Ten (1991)

One of Cage's favourite techniques in his later years was time bracket notation. Time brackets tell you when a note (or set of notes) should start and when it should end. Thus, if I write 2'15" to the left of the note and 3'30" to its right, the note is played from 2'15" to 3'30". We can also make the time brackets flexible and introduce indeterminacy by writing on the left, e.g. 2'15" - 3'00", which means you start playing anywhere between 2'15" and 3'00", and on the right 2'45" - 3'30", which means you stop playing anywhere between 2'45" and 3'30". Almost all of Cage's Number Pieces use flexible time brackets, and Ten is no exception.

Ten does stand out in some ways, though. In most of the Number Pieces, each time bracket contains very few notes, often just one. Hence most of the pieces consist of long-held tones that force very focused listening; one becomes attuned to the minutest variations in the sounds. In Ten, however, the time brackets contain as many as twenty notes each. Hence, although it's by no means fast-paced, it is certainly one of the most active and intricate of the Number Pieces.

Also interestingly, the set of notes in the time brackets for the strings and winds are often microtonal variations on a single note. James Pritchett, in The Music of John Cage, writes: "the notes within a single bracket always span no more than a major second ... in one bracket of the violin part to this piece, there are ten notes, all of which are microtonal inflections of the same C#." Throughout the piece, the strings and winds generally play long lines of sound that slowly move up and down a narrow microtonal pitch range; the music has a sort of rocking motion. (Last week I reviewed another microtonal Number Piece, Two4, although I wasn't really able to hear the microtonality in that one. The microtonality in Ten is unmistakeable.)

While other Number Pieces use very quiet notes held for a long time to draw attention to the natural, accidental wobbles of the sounds, here it's as though Cage uses microtonality to create those wobbles intentionally. I think I prefer his usual approach of focusing on the accidental, more subtle variations in sound as the greater activity of this piece causes it to forfeit, for me at least, the strongly meditative effect that so many other Number Pieces have. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating exploration of pitch and harmony.