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)?