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.