite minor to me. It's perhaps an odd choice for two versions (compared to something like, say, Four6, where the instrumentation is unspecified and thus may sound radically different each time it's played)?
Saturday 23 August 2014
My girlfriend listens to John Cage
I thought it might be interesting to hear a different perspective on this blog, so I subjected my girlfriend, who is not a fan of Cage's music and has had to endure my interest in it for several years, to five of his compositions (well, or two-minute excerpts from them), and noted her comments.
Rozart Mix (1965)
We jump in at the deep end with Rozart Mix, probably one of Cage's least accessible pieces. She says that "it's just not music"; listening to it is "like being drunk" and "like being ill", and it "will cause tinnitus". I asked her what she rated it out of 5 and she said 0. I pointed out that I was using a 1 to 5 scale, and she said: "I don't care. It is 0." 0/5
Raga 16 from Solo for Voice 58 (1970)
An improvement. "I can listen to it" - however, since this probably translates to "I can listen to it without wanting to throw the computer out the window", that's maybe not such a big compliment. Indeed, in the end she felt that it's the sort of thing you'd hear as "background music in a new age shop", and gave it: 2/5
Quartets I-VIII (1976)
I was expecting this to go down the easiest, as it's definitely the most musically conventional of the bunch. In fact, it was perhaps rather too conventional for her: better than most Cage stuff, she said, but boring and unmemorable. It had no interesting melody; no hook to grab you and that you could remember. She suggested that it would be best used as "advert music". 2/5
Freeman Etudes VIII (1980)
"It's just a lot of annoying squeaking." "I'd like to smash the violin over his head." "It's tuneless." When I pointed out that a tune is simply a succession of musical notes, and hence this is not tuneless, she sighed and said that it's not mellifluous. This one is another 0/5.
Fourteen (1990)
This was her favourite. She said that it reminded her of film music, especially for some sort of weird sci-fi. It brings to mind a different world. It would however "be better without the annoying squeaky sound at the end" (in fact, I faded it out after only two and a half minutes... I'm not sure she would have been so positive about it had she heard the enitre fifteen minute piece). 3/5
Update: she wanted to read this post, after which she text me: "I just relived the trauma of it again!" It looks like it might be a while before we do "my girlfriend listens to John Cage, part 2".
Rozart Mix (1965)
We jump in at the deep end with Rozart Mix, probably one of Cage's least accessible pieces. She says that "it's just not music"; listening to it is "like being drunk" and "like being ill", and it "will cause tinnitus". I asked her what she rated it out of 5 and she said 0. I pointed out that I was using a 1 to 5 scale, and she said: "I don't care. It is 0." 0/5
Raga 16 from Solo for Voice 58 (1970)
An improvement. "I can listen to it" - however, since this probably translates to "I can listen to it without wanting to throw the computer out the window", that's maybe not such a big compliment. Indeed, in the end she felt that it's the sort of thing you'd hear as "background music in a new age shop", and gave it: 2/5
Quartets I-VIII (1976)
I was expecting this to go down the easiest, as it's definitely the most musically conventional of the bunch. In fact, it was perhaps rather too conventional for her: better than most Cage stuff, she said, but boring and unmemorable. It had no interesting melody; no hook to grab you and that you could remember. She suggested that it would be best used as "advert music". 2/5
Freeman Etudes VIII (1980)
"It's just a lot of annoying squeaking." "I'd like to smash the violin over his head." "It's tuneless." When I pointed out that a tune is simply a succession of musical notes, and hence this is not tuneless, she sighed and said that it's not mellifluous. This one is another 0/5.
Fourteen (1990)
This was her favourite. She said that it reminded her of film music, especially for some sort of weird sci-fi. It brings to mind a different world. It would however "be better without the annoying squeaky sound at the end" (in fact, I faded it out after only two and a half minutes... I'm not sure she would have been so positive about it had she heard the enitre fifteen minute piece). 3/5
Update: she wanted to read this post, after which she text me: "I just relived the trauma of it again!" It looks like it might be a while before we do "my girlfriend listens to John Cage, part 2".
Friday 22 August 2014
Hymnkus (1986)
Although he created plenty of music that's minimal in the general sense (sparse, simple), Hymnkus is probably the closest Cage ever came to minimalism à la Reich, Glass, Riley, etc. Indeed, despite his influence on various minimalist composers, Cage himself was never much of a fan of minimalism. In his entry in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, Kyle Gann discusses how Cage always endeavoured to overcome his own dislikes and, if he didn't like something, to find a perspective on it that would make it more interesting. Gann suggests that Hymnkus was his attempt to overcome his aversion to minimalism.
Like most minimalist music, it's extremely repetitive - or at least it seems to be. It's difficult to say whether the piece as a whole ever actually repeats itself. Imagine a composition structured in the following way: you give one instrument a 20-second section to repeat, another instrument a 25-second section to repeat, another a 30-second section, etc etc. Then each instrument will repeat, but every part of the whole piece may be unique. Now suppose further that you slightly change each section each time it's played. Then strictly speaking there may not actually be any repetition at all, but it may still give a strong impression of repetition. I'm not saying that Hymnkus was composed in this way (it probably wasn't), only that it sounds like it could have been.
Part of the repetitiveness results from its long length (30 minutes) combined with its spare musical materials: it has an extremely restricted pitch range spanning only two octaves, and including only notes from the perfect fifths from G to C. On the other hand, one reason why the repetition seems elusive is because there are no melodic hooks whatsoever; instead, each instrument will play a few notes, or often just one note, then rest. Since there are so many instruments, there's always a lot going on, so it's difficult to focus on just one instrument and see how exactly it changes over time. Each note becomes lost in a mass of other notes. The mind has nothing to follow, nothing to grasp; hence although we hear repetition, any attempt to analyse the repetition will be scuppered. (The thwarting of our ability to place sounds in an immediate context is a feature of a few other Cage compositions from around this time, particularly But what about the noise.... Like that piece, Hymnkus also has a sort of "slippery" rhythm.)
Ultimately, it's most reminiscent to me of the "systems music" and music made by machine processes of John White, Christopher Hobbs, etc. It's literally machine-like: listening to it, I imagine some sort of complex, industrial machine chugging away. An interesting feature of it that underlines its machine-like nature is its use of short sounds and rough timbres. A number of instruments (I assume the winds and the strings) are played in a short, sharp way that produces odd, somewhat percussive scratch noises. Another string instrument sounds somewhere between a high-pitched beep and a thud. A fantastic composition.
Like most minimalist music, it's extremely repetitive - or at least it seems to be. It's difficult to say whether the piece as a whole ever actually repeats itself. Imagine a composition structured in the following way: you give one instrument a 20-second section to repeat, another instrument a 25-second section to repeat, another a 30-second section, etc etc. Then each instrument will repeat, but every part of the whole piece may be unique. Now suppose further that you slightly change each section each time it's played. Then strictly speaking there may not actually be any repetition at all, but it may still give a strong impression of repetition. I'm not saying that Hymnkus was composed in this way (it probably wasn't), only that it sounds like it could have been.
Part of the repetitiveness results from its long length (30 minutes) combined with its spare musical materials: it has an extremely restricted pitch range spanning only two octaves, and including only notes from the perfect fifths from G to C. On the other hand, one reason why the repetition seems elusive is because there are no melodic hooks whatsoever; instead, each instrument will play a few notes, or often just one note, then rest. Since there are so many instruments, there's always a lot going on, so it's difficult to focus on just one instrument and see how exactly it changes over time. Each note becomes lost in a mass of other notes. The mind has nothing to follow, nothing to grasp; hence although we hear repetition, any attempt to analyse the repetition will be scuppered. (The thwarting of our ability to place sounds in an immediate context is a feature of a few other Cage compositions from around this time, particularly But what about the noise.... Like that piece, Hymnkus also has a sort of "slippery" rhythm.)
Ultimately, it's most reminiscent to me of the "systems music" and music made by machine processes of John White, Christopher Hobbs, etc. It's literally machine-like: listening to it, I imagine some sort of complex, industrial machine chugging away. An interesting feature of it that underlines its machine-like nature is its use of short sounds and rough timbres. A number of instruments (I assume the winds and the strings) are played in a short, sharp way that produces odd, somewhat percussive scratch noises. Another string instrument sounds somewhere between a high-pitched beep and a thud. A fantastic composition.
Thursday 21 August 2014
Sonnekus2 (1985)
One of a number of works inspired by Cage's love of Erik Satie's music, this consists of several mesostics for solo voice that were derived from Biblical verses interspersed with cabaret songs for voice and piano by Satie. I have no idea what the relation is, if any, between Satie and the Bible verses. (Cage enjoyed combining completely unrelated things into a single piece, so this may be just another instance of that.)
This is as much Satie as it is Cage. As far as I can tell, the Satie songs are played completely straight, not altered by chance operations. Plus, they comprise more than half the running time of the piece. The reason for all this Satie is that this was conceived as part of the larger work The First Meeting of the Satie Society, a tribute to Satie involving writings, music, visual art, etc by a variety of different people.
It functions perfectly well on its own terms, however. The mesostics have a simple, quite pretty melody and a rather lonely mood. Although the cabaret songs are upbeat in themselves, they become rather more wistful when interspersed with the mesostics. Ignoring the Biblical lyrics, it gives the impression of longing and nostalgia: it's like an old and bygone singer is reminiscing alone about her past, and the cabaret songs are flashbacks to a happier time. The impression of the cabaret parts being flashbacks, mere memories remote in time, would be reinforced in a live performance as they are to be sung away from the stage in separate rooms, giving them a literal remoteness in space. This remoteness is achieved in the recording by mixing them at a lower volume and with less reverb than the mesostics.
This is as much Satie as it is Cage. As far as I can tell, the Satie songs are played completely straight, not altered by chance operations. Plus, they comprise more than half the running time of the piece. The reason for all this Satie is that this was conceived as part of the larger work The First Meeting of the Satie Society, a tribute to Satie involving writings, music, visual art, etc by a variety of different people.
It functions perfectly well on its own terms, however. The mesostics have a simple, quite pretty melody and a rather lonely mood. Although the cabaret songs are upbeat in themselves, they become rather more wistful when interspersed with the mesostics. Ignoring the Biblical lyrics, it gives the impression of longing and nostalgia: it's like an old and bygone singer is reminiscing alone about her past, and the cabaret songs are flashbacks to a happier time. The impression of the cabaret parts being flashbacks, mere memories remote in time, would be reinforced in a live performance as they are to be sung away from the stage in separate rooms, giving them a literal remoteness in space. This remoteness is achieved in the recording by mixing them at a lower volume and with less reverb than the mesostics.
Tuesday 19 August 2014
Ten (1991)
One of Cage's favourite techniques in his later years was time bracket notation. Time brackets tell you when a note (or set of notes) should start and when it should end. Thus, if I write 2'15" to the left of the note and 3'30" to its right, the note is played from 2'15" to 3'30". We can also make the time brackets flexible and introduce indeterminacy by writing on the left, e.g. 2'15" - 3'00", which means you start playing anywhere between 2'15" and 3'00", and on the right 2'45" - 3'30", which means you stop playing anywhere between 2'45" and 3'30". Almost all of Cage's Number Pieces use flexible time brackets, and Ten is no exception.
Ten does stand out in some ways, though. In most of the Number Pieces, each time bracket contains very few notes, often just one. Hence most of the pieces consist of long-held tones that force very focused listening; one becomes attuned to the minutest variations in the sounds. In Ten, however, the time brackets contain as many as twenty notes each. Hence, although it's by no means fast-paced, it is certainly one of the most active and intricate of the Number Pieces.
Also interestingly, the set of notes in the time brackets for the strings and winds are often microtonal variations on a single note. James Pritchett, in The Music of John Cage, writes: "the notes within a single bracket always span no more than a major second ... in one bracket of the violin part to this piece, there are ten notes, all of which are microtonal inflections of the same C#." Throughout the piece, the strings and winds generally play long lines of sound that slowly move up and down a narrow microtonal pitch range; the music has a sort of rocking motion. (Last week I reviewed another microtonal Number Piece, Two4, although I wasn't really able to hear the microtonality in that one. The microtonality in Ten is unmistakeable.)
While other Number Pieces use very quiet notes held for a long time to draw attention to the natural, accidental wobbles of the sounds, here it's as though Cage uses microtonality to create those wobbles intentionally. I think I prefer his usual approach of focusing on the accidental, more subtle variations in sound as the greater activity of this piece causes it to forfeit, for me at least, the strongly meditative effect that so many other Number Pieces have. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating exploration of pitch and harmony.
Ten does stand out in some ways, though. In most of the Number Pieces, each time bracket contains very few notes, often just one. Hence most of the pieces consist of long-held tones that force very focused listening; one becomes attuned to the minutest variations in the sounds. In Ten, however, the time brackets contain as many as twenty notes each. Hence, although it's by no means fast-paced, it is certainly one of the most active and intricate of the Number Pieces.
Also interestingly, the set of notes in the time brackets for the strings and winds are often microtonal variations on a single note. James Pritchett, in The Music of John Cage, writes: "the notes within a single bracket always span no more than a major second ... in one bracket of the violin part to this piece, there are ten notes, all of which are microtonal inflections of the same C#." Throughout the piece, the strings and winds generally play long lines of sound that slowly move up and down a narrow microtonal pitch range; the music has a sort of rocking motion. (Last week I reviewed another microtonal Number Piece, Two4, although I wasn't really able to hear the microtonality in that one. The microtonality in Ten is unmistakeable.)
While other Number Pieces use very quiet notes held for a long time to draw attention to the natural, accidental wobbles of the sounds, here it's as though Cage uses microtonality to create those wobbles intentionally. I think I prefer his usual approach of focusing on the accidental, more subtle variations in sound as the greater activity of this piece causes it to forfeit, for me at least, the strongly meditative effect that so many other Number Pieces have. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating exploration of pitch and harmony.
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