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.
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