In the 20th century, composers Erik Satie, Francis Poulenc, and John Cage each created a pause in music-a caesura-by exploring life's contrasts: the noise of the outside world and the quiet of inner reflection. Satie balanced cabaret flair with meditative stillness. Poulenc exposed the cabaret's charm and underlying despair before turning to sacred music. Cage broke with tradition, using experimental simplicity to draw listeners inward and awaken deeper listening. A journey inward-a Room for Listening

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.

Radio With/Out Voice�is a provocative new album which reanimates John Cage's enduring fascination with the medium of radio. Performed by Clare and David Lesser-two of contemporary music's most versatile interpreters-this recording explores Cage's radiophonic works through performance, composition, and critical engagement. Far from being a nostalgic reconstruction, the Lessers' approach is both scholarly and boldly creative, situating Cage's use of radio not merely as a historical curiosity, but as a radical act of decentralisation: of authorship, temporality, and musical expectation. This is Cage as theorist of transmission and static, prophet of sonic ephemerality, and architect of what Mark Fisher called "a time out of joint." Spanning works such as�Radio Music�and�One�to the rarely heard�Sculptures Musicales, this album presents the radio not only as a sonic instrument but as a philosophical site-an invisible architecture in which Cage staged his most audacious dismantling of musical norms. Static and fragmentation become expressive forces in themselves, mediated by the performers' acute sense of form and freedom. Drawing on deep knowledge of Cage's methods, including his application of the I Ching and his subversive use of silence and structure, Clare and David Lesser illuminate the vibrancy of Cage's late and lesser-known works. These performances embrace the medium's inherent unpredictability-it's "crackle" and drift-and in doing so, reaffirm Cage's commitment to sound as process, possibility, and play. This is an album for critics, scholars, and listeners attuned to the intersections of philosophy, sonic experimentation, and media archaeology. It speaks to the ever-shifting boundary between sound and signal, listening and hearing.

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

Cage's Sixteen Dances (1951), for Merce Cunningham's choreography, are a missing link in his still-growing representation on CD. The Ensemble Modern, whose Ives and Nancarrow performances I have so much admired, bring them to the British catalogue for the first time. There was an American LP (never issued in the UK) with a chamber group including the Nexus Percussion Ensemble under Paul Zukovsky, which was well worth having at the time but the recorded quality on RCA is much better, even though the periodic loud attacks on the bass drum (track 3, for example) often seem to distort.

In 1951 Cage was at a turning point following major achievements such as the Sonatas and Interlucks for prepared piano (Tall Poppies, 10/94), the Cunningham ballet The Seasons (not yet on CD), the String Quartet (Mode Records, 12/93) and the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (on CD only in the USA—Wergo).

Whereas Cage had carefully chosen the sounds in Sonatas and Interludes, in the Sixteen Dances he began to accept moves on his charts as a basis for 78 Gramophone April 1995 composing decisions. You can't really tell this in the Sixteen Dances, which have the authentic atmosphere of Cage of this period and are linked to the Sonatas and Interludes since eight of them represent specific Hindu emotions such as anger, humour and sorrow.

At times the moods of the String Quartet recur, but with much more activity and colour thanks to a palette of flute, violin, cello, trumpet, piano and percussion. Cage's philosophy was by now Zeninfluenced and even the sound is oriental at times—the interlude at track 12 is enchanting and the one at track 14 particularly witty. The final dance, representing tranquillity, accumulates real depth and grandeur with its tolling tam-tam. There is a ceremonial sense of progression in the work as a whole which is almost nostalgic at this point, since Cage was about to give all that up. Part of a 1988 watercolour by Cage is reproduced in the booklet and the notes are by James Pritchett, whose book on Cage was published in 1993.

-- Gramophone [4/1995]

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

NEW ELECTRONIC MUSIC FROM LEAD

Classical Music

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

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music