Works for 2 Keyboards, Vol. 2 – Music for Two / 3 Dances
Naxos
CD
$19.99Apr 29, 2014
John Cage’s practicality transformed the piano into a full percussion orchestra and a workbench for sonic experiment. Three Dances is one of his most ambitious prepared piano works. Music for Two includes bowed piano techniques to create shifting tapestries of subtle expression, making for some of the most exquisite and moving chamber music of the late 20th century. The second of a three volume series; Volume 1 can be found on Naxos 8.559726.
Works for 2 Keyboards, Vol. 3 – Winter Music / Two² / Experiences No. 1
Naxos
CD
$19.99Jul 08, 2014
John Cage was one of the twentieth century’s most radical thinkers who redefined his own contribution to musical history in the light of his ceaseless exploration. + One aspect of this was the technique of ‘indeterminacy’, exemplified by Winter Music, a major work on the grandest of scales that can be freely interpreted as to time but which remains coloristic and resonant. + Two2 is one of Cage’s ‘Number Pieces’, and one of his most forward-looking works, a composition that considers the structure of listening itself and one that continues to influence a new generation of composers. + This is the final disc in the series (volume 1 is on 8.559726, volume 2 on 8.559727).
Nicholas Isherwood made his début as Lucifer in Stockhausen’s Donnerstag aus Licht at Covent Garden, and has since collaborated closely with composers such as Crumb, Henze, Kurtág and Xenakis. His initial exposure to the music of John Cage left him less than convinced, but after corresponding with Cage he acquired a taste for it – something which soon developed into what he now calls ‘a love affair’. On ARIA, Isherwood presents most of Cage’s music for solo voice that is not included in the composer’s Song Books, and most pieces are here recorded for the first time by a male singer.
John Cage's remarkable magnum opus A Book of Music for two prepared pianos is brought together here with his complete works for toy piano. Intricately structured according to Cage's ideas about Mozart, A Book of Music is an eloquent and virtuoso mosaic of driving and sometimes frenetic rhythms, the exotic sounds of the 'prepared' piano strings transporting the listener into worlds of the strangest imagining. The Suite for Toy Piano is a modest miracle of precise expression and the first ever serious concert music written for this instrument, while Music for Amplified Toy Pianos is composed using chance elements, generating a spacious field of sound filled with surprise.
Originally created as an invitation by Rolling Stone magazine in 1977, as part of a gala issue celebrating the magazine's move from San Francisco to New York, which featured literary and art contributors honoring it's new home. Cage constructed his waltzes as a series of 49 multi-colored triangles superimposed on the Hagstrom map of New York City, each point derived by the use of chance operations. Wanting to celebrate Cage's memory, Don Gillespie decided to collect the sights and sounds from the locations specified in "49 Waltzes." This ambitious project of filming Cage's 147 specific locations in New York's five boroughs took one year to complete.
Cage composed his Number Pieces during the last six years of his life. Their titles indicate the number of performers or parts. Their notation is based on fixed and flexible "time brackets." the fixed brackets show when a musician should begin and end a pitch or tonal event. With the flexible brackets, the interpreter decides, within a predetermined time frame, when an instrument enters and when it falls silent. This disc featuring pianist Sabine Liebner explores two of Cage's late masterworks.
Cage: Music for an Aquatic Ballet, Music for Carillon No. 6 / Faralli, Fabbriciani
Brilliant Classics
CD
$13.99Aug 28, 2012
In addition to electrifying performances and exciting repertoire, this fascinating disc offers several world premiere recordings to the Cage canon. Flautist and Cage expert Roberto Fabricciani is joined by percussionist Jonathan Faralli in anticipation of John Cage’s 100th birthday in 2013, turning out a disc that reveals a rich interpretation couched in intimate knowledge of the composer’s game-changing aleatoric music. An historic disc for an historic event.
The works for violoncello solo recorded and compiled on this CD by Friedrich Gauwerky are reference works for John Cage's unusual way of composing. Apart from the tones, Cage also helped to put the varied forms of silence on the musical map: In John Cage's "Concert for Piano and Orchestra", the western art work, score, exploded: The work is composed in individual parts whose execution is freed of every constraint. Each part is even conceived as an autonomous work, e.g. like "Solo for Cello". "59 1/2 Seconds", one of his "time-length pieces", ranks among Cage's most radical "graphic" compositions. Stars become notes or noises in "Atlas Eclipticalis" - again without a score. With the "Variations I", written for any number of people using any sort and number of sound-producing means, Cage's composition reached the outmost limit on the way to absolute indetermination. But, if one hears "Etudes Boréales" for cello solo, however, one experiences that it is a piece whose status can only be compared with J.S. Bach's cello compositions. A critic wrote about Friedrich Gauwerky: "... a virtuoso with far-sightedness, good taste, amazing technique, and a captivating instrument." (Lutz Lesle: Neue Zeitschrift für Musik)
Cage, J.: Concert for Piano and Orchestra / Freeman Etudes /
Wergo
CD
$20.99Apr 01, 2009
John Cage (1912-1992) had a particular predilection for poetry. "[Poetry]," he wrote, "is not poetry by reason of it's content or ambiguity, but by reason of it's allowing musical elements (time, sound) to be introduced into the world of words." And about Stefano Scodanibbio who transcribed the "Freeman Etudes" and "Dream" for contrabass and in this recording also serves as the conductor of "Concert for Piano and Orchestra" and "Radio Music": "Scodanibbio. I thought he played beautifully. He played 'Ryoanji' absolutely better, than anyone I ever heard. - I haven't heard better double bass playing than Scodanibbio's. He's really extraordinary. His performance was absolutely magic."
Anyone performing John Cage's music cannot avoid silence. In all the works performed in this collection, percussionist Matthias Kaul deals with silence and how it can be realized in the most concrete way. Kaul is not only a percussionist, he is also a composer and therefore equipped for such a task. In Variations I, Cage plays with various forms of silence. The score consists of transparent sheets with dots and lines and the performers generates concrete tones, sounds and "pauses". The playing instructions for Inlets are still more rudimentary; there are three performers, each of whom has four conch shells. The shells are filled with water and turned round and round; then a fire fueled by pine cones begins, and the piece ends when one of the shells blown like a horn. In Child of Tree, the performer must toss coins to determine how many sections to divide the eight minutes into and which instruments to use in which sections. For this major project, Kaul used 90 different instruments and objects altogether.
In the 1950's, John Cage tried to make the genesis of his compositions dependent on random processes. Several years later this randomness of the compositional process was reflected in the indeterminacy of the performance, with the aim of separating the compositional design from the interpretive result. Solo for Piano comprises 63 pages with 84 different types of graphical structures, which, due to their shape, are reminiscent of musical notation, but on the other hand, represent no clearly reproducible notes. Here, the notation is modified into a kind of "proposal" for the performer; thus, all kinds of implementation of the score are infinitely possible. On this disc from Wergo, pianist Sabine Liebner presents her own unique interpretation of Cage's musical proposal.
Cage, J.: Credo in Us / Imaginary Landscapes Nos. 1 and 3 /
Wergo
CD
$20.99Sep 01, 2001
Ten years after their first highly estimated Cage CD "Works for Percussion" (WER 62032), Quatuor Hêlios are presenting a second one with works by the inventor of the prepared piano. In the wake of this process comes the series of the five "Imaginary Landscapes". "Credo in US" is another heroic work, particularly in the ambiguity of it's title: is Cage patriotically referring to the United States, or is he simply humanistically proving allegiance to the first person plural? And then again, doesn't this Credo relate to the 1937 manifesto whose title it reflects? Collages, layerings and overlaps clash with omnipresent wild and scattered piano bits, strewn with explosions and streaked with silences that are in themselves aggressive. In "Inlets", the performers do offer Nature what we could call a choice gift: letting it do the composing... The crackling fire or the water gurgling in the conches redefine music! Quatuor Hêlios has always been open to collaboration with composers in order to develop new contemporary percussion languages, often associating "classical" instruments, new technologies and musical theater.
In the last years of his life, John Cage wrote a great many so-called "Number Pieces" the title indicating the number of performing musicians. While most of these pieces indicate which instruments are to be played, as well as the sounds that are to be produced, other pieces offer only general tone descriptions or a framework for choosing the tones oneself. What these pieces do have in common is time\-organization: Cage designates the measure within which the tones must be played. Should one play these sound\-sequences within the interval quickly, then one must wait for the beginning of the next measure in order to continue; should one play with an even slowness, the separate intervals are joined without interruption. And so, each performance of the same piece is different: in one instance an even flow of sounds, in another a pulsation of rapid responses accompanied by pauses (including all variations). An exception is "Two²". Here the two pianists do not play according to a stopwatch, but rather by reacting to one another: Although the piece indicates measure, it does not assign tempo or even pulse. While both interpreters play independently of each other, they may continue on to the next measure only when the other player has finished his. Cage decided on the number of tones within a measure by drawing upon the rules of Renga, Japanese linked poetry, in which the number of syllables per verse are set at 5, 7, 5, 7, 7. As the pedal is continuously depressed, the notes sound into one another and this inner structure remains undetected.
Cage, J.: Piano Music, Vol. 3 - Suite for Toy Piano / The Se
Wergo
CD
$20.99Mar 01, 1991
It may come as a surprise but one of the leading creators of Keyboard music in the twentieth century is a composer by the name of John Cage. Cage's reputation is so deeply associated with the avantgarde, with chance music, graphic notation, performance art, technology and Zen Buddhism that is early, conventionally-notated music for percussion ensemble and keyboards is sometimes neglected. Or was until recently. In the last few years - with the advent of performances and recordings like this one - there has been a renewed appreciation of Cage's achievements in the earlier part of his creative life. Of course, Cage's keyboard music is not just keyboard music. Cage's once infamous "prepared piano" - born out of need as well as desire - is a keyboard instrument unto itself, as different from the romantic piano as that instrument is from the baroque harpsichord. But even in his "unprepared" piano music, Cage shows his individuality and distance from European tradition. This production received the quarterly German Record Critics' Award.
In 1990 John Cage met sho player Mayumi Miyata, who requested he write a piece for the ancient Japanese mouth organ. Cage was deeply impressed by the sound of this instrument and in 1991 he wrote Two3 for sho and five water-filled conch shells - one of the so-called "Number Pieces" Cage worked on during the last years of his life. Although the sound of the piece's structure remains a mystery to rational thinking, it is directly accessible to sensory awareness - especially in the interpretation here played by accordion player Stefan Hussong and sheng virtuoso Wu Wei. Two3 for sho (a Japanese free reed musical instrument) and five water-filled conch shells (1991)
