John Cage reviews

20th Century: American Scene with Tai Murray and Ashley Wass

The opening movement of Copland’s Violin Sonata is dominated by a clipped, recitativo style of writing that eschews big, cumulative gestures and can seem inconsequential. With the American violinist Tai Murray, it is anything but that. Her rosined, folksy tone has you listening as though to a genial conversationalist, the soft-spoken piano of Ashley Wass providing apt, satisfying punctuation.

John Cage: As It Is

Those who consider John Cage to be the king of chaos, ruling over a world of disconnected, random events, may be surprised by this wonderful CD. It comprises early works for solo voice, solo piano and duets for piano and voice. Many of them are conventionally melodic with fairly straightforward harmonies. However, these works map Cage’s shift away from pitch-based structures to time-based structures, conveyed through rhythm and irregular phrasing. And the harmonies often keep the music quite static, suspending time and erasing narrative.

John Cage Journeys in Sound

‘I think our aim should be to have more and more access to the enjoyment of life,’ says John Cage in this lucid and eminently watchable DVD which is packed with people and history and some wonderful performances of Cage’s music.

John Cage Sonatas & Interludes

The prepared piano is perhaps John Cage’s most famous invention. He created it out of necessity in 1940, when he was composing music for a dance by Syvilla Fort. She wanted an ‘African’ sound so Cage modified a piano. He did this with screws, bolts, pencil rubbers and draft-proofing material placed in the strings of the instrument. The result was a series of clunks, buzzes, pings and rattles. Exquisitely exotic.

John Cage Sonatas for Unprepared Piano

The prepared piano is perhaps John Cage’s most famous invention. He created it out of necessity in 1940, when he was composing music for a dance by Syvilla Fort. She wanted an ‘African’ sound so Cage modified a piano. He did this with screws, bolts, pencil rubbers and draft-proofing material placed in the strings of the instrument. The result was a series of clunks, buzzes, pings and rattles. Exquisitely exotic.

How To Get Out Of The Cage: A Year With John Cage

Cage Music for Piano Vol. 4

Chance and indeterminacy are not the same thing but they were both significant concepts underpinning John Cage’s work from the early 1950s onwards. He used them in different ways and devised techniques for creating both in order to free his music from his own taste, ego, likes and dislikes.

This three-CD set beautifully demonstrates Cage’s aesthetic in a series of virtuoso performances involving a fabulous array of piano sounds and playing techniques.

Collection: A Chance Operation Ð The John Cage Tribute

In tribute to the composer, who died in 1992, these discs include many works besides Cage’s own. Most are close to him in spirit; some are engaging, many are merely curiosities. They are seemingly produced in association with Gay Men’s Health Crisis, though it isn’t clear whether the buyer is automatically helping to fund AIDS services. Cage disapproved of the recording medium. But an attempt is made here to encourage the listener’s participation in a way Cage might have approved of.

Cage: One11; 103

One11 is a visual counterpart to Cage’s ‘silent’ composition 4:33, questioning our concepts of emptiness. ‘No space is empty,’ he said. ‘Light will show what is in it.’ The film is ‘about’ the play of light on more-or-less plain surfaces, shot in gritty black-and-white: I guess shooting in colour would have made it a film about light and colour, rather than pure light. It’s also about the movements of the lights and camera, devised in advance by a computer programme, created in consultation with the random principles of I Ching.

Cage: Chorals; One6

If you were as impressed as I was by Irvine Arditti’s staggering performances of John Cage’s more-difficult-than-they-sound Freeman Études a few years back (Mode 32 & 37), you’ll probably be interested in his follow-up volume in Mode’s complete Cage violin music survey. The 1978 Chorals alter the pitches of Satie’s Socrate in microtonal increments, based on chance operations. Arditti shaves about one minute off Paul Zukofsky’s 1991 premiere recording (Musical Observations) and connects Cage’s recalcitrant pitches with a greater sense of colour and line.

Cage, Henck

Since numerous first-rate recordings of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano flood the market, the competitive stakes run higher with each new version that appears. Although Cage left painstakingly explicit instructions as to where to position the various screws, nuts, bolts, erasers and other such implements on or in-between the strings of a concert grand, the resultant sonorities differ from instrument to instrument. Suffice it to say that Cage’s ‘one-person-percussion-ensemble’ has rarely sounded as sumptuous, timbrally varied or alluring in terms of sheer colour as here.

Part/Cage/Scelsi

President Nixon, with a self-conscious eye to the future, views his meeting with Premier Chou En-Lai in John Adams’s Nixon in China as a point of simultaneous transformation and transfixion. The libretto’s paradox is an apt reminder of the minimalistic essence of Adams’s work and of the work of others who have taken this path.

Cage: In a Landscape; Music for Marcel Duchamp; Souvenir; A Valentine Out of Season; Suite for Toy Piano; Dream; Bacchanale; Prelude for Meditation

John Cage traced his musical and philosophical ancestry back to Erik Satie, whose inscrutable urbanity is strongly evoked in Dream (1948). But a lot of the music on this disc sounds distinctly oriental and Drury’s pacific approach brings out the Zen in Cage. Bacchanale (1938), his earliest work for prepared piano, is given a lot more life and character on Alan Feinberg’s recent disc on Argo. Here, there’s nothing to frighten the horses. Even Souvenir, a 12-minute organ piece from 1983, is much prettier than most of Cage’s later music. Adrian Jack

Cage: Sonatas and Interludes; Lecture 'Composition in retrospect'

It was Arnold Schoenberg, no less, who described John Cage as an inventor rather than a composer, implying that he was good on ideas, less convincing at working them out. But in one case Cage’s inventive mind and the music it produced went hand in hand; in 1940 he made the first prepared piano, discovering that by placing pieces of metal and felt across the strings of a concert grand he could obtain a whole new sound-world, one that was purged of most of the associations of Western art music which he was already beginning to mistrust.

Cage: Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano; The Perilous Night; Two Pastorales; Daughters of the Lonesome Isle; Mysterious Adventure; Bacchanale

Transforming the piano by inserting bits and pieces between its strings might appear limiting. But, as the German pianist Steffen Schleiermacher’s performances of John Cage’s music for prepared piano show, the inventor of this delightful ‘extended’ instrument brought astonishing imagination and resourcefulness to his task. These three discs are not only carefully prepared (in all senses), but also the first to assemble the composer’s complete works for his invention in a single set.

Cage: Litany for the Whale

This new disc of John Cage’s vocal works is an eminently worthwhile project. It’s a brave compilation, taken not just from the more listener-friendly pieces of early in Cage’s career or of recent years, but also from the more experimental and challenging works of the Sixties and Seventies. The centrepiece is the 25-minute Litany for the Whale from 1980, in which Cage constructs winding melodies for two antiphonal voices from just five notes assigned to the letters of the word ‘whale’.

Cage/Ives/Sessions

Ever since Beethoven took the piano sonata to an exalted level, composers have been daunted by the prospect of following his example. I can, however, think of one exception, the English composer John White, who has felt relaxed enough about it to produce well over a hundred sonatas. Peter Lawson’s excellent disc collects three powerful works each exploring its own world, and you can’t very comfortably listen to one immediately after the other. Ives’s Sonata No.

Henze, Ta•ra, Smith Brindle, Carter, Cage, Stockhausen, Sciarrino & Tanguy

Whether the young Italian percussionist Jonathan Faralli’s excellent new disc features the ‘most important’ solo percussion works of the late 20th century (as the booklet note claims) is certainly open to debate: Reginald Smith Brindle’s Orion M 42 is an evocative sound-picture of a star cloud, pleasant but hardly ground-breaking, while John Cage’s Cartridge Music is actually scored for any instruments. But Faralli proves himself an exceptionally gifted performer, conjuring a bewildering variety of sounds and textures from often very simple resources.

Glass, Cage

The booklet note remarks on Brubaker’s ‘splendid audacity’ in yoking together two such contrasted composers as John Cage and Philip Glass. It would have been audacious if Cage had got more than 10 minutes out of 63. As it is, we get vast swathes of Glass’s hypnotically repetitive music, in which two exquisitely gentle and ruminative Cage miniatures appear like oases.

Cage: Litany for the Whale; Aria; Aria No. 2; Five; The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs; Solo for Voice 22,

A tricky one. If you’re at all interested in John Cage you’ll have either loved or hated this CD when it was first issued several years ago. Cage’s scores often include indeterminate procedures and frequently rely on simple and unadorned vocal, instrumental and electronic sounds. At the time, this controlled, perfectionist, rather academic approach to Cage’s music was something of a novelty, but much of the spontaneity inherent in the music went missing.

Cage: Triple-Paced; Totem Ancestor; Ad Lib; Jazz Study; Works of Calder

Two factors make this addition to Mode’s ongoing complete John Cage edition particularly delightful. Firstly, Margaret Leng Tan is without doubt the most empathetic pianist ever to be associated with the composer’s work. Secondly, it transpires that the source for much of this material is a box of miscellaneous manuscripts kept until 1993 in the office of Cage’s publisher, which contained works which the composer had either forgotten about or simply hadn’t got around to publishing.