Search - John [1] Cage, Steffen Schleiermacher :: John Cage: Complete Piano Music, Vol. 2

Imperfections of the page piano music

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 01/12/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"John Cage wrote piano music all his life, it was a genre that you can say was like a template for his creativity for whatever-wherever his fascinations and intellectual pursuits placed him there was piano music that followed. The early music is dominated by the interest in pure beauty, the sustainability of tones, inside and outside the piano. It was Henry Cowell that suggested the idea of placing nuts and bolts, woodscrews, erasers and rubber paraphanalia in between the piano strings to alter or dull or transmogrify its tones to render a gamelan-like timbre. The music here of these disks are the various "Music for" sort of generic in import, and that is what the pianist approach seems to be, in that there doesn't seem to be a wide pallette, a wide spectrum of variability. Some of these pieces were simply dots reiterated from imperfections Cage found on the a piece of paper,(the places without imperfections were silence). So here we have the equivalent of a "readymade" I suppose for musical composition only with a high degree of abstraction. Remember that the innovativeness in musical graphics was a high point within the avant-garde, the post-war; even Stockhausen dabbled in graphic procedures, for Boulez this realm was much too arbitrary so Boulez theoreticalized it with the help of Mallarme's Blue-Unbound "Livre", and alea, or the throwing of the dice,where Cage consulted the I-Ching to obtain readings for his works as in the "Music of Changes" also available within this set, not here but another installment.



On these disks however there is an incredible interest in the mixtures, and promuligations the linear richness of musical events that proceed from the struck piano tone (normal) to one that is muted with the flesh of the finger or palm, to plucked string(s) inside the piano box, to glissandi again within the inside strings of the piano. The problem I found was the lengths of these tones (which are not specifically notated), but graphically notated (meaning it is simply a black rhythmless unbeamed dot on the page)all seem to be the same length,or nearly so in projection; this is what strikes the ear as being so, so the music has a kinsa of sameness, a boredom of sorts sets. Now this music is not suppose to dazzle the imagination, it is simple to be like walking in a Zen garden forgetting the atrocities of the neoliberal order on the globe, simply one mind with timbre, so where is the "freedom", relative that is, for tones that are "free" in one country cannot be so in another.) Still I found all this music interesting to ponder if the experience is like simply looking for inperfections on the window glass pane of the ice formations there."