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.