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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great for old and new listeners, August 3, 2002
...For a new listener this album is perfect. It's beautiful, and accessible and just all around pleasing to listen to. The piece "In A Landscape" is the first piece I play for anyone who says they don't like John Cage. They're usually sold within the first 30 seconds of the piece. The ambience and simplicity of this piece is so striking, but Cage's take on harmony (which is especially challenging in a piece that's so focused on melody) keeps the piece from sounding new age.
Anyone just starting out with John Cage, start here. If this strikes you well, check out "Music For Changes" and then the Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano. Beyond that I highly encourage anyone to do some research, read some of Cage's writings, especially a collection of essays and lectures titled "Silence." As his life progresses, his music becomes more minimal and disjointed, and his words really strike down exactly what it is he's trying to accomplish with his music, and that really helps the listener.
For listeners that are already very familiar with Cage's work, this still isn't a waste. These recordings are a great collection of some nice Cage pieces that don't get as much attention, and is still a really pleasing album to listen to.
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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don't be intimidated!, October 17, 1999
Don't be intimidated by what you may have heard about John Cage; his music can be much more accessible than that of many other 20th-century composers, and perhaps even some earlier ones (I'll take Cage over Wagner any day). Drury plays Cage's early piano music, some of it written as dance accompaniment, with knowledge and respect. The title piece, which opens the album, sounds superficially like new-age music, but isn't the least bit boring--it's as boring as a beautiful woman, or a view from a mountain. More idiosyncratic and humorous (Cage *always* had a great sense of humor) are the "Music for Toy Piano," which shows Cage's ability to see more possibilities than the rest of us, and the short "Prelude to Meditation," which says an enormous amount with a few light touches on the keys. There's even an organ piece, which provides a nice variation. Please forget what you may have heard about Cage and buy this CD!
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Cage for people who don't like modern music, January 24, 2004
Stephen Drury has been a great servant of John Cage's music for many years, mostly recording for small labels such as Mode (who honoured him by putting him, along with Irvine Arditti, on their 100th release). In this, one of Drury's few recordings for a major label, he concentrates on Cage's more accessible music, for piano, prepared piano (a piano with objects placed on the strings to turn it into something between a piano and a percussion instrument), organ and even a toy piano.In A Landscape is a 1948 work in which simple Satiesque melodies are played on a piano with the sustaining pedal held down, creating a soft haze of harmonies. This could easily be simple kitsch, but Cage's careful musical judgement allows the music to be sonically beautiful without degenerating into New Age mush. Music for Marcel Duchamp, a 1947 film soundtrack for prepared piano, takes a single melodic line and spins it out intriguingly, insistent rhythms mollified by soft modal harmonies and long silences. Souvenir, a 1983 organ composition, continues the Satiesque aesthetic with its gentle progress, repetitions and modal harmonies. It is certainly sonically beautiful, though I find it goes on a little too long for my taste. A Valentine Out Of Season is a set of three brief pieces for prepared piano, written in 1944 (the title refers to the break-up of Cage's marriage). The first piece is slow and chromatic, the second a vigorously rhythmic dance and the last combines the characteristics of the two preceding pieces. Rather slighter is the 1948 Suite for Toy Piano, which makes about as much music as can be made from an instrument with only nine notes. A major contrast to this is the 1940 Bacchanale, Cage's first work for prepared piano, a vigorous, repetitive dance that keeps suddenly losing its rhythmic vigour, then recovering it. The disc ends with two slow pieces. The brief, white-note Prelude for Meditation was written for prepared piano in 1944 and is Satiesque in its rhythmic and harmonic restraint. Dream, a 1948 piano piece, returns to the atmosphere of In A Landscape, though I don't think it's quite as striking as that piece. With the exception of In A Landscape, I would regard the works on this disc as minor rather than major Cage. Nonetheless, Drury's sympathetic performance approach brings out the best in these attractive pieces, and this disc would make a very good first taste of Cage for listeners of a more conservative bent.
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