Customer Reviews

John Cage: Complete Piano Music, Vol. 4 (Pieces 1950-1960)

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There are some wonderfully marvelous items on these Disks,more the Hardcore Cage period the Fifties streaming into the Sixties. The Fifties is when Cage discovered Zen and chance processes but also trapsed into areas of performance art, something he introduced the Europeans to, The 'Water Music' is a wonderfully inventive example. The piece is about 8 minutes and is performance art where a single pianist plays a radio(turns it off and on it is not continuous,plays abrupt chords on the keyboard(, blows three different whistles into a bowl of water, (duck, warbler, and penny whistle)then shuffles a deck of cards with the sustaine pedal down for resonance, and proceeds to deal the cards into the piano hitting the open exposed strings to marvelously ideterminate pointillistic actually pings,tings. The audience also looks on at the large seven foot score.

The 'Winter Music' as well,for one to twenty pianos I recall a story of a performance in Italy where the audience inhabits a typical European aristocratic courtyard at a music school, and the surrounding two tier buildings (in a rectangle) have pianos that creates a wonderful antiphonal effect. Here you cannot get that, the piece comes across with intense convolutions, and indeterminate-ness,the work is very difficult to listen to, each event is unto itself, not related to anything anytime, other than the here an now of what is known or was known.Zen.

TV KOLN is a graphic work where you the pianist has options to play other noises or timbres, or sounds, usually a radio is used, or the human voice.KOLN was the music center of the avant-garde in the Fifties continuing to today in many respects. You can also tap different parts of the piano box body, and it is up to the pianist performance to discovered the registers of the piano fully. "MusicWalk" is like "Water Music"only for a "travelling" pianist who must walk within the performance space to make noises elsewhere than center stage; you can use differing timbres.The pianist here uses his voice as his extended timbres.

The "Concert for Piano" and Orchestra was/is a seminal work, it is not really a "Concerto" it simply means musicians can co- inhabit a place to play together or not. The music is a virtual encylopedia of graphic notation processes, playing arpeggiations, horizontal and vertical distributions of tones, clusters, tremoli, rolls, also playing the piano's insides. The best way to play this and again only a live performance will give you the import of it, is like Bach or Xenakis, where you simply 'flip a switch', turn on the sound. playing as if there is no one else in the world. very provate. The result can be mysterious, magical,fascinating, disorienting, also boring and tedious, but mixtures of these gestures as well is part of this piece.

Much of the playing here seems much too much the same, I would think if you are going to ambitiously mount entire swabbs entire tomes of Cage's piano music that you bring a large spectrum of what the music can be and you introduce as much variety as possible.I would have liked to have more "theatre" for performance art was born here. The radio is a wonderful instrument.Also electronically altered,morphed timbre is perfectly allowable in this music,contact microphones would have brought another dimension to these works, and you then get outside the box of the stereo renderings of CD and there was none of that to be found. Here the readings are hardcore,there is no right or wrong, merely interesting and uninteresting.