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!
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