These Cagean masterpieces have in common a grandness of conception - they take a single idea and explore it exhastively, at length. Cage is among the few figures in modern art of whom it could be said that the world would have been different had he not come - not just the music world or the art world, but the world we experience every day. (Richard Konstelanetz) "These works of Cage as performed by Joshua Pierce are fascinating to consider; fascinating to listen to." (The New York TImes) "Outstanding exponent of the Cagean prepared piano... This recording is excellent!" (The Musical Quarterly)

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.

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."

The first works of Cage are experimental and related to the future. "The Future of Music" - a Credo" is the title of his first manifesto, and this future bears the name "all-sound music". Peter Roggenkamp: piano / Schola Cantorum Stuttgart / Clytus Gottwald: conductor / John Cage: speaking part.

Ten years after their first highly estimated Cage CD "Works for Percussion" (WER 62032), Quatuor H�lios 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 H�lios 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.

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.

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.

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The significance of the seven pieces brought together here is that they both generate a striking panorama of the intelligence of the material presented, over a period of four years, from 1939 to 1943, by the composer whom the critic Fred Goldbeck described as "the greatest Giraudouxian of our age", and clarify in an extraordinarily oblique manner the prehistory of this "automation" of the creative act, towards which one can detect the perpetual temptation in the young Cage.

Enormous technical requirements make John Cage's "Etudes Boreales" a highly virtuosic work, which requires an extreme sensitivity of feeling for the coordination of fingers, instrument, and intellect. On this CD it is presented in versions: for piano solo and later for cello solo with piano solo. As in the sister works, "Etudes Australes" and "Freeman Etudes", Cage based the "Etudes Boreales" on a star chart. He used the chart of the northern sky that the Czech astronomer Anton�n Becv�r made in 1962. The time length piece 26'1.1499' - Friedrich Gauwerky chooses the first 640.3 seconds for this recording, thus giving the piece the titel 10'40.3' - documents the composer's retreat from an intentional determination of the sounds. And also the "Harmonies" welcome the creative possibilities of whatever happens next.

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 John Cage and contemporary artists.

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Classical Music

Classical Music