Erik Satie and John Cage are UFOs in the world of music, because they envisioned music through a completely different prism," says pianist Bertrand Chamayou. "They are pioneers in the sense that, for many people, they changed the very idea of what music must be." With his album Letter(s) to Erik Satie Chamayou pays tribute to two idiosyncratic, innovative and influential composers, one born in Normandy in 1866, the other in Los Angeles in 1912. There is a strong connection between them: Cage considered Satie a source of inspiration. Satie takes pride of place on the album with such pieces as the three Gymnop�dies and the seven Gnossiennes, while Cage is represented by five pieces and a work attributed to him following it's rediscovery amongst the papers of his disciple James Tenney - whose musical homage to Satie also features in the programme. Chamayou recorded the album at the state-of-the-art Miraval Studios in Provence, which inspired him to take an experimental approach: "I thought we should do something a little different - and I thought of Erik Satie. This was an opportunity to get really intimate with the piano... Satie is really a special case, a strange musician unlike anyone else.

The guitar duo of Adam Cicchillitti and Steve Cowan presents a new album of their original arrangements of 19th and 20th century piano repertoire. Lyrique features the works of Edvard Grieg, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, Germaine Tailleferre, John Cage, and Federico Mompou. Though varied in style, these pieces invite listeners into a rich and multifaceted dialogue with the concept of 'lyrical' in instrumental music. The guitar's rich tonal palette and nuanced capacity for expression brings new life to these iconic works.

Pressed between bodies heaving to the pulse. The room inside the drum: each of us within it's envelope. Sent elsewhere. Stamped to distant locales but together in this resonating box. My wrists were broken. My mind screwed on tight.�I wake next to a reflecting pool. An inlet. The water here is cool, shaded by trees that lean in to listen, swaying lightly with the gentle breeze, the hairs on my neck alive. I start my own religion here.�But I ask of the sea: long to see it's waves crashing. As I approach, the blue-green colors of my oasis dull to a metallic blur. The wind a knife's edge into my bleared eyes. From below the surface, shafts of artificial light emerge. Power indicators of unseen machines from another time, rising endlessly... narrow spotlights pushing into the sky. My heart quickens. These climbing pixels build a hard-edged latticework of digital snow, blinding me. I try to tune it. I look for the one of one. No wiser, I exhale and step into a clearing among the trees: an orderly garden path. I pace slowly among the carefully selected native plants... am I yet awake? Each turn reveals that these rows lead into a deep forest. The roots intertwine with a soil rich in jumbled wiring, broken monitors, cables to outdated devices. The path opens suddenly onto an outcropping above the sea. From this new vantage, each square of color in the water pollutes it's surface with 8-bit splendor. I spin back into the forest, the roots and limbs now formed of telephone cords, drive thru bank tubes, and strings of LED lights. They whirl me into a dance: a rite of doubt and self-abdication. Awakening from the depths of this wood: a giant stone head. Looming. Impassive. It's face in a half-smile of cool knowing. It's surface like a freshly cut tree trunk, brindled with geological age and the scars of it's removal from the earth. I am lifted up and held against it: a familiar texture, it's rough beard streaked with aquamarine moss. A deep calm comes over me: of the kind one feels when giving in to the weight of a midday slumber or a powerful drug. A kept beast that loves it's strict, heavy-handed trainer. Below this effigy, an entry to the junkyard earth. I walk myself dutifully down the mossy stairs to my resting place, each step echoing with a memory of an imagined golden age. "Activity involving in a single process the many, turning them, even though some seem to be opposites, towards oneness, contributes to a good way of life." - John Cage

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Originally released in 1995. Directed by Frank Scheffer, Andrew Culver. Starring John Cage.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Cloudgate Dance Theatre - Cursive Ii (Ntsc)

John Cage's importance for a comprehensive aesthetic reorientation of New Music after the Second World War can hardly be overestimated. His self-discovery and compositional articulation took place particularly in the field of piano music: in the art-merging experimental laboratory of New York around the dancer Merce Cunningham, the painter Robert Rauschenberg and the congenial performer and pianist David Tudor. It is good fortune that Sabine Liebner, who has already released several internationally acclaimed, award-winning albums with WERGO, has thrown herself into the complex pianistic and artistic demands of interpreting another of Cage's great works. The result is the first recording of the complete "Winter Music" for one pianist: all notated events (aggregates) from each of the 20 unnumbered pages are played consecutively. The additional, fascinating expansion of the sound space through "harmonics" - overtone vibrations - creates a very differentiated sounding, kaleidoscope-like music of surprisingly idiosyncratic beauty. Dedicated to the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, "Winter Music" calls for a new way of listening: listening to sound with crystalline clarity and permanent change both inside and outside the sound. This integral recording, which is set against the tide of a strongly event-driven cultural life, represents a milestone and point of reference for the further impact of "Winter Music"!

Summer Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Directed by Arne Arnbom. Starring David Tudor, Carolyn Brown, Barbara Lloyd.

A sonic innovator or an expert on chance? This documentary by Oscar-winning director Allan Miller and Emmy-winner Paul Smaczny pays tribute to the most fascinating American avant-garde composer. Shot in America, Germany and Japan, 'Journeys in Sound ' premieres rare archival footage and features associates of.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music