Twenty-Six (1991)

Over the last six years of his life, Cage composed 51 "Number Pieces" - so named after their straightforward titles that refer simply to their number of performers, some with a numeral superscript to distinguish them from other works with the same number of performers (hence Four6 is the sixth work for four performers).

Twenty-Six was composed in the penultimate year of his life (his advanced age and declining health had not slowed him down, as it was his most prolific year as a composer: 24 compositions, many of them long, many of them for a large number of performers), for twenty-six violins, all of which play long drones without vibrato. The result is a fairly simple timbral palette for such a large number of players, but a dense, slowly changing wash of sound that is, as is the case for many of the Number Pieces, unrelentingly dissonant. The closest analogue, then, might be some sort of dark ambient, though I wouldn't say that this piece is particularly dark. The dissonance never resolves, nor does it ever get more dissonant; in general, though the piece changes, it doesn't really develop or go anywhere musically. It simply is. The sounds simply occur. Any first impressions of darkness, uneasiness, tensions, etc, will soon slip away.

Throughout most of the piece, there are at least some violins playing in the highest possible pitches, maybe harmonics? - in any case the sounds are very smooth, unlike the usual scratchy timbre of the violin. These provide a bright, shimmering background against which the lower sounds emerge and recede. I don't think I could ever listen to this as background music, but it is deeply soothing.

In my recording of Twenty-Six, which is the only recording of Twenty-Six alone that I know of (it can be performed with Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine, and has been recorded this way), only one performer, Christina Fong, was involved, and the piece was created by overdubbing. Overdubbing is somewhat problematic with Cage's Number Pieces, because the interaction between the performers was, for him, an important element. However, I'm not a purist, and one of the benefits of overdubbing is that it allows every violin to be mixed properly. The production on this is undeniably superb (I really can't even imagine other performances sounding better than this, though they might sound just as good). Still, it would be interesting to hear a non-overdubbed performance of the piece.