What a bizarre little piece this one is! About a minute and a half long, for solo piano, with a fairly traditional, even pretty, melody played over two repeating notes (though I sure wouldn't say it swings... "Just Quietly Wandering Along Keeping to Myself" might have been a better title). It's simple, unassuming - and at first blush completely incongruous with the rest of Cage's work around this time. However, the oddness is mitigated somewhat when we consider that this is just one part of a larger, unfinished work called Sports that's based on an Erik Satie piece. Cage's adoration of Satie had led to rather un-Cageian music before, in the similarly traditional and pretty Cheap Imitation.
Presumably, Sports was to have been another Cheap Imitation. The first part, Perpetual Tango, was composed five years before this one. Unfortunately Cage didn't live another five years to produce the third part. I wonder why he dropped it for five years, revisiting it with this tiny piano piece, only to drop it again?
In any case, there's not really much to say about this. It isn't particularly interesting but it's too short to be boring. Perhaps it would function better in the context of the whole work. I guess we'll never know. As it is, it's just something of a minor curiosity in Cage's oeuvre, one for the completists like myself, I think.
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