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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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).

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).

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)?

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".

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.

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.

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.

Music for Carillon no.s 1-5 (1952-1967)

As far as I know, there is currently no album containing all five Music for Carillons. A version of no.1 performed by David Tudor is available on the 1958 25-Year Retrospective and nos.1-3 are all available on American Classics. I already had no.1 so I downloaded no.s 2 & 3 off iTunes. Unfortunately, the production on all of these is fairly poor. No.1 is distorted and fuzzy, especially when flurries of notes are played quickly, which happens quite often. In the American Classics recording, it sounds like the carillon is way off in the distance, and there is an odd, unpleasant quality to the sound that seems like what happens when you have music at a very low bitrate (as I said, though, I got these off iTunes, at 260kbps and 272kbps). No.4 doesn't seem to be available anywhere. No.5 was another iTunes purchase, found on this album.

To be fair, part of the problem is that a carillon probably isn't an easy thing to record: it's a very large instrument usually found in church belfries that consists of large bronze bells connected to a keyboard. I imagine that it's very impressive to hear in real life, but that a lot of its qualities are lost on a recording. Still, if there's anybody planning on releasing some new Cage stuff, and you play the carillon, it would be great to hear a good recording of the whole series.

Nos.1-3 are all for solo carillon, and are pretty much what you'd expect from playing a bunch of chance-determined notes on a carillon. No.5, composed 13 years later in 1967, is rather more interesting. It's utterly chaotic - it sounds like somebody took a number of different recordings of carillons, manipulated them electronically, then played them over each other. The result is more along the lines of HPSCHD than the first three Music for Carillons. There are flurries of twinkling high-pitched notes, electronic bleeps and bloops, jangling bells, metallic clangs, drones that sound like they were produced by synthezisers or strings - and sometimes all of this is happening all at once. It's surprising coming after the first three in the series, but it fits right in with Cage's work of the late 60s. A number of his compositions from that time involved playing various unrelated musical pieces simultaneously: HPSCHD, 33 1/3, Musicircus. Like those pieces, this is a rich and fascinating sonic storm. My only complaint is that at only five minutes, it's too short!

Given the radical difference between nos.1-3 and no.5, I'm curious to hear no.4.

Five3 (1991)

Composed for trombone and string quartet, which here is two violins, viola, and a cello, this is in many ways quite similar to Seven2, which I reviewed a couple of days ago: at 40 minutes, it's one of the longer Number Pieces (eight times longer than all the others Fives); it mostly features dissonant notes played slowly and softly; and the music often gives way to stretches of silence.

In many of his Number Pieces, Cage draws attention to what would often be seen as accidental, imperfect elements of the sounds. Here, the strings are played so quietly, and the notes held for such long times, that we often have a chance to hear the notes wobble - not vibrato, but just the natural imperfections of human playing - and the even the sound of the bows scraping on the strings. I love Cage's focus on these kinds of subtle variations because it makes the music feel so much more vital and organic.

Also, I wonder if this focus on imperfection was one way Cage resolved the tension in the ideas behind his music. On the one hand, being extremely resistant to the view that music should be a form of expression, he had always endeavoured to remove the voice and emotions of the composer and performers from his music. On the other hand, as he got older, his anarchist social beliefs began to influence his approach to composition, and he wanted to find ways to preserve and respect the individuality of each performer. So the question is: how do you eliminate personal expression while preserving individuality? I will probably talk about this more later, but for now, note that imperfections and accidents are completely unintentional, so they cannot be a form of expression; but because they depend on each person’s way of playing, they also reveal the peculiarities of each musician. Perhaps this explains Cage's preference in the Number Pieces for long-held, very quiet notes.

The strings create a beautiful droney backdrop for the trombone, whose notes are often shorter and louder - indeed, some really blast out. The impression I have is of the strings being a lake, with the imperfections in the notes being ripples on its surface; and the trombone is like large bubbles floating to the surface and bursting.

34'46.776" for a Pianist (1954) and 31'57.9864" for a Pianist (1954)

In 1953, Cage began composing a variety of "time-legnth pieces" - pieces whose titles refer to the length of time they are played: for example, 45' for a Speaker is a 45 minute composition for vocals. The idea was that the pieces could be played solo or in any combination, and Cage's original plan was that the work as a whole (which has come to be called The Ten Thousand Things) would be forever unfinished, as he could keep adding more and more pieces to it ad infinitum. As it happens, he abadoned the project after only three years. During that time, he completed two piano works for it: 34'46.776" for a Pianist and 31'57.9864" for a Pianist. Yes, Cage has indeed specified the time-lengths to the thousandth and ten-thousandth of a second. I assume he was being somewhat humorous here; presumably he did not actually expect the performer to have such a superhuman control of time.

Ideally, I would like to have reviewed these separately, but I don't own solo performances of each of them. Solo performances are available on the USB I-Ching Edition of The Ten Thousand Things from Microfest Records. This looks like an incredibly cool release: it contains all of the time-length pieces, plus a computer program that will play them in any combination, as Cage intended. Unfortunately, the cheapest I can find it is for £45, and I'm not willing to put up that amount of cash for the sake of this blog. Cage fans who are less frugal might want to check it out.

So I'm listening to the simultaneous performance of 34'46.776" and 31'57.9864" (plus three other time-length pieces) here. One of the things that initially struck me as odd about these performances is that the piano parts clearly continue for more than 34 minutes, the length of the longest. The reason for this is that when played in combination, the structure of each time-length piece is rearranged, so 34' can continue for longer than 34'. This is one of the big problems with not having a solo performance: you really are listening to a different composition.

Both pieces are pretty much along the same lines as Cage's other chance-composed piano works. Notably, these are among the very few chance-based piano works for prepared piano, which gives them a more varied and unusual timbral palette. Most notes sound like a standard piano, but some notes rattle, some notes thud, etc. They also include occasional other sounds - e.g. by hitting the exterior of the piano, vocalising, whistling, etc. However, because I'm listening to a performance with a bunch of other time-length pieces, it's not always obvious whether these sounds come from one the pianists or somebody else. In any case, the use of a variety of non-pianolike sounds certainly helps the piano pieces blend in seamlessly with the others.

(I would guess that one big reason why Cage dropped his Ten Thousand Things project was that in the later 50s he became increasingly interested in compositions that were indeterminate of performance - that is, compositions where important parts are left in some ways vague, and up to the interpretation of the performer, and so will sound significantly different in each performance. The time-length pieces were all fairly strictly notated. However, there are moves towards indeterminacy of performance in them. In these piano pieces, Cage does not specify the preparations exactly, so two performances might involve quite different sounds.)

Seven2 (1990)

At over fifty minutes, this is one of the longest Number Pieces. Cage gives it a dark texture by using mostly low pitches, with an ensemble of bass flute, bass clarinet, bass trombone, contrabass, and cello (plus two percussionists), being played very slowly, softly, and quietly.

Indeed, despite the seven-piece ensemble, the arrangement is sparse. There are rarely more than three instruments playing at any one time, and the music is interspersed with long stretches of silence. It seems to merge with the ambient noise.

Like most Number Pieces, this is notable for its constant dissonance, which in combination with the lower, quieter tones creates an atmosphere of anticipation and foreboding. One of the instruments - I'm not sure which - occasionally produces a sort of ethereal groaning sound that adds very much to this mood. I had the impression of thick, dark, slowly moving cloud, perhaps rumbling towards a storm. There's even the aural equivalent of flashes of lightning: at 34:30 we get a sudden bang on a drum, just in case the previous part had been lulling you to sleep; at about 38:30, there's a short, loud blast from the trombone.

I think it's a pity that Cage didn't compose for ensembles of lower-pitched instruments more often, as I love the low, deep sounds of instruments like trombones and contrabasses.

Two4 (1991)

This one comes in two versions: it's scored for either violin and piano or violin and shō, a Japanese instrument that sounds somewhat like a cross between an organ and a harmonica. Cage was rather enchanted with the shō when he discovered it late in his life, so he wrote a few pieces for it. I'm not sure why he gave the option of either piano or shō for Two4. They certainly don't sound anything alike.

Cage's score exploits the different abilities of the three instruments in two interesting ways. First, as a violin, unlike a piano/shō, can sustain a note indefinitely, the violin holds long drones of single notes while the piano/shō plays more quickly (though still fairly slowly - just a few notes per minute, in fact) over it. Second, while the pitches available to a piano/shō are discrete and fixed, a violin has the whole field of pitch in its range at its disposal. Hence the violin part is microtonal: Cage splits the octave into eighty-four notes (versus the standard twelve). I must confess, though, that my untrained ear would never have picked up on this had I not read about it. I can sometimes tell when music is microtonal - it's obvious in Harry Partch and a lot of world music, for example - but frankly I can't tell what difference it makes here.

Obviously, the two versions sound fairly different, and each has its benefits and drawbacks. On the one hand, the shō has a rich, unusual timbre that brings a rather more exotic flavour to the piece, and its notes can be sustained for as long as the player's breath so it tends to be quite droney like the violin. They merge together; it's sometimes difficult to tell where one instrument begins and the other ends. However, partly for this reason, the shō tends to drown out the subtleties of the violin part. The piano isn't so invasive. Since the violin is played so softly and without vibrato, we have a chance to focus on the slight "imperfections" in the drones, that are like ripples on the surface of water. It provides an intricate and beautiful bed of sound to complement the delicate piano notes.

Piano or shō, I love this piece. I love its long drones and its gradually changing texture as over time, almost imperceptibly, the pitch of the violin drops. It slowly divides the two instruments, since the piano/shō part is for the same seventeen notes throughout. Both begin at a high pitch, but the violin ever so slowly drifts away.

36 Mesostics re and not re Marcel Duchamp (1972)

Throughout his life, Cage created a great deal of written work, both academic essays and more artistic writing. Perhaps his favourite form of artistic writing was the mesostic, a poetic form that he used frequently from the late 60s until his death.

This is, as the title suggests, 36 mesostics, both about and not about Marcel Duchamp. Although it was originally a written work, it has been performed as music. Cage blurred the line between his music and writing by giving frequent musical performances of his poetry and prose. In the case of mesostics I find this somewhat problematic because they have an essential visual element: the central vertical "spine" cannot be communicated when speaking them (well, I guess you could say it before or after the poem proper, but you still wouldn't be able to see how all the lines fit together). And in any case, they simply *look* wonderful... you lose a lot of their charm and beauty by translating them into sound. This excerpt from 36 Mesostics is a good example of how even the most mundane statements are infused with a subtle grace when presented in the mesostic form:

                   inviteD
                        oUt
                    he'd Cut
            the evening sHort.
                         At
                       hoMe
   he'd suggest we stay uP later.

So I think mesostics should ideally be read, not heard. As a poem, 36 Mesostics is extremely impressive. Many of Cage's poems were written, like his music, by the use of chance operations - often resulting in uncompromisingly experimental writing that had only the barest resemblance to the English language. However, no chance was used here (except perhaps in determining the order of the mesostics). Hence this is a good example of Cage's skill as a more conventional poet. Here's a lovely excerpt:

   since other Men
              mAke
              aRt,
            he Cannot.
            timE
          is vaLuable.

Or consider this reflection on Duchamp's death, the penultimate mesostic of the set. To me, this is one of the most moving passages about death and loss ever written; its poignance is matched only by its simplicity and brevity. Its impact is particularly powerful as it comes after several mesostics about rather more humdrum, day-to-day things:

   questions i Might
              hAve
            leaRned
        to ask Can
        no longEr
    receive repLies

At their best, mesostics are like haikus: highly constrained writing that can highlight the beauty in the apparently mundane, or express profound feelings and experiences in a strikingly simple way. 36 Mesostics is a wonderful poem that demonstrates both of these virtues.

It is also, at least on the recording that I'm listening to, a fairly interesting piece of music, though I'm not sure how many, if any, of the musical elements were actually composed by Cage (I think he only wrote the words). It's performed by two voices, Paul Hillier and the minimalist composer Terry Riley, who each take turns reading the mesostics. Hillier sings in an exaggerrated baritone that evokes medieval monastic music (which is unsurprising, given that this is on the same CD as the performance of Litany for the Whale that I reviewed yesterday), and which is subjected to various kinds of electronic manipulation.

This makes for a rather amusing performance for several reasons. First, because so many of his lyrics are so banal - it tickles me to imagine a medieval monk singing, with all the gravity and sincerity he gives to his religious songs, lyrics like "crême fraiche followed by three kinds of potatoes" and "they told me someone who had a problem engaged him in a discussion of it". Second, because the electronic effects are sometimes a little ridiculous. For example, in one of his parts, we hear a copy of his voice that's had its pitch shifted upward, so it sounds all high and squeaky. And finally because all of this is at jolting variance with Terry Riley's totally straight, unprocessed, spoken-word readings.

Although I still think that 36 Mesostics works better on paper, this performance is a lot of fun, and at only 11 minutes (yes, only 11 minutes... plenty of Cage compositions go on far longer than 11 minutes) it doesn't overstay its welcome. Whenever Cage performed his mesostics, he would usually just read them out straightforwardly. This creative interpretation is far more engaging.

Litany for the Whale (1980)

Like the piece I reviewed yesterday, this is a rather incongruous entry in Cage's catalogue. While the incongruity of that piece can be explained as arising due to Cage's love of Satie, I'm not sure what the explanation for this one is. It's a composition for two vocalists, who take turns singing letters of the word "whale" in a call-and-response fashion. Here's an excerpt of the score:

The structure is simple. Vocalist A sings the recitation "W-H-A-L-E". Vocalist B responds with "H-A-W-E", then sings the recitation. Vocalist A responds with "E-A-H-A-E", then sings the recitation. Etc etc for the next twenty-five minutes. Presumably, the order of the letters in the responses was partially determined by chance, though note that each response ends with the letter 'E'. Further, Cage fixes the notes of each letter, like so:

W-D   H-C   A-B   L-G   E-A

Hence, this consists of straightforward monophonic melodies with a simple tonality (from my limited knowledge of music theory, I assume it's in A-minor), to be sung slowly and softly without vibrato. It is extremely peaceful, even religious - indeed, it strongly evokes Gregorian chant, especially with its reverb-heavy production that makes it sound as if it was sung in a church. The monastic overtones are, of course, made explicit by the "litany" of the title.

It would be interesting to know more about Cage's intentions and what compositional methods he used here. It sounds like one of Cage's "transformative" works - as in Apartment House 1776, Cheap Imitation, Hymns and Variations, Quartets I-VIII, etc - in that it sounds like he took some previously existing work, in this case a Gregorian chant, and then altered it somewhat. I think this was composed from scratch, though. What is particularly odd in the context of the rest of his work is how he gives it a tonal centre, on the note A (the letter E). Even in his compositions that used more traditional pitch-sets, this is something that as far as I understand he always worked to avoid. Per Cage's aesthetic, the problem with a tonal centre is that it means that notes are arranged in hierarchy, and according to a theory. In all his work from the early 50s onwards, Cage had endeavoured to create compositions where, essentially, all sounds are equal - where there are no hierarchies, where each sound is its own centre, where "each sound vibrates from itself, not from a theory" (that quote is from Conversing With Cage, pg 90). By all means play an A, but don't play an A as the tonal centre. (The anti-theoretical inclination comes from Zen; the anti-hierarchical inclination from anarchism.)

Of course, none of this has anything to do with the quality of the music, which is extremely high. Just as "litany" suggests religion, so "whale" suggests the ocean, and the music seems evocative of the ocean to me. Notes are sung deliberately, one by one, surrounded by silence; they have an undulating quality, like waves coming into shore. The alternation from the first vocalist to the second and back again conjures the rise and fall of the tides, with the steady repetition of the recitation underlining its cyclical character. To paraphrase one of the favourite slogans of deep ecology, Litany for the Whale may be simple in means, but it is very rich in ends.

I came across a performance of this on carillon, which can be found here (there is a 48 second youtube video; the whole performance is given on a link below). I don't like it so much, and for me it drives home just how important the choice of instrument can be for a composition. Litany for the Whale is beautiful, but a lot of that depends on the qualities of the human voice. Without the voice, without the monastic mood, it becomes a bit boring. It ends up sounding like a child's first attempt at writing music. (The carillon version reminds me quite a lot of Cheap Imitation, another one that I don't find so interesting.)

Swinging (1989)

What a bizarre little piece this one is! About a minute and a half long, for solo piano, with a fairly traditional, even pretty, melody played over two repeating notes (though I sure wouldn't say it swings... "Just Quietly Wandering Along Keeping to Myself" might have been a better title). It's simple, unassuming - and at first blush completely incongruous with the rest of Cage's work around this time. However, the oddness is mitigated somewhat when we consider that this is just one part of a larger, unfinished work called Sports that's based on an Erik Satie piece. Cage's adoration of Satie had led to rather un-Cageian music before, in the similarly traditional and pretty Cheap Imitation.

Presumably, Sports was to have been another Cheap Imitation. The first part, Perpetual Tango, was composed five years before this one. Unfortunately Cage didn't live another five years to produce the third part. I wonder why he dropped it for five years, revisiting it with this tiny piano piece, only to drop it again?

In any case, there's not really much to say about this. It isn't particularly interesting but it's too short to be boring. Perhaps it would function better in the context of the whole work. I guess we'll never know. As it is, it's just something of a minor curiosity in Cage's oeuvre, one for the completists like myself, I think.

Twenty-Six (1991)

Over the last six years of his life, Cage composed 51 "Number Pieces" - so named after their straightforward titles that refer simply to their number of performers, some with a numeral superscript to distinguish them from other works with the same number of performers (hence Four6 is the sixth work for four performers).

Twenty-Six was composed in the penultimate year of his life (his advanced age and declining health had not slowed him down, as it was his most prolific year as a composer: 24 compositions, many of them long, many of them for a large number of performers), for twenty-six violins, all of which play long drones without vibrato. The result is a fairly simple timbral palette for such a large number of players, but a dense, slowly changing wash of sound that is, as is the case for many of the Number Pieces, unrelentingly dissonant. The closest analogue, then, might be some sort of dark ambient, though I wouldn't say that this piece is particularly dark. The dissonance never resolves, nor does it ever get more dissonant; in general, though the piece changes, it doesn't really develop or go anywhere musically. It simply is. The sounds simply occur. Any first impressions of darkness, uneasiness, tensions, etc, will soon slip away.

Throughout most of the piece, there are at least some violins playing in the highest possible pitches, maybe harmonics? - in any case the sounds are very smooth, unlike the usual scratchy timbre of the violin. These provide a bright, shimmering background against which the lower sounds emerge and recede. I don't think I could ever listen to this as background music, but it is deeply soothing.

In my recording of Twenty-Six, which is the only recording of Twenty-Six alone that I know of (it can be performed with Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine, and has been recorded this way), only one performer, Christina Fong, was involved, and the piece was created by overdubbing. Overdubbing is somewhat problematic with Cage's Number Pieces, because the interaction between the performers was, for him, an important element. However, I'm not a purist, and one of the benefits of overdubbing is that it allows every violin to be mixed properly. The production on this is undeniably superb (I really can't even imagine other performances sounding better than this, though they might sound just as good). Still, it would be interesting to hear a non-overdubbed performance of the piece.

Ryoanji (1985)

Ryoanji is often considered, in my opinion quite rightly, one of Cage's finest compositions from the 80s and is one of his most frequently recorded. It has a long and interesting genesis, which goes all the way back to the early 60s when Cage visited the Ryoan-ji temple in Japan. He was fascinated by its karesansui, a "Zen garden" consisting of large rocks placed on a bed of small pebbles, raked to create minimal, ripple-like patterns. Looking at pictures of it on Google, it's easy to see why he was entranced by this tranquil miniature landscape: he had long held the view that function of art is to "imitate nature in her manner of operation", and the Ryoan-ji garden is as clear an example of this as you're likely to find.

However, the garden would not have any explicit influence on his work until about two decades later, when he began creating a series of drawings called Where R = Ryoanji. These were created by placing stones on the paper and drawing around them, usually just with pencil. The position and orientation of each stone and the hardness of the pencil used to circle it were all determined by chance operations. They are perhaps the most austere of Cage's visual art - indeed, he saw drawing them as being more a form of meditation - but like the rock gardens they have a simple, tranquil beauty:

Cage then applied the same technique to musical composition, scoring many of the parts for Ryoanji by drawing along one side of a stone. The resulting lines represent changes in pitch (these sounds are the rocks of the garden; Cage also adds a conventionally notated percussion/orchestra obbligato that stands for the raked pebbles):

This is then a very interesting piece, intimately connected with both his Zen influences and his visual art. It is also a piece of simply stunning beauty. The first thing one hears, at least in my favourite recording of it, is the percussion, a drum that sounds like it has some kind of bells on it. It's reminiscent of the percussion in But what about the noise... (1985), in that the instrument is hit just once, then there is a long period of silence, then it is hit just once again, and repeat; and also in that it's impossible to follow its beat (given their proximity in time, I wonder if Cage had similar things in mind when scoring each of them). However, Ryoanji is very much unlike that composition in that here, there's only one percussive sound. The playfulness of But what about the noise... contrasts with the much more ascetic mood here.

Solos of microtonal glissandi from a somewhat plaintive flute and a low, grumbling trombone accompany the percussion. I love the guttural sound of the trombone, being played right at the lowest possible end of the scale, especially as it contrasts with the lighter flute. They are both played slowly, softly, and they often dissolve back into silence. Cage once described sound poetically as being bubbles on the surface of silence that burst. These sounds are more like a thin mist in silence, fading in, fading out, not-quite-existing.

Since there are so many recordings of this, I also had a listen to this rather different take provided by Mode Records. What's notable about it is its denser arrangement. We have four soloists here: the flute and trombone, as before, but also oboe and bass. Plus, the single percussion instrument is replaced by a twenty-piece orchestra. The effect is that the soloists' sounds here seem much more tangible. Indeed, they are somewhat imposing, as the larger number of sounds results in a fairly extreme and continuous dissonance. Personally, I prefer the more standard versions with percussion and fewer instruments. This doesn't have the same contemplative mood... and without any hard, percussive sounds, it just doesn't feel like Ryoanji to me. Which is not to say that it's bad, of course. Indeed, it's definitely worth hearing, as aside from the beauty of the music its different approach shows a new, unexpected side to the piece.

I'm also aware of a version of Ryoanji that goes on for over an hour. Unfortunately I haven't heard this one, but it's on my wishlist. No recording of it that I've heard has extended beyond 20 minutes.

But what about the noise of crumpling paper which he used to do in order to paint the series of "Papiers froissés" or tearing up paper to make "Papiers déchirés?" Arp was stimulated by water (sea, lake, and flowing waters like rivers), forests (1985)

The first question, of course, is: what the hell is up with that title? I'm not sure why he was feeling so logorrheic when he wrote that, but the musical content is nothing unusual for late-period Cage.

It's a largely percussive piece for 3 to 10 players, with a rich variety of different percussive sounds - some metallic, some wooden, some rattle, some make a watery 'plop', etc. What stands out about it is its unusual rhythm, a result of the fact that (1) each player hits his instrument just once then waits a long time before hitting again just once, and repeat; and (2) each player keeps his own time. The rhythm is somewhat reminiscent of water dripping in a cave; this impression is underlined by the watery timbre of many of the noises.

The effect of the rhythm is somewhat meditative. As with water dripping in a cave, there is a distinctive rhythm to the piece, but one that emerges only after each sound has occurred. That is, unlike with any kind of standard rhythm, you can't predict when the next sound will come. The rhythm here is slippery, snakelike, constantly outside the mind's grasp. Any attempt to play along with it, even just in your head, will be stymied. Hence, listening to this piece, you are forced to empty your mind, and simply accept each sound as it comes. And also as it goes, for they are all fleeting. Thus: emptiness and non-attachment. Cage's Zen influences certainly shine through here. There is even a kind of Zen playfulness to this, in its wide variety of sounds and its unwavering, impish refusal to march to any kind of standard beat. I can imagine Cage writing the title with a sly smile and that sets the tone for the music, too.

Occasionally other sounds enter the mix. A few times, we hear a snippet of an uneasy whistle and a low, ominous groaning sound, which evoke weird animal calls. They emphasize the sense of being in a cave, albeit a very strange and alien cave. Other times we hear things that sound like wind, water, crunching paper, a creaky door, etc. It's great fun. I'm not sure I would say it's one of Cage's best compositions, but that's simply because he has such a large quantity of fantastic compositions.

For Paul Taylor and Anita Dencks (1957)

For Paul Taylor and Anita Dencks is a minor, three-minute piece for solo piano. In fact, from the sounds alone, you'd probably never be able to tell that a piano is involved. Two of the sounds are produced by using the interior of the piano, rather than the keys; the other two sounds are "auxiliary sounds" - that is, they are produced elsewhere, so have nothing to do with the piano.

You might have noticed from that description that we have a grand total of four sounds. Obviously, then, this piece is extremely minimal, especially since each sound appears only once. Here's what happens:

- At 0'12", a very quiet, very short (about half a second) snippet of what sounds like white noise;
- from 0'24" to 0'33", a rather loud, high-pitched drone;
- from 0'59" to 1'12", a quiet, rapid tapping noise;
- at 1'02", a quiet, short (about a second) groaning/creaking sound.

This is followed by slightly over two minutes of complete silence.

It's difficult to know what to make of this piece. It's so brief and sparse that it feels more like an experiment than a serious composition. But at the time it was written, Cage had been using chance operations and "non-musical" sounds for years; he didn't really any experimenting left to do with them. Certainly, this doesn't push any musical boundaries that he hadn't already demolished.

A couple of things did catch my eye on this piece's entry on johncage.org: it notes that the first two sounds are "produced somewhere between 0'36" and 1'00""; the next two "between 1'24" and 1'36"." First, as you can see from my description, none of the sounds in the recording I have occur during those times. Would Schleiermacher make such an elementary mistake as playing the sounds at a completely wrong time? Second, and more interestingly, was this piece an early use of Cage's time-bracket technique? (The time-bracket technique is explained here; I might talk more about it when I come to one of the Number Pieces.) If so, perhaps it would be of some historical interest.

Overall, rather baffling and not especially interesting to listen to.

Etudes Australes (1975)

The first piece from my randomized list of Cage works, and it's a big one! Both in terms of its length, which on the recording I have is a hefty 2 hours 50 minutes (though actually, this is one of the shorter recordings - Sabine Liebner's version clocks in at over 4 hours), and its relative fame/importance in Cage's work. It's also a piece that I've listened to quite a lot already, being a favourite of mine.

The Etudes Australes is one of Cage's many pieces for solo piano - or, more accurately, a "duet for two hands" - and was composed specifically for Grete Sultan. The version I'm listening to was played by Sultan herself, so is among the definitive recordings. Like a few other Cage pieces, the composition is notorious for being extraordinarily difficult to play. Honestly, this doesn't sound particularly difficult to me (but I'm no pianist). With something like, say, the Freeman Etudes, I can tell just from listening to it that it must take an enormous amount of skill to perform. Here, the playing seems too slow to be all that difficult. Perhaps part of the difficulty arises from having to play with each hand independently? (Even this aspect is not obvious to my ear - it doesn't sound like a duet.)

In any case, the point is that enjoying this doesn't have to be a matter of approaching it like some sort of Olympic event and simply admiring the talent of the player.

Cage's compositional process was particularly interesting here, as he generated indeterminacy by using star charts, as he did thirteen years previously on Atlas Eclipticalis. In a way, I find the solo piano to be more suited to star charts than almost any other instrument. When you hear piano notes, they are points of sound surrounded by silence, just as stars are points of light surrounded by darkness. With the Etudes Australes, I have a very strong impression that I'm "listening to the sky".

Aside from being a beautiful and somewhat humbling, even spiritual, experience in itself, this makes Cage's ideas much more tangible. We all appreciate the beauty of the night sky, and many of us can even appreciate the beauty of a simple star chart printed on paper. On the other hand, the vast majority of people find it almost impossible to comprehend how anybody could see the slightest bit of beauty in the music of John Cage. Yet, in these Etudes, he's only doing for our ears what the stars do for our eyes. Cage spent much of his career inviting us to simply, as he said, "let sounds be sounds", and I feel like this composition pointedly adds: "...just like you let stars be stars." If you can understand why somebody might find the night sky aesthetically beautiful, you're well on the way to understanding why people like me find Cage's music aesthetically beautiful.

Etudes Australes is one of Cage's finest compositions - grand, majestic... yet also low-key and austere. Much like the night sky, I suppose.

Review Index

I'll update this to include links to my reviews as I post them, so people can easily find reviews for particular compositions. This is, I hope, a complete list of Cage's indeterminate compositions (for a link to a comprehensive list of all of Cage's works, see my first post).

Below the review index, I have included an index of miscellaneous posts; and below that, a list of works by Cage that I'm at present unable to review, since I don't own them and can't find them for a reasonable price (or elsewhere like youtube).

___, __ _____ circus on _________
0'00" (4' 33" No. 2)
4'33"
26'1.1499"
27' 10.554"
31'57.9864"
33 1/3
34'46.776"
36 Mesostics re and not re Marcel Duchamp
44 Harmonies from Apartment House 1776
49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs
59 1/2" for a String Player
62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham
103
108
1O1
A Collection of Rocks
A Dip in the Lake: Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-One Waltzes and Fifty-Six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity
A House Full of Music
Address
Alla Ricerca del Silenzio Perduto
Apartment House 1776
Aria
ASLSP
Atlas Eclipticalis
Bird Cage
Branches
But what about the noise of crumpling paper which he used to do in order to paint the series of "papiers froisses" or tearing up paper to make "papiers dechires?" Arp was stimulated by water (sea, lake, and flowing waters like rivers), forests
Cartridge Music
cComposed Improvisation (for One-Sided Drums With or Without Jangles)
cComposed Improvisation (for Snare Drum Alone)
cComposed Improvisation (for Steinberger Bass Guitar)
Cheap Imitation (duet: piano and violin)
Cheap Imitation (orchestra)
Cheap Imitation (solo: piano/violin/cello)
Child of Tree
Chorals for Violin Solo
Concert for Piano and Orchestra
Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra
Concerto Grosso
Dance/4 Orchestras
Dialog
Duet for Cymbal
ear for EAR
Eight
Eight Whiskus (solo violin)
Eight Whiskus (solo voice)
Eighty
Electronic Music for Piano
Empty Mind
Essay
Etcetera
Etcetera 2/4 Orchestras
Etudes Australes
Etudes Boreales I-IV (for solo cello)
Etudes Boreales I-IV (for solo piano)
Europera 5
Europeras 1 & 2
Europeras 3 & 4
Exercise
Extended Lullaby
Fifteen Domestic Minutes
Fifty-Eight
Five
Five Hanau Silence
Five Stone Wind
Five2
Five3
Five4
Five5
Fontana Mix
Food
for a Singer (1st Piece)
For M.C. and D.T.
For Paul Taylor and Anita Dencks
Four
Four Solos for Voice (93-96)
Four2
Four3
Four4
Four5
Four6
Fourteen
Freeman Etudes I - XVI
Freeman Etudes XVII - XXXII
Furniture Music Etcetera
Haikai (for gamelan)
Haikai (for zoomoozophone and flute)
Haiku
Haikus
HMCIEX
HPSCHD
Hymnkus
Hymns and Variations
Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (March No. 2)
Imaginary Landscape No. 5
Improvisation A + B
Improvisation III
Improvisation IV
Inlets
Instances of Silence
James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet
John Cage Meets Sun Ra
Klassik Nach Wunsch
Lecture on the Weather
Les chants de maldoror pulvérisés par l'assistance même
Letter to Erik Satie
Litany for the Whale
Mirakus2
Mozart Mix
Music for
Music for Amplified Toy Pianos
Music for Carillon no.s 1-5
Music for Piano 1-85
Music for The Marrying Maiden
Music of Changes
Music Walk
Musicircus
Musicircus for Children
Newport Mix
Nowth Upon Nacht
One
One2
One3 = 4'33" (0'0") + [G clef]
One4
One5
One6
One7
One8
One9
One10
One12
One13
Organ2/ASLSP
Paragraphs of Fresh Air
Perpetual Tango
Postcard from Heaven
Quartet
Quartets I-VIII
Radio Music
Renga
Reunion
Rocks
Rozart Mix
Ryoanji
Score (40 Drawings by Thoreau) and 23 Parts
Scottish Circus
Sculptures Musicales
Selkus2
Seven
Seven Haiku
Seven2
Seventy-Four
Shimmera
Six
Sixty-Eight
Solo for Voice 1
Solo for Voice 2
Solos from Concert for Piano and Orchestra
Some of "The Harmony of Maine"
Song Books
Sonnekus2
Sound Anonymously Received
Sounday
Sounds of Venice
Souvenir
Speech 1955
Sports
Swinging
Telephones and Birds
Ten
The Beatles 1962-1970
Theatre Piece (1952)
Theatre Piece (1960)
Thirteen
Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras
Thirty Pieces for String Quartet
Three
Three2
TV Köln
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Three
Two
Two Pastorales
Two2
Two3
Two4
Two5
Two6
Variations I
Variations II
Variations III
Variations IV
Variations V
Variations VI
Variations VII
Variations VIII
Vis-à-Vis
Voiceless Essay
Waiting
Water Music
Water Walk
WBAI
WGBH-TV
Williams Mix
Winter Music
Wishing Well


Miscellaneous posts
Conventional Cage
My girlfriend listens to John Cage


Cage works that I can't find:

A House Full of Music (1982)
Address (1977)
Cheap Imitation for orchestra (1972)
Concerto Grosso (1979)
Dance/4 Orchestras (1982)
Dialog (1977)
Empty Mind (1987)
Essay (1986)
Extended Lullaby (1991)
Fifteen Domestic Minutes (1982)
Five Hanau Silence (1991)
Food (1981)
Haiku (1958)
HMCIEX (1984)
Improvisation A + B (1986)
Instances of Silence (1982)
Klassik Nach Wunsch (1982)
Les chants de maldoror pulvérisés par l'assistance même (1971)
Letter to Erik Satie (1978)
Music for Carillon no.4 (1961)
Musicircus (1967)
Musicircus for Children (1984)
Newport Mix (1967)
Paragraphs of Fresh Air (1979)
Quartet (1978)
Reunion (1968)
Rocks (1986)
Score (40 Drawings by Thoreau) and 23 Parts (1974)
Scottish Circus (1990)
Selkus2 (1984)
Sound Anonymously Received (1969)
Sounday (1978)
Speech 1955 (1955)
Theatre Piece (1960)
Variations VII (1966)
Vis-à-Vis (1986)
WGBH-TV (1971)
Wishing Well (1986)

Listening Through John Cage

I recently came across an excellent blog in which the writer, Zac, listened comprehensively to all of John Cage's recorded works: The John Cageblog

What a great idea! Being a huge fan of John Cage, I decided to have a go at it myself. Well, actually, I'm a little bit more lazy than Zac. I'm going to ignore all of Cage's pre-chance works. It's not that I dislike them - indeed, some of them are incredibly beautiful - but I don't find them nearly as interesting and I probably wouldn't have much to say about them. In this blog, then, I aim to write my thoughts on every composition by Cage from when he started using chance, i.e. his compositions from between 1951 to 1992.

I am not much of a musician; I can play the didgeridoo, but that's about it. My background is in philosophy. I'm doing this simply because I absolutely adore John Cage's music. As noted by Zac, there are many people who appreciate Cage's ideas, but don't bother actually listening to much of his music, seeing him as more a philosopher or theorist or whatever (and, of course, there are plenty of folks who don't even appreciate the ideas). I will certainly discuss Cage's ideas. But for me, his primary contribution is as a composer - I think that ultimately, the real point of his music is not the ideas but the sounds, and the sounds are often fascinating and beautiful.

I will say something about how I am going to approach this. I have made a list of all of John Cage's compositions from his first use of chance (in 1951's Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra) onwards. I will randomize the list using random.org, and go through the pieces in whatever order results, so that I can explore Cage's music in an appropriately Cagean way. Obviously, I don't own every single piece by Cage (though I do own a lot of them). I will be buying more, but if I come to a piece that I don't have, I'll see if I can find it on youtube. If it's not on youtube, I'll just move it to the end of the list. A few of Cage's pieces have never even been recorded, so this blog will perhaps never be completed.

For anybody interested, I've drawn up a comprehensive list of Cage's works here:

John Cage: A Comprehensive List of Works

I think that's all we need by way of introduction. I hope you enjoy the blog!