John Cage: Three2, Twenty-Three, Six, Twenty-Six / Christina Fong, Glenn Freeman, Karen Krummel [LIMITED EDITION]

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The first disc listed above, in some ways the most satisfying of the three, interweaves two works for percussion ensemble and two for large string ensembles (both achieved here through overdubbing). A feature in common to all of the pieces on the three discs is the utilization of extended tones. With the percussion works, this generally means lengthy washes of cymbals, cascades of small bells and a prominent use of ringing, flex-a-tone kinds of sounds. 'Three2', performed by Glenn Freeman in three increasingly short portions, typifies this approach. For all its surface attractiveness, it's a difficult thing to get a good grasp on, the sequences of percussion passing by in seemingly random stages; I had a little bit of an impression of watching particularly mellifluous cars driving slowly by, different models or colors represented by different instruments. 'Twenty-Three', for massed violins, violas and celli (Christina Fong on the first two, Karen Krummel on the latter), is a gorgeous lattice of densely layered drones occupying a very small note range but varying widely in intensity of attack. Here, as in the other string pieces on this and the second disc, Tony Conrad's music inevitably comes to mind, but there's nothing that remotely smacks of science experiment here (not that that's a bad thing about some of Conrad's work). More, there's a surprising (for Cage) amount of palpable, human striving and emotion. In fact, I sometimes found myself hearing it as an ungodly but luscious melding of Conrad and Gavin Bryars. It also contains something of a brief coda after the 21-minute mark, a slight but lovely mood shift away from the urgency express previously, more toward an uneasy acceptance. The short 'Six' (which, unlike the other pieces whose durations in minutes are indicated by their titles read 'Three 2' as 'three squared') lasts but three minutes and, not dissimilarly to the first track, consists of a series of bowed cymbals, jingle bell shakes and tympani rolls, sliding segmentally across one's field of hearing. It a rather strong work though, with an odd, alien kind of power, as though one is observing some baffling procession of unknown purpose. 'Twenty-Six' is something of a counterpart to 'Twenty-Three' save that all the parts are for violin and, perhaps simply due to Fong's persona, the emotional intensity is ratcheted up a notch or two. Again, I find myself drawing comparisons to music that one doesn't normally associate with Cage, in this case to some of Penderecki's writing for string orchestras from the 60s; there's something of a similar raw, naked vibrancy. It's a marvelous, searing performance, capping a very fine recording that should be far more widely heard than it's likely to be.

These are all fine, difficult releases, performing the valuable service of continuing to challenge ideas about how one perceives music, how one perceives perception. --Brian Olewnick, Bagatellen, April, 2004

Product Description
Second in a complete series of the Number Pieces (final works) for strings and/or percussion, this 61-minute CD features the world premiere recordings of John Cage's Three2, Twenty-Three and Twenty-Six.

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