One5 (1990)

As is the norm for the smaller Number Pieces, this is extremely minimal and sparse. It's a twenty-minute piece for solo piano. The left hand is given 21 time brackets, the right hand is given 24; and each time bracket contains either a single note or chord. So we have just over two sound events per minute.

The instrumentation is stripped down to its basics: a completely standard piano, with no preparations or alterations, played in a completely standard way (i.e. pressing the keys). Cage specified that the notes are to be sustained for as long as possible, but since it's a piano, and since all the notes are played softly and quietly, they peter out pretty quickly regardless. Unsurprisingly, then, the most conspicuous element of this piece is the silence. Indeed I confess that when I listened to the whole thing earlier, it took me a little while to realize when it had finished! I guess that with a piece like this, it's pretty much impossible not to listen to the ambient sound (which for me, listening at 1a.m., was just the quiet drone of my laptop) as much as the music, and you don't immediately miss the music when it ends.

It's interesting that Cage chose to give each hand separate time brackets. I don't know what the reason for this was, but it calls to mind the Etudes Australes, which was conceived as a "duet for two hands". Now in fact, the Etudes did not seem much like a duet to me... similarly, in One5, I'm not sure what difference splitting the hands makes. It's just a load of notes scattered very sparsely on a canvas of silence. Perhaps somebody who actually plays the piano would be able to pick up more here.

In any case, I love One5. Its consistently soft dynamics, its slow pace, and its simple instrumentation with plenty of silence, make for a degree of tranquility and stillness that is extreme even by Cage's standards. It doesn't seem to matter whether it goes on for five minutes or five hours (yes, I could easily listen to five hours of this, at least as background music and with a few breaks).