John Cage Meets Sun Ra (1986)

As the title suggests, this is a recording of a joint live performance given by John Cage and Sun Ra in 1986. At first glance this pairing might not seem too surprising to most people - after all, both Cage and Ra are big figures in the broad and vaguely-defined genre of experimental music, so why not put them together?

But you only have to listen to this once to see what an odd couple these two really make. For one thing, there's barely any actual collaboration here. Ra and Cage take turns giving solo performances; they only perform together for a few minutes on side 2. Ra's solos are enormous fun - dissonant, clangy, utterly chaotic synthesizer freak-outs. They stand in complete contrast to Cage's solos, wherein he gives readings of his poem Empty Words. Specifically, he appears to be reading from the final part of the poem, which is one of the most impenetrable things ever written, containing not a single recognizable word but instead lines such as "rstsprea ce d ncuyth e ch hchsy" and "aici brnkr m ndthi n e llgr o". He's also reading it very, very slowly and in a monotone voice. So Cage's performance consists of dry utterances of meaningless syllables separated by long stretches of silence. And I mean long:  the silences here sometimes last minutes (well, at least it feels like minutes... and I'm pretty sure that's because it really is literally minutes).

In fact, there was a deep ideological divide between Cage and Ra; what surprises me is not their very different performances here but the fact that they ever performed together at all. Most significantly, Cage was never a fan of improvisation or jazz. Indeed, for much of his career he actively rejected them. The reason is simple: the central feature of his mature aesthetic theory was a dogmatic rejection of self-expression. In literally every single artwork that he created from the late 40s onward, he sought to remove the voice of the composer and performer. This couldn't be more opposed to ideology of jazz and improvisation, particularly free jazz, the ultimate arena for unbridled expression in music.

Cage eventually softened to jazz and improvisation, but he never really accepted them. One of Cage's goals when composing Imaginary Landscape no. 5 was to overcome his distaste for jazz, and to this end he used 42 jazz records in the original version. But ultimately, Cage treated the records as mere raw material for his chance operations. You could substitute any other 42 records and you'd have just as legitimate a performance of the piece (it's explicitly composed for any 42 records). So I'm not sure in what sense this represents any kind of reconciliation with jazz.

Perhaps more significantly, he began to incorporate improvisation in his work in the mid-70s with the beautiful Child of Tree. Even here, however, Cage is only allowing on his own terms. Child of Tree is written for amplified plant materials, and as I explain in my review of this piece a notable problem with using a plant as an instrument that you can't really learn how to play it, since if you practice on it too much, it will simply disintegrate. This leaves room for improvisation without expression. An improvisation on a plant will have to be based more on exploration and discovery.

So, despite his appreciation for jazz and improvisation in specific circumstances, he never budged on his basic commitment to eliminating self-expression. I suspect that he always retained some resistance to the totally unrestrained, freeform freak-out brand of jazz that Ra exhibits here.

With that in mind, I can't help but hear a kind of passive-aggressive rivalry in this album. After all, for all his talk about removing the voice of composers, removing self-expression, etc, Cage can't give up his voice completely. He still has to choose what piece to play. I wonder: why did he choose to give a solo vocal performance of Empty Words? A performance that is stubbornly subdued and sterile, the polar opposite to Ra's work? Well, I think it's his way of digging in his heels against this unrestrained improviser. (Viewing it this way makes Cage's parts rather more entertaining, even somewhat amusing.) And it looks like Cage wins: on the short collaborative part, Cage obstinately continues his lifeless reading of Empty Words, while Ra pulls back, providing just a few sparse, quiet synthesizer noises.

My final verdict: Ra's parts are enormous fun. Cage's parts are frankly a bit boring. Empty Words is an absolutely beautiful poem - one of my favourite of Cage's written works - but much of its beauty derives from its visual elements, which obviously are lost here. Overall then, this joint performance is something of a disappointment. It would have been interesting to hear these two very distinct but both very radical musicians work together on something more seriously.

(This post is adapted from the short review I wrote here.)

Water Walk (1959)

This was written specifically to be performed on television - it premiered on an Italian TV show, and then later was performed on the American show I've Got a Secret. There's a recording of the latter performance on youtube that's well worth checking out. As a recording of the composition, it's not great - it's fairly bad quality, and it isn't even a faithful performance since it should have involved radios, but Cage was unable to play these due to a union dispute. But as a piece of television, it's wonderfully bizarre, and there are couple of things about it that are notable. First, the interview before the performance contains one of my favourite Cage quotes. After the host points out that some people are going to laugh at his music, Cage responds, "I consider laughter preferable to tears." Second, more notably, people do laugh. But their laughter strikes me as perfectly good-natured. It really sounds like the audience is enjoying Cage's performance.

A lot of people are very dismissive of experimental music. Cage, unsurprisingly, tends to receive a great deal of criticism from these folks. I've long tried - thus far completely unsuccessfully - to persuade my girlfriend that he wasn't just a pretentious charlatan. He was a sincere composer, and some people genuinely enjoy his music. (No doubt that some people inspired by Cage are pretentious charlatans, but that's hardly his fault.) It's very difficult to shake the impression some people have that only "serious arty types" enjoy it, and really even they are only pretending to enjoy it. However, the reaction of the audience of I've Got a Secret suggests another way of approaching Cage's work: as something amusing, humorous, and fun. I don't think Cage ever encouraged people to see his work this way. But he didn't discourage this, either.

In fact, I think modern art in general would be far better received by the public if more people involved with it dropped the pretension, affectation, and dreariness and just embraced the fact that a lot of what they're doing is really very silly. One of my favourite contemporary artists is Jonathon Keats, largely because he clearly has a good sense of humour.

Anyway, I'm listening to a recording of Water Walk by a couple of fellas called "Duo Conradi-Gehlen". It's a really easy listen - only three minutes long, and much more active than usual for Cage: there's no silence, and loads of interesting sounds. Despite that this was composed to be both seen and heard, I think it works much better just hearing it. Aside from the fact that watching someone fill up a bathtub or turn on a radio is kinda boring, the sounds are bound to seem much more mundane if you can see them being produced. It removes the mystery and the sense of exploration.

Four Solos for Voice (93-96) (1988)

This one does exactly what it says on the tin: it's four solos for voice! In fact, each solo contains various different parts, which don't seem to have any relation to each other. We might veer from opera, to religious choral vocals, to spoken word, to weird experimental stuff. Similarly, none of the parts for one voice seem to have any relation to the parts for other voices; and since all the solos are played simultaneously, the result is rather a mess. A lovely mess, but a mess all the same. Some of the parts are actually fairly conventional - in fact, there were even a few times when I thought I heard snatches of tunes that I recognized, though these were possibly coincidences - but the bass might be doing some traditional religious thing, while the tenor is doing some kooky screaming, etc.

In a way, with all the different styles, and different things happening at the same time, this recalls the extreme multiplicity in Cage's work from the 60s - pieces like HPSCHD and 33 1/3 that play various unrelated things simultaneously. But where those pieces were chaotic walls of noise, this is notable for its simplicity. We have a bare-bones arrangement: only four voices, not manipulated in any way (aside from the basics like a bit of reverb). It's actually quite restful overall, even when the singers get more dramatic and energetic.

Just to place this in context: Solos for Voice 1 and 2 were composed in 1958 and 1960 respectively, to be performed with the Concert for Piano and Orchestra. Solos for Voice 3 to 92 were composed in 1970 as part of the Song Books. Then we have this final set of four solos in 1988, which comprise an independent piece.

Quartets I-VIII (1976)

Wait - what's going on? Have I selected the wrong track? Did they put the wrong CD in the "John Cage" case?

... well, no: this is John Cage. It's one of his "imitations", and it's possibly the most conventional of a surprisingly conventional bunch of compositions. Here, Cage worked with eight pieces by a few obscure 18th-century American composers, such as William Billings, Jacob French, and Andrew Law. Just what he did with those pieces, I'm not sure. One wonders at times: did he make any changes at all? The only hint that there actually is some Cage in this is that over its 37 minute running time, it doesn't really go anywhere; there's never any sense of building towards anything: it sets a pastoral, contemplative mood in the first few seconds and then just sticks with it till the end.

So I suppose this is somewhere between ambient, minimalism, and more standard classical - but make no mistake, it's far more standard classical than it is ambient or minimalism, and it retains a distinctive eighteenth-century American flavour. It conjures up images of open prairies, wagons crossing rolling hills, and dead Indians. Even the instrumentation is traditional, involving a standard orchestra, mostly strings. The one cool twist is that since this is written for an orchestra, and since each quartet contains (obviously) only four players, the players in each quartet are different, resulting in gradual, subtle timbral changes throughout the piece.

A very easy listen. Even including his earlier years, I don't think Cage ever wrote a composition quite as emotive and as traditionally melodic as this. It's John Cage for people who don't like John Cage. When I played two minutes of this to my girlfriend, she merely found it boring, rather than completely unlistenable, so a big improvement on the norm!

A Dip in the Lake (1978)

A large composition consisting of hundreds of recordings from a city, assembled together according to chance operations. A complete realization, recorded in various places in Chicago, is available for free on ubuweb: http://www.ubu.com/sound/cage_dip.html - 2 hours 20 minutes, so that's basically a double album of free Cage.

The city setting reminds me of a somewhat Cagean story. A few years ago, when I was out in a local city, I could hear what I thought was some sort of avant-garde noise/industrial band busking on a street nearby. I thought it sounded pretty good, but was surprised that a band like that would bother busking, as surely most people would hate it. Anyway, when I turned the corner, I saw that it wasn't a band at all, but construction workers doing some roadworks.

Anyway, unsurprisingly, we mostly hear some of the standard sounds of the city: a lot of traffic noise; snatches of music from car radios; trains chugging along; people talking; birds tweeting; construction work - etc etc. There are however a few surprises. There's the sound of what seemed like people playing golf at one point. In part 3 (Waltes 32-61), there's an odd buzzing noise, which is somewhat reminiscent of crickets chirping. One of my favourite noises occurs in part 4 (Marches 1-28): a beautiful, ethereal, high-pitched drone; it has a "glassy" timbre and seems to seep in from the distance. I have no idea what it is, but it's absolutely lovely. Occasionally some of the recordings are played backwards.

There's a lot of repetition. We might have, say, a two second clip of traffic noise, which is then repeated several times over a short space of time. It gives the impression of a record stuck on a loop (or several records stuck on a loop, since there's often more than one recording played at once), and creates an almost hypnotic rhythm. Similarly, many of the recordings start and stop, start and stop, start and stop.

So there's a fairly wide variety of sounds - mostly standard city sounds, but a few strange ones and a few more "organic" ones (birds and water), all intercut with each other in an often hypnotic way to build a rich soundscape.  It's all recognizably Earthly - but just with something slightly off. And actually, after listening to nearly 2 and half hours of this, even the more normal sounds become disconnected from their usual sources. I stop hearing the traffic drone as traffic and hear it instead hear it as just one interesting noise among many. All of these sounds are in their usual context - city sounds among city sounds - but the context is completely scrambled, so we hear even the most apparently mundane sounds in a new light.

Overall it evokes compositions like Rozart Mix, Variations IV, etc, but it's much calmer. Most of the sounds here are quiet and/or droney - traffic noise, wind, and so on - and there are long stretches of near-silence. A fairly easy listen, then, despite the mammoth length.

Two (1987)

This is a special one: it's the very first Number Piece! And with that in mind, it's... well, fairly inconsequential. 10 minutes long, for piano and flute. Actually, it might as well be One for piano, because at least on my recording, you can barely hear the flute - even when turning the volume up to the point that the piano becomes slightly uncomfortably loud (and this semms to be faithful to Cage's instructions, as he specified that the flute was to be played very quietly). It's a very quite wheeze in the distance, maybe like a soft wind. You might not even realize that it's playing until it stops.

The piano is surprisingly melodic, and unsurprisingly played slowly and softly. It brings to mind some of Cage's Satie-influened work. There's no indication here of the extreme, sustained dissonance that would become characteristic of later Number Pieces. It does however have the same mood of tranquility and stillness.

Nice enough I suppose, though it seems a bit like two instruments playing different pieces. Imagine the piano playing some Satie at a snail's pace tempo, with the flute playing some sort of extreme, minimal ambient.

Fifty-Eight (1992)

I mentioned in the last review that one of the problems with listening to Cage's music is that he often put a lot of emphasis on space - where the audience sits, where the performers are situated, the kind of place it's performed, etc - which, obviously, cannot be preserved in a recording. In few Cage compositions is the problem as acute as it is here, as this was designed for one specific courtyard! (The courtyard had fifty-eight arches; hence fifty-eight players: one for each arch.) Perhaps this explains why this is oddly neglected as far as Number Pieces go - my recording by Pannonisches Blasorchester is the only one that I'm aware of. Which is a pity, because this is a really wonderful piece of music. One of Cage's best, in my opinion.

Also, this particular recording is perhaps not ideal. There is a lot of audience noise. Mostly coughing, a few people shuffling around, and at one point I even heard what sounded like a baby crying out. That last one was probably just one of the instruments. But the audience certainly make themselves known. I suppose it's not very Cagean to complain about that. And I'm not really complaining; I wouldn't say it detracts from the music at all, but it would be interesting to hear a "pure" recording.

To be fair, the courtyard it was written for - Landhaushof in Graz - is, just going by the images on Google, very open and even appears to be right next to a road. It's to be expected, then, that a good deal of ambient sound will intrude into the piece. Indeed, it could be argued that this recording doesn't really go far enough on that end. Maybe during a normal performance of this, you could expect to hear a lot of people talking, and even cars driving by. Again, it would be interesting to hear that kind of recording, too.

Like most Number Pieces, it consists mostly of slow, long-held notes with a few short notes. However, it differs from most Number Pieces in that the dynamics are about the same for both long and short notes. So, don't be worried about drifting off to sleep to this one! (It's 45 minutes long, so falling asleep is a possibility.) You won't be jolted awake by a sudden, loud honk on a saxophone. Instead, this is pretty much ambient; and the music generally has a fairly soft timbre, being composed only for wind instruments. It drones away slowly and softly - gradually getting louder and quieter, as though it's breathing.

With so many instruments, it's often difficult to distinguish one from another, creating fuzzy mass of sound from which various specific sounds are brushed in and out. Overall it brings to mind rolling clouds, maybe a gathering storm. There are plenty of lovely low, deep notes. And it is, of course, unrelenting dissonant.  The stormy mood is emphasized somewhat about half-way through this recording, where people start shuffling about so much that they make a sound like rain pattering down (I'm not sure exactly how that sound arises - from clothes crinkling perhaps?). A fantastic piece!

Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras (1981)

There are a couple of interesting points about this piece. First, it's an important milestone in Cage's work as, supposedly, it's his first use of time-bracket notation. I say "supposedly" because I'm unclear what those timings were in For Paul Taylor and Anita Dencks if not time brackets. But I've read in a few places that time brackets proper started here.

With the use of time-brackets, it's immediately tempting to connect this to the Number Pieces. Personally, I would be wary of that temptation. I'm not sure there's all that much continuity between this and the Number Pieces. You can see an important difference in the title alone. Thirty pieces. Five orchestras. Whereas the main feature of most Number Pieces, even the ones involving large numbers of musicians, is simplicity and stillness, the focus here is on multiplicity, complexity, extravagance. This is as related to something like HPSCHD as it is to the Number Pieces (in both cases, not much).

Another notable difference is its use of repetition. In almost all the pieces, there is at least one instrument repeating a single note. None of these seem to be following any particular rhythm. It reminds me a little of Hymnkus, though the music here feels much more organic, and because of the short length of each piece (there are thirty pieces in about thirty minutes), none of them have a chance to develop gradually like Hymnkus does. Just as you're feeling tempted to describe it as "minimalist", the music is cut short and some new part starts. Again, Cage's focus here seems to be multiplicity. Cram in as much as possible. Quantity creates quality. Don't be afraid of waste. (I should note that Cage crams in plenty of silence and quiet parts, too. This is not nearly as loud and chaotic as HPSCHD.)


Second, I think, though I may be wrong about this, that this was also the first time Cage derived his compositional method from his visual art, here the series of paintings On the Surface. I'm not sure if I've ever seen On the Surface. I have a few collections on Cage's visual art, but not on me where I am right now; and I couldn't find anything on a brief search on Google. So I can't say whether the music feels similar to the artwork.

Nevertheless there is something more generally interesting to note about the use of paintings here. Visual art is, of course, a medium that necessarily exists in space; music, on the other hand, is generally seen as being an art of time rather than space. Cage felt that any strict division here would be a mistake. Granted, time is essential to music; but space need not be neglected. Indeed, it's impossible to neglect space entirely: where the musicians are placed, where you are in relation to them, what kinds of room is used, etc, will make a difference to the sounds you experience no matter what composition is being played. Even so, very few composers have shown much concern with space. Questions such as "where to place the musicians?", "what kind of room should this be performed?" are not traditionally ones with which composers have concerned themselves. Cage, however, was deeply concerned with space, especially during his later career. He tried to erode the boundaries between time-art and space-art. And I think that his use of paintings in his music composition was very much an expression of this concern.

(Re space and music in general: here's an interesting talk by David Byrne about the significant influence that venue - space - has on music. Cage's interest in space had some justification.)

Importantly, the use of space extends to the music itself. The five orchestras are placed apart from each other and arranged in a pentagon around the audience. Unfortunately, I can't really comment on this aspect of the piece, as it's obviously impossible to preserve it in a recording. It's one of the things that makes being a fan of Cage somewhat frustrating. Much of his work is not really suited to recordings (which is one of the main reasons why Cage himself was fairly hostile to recordings). I will probably never hear anything more than a cheap imitation of Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras.

One10 (1992)

This makes an interesting contrast to the piece I heard last time, the Freeman Etudes. Like those Etudes, One10 is for solo violin. Beyond this, the pieces could not be more different. The Freeman Etudes is a composition of extraordinary complexity, which jumps rapidly across the whole field of possible notes. One10 is a late Number Piece, and - well, you probably know the drill by now: it's extremely minimal, consisting simply of long drones separated by silences, played in a uniform way without vibrato, without plucking, without any other extended techniques. It's 24 minutes long and contains maybe 40-something notes overall.

I must say that listening to this is a thoroughly refreshing experience after 100 minutes of the Freeman Etudes! Maybe this is the best way to appreciate Cage's more extreme Number Pieces. But what's notable about it is that it shows Cage's skill as a composer, particularly his ability to use chance as a tool for achieving all sorts of different ends. When listening to Cage, it's important to remember that though chance is an important part of his aesthetic, it is only one part. Chance is Cage's way of removing his own voice and emotions. It's what allows him to explore and discover. But that doesn't mean he has no destination in mind: he reaches a determinate place in an unpredictable way. This fact is really brought home when listening to radically different pieces like the Freeman Etudes and One10: the different ideas they embody, and the different sounds that we hear.

Turning to the sounds in question, it is definitely sound that is the focus here. The drones are very long, so silence has a fairly minor role, unlike with most of the other Ones and Twos. Interestingly, the drones often don't seem so much like a violin. I believe that most of it was played on harmonics, resulting in lots of high-pitched, screeching notes, occasionally quite reminiscent of whistling wind. At first, the mood seems agitated, tense - certainly, the drones are too harsh to be ambient, so it demands attention, forcing us to focus on the tiniest variations in the sound. And as the piece continues, without building up or going anywhere, without piling on more tension or releasing it, you soon come to accept the sounds as they are. I don't really know of any listening experience quite like this (well, aside from a few other Number Pieces). But I love it.

Freeman Etudes (1980/1990)

The Freeman Etudes for solo violin is one of Cage's most notorious compositions: a contender for his most devilishly difficult to perform, and this from a composer notable for his many devilishly difficult pieces. The dates he wrote it tell part of the story. Cage originally began this in the late 70s for Paul Zukofsky. As far as I understand it, Cage's basic method was that after writing a note, he would ask Zukofsky what notes (and with what playing styles) it would be possible to perform right away after it, then used chance operations to determine which of those notes would be next. The piece is written with extreme precision. For each note, Cage determines exactly the duration, the amplitude, the position of the bow on the string, the style of bowing (or fingering); slight microtonal variations in pitch, etc; and since all of these are determined for each note, all of these properties can change from note to note. Worse, it is to be played extremely fast.

Cage completed books 1 and 2, comprising etudes I-XVI, in 1980. But even Paul Zukofsky, an extremely skilled violinist, was complaining that the pieces were in some cases simply impossible to perform. Rather than compromise his vision for the composition and find a way to make it a little easier, Cage simply gave up the project.

Until, that is, he met Irvine Arditti, who not only could perform the first two books, but played them even faster than Cage had directed. This inspired Cage to return to the Etudes, completing books 3 and 4, etudes XVII-XXXII, in 1990. So thankfully we have a full set, but that hiatus is certainly telling. As far as I know, there is no other case of Cage writing a composition that even he concedes is too difficult to perform (and as I noted, he has plenty of very difficult compositions).

Anyway, I'm listening to the recordings by mode records, with Arditti on violin. There's probably nobody else in the world who can play this as well as Arditti. It's not that we lack skilled violinists, but there aren't many of them who are willing to spend years obsessively practising a composition that sounds more like a squeaky door than violin music. This point also brings me to the difficulties that confront any potential listeners. I'm not joking about this sounding like a squeaky door; and even with with Arditti's speedy playing, we still have about 100 minutes of this stuff.

Listening to it carefully, what immediately struck me was, unsurprisingly, its extreme complexity. This stands out from Cage's other impossible compositions in being so obviously impossible. For example, take the Etudes Australes for piano, which I reviewed in my first review on this blog. As I mentioned in that review, just listening to the Etudes Australes, it doesn't sound particularly difficult. Of course, I'm no pianist, so what would I know about that? But with the Freeman Etudes, though I'm no violinist either, it's immediately obvious that this must be an absolute bastard to play. And this, of course, was Cage's point. The Freeman Etudes, for Cage, has an important political message: in the face of an apparently impossible world situation, this composition demonstrates the possibility of the apparently impossible.

Fair enough, but that idea is communicated as well in twenty seconds as in 100 minutes. The impression I have listening to the whole thing is not so much an inspiring political message; it's more like watching an Olympic event. And the mere fact that it requires so much virtuosity is a novelty that sustains interest only for so long.

It doesn't help that really, once you've heard one etude, you've heard them all. Despite the complexity of these pieces, they end up seeming very uniform. None of them develop or go anywhere, and there's no variation in arrangement; it's just an onslaught of completely unrelated notes. The wonderful free improv guitarist Derek Bailey once described his style as "playing without a memory". What Bailey meant was "playing without a memory of previous musical traditions*. But we could interpret that phrase to mean "playing without a memory of the other notes I have just played". This is the impression conveyed by the Freeman Etudes. Each sound connects to no past, and points to no future. Eventually, it all just becomes a fuzzy mass of scrapes and squeaks (there's not even any variation in length of the etudes, all being about three minutes). Consider changing patterns of static on a television screen: there is little to differentiate one from another.

What's sad, given the difficulty of performing this, is that I'm guessing that the response 99% of people would have to it is simply: look disgusted and say "my 3-year-old kid could play better than that!" Of course, that's a really stupid criticism. But it does hint at something important. This piece could be far easier, and the experience for the listener would not be much different. (That's not to say, of course, that you can't tell how difficult this is. Just that similar overall sounds and similar complexity could be produced far more easily.)

The above comments probably make me come across as much more negative about this piece than I actually feel. Don't get me wrong; I just wonder about Cage's intentions for the piece. In fact, I absolutely love the Freeman Etudes. Bear in mind, however, that if you gave your 3-year-old kid a violin and recorded whatever sounds they bashed out, I'd probably love that too.

Two6 (1992)

A twenty-minute Number Piece for piano and violin; as you can probably guess, its most distinctive features are its slow pace and minimal arrangement.

It does however have a few distinctive features. Notably, some of the piano parts are derived from Cage's piece Extended Lullaby (1991), which itself is one Cage's Satie pieces, derived from Satie's Vexations. Unfortunately I've never heard Extended Lullaby. But the parts excerpted here clearly show the strong Satie influence: consonant, delicate, meandering melodies. The rest of the piano parts, penned by Cage, are just ascending scales. Again, they're consonant, and played softly, so merge well with the Extended Lullaby excerpts (indeed, without careful listening, it probably won't be obvious which parts are derived from Satie and which aren't). They do stand out in a way, though, since a simple move up a scale leaves you with the distinct impression that the music is going somewhere; in contrast to the meandering mood of the piece overall.

At first, for about two minutes, the violin plays a high-pitch, airy drone - it's more reminiscent of whistling wind than a violin, very atmospheric, and makes for an interesting contrast with the piano. It would have been cool if this kind of thing had gone on longer. After this, however, the violin becomes relatively active. Passages contain a number of notes, that get higher and lower and higher and lower in a narrow pitch range, like the kind of style used in Ten, and as in that piece, the music here evokes a rocking motion (imagine a person saying "ee-oo-ee-oo-ee-oo"; that's sort of what it sounds like). The mood of these parts is surprisingly plaintive. Maybe it's something about the particular timbre of the violin combined with that kind of playing, but the result definitely seems more emotive than usual for Cage. Anyway, these passages alternate with the quiet drones (though unfortunately, the lovely wind-like sound of the first drone never makes another appearance).

So this is Two in two ways: two instruments, the piano and violin; and each instrument plays two kinds of things: the piano alternates between Satie and Cage, the violin, between quiet drones and more active, emotive parts. Very interesting listening, and often very beautiful. (When I listened to this yesterday, I wasn't quite so keen on it. The violin and piano seemed kinda incongruous, they didn't fit together well. I think I felt that the sad mood of the violin clashed with the extreme tranquility of the piano. And indeed I still think that they seem incongruous. But that tension between the two moods has very much grown on me. There's a famous Zen story that Cage liked to tell about a monk who achieves Enlightenment and, when he's asked how it feels, responds: "I'm just as miserable as ever." This piece, with its contradictory moods, reminds me of that.)

Fontana Mix (1958)

As you know, my goal with this blog is to listen to and comment on all of John Cage's indeterminate music. But what exactly do I mean by "indeterminate music"? It may be worth saying something about how this is defined. Broadly, there are two basic types of indeterminacy: (1) music in which chance operations are used to write the composition, and (2) music in which relevant parts of the composition are left in some ways vague. In the case of (1), two performances of the same composition should sound pretty much the same: the composer might use chance to generate e.g. the pitches, but once the composition is written, the performers will play the same pitches every time it's performed. In the case of (2), however, two performances of the same composition might sound radically different, because e.g. exactly which pitches to play is simply left unspecified.

I mention this here because Fontana Mix is a wonderful example of indeterminacy in the second sense (and in the first, actually, but of course Cage had been using chance operations for years by this point). Part of this indeterminacy arises from its use of graphic notation: its score consists wholly of transparent sheets of grids, dots, and lines that are placed on top of each other. Ignoring the music for a moment, the score, like many Cage scores, is just a beautiful piece of visual art in itself:

A tangent: when Cage was younger he studied under Arnold Schoenberg, who supposedly agreed to teach him on the condition that he devote himself entirely to music. However, Cage had always been interested in visual art - perhaps he saw graphic notation as giving him a way to explore this interest while keeping his promise? (Of course, Cage would eventually flagrantly break the promise anyway, producing pure visual art at places like Crown Point Press (and I'm very thankful this, since much of his visual art is stunningly beautiful).)

Anyway, Fontana Mix pushes indeterminacy of type (2) to an extreme. First, the way that all the sheets are put together is determined by chance operations before each performance, so in fact no two performers of Fontana Mix will use the same score. Nor need they use the same sound sources, since it's for any number of performers using any kinds of instruments. Further, Cage says nothing about how the grids, dots, or lines are to be interpreted, so all of the elements are left undefined. The same dot might represent a one-second long violin note in one performance, and a ten-second sound of tearing paper in another. A line might represent a note rising in pitch in one performance; in another, it might be taken as a visual guide for how the performers are to be placed on the stage. Etc. All of this is to be determined by the performers.

It should go without saying that different performances of this may sound radically different. Indeed, literally none of the sounds you hear in a performance of Fontana Mix have been specified by Cage. With compositions like this, indeterminacy is so great that it calls into question the very nature of composition. What, exactly, has Cage composed here? I read a lovely comment on a youtube video of Fontana Mix (I don't have the link, but I'm pretty sure this is verbatim): "The realization of the score is itself a new composition. In a way, Cage did not compose this - he composed the opportunity for it to exist."

The recording that I'm listening to is, I think, the original version created by Cage himself on magnetic tape. It's very reminiscent of Cage's earlier Williams Mix: it consists mostly of a lot of static noise that seems to have been electronically processed in various ways. There's harsh white noise, soft radio static, and some of the static stops and start quickly, giving it a kind of staccato rhythm. Throughout the piece, there are also quick snatches of music, voices, electronic beeps and tones, and found sounds. Imagine somebody rapidly flipping through radio channels, landing mostly on static, and then processing the result. It is wonderfully chaotic!

It's definitely worthwhile to check out other versions of the piece - there's a few on youtube, last time I looked.

HPSCHD (1969)

This was composed with Lejaren Hiller, a composer famous (well, maybe not so famous, but known among those who are into modern classical) for his work in computer music. Unfortunately I haven't heard much else by Hiller - just a few pieces on youtube, but I enjoyed them all, and I can see why he'd be a good match for Cage given his experimental approach to composition ("experimental" both in the sense that his music is very weird, and in the literal sense of doing experiments with new ways of producing sound).

It's worth noting that the original performance of HPSCHD involved a whole load of visual material as well; plus, it was spread out over a wide space so that the audience could hear and see different things as they walked around. Obviously, all of these elements are unfortunately lost in this recording. Still, perhaps this isn't such a bad thing, since the music alone provides more than enough to digest. HPSCHD is complete chaos. It's one of Cage's most noisy, complex, and abrasive works.

As far as I can tell, there are two basic types of music used here. The first thing we hear is the computer music. This consists of lots of atonal beeps and bloops, many of them with a scratchy timbre so it sounds rather like a primitive synthesizer. I find it reminiscent of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, though it's slower, less loud, and less industrial.

After about 10 seconds or so, a completely generic classical piece starts playing, possibly Mozart or something along those lines (Cage used a number of classical pieces in this, Mozart included), played on a harpsichord (hence HPSCHD). Classical harpsichord music continues throughout. Not much of it is particularly interesting in itself. It's all the sort of classical music that sounds familiar but that you can't place - the kind of thing you imagine being played on a film or TV show when the soundtrack calls for some generic classical. At first, the juxtaposition of this with the atonal computer music is kinda jarring and actually somewhat amusing. It's perhaps because this first piece has a jolly, carefree mood, as though it's blissfully oblivious to, or just doesn't give a shit about, all the terrible noise happening all around it. But ultimately, I think all the music meshes together well. As the piece continues, you soon become accustomed to the odd musical combinations; and it helps that the harpsichord has a very metallic, machine-like timbre, making a good complement to the computer music.

It would be interesting to hear the computer music on its own. Here, it functions more as a background to the harpsichord pieces. There's generally more than one harpsichord piece playing at once - and obviously there is no attempt to merge them together in any coherent way, just or two or three or however many tracks played simultaneously. Hence the complete chaos I mentioned earlier. In this context, all those uninteresting classical pieces becomes very interesting indeed. I love HPSCHD. It's a glorious, messy collision of future and past, with its odd clash of computerized sounds and generic classical melodies.

TV Köln (1958)

For a solo pianist, though this also includes percussive noises, which I assume were produced by hitting the piano, a radio, and in the middle of the piece there's a short, quiet creaking/groaning sort of sound. The radio is also quiet and produces snatches of foreign voices. Overall, it's reminiscent of Water Music - TV Köln has similar instrumentation, a similarly sparse arrangement, and the same night-time atmosphere.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to get much enjoyment out of this because it's so short: only 1'20", and really it's shorter than that since the last 20 seconds are silent. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly not bad: it has a nice mood and an interesting set of sounds, and at 1'20" it's hardly going to overstay its welcome. It all just seems rather inconsequential. It's a shame Cage didn't allow it to develop for a few more minutes... as it is, I'm left wondering what the point of it was (I guess the point was simply to make a few nice sounds, and to that extent I suppose it's successful).

Sixty-Eight (1992)

First of all, I apologise for my absence over the past week. I've been quite busy, mostly because I've just moved from home to university. My target when I started this blog was one review per day, and I'll try to get back to that - though of course it depends on how much work I have...

Anyway, onto one of my favourite Cage compositions: Sixty-Eight! Essentially, we begin with a number of instruments playing in unison. Then silence. Then, a number of instruments playing in unison, though this time on a different note. Another silence. Then a number of instruments playing in unison, again on a different note... and so on, to the end of the piece. Ultimately then this piece is a series of drones separated by silences, in which multiple instruments play a single note in unison. There are fifteen such drones, spread over half an hour.

Probably thanks to Cage's use of time-brackets, allowing the performers freedom over when to start and stop, the drones build up and recede gradually. They wax and wane in a cyclical manner; it's evocative of something like slow breathing, or perhaps the sea that washes in and out with each wave.

The "series of drones" structure is in itself quite interesting, but the style of playing is also notable. Unlike most Number Pieces, this is, of course, not especially dissonant (well, in fact, it doesn't sound quite as consonant as you'd expect from unison playing, so I wonder if this might have been one of the many Number Pieces in which Cage used slight imperfections of tuning, to produce imperfect unisons). It also features no sudden, loud sounds. So, this is as close as Cage comes to traditional ambient music - slow, not intrusive, doesn't demand attentive listening. This could easily fade into the background; you could even fall asleep to it, and it won't jolt you awake with sharp, loud bangs scattered randomly through it.

What I love most about Sixty-Eight is its fascinating exploration of timbre. Here, Cage has a full orchestra to play with, and he embellishes this with liberal use of non-standard instruments: for example, I heard something that sounded like a Tibetan singing bowl, evoking wind; then later, literally the sound of wind produced by a wind machine; one drone included an odd rattling noise; another, beautiful, sparkling chimes; another had something that sounded a bit like rainsticks (perhaps an appearance of the amplified cactus?); another included low, rumbling drums. Each drone has its own unique character. In fact, Cage could have probably taken each particular drone and extended it to, say, five minutes to form a stand-alone piece. This is definitely one of the most active and varied Number Pieces, despite its slow pace.

Five2 (1991)

A five minute piece for three clarinets, English horn, and timpani. The timpani is silent for the first two minutes, the English horn is silent for the last two, and the clarinets play throughout.

Anyway, there's not really much to say about this. It's a standard Number Piece: dissonant, slow, and with a few extended silences. Most of the notes are held for a long time, and the dynamics are consistently soft.

The horn seems to have much the same timbre as the clarinets - I couldn't really distinguish them - so the timpani provides some nice variety, in the form of a quiet, rumbling percussive sound, reminiscent of distant thunder. In contrast to the fairly bright sound of the clarinets and horn, it suggests anticipation and perhaps unease, giving the second half of the piece a somewhat darker tone. Not a particularly notable composition, but it's lovely as usual.

Four2 (1990)

A stunningly beautiful and in many ways fairly surprising Number Piece for choir. As with most Cage pieces, the pace is slow: each person sings a single note, held for a long time - I mean a very long time, what sometimes seems like a superhuman length of time - and then rests. There is always at least one person singing, usually more; so this is built from a number of often overlapping, long, single notes.

So far, so good, nothing unusual there. What's surprising about it is its extreme consonance. This is, without any doubt, the most consonant Number Piece. It actually reminds me much more of Cage's "imitations" (Cheap Imitation, Hymns and Variations, Quartets I-VIII) than his Number Pieces. Now as far as I know, this is an entirely original work. I think it was composed for a high school choir, which might explain why Cage chose to work with more traditional material. Anyway, frankly, coming from a steady diet of Cage, this is almost overwhelmingly consonant, sort of like eating really sweet chocolate cake after having had a month off all junk food. I'm not complaining though. I love chocolate cake. And this composition is absolutely beautiful, in a traditional way.

Interestingly, over the last two minutes, standard Cage seems to reassert himself a little: the piece takes a darker turn as slightly more dissonant notes emerge, some of which are high-pitch nearly to the point of being shrill. The mood becomes rather more uneasy. It ends on an unresolved tension.

This leads us to another surprising thing about Four2: whereas most Number Pieces don't seem to progress or go anywhere, this has a clear structure - a simple structure, to be sure, but given the relatively short length (7 minutes), it's easy to pick up. The volume gradually increases over the first minute, then is stable until about three and a half minutes, at which point the music goes fairly quiet. This lasts until five minutes, when the somewhat more dissonant notes come in, and the volume increases. This section lasts till the end. Hence: 0'00" to 3'30": consonant loud - 3'30" to 5'00": consonant quiet - 5'00" to 7'00": dissonant loud. It is of course entirely possible that this structure arose entirely by chance. Perhaps if Cage had written 70 minutes rather than 7, we would have lots of random changes in volume and consonance/dissonance (or perhaps it would have the same general structure, but this would be unnoticeable when stretched to that length). But as it is, it's very difficult not to hear this as evincing some sort of overall development.

The mood throughout is one of yearning and devotion, with a religious/spiritual undertone. The use of the choir sets the religious atmosphere. Indeed, the choir sounds otherworldly, simply angelic (as I said, the notes are held for a superhuman length of time...). Part of this is that I'm listening to the recording by Mode, which boasts some incredible production. The voices are very resonant, and since there are no vocal acrobatics, no vibrato or whatever, each note rings out absolutely pure (this is probably partly why the consonance is so striking). I find it deeply moving. I don't know what prompted Cage to write this, but it really is an entrancing composition, well worth hearing.

Atlas Eclipticalis (1962)

One of the more infamous entries in Cage's catalogue, as it was the subject of a disastrous performance in 1964 by the New York Philharmonic, presented by Leonard Bernstein. The audience hated it, and so did the orchestra, who pretty much ignored Cage's score and just messed around. You can hear this performance here (Atlas Eclipticalis starts at about 11:30, but I'd recommend listening to the whole video as it includes an introduction by Bernstein and a free improvisation by the orchestra). Quite frankly, I really like it that performance. In fact I love it. It's right up my street, I think it sounds fantastic. I can see why Cage was annoyed though.

Beyond this disaster, Atlas Eclipticalis is notable for being the first composition that Cage wrote using star charts - I believe by simply copying the stars onto paper and placing staves over them, giving the notes (then using other properties of the stars, such as magnitude, to determine the volume and duration of the notes). Hence this is Cage's earliest composition in which natural phenomena plays a notable role. I'm not sure, however, whether there was any significance in the use of stars, or if it was simply a more expedient way of generating chance than the endless coin-tossing required for the I-Ching.

Certainly, at first blush, it doesn't really evoke starlight. Part of the reason for this is that it includes up to 86 instruments, of many different kinds, some of which seem to be nonstandard - for example, towards the beginning of the recording I'm listening to I heard what sounded like amplified rustling paper, then later, there was an occasional metallic rattling noise. With all of this variety, it's more evocative of, say, the complexity of the rainforest, than the minimal and austere image of the night sky.

That's at first blush. However, it soon becomes clear that the piece boasts extreme variation in dynamics. Scattered throughout it are a number of very short but very loud sounds, which force you to play it at a relatively low volume. Here is the waveform of the first 20 minutes in Audacity:

So you have to turn the volume down, and with that, most of the instruments fade into the background, barely perceptible or just plain imperceptible. There are occasionally fairly long stretches where I can't hear anything at all; and when I can hear the instruments, it's often difficult to distinguish them. They form a quiet but intricate canvas, with loud bangs suddenly and randomly popping out of it. And now, I very much have the impression of the night sky. (With the quiet music being the black background, and the short, loud sounds being specks of starlight. There are even a few drum rolls of mid-amplitude that remind me of clouds drifting across the sky.) In fact, if you amplify the quieter parts and the silences, you find that they are just as active as the louder parts - they even have similar extremes of dynamics - much as a telescope peering into apparently empty space will reveal lots of hidden stars and galaxies. It's a lot of fun to play around with the recording, and discover music hidden beneath its surface.

This piece allows for discoveries in more ways than one. The score is for 86 instruments, but a performance may use any combination of those. Eberhard Blum has a wonderful version for three flutes, which of course is a radically different take on the piece, very minimal and quiet. It doesn't evoke starlight, though... it doesn't really evoke anything, but it is lovely to listen to. So it's well worth checking out different recordings of this.

Some of "The Harmony of Maine" (1978)

This piece for solo organ is one of Cage's "imitations", this time based on The Harmony of Maine by Supply Belcher, hence its title. The Harmony of Maine is a collection of hymns from the late 1700s; Cage uses chance procedures to delete some notes, extend or shorten others, alter the registration of the organ, etc. So this is in the tradition of other imitations like Cheap Imitation, Hymns and Variations, and Quartets I-VIII. If you enjoy those, check this out, and vice versa.

As in those other pieces, the result of Cage's modifications is a composition whose melodic and harmonic content is surprisingly (for Cage) consonant and traditional, but that doesn't really go anywhere, doesn't develop musically. There is no tension and release, no emotional development, there are no cadences and no memorable melodies. If you've heard the first minute, you'll know exactly what to expect of the next forty minutes.

Cage's technique strips almost everything away, leaving only a ghost of the original: a collection of notes that seem to float in the ether, unconnected to each other, and an impression of its overall mood. Or at least what I guess is its overall mood: I have never actually heard The Harmony of Maine (I did look it up on youtube but couldn't find any videos), but this piece clearly retains the religious overtones. The melodies are solemn and hymn-like; and, of course, the use of the organ immediately brings a monastic atmosphere to the music. Indeed, I think that the organ was an excellent choice in general. Aside from being well-suited to the religious theme, the weighty, magisterial quality of its sound contrasts beautifully with the unrelenting stillness of the composition. I always feel like organs are saying something deep and important, about God, or marriage, or death. Yet here the organ says nothing. It goes nowhere.

I also love the different variety of timbres that the organ produces. Since each note is allowed to ring out for a fairly long time, you can really focus on the various colours of the sounds. (With Cage's more traditional pieces, instrumentation can make a big difference. It's interesting to compare the version of this piece for guitar, produced by Marc Ribot, which can be heard here. As much as I like Ribot, I think this works far better on organ.) A lovely piece. Big thumbs up from me.

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).