John Cage’s Number Pieces, late compositions (from 1987-1992) are given two designations, a number indicating the size of the ensemble and a superscript indicating its order in multiple pieces for the same-sized grouping (Quintet #2 = 52). Fragments of pitches, sometimes single notes, are indicated; dynamics appear sporadically. Rhythm is codified through the use of “time brackets,” indicating how long before a performer can move to another fragment. Most of the pieces are for a particular instrumentation, although a few are unspecified. Thus, while a considerable amount of interpretation remains in the performers’ hands, Number Pieces are less aleatoric than many of Cage’s works from the 1950s to the early 1980s. Commentators have likened some of them to Morton Feldman’s compositions, as both regularly employ soft dynamics and slow tempi, with gradually evolving pitch collections accumulating into pointillist harmonies. While none of these pieces approach a pitch center, in addition to the numerous dissonances one might expect in a Cage piece, it is notable how many minor and major thirds appear in the texture.
Apartment House has recorded a quadruple CD set, released on Another Timbre, of all the number pieces for medium ensembles (from 5 up to 14). It includes some alternative versions and one of the “4” pieces. The group has previously released benchmark recordings on Another Timbre of other New York School repertoire and that of the Wandelweiser Collective, and are thus well-seasoned for this project. If anything, Apartment House surpasses expectations, making much of the subtle distinctions between pieces while presenting a comprehensive collection imbued with Cage’s late musical sensibilities. Excellent liner notes by label owner Simon Reynell help to put Number Pieces into perspective. Quotes from Cage’s late interviews, talks, and writings are edifying in and of themselves, and support the manner that Apartment House has inhabited the Number Pieces they interpret. John Cage: Number Pieces is Sequenza 21’s Recording of the Year.
Pianist Philip Thomas is a prolific artist. A member of Apartment House, he recently participated in their recording of Ryoko Akama’s compositions for Another Timbre. Also on Another Timbre is Thomas’s gargantuan CD set of piano music by Morton Feldman, which includes several previously unreleased pieces.
Two of the pianist’s other recent projects focus on other members of the New York School. His deep dive into Cage’s Concert for Piano (again with Apartment House) has resulted in a book, recording, and an interactive online project, Cageconcert (cageconcert.org) that also includes apps to work with segments of the piece and make one’s own versions. He has also released a recording of Christian Wolff’s piano music. Finally, Thomas has recorded a CD of composer-pianist Chris Burn’s work, including transcriptions of improvisations by the late guitarist (and author of one of the key books on improvisation) Derek Bailey. As the interview below demonstrates, Thomas’s performance and recording schedule shows no signs of let-up. (Note: Philip and I talked before the pandemic, so some of his future projects are now TBA).
How did you and
Martin Iddon come to collaborate on a book about Cage’s Concert for Piano
(1957-’58)? Were the book and recording in process before the website and apps
were conceived or was the idea of multiple presentations part of the initial
concept?
This goes back a long
way! I had it in my thoughts that, having performed the piece a number of
times, with Apartment House but also with others, including the Merce
Cunningham Dance Company for the dance ‘Antic Meet’, it was a far richer piece
than had perhaps history had credited it. It’s such a well-known piece, not
least from its visual appearance, and its historic performance value has
influenced what we think of as a Cage-ian performance practice. Plus the
premiere performance and recording is notorious from its depiction on the
Twenty-Fifth Retrospective Concert album. But I felt strongly that there was
much that is not more widely known when digging a little deeper, both about the
way it can be performed, about the graphic notations of the ‘Solo for Piano’,
and about the instrumental and conductor parts. And I was aware that
performance as both historical and contemporary practice has a lot to say about
the music, not least because of the unusually long time one has to spend with
the piano part in order to arrive at something which is playable. So I set to
thinking about this as a major research project and immediately thought of
Martin as being an ideal collaborator, particularly due to his brilliant book
about Cage and Tudor, as well as his Darmstadt book. So over lunch in London
one day we dreamt up the project, which over the following year developed and
formed to include the book, the website and apps, as well as the involvement of
Apartment House. Then there was the inevitable long wait until we found out our
grant application was successful. The grant was for a 3-year project but
inevitably aspects of that spill over into the months since – and I’ve just now
finished the index for the book! The apps grew from a simple idea that we
thought might be nice to a far more complex concept than any of us could have
imagined, forming a vital part of the project. The team expanded to include two
research assistants, Emily Payne and Chris Melen – Chris being the developer of
the Solo for Piano app – with additional help from others, including Stuart
Mellor who designed the Concert Player app.
As a pianist who
specializes in experimental music, Concert for Piano seems like a natural work
to explore from multiple vantage points. When did you first become acquainted
with the piece, and what does it mean to you as an interpreter?
I’ve mostly played it
with Apartment House. I think possibly the earliest occasion was in 2008 when I
organised a 50th anniversary concert
of the 25-year retrospective concert. My experience then was as it continues to
be, that this is an exceptionally rich and lively piece, full of surprises, and
one which is a total joy to perform – each moment is alive and fresh, and my
experience as a performer is of being part of music being made, rather than
something which is ‘re-played’. We don’t rehearse, everyone works on their own
materials, and then it’s put together, so for everyone playing the experience
is as new as it is for the audience. This is true of many pieces by Cage of
course, but this piece seems to heighten those senses and the material is so
exaggerated in its range here – noises, pitches, highs and lows, louds and
softs, etc.
The website and apps
provided detailed and varied material from Concert. Will you share with us some
of the features you consider to be highlights?
There’s so much
there, a few of my favourite things include:
Interviews with
Apartment House – I love to hear the musicians of Apartment House talk about
what they do. These interviews are brimming with insight. I especially like the
films which combine their different insights, such as the ‘Performing the
Concert’
film and the last 10 minutes of the conductor film.
Watching the films of
our performances of the ‘Concert’ and also Christian Wolff’s ‘Resistance’ is a particular
thrill, because, as I suggested above, there’s so much unknown in the
performance itself that it’s great to get a stronger sense of the kinds of
things the other musicians are doing.
This one is not yet
on the website but will be appearing very soon – I have made a studio recording
of the complete ‘Solo for Piano’, which has never been done. It’s completely
different from the version I play with Apartment House – for this I recorded
each notation individually, according to a space time measurement of 3 minutes
per page, and then Alex Bonney has mapped them together like a patchwork quilt,
to get a complete 3 hours and 9 minutes performance of the Solo. You can hear
it now actually on the Concert Player app as it’s this recording which we use
for the app.
For the uninitiated person
finding this on the web, what do you think they apps will demonstrate to them?
I hope firstly that
it’ll just be a great entry into the music – that this is music people play and
love to play, and is really great to play, instead of perhaps either that it is
too ‘far-out’ or obfuscatory, or, the flip-side, that it is entirely open and
‘free’! For users trying out the Solo for Piano app, I hope it’ll both be a
great way of playing with the notations and their conditions for performance,
to see what might be possible and conversely what is not possible with each,
and to play with the multiple possibilities the notation offers; and that it
will also be an aid to performance. Of course each pianist will want to try it
out in their own way, but at the least I hope that for some notations this will
be a time-saver, offering possibilities to randomly generate multiple outcomes
and to print them off in usable formats. An obvious criticism of the app is
that it removes the fun of working these things out yourself – I think it
manages to keep the fun of playing with each notation, whilst cutting down on
the work needed to write these things out. And we’ve been careful to always
show where and how we’ve made interpretative decision when others might make
other choices, so it’s clear that this is both a facility AND an
interpretation.
And then the Concert
player app is simply a delight to hear – there are 16,383 possible instrumental
combinations of this piece, and we have a handful of recordings available.
Clearly, a recording of a work such as this can only hint at the slightest
possibility of how this piece may sound. But the app allows users to randomly
generate or select combinations, plus select pages, their durations, their
sequence, and then hear how that might sound. We’ve taken great care to ensure
the space-time properties of the music are upheld (measuring by the pixel!) and
so really this is a pretty accurate – no matter how inappropriate that word is
to this piece!! – realisation. I still listen to it regularly and am surprised
all the time by the combinations. It’s a thrill, so I hope people will just
dive in.
You have been
performing Morton Feldman’s music for over a quarter century. Still, the
recording you did for Another Timbre last year was a mammoth undertaking. How
long did it take to record? How do you keep so much detailed, long repertoire,
with irregular repetitions, in your brain and fingers?
Somehow it didn’t
feel like a mammoth task, more like a real pleasure to play these pieces again.
Perhaps surprisingly, I didn’t feel any kind of pressure to give a ‘definitive’
statement on the music – my performances on disc just happen to be a
representation of how I play this music today, after many years of thinking
about and playing it. If I were to record it all again in 10 years it may be
quite different, who knows? It was though a particular pleasure to discover a
few pieces that I hadn’t played before, namely the unpublished works I explored
at the Sacher Foundation in Basel, and the transcription I made of the Lipton
film music.
I recorded the music
over a period of about 2 years, in different sessions. It’s funny how the music
at times just sticks in terms of fingering, rhythmic detail, whilst at other
times what should be very familiar to me still seems strange. Certainly,
whereas I thought this project might draw a line in the sand for me – no more
Feldman! – I feel it’s done the opposite, opened up more possibilities, more
ways of thinking about the music. In particular, Triadic Memories, which
I’ve probably played more often than any other single piece of music, changed a
great deal for me in preparation for the recording and what I thought I knew
now feels more experimental, more curious, than ever. There’s a part of me that
sometimes tries to avoid Feldman’s music – it’s almost too gorgeous at times,
and I need to find something else, something of rougher hue, but those chords
keep pulling me back! Thankfully, there’s so much more to the music than just
beautiful sonorities, and in particular the music’s form and narrative feels to
me to be so strikingly original.
Are there surprises
among the previously unrecorded pieces?
Certainly, the
addition of struck drum and glass to the Feldman sound is pretty surprising,
bringing to mind much more the 1940s music by Cage, and here included as part
of a set of three pieces composed for the dance. In fact there’s a surprising
number of pieces composed for dance collaborations, not just for Cunningham,
but also for Merle Mersicano, as Ryan Dohoney has written about in considerable
detail recently. One of these is Figure of Memory which sounds nothing like
Feldman and more like some kind of sketch of a Satie piece, consisting simply
of repetitions of three short phrases.
Another recent
release is of music by Chris Burn, including a transcription of an
improvisation by Derek Bailey. How does that translate to the piano?
Well Chris is a
wonderful wonderful composer, and a brilliant pianist and improviser. And so he
is fully aware of the slightly perverse nature of what he was doing in writing
these pieces, not least as someone who used to play with Bailey. But these
pieces are not just really lovely pieces of music, but they also reveal
something about Chris and how he hears and thinks of music, as well as being
revealing of Bailey’s own work, and in particular of his love of Webern and his
close attention to pitch. So when the guitar-ness of the pieces is removed a
different side to Bailey’s music is revealed which is simply different but to
my ears no less remarkable.
As if 2019 weren’t
busy enough for you, a compendium of Christian Wolff’s piano music was released
on Sub Rosa. In the notes you say that “In all my performances of Wolff’s
music, I aim for interpretations that both interest and surprise me, allowing
the notations to lead me to new ways of playing and thinking about music,
whilst at
the same time trying
to lead the notations toward the unexpected.” When discussing the piano music
with Wolff, what were some insights he offered? What piece will most likely
surprise listeners?
The recent double
disc follows on from an earlier three-disc set, and hopefully precedes another
three-disc set to follow. Christian’s music is, when it comes down to it, the
music I feel closest to. I love the potential for change, for surprise, for
play. On the whole I tend not to ‘collaborate’ with composers (I trust them to
do what they do well and then it’s over to me) and so I love the moment when I
begin a new piece, I put it up on the piano and I start to think ‘ok so what am
I going to do with this’. This is where I am at my most creative, and
Christian’s music works especially well to that effect. I’ve never asked him
for his approval of what I do and most often he doesn’t hear my interpretations
until after I’ve performed or recorded it. Though the very first time we met,
in 2002, I played ‘Bread and Roses’ to him, waited for his response, and learnt
fairly quickly that his typical response was ‘Sure!’. He tends not to validate
not to denigrate peoples’ performances of his music and I appreciate that. He
doesn’t want to say ‘yes, this is how it should be played’ preferring instead
for the individuality of the player to find new solutions, new ways of playing.
And so I do hope with each performance I give of his music that I might offer
something that would surprise him, that might suggest possibilities in his
music which he’d not considered.
In this recent set
I’ve included a few pieces which are not published, so that surprised him too!
So three variations on Satie, pieces he composed for John Tilbury, which he
never quite convinced himself as worth publishing but hopefully he’s convinced
now they’re out on disc – they’re wonderfully eccentric pieces. Also his
Incidental Music, which he has played and recorded (wonderfully, on Mode) but
which he’d not heard anyone else perform. He was delighted, so that’s great.
And for anyone familiar with Wolff’s music I hope that my playing brings both
recognition and surprise too.
What will be your
next recording/recital? What will Apartment House be up to in 2020?
Next concert, in Cambridge in April, features a brand-new piece that Toronto-based composer Allison Cameron is writing for me, which I’m delighted about. And Simon Reynell’s always dreaming up new ideas and introducing me to younger composers and I’m always happy to play a small part in that project. And as a result of the Feldman release we’ve been able to commission one of my very favourite composers, Martin Arnold, to write a large-scale new piece for me. But that won’t be for a while. Lots of ideas, lots of pieces I want to play, but actually I’m hoping for a bit of a quieter year this year!
Christian
Carey is a composer, performer, musicologist, and writer. His work has been
published in Perspectives of New Music, Intégral, Open Space, Tempo, Musical
America, Time Out New York, Signal to Noise, Early Music America, Sequenza 21,
Pop Matters, All About Jazz, and NewMusicBox. Carey’s research on
narrativity in late music by Elliott Carter, presented at IRCAM in Paris on the
composer’s 100th birthday, appears in Hommage à Elliott Carter (Editions
Delatour). He is Associate Professor of Composition, History, and Theory at
Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey.
Just before intermission of the opening concert of the Beyond Cage Festival on October 22, I pulled out my iPhone to see if the Giants were beating the Cardinals for the National League Pennant, and was disoriented to see that it was 9:49pm. It seemed like there must have been a massive network malfunction, because the extraordinary performance of Atlas Ecpliticalis with Winter Music that I and the rest of the audience had fervently applauded could not possibly have gone on for an hour and forty-five minutes. The duration had felt assuredly like a leisurely performance of an early Romantic symphony, say the Beethoven Pastorale, something that was stimulating and enveloping but that never demanded a hint of endurance from the ear or mind.
But it was so, Petr Kotik had just led the Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, with Joe Kubera and Ursula Oppens simultaneously playing Winter Music, in almost two hours of some of the most resolutely avant-garde music, and the listening experience was such that the sensation of time was lost completely inside the performance. The extraordinary became the unbelievable.
Kotik had already presented this piece twenty years ago, in a historic concert that became a memorial to the recently deceased composer. And he and the ensemble have recorded it twice, on a recently reissued Wergo album and a great and unfortunately out of print Asphodel release, and these are not only the two finest recordings of Atlas but also two of the finest recordings of Cage’s music available. But the concert exceeded these, reflecting the understanding of such a profound work of art that can only come through time spent examining and thinking about it.
The 100th anniversary of the birth of John Cage was celebrated in Pasadena, California at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center with a concert by Gloria Cheng titled Two Sides of Cage’s Coin. The Boston Court venue is comfortably cozy and all but a few of the 100 seats were filled to hear Water Music and the entire sequence of Sonatas and Interludes. Despite the modern industrial construction of the hall – it has corrugated steel walls – and a play going on in the adjacent theater, the acoustics proved more than adequate for the intimate space.
John Cage was born in Los Angeles and has many connections here despite being known primarily as a New York composer. Cage studied with Schoenberg at UCLA – where Gloria Cheng is now a faculty member. He lived for a time in Pacific Palisades and later in Hollywood. Cage was also a colleague of Lou Harrison and taught at Mills College in the Bay area. To mark the centennial here in Los Angeles of the birth of John Cage – one of Americas most influential composers – is entirely fitting and appropriate.
The first piece on the program is known generically as Water Music but as Ms. Cheng explained the official title should be Boston Court, Pasadena August 24, 2012 because Cage had intended the title to be taken from wherever it was performed. This piece was first presented as 66 W. 12 at Woodstock, NY August 29, 1952 and so the title is updated on each playing. Water Music is partly music and partly performance – the score calls for a table radio, three kinds of whistles, cups and pitchers of water, a wooden stick and a deck of playing cards, all in addition to the piano. (A similar piece – Water Walk – was once performed by Cage himself on the old I’ve Got A Secret TV program and you can see this here on You Tube.)
Boston Court, Pasadena August 24, 2012 started with the rolling out of a small cart full of items to center stage – the radio plays – and Ms. Cheng began a series of activities such as pouring water from cup to pitcher, blowing various whistles, etc. This was all done by timing the sequence of actions with her iPhone (a nice 21st century touch) and following Cage’s score, which was projected overhead for all to see. No one brings as much dignity to the concert stage as Gloria Cheng, but she could have been a 1950s housewife scurrying about attending to various domestic chores. When the score called for a chord or two on the piano, however, everything changes: it is the virtuoso who – with just a few notes struck – suddenly and decisively shifts the focus to an artistic perspective. It is this overlap between the mundane and the suddenly artistic that makes this piece so intriguing – our ordinary lives are never quite removed from the arts – and art bleeds into our everyday experience.
Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano was written over two years,1946 to 1948, at a time when John Cage was working with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Ms. Cheng explained that because there was no room in the dance studio for drums, Cage hit upon the idea of adding various pieces of hardware to the piano strings to give it a more percussive sound. He eventually devised explicit instructions on how the piano was to be prepared and he specifies individual types of screws, bolts and plastic pieces for each of 45 different notes on the piano. A complete chart by Cage showing how the piano is to be prepared was included in the program.
To those who have never heard a prepared piano the resulting sound invariably exceeds prior expectations. The lower prepared notes have a wonderful gong-like quality while the middle register can produce beautiful bell tones. The higher notes tend most toward the percussive, at times resembling the notes from a music box. The added texture of the prepared piano is fully explored in Sonatas and Interludes which are, by turns playful, dramatic, solemn, agitated, languid, mysterious and tranquil. The ‘Sonatas’ are played in groups of four followed an ‘Interlude’ for a total of 20 pieces – all played sequentially. This work was written at a time when Cage was studying South Asian music and culture – the various pieces in Sonatas and Interludes evoke a definite exotic and mystical feeling and are intended to portray the eight permanent human emotions as defined by Indian philosophy.
As might be expected, Sonatas and Interludes is a very challenging work for the performer – from the 3 hours of piano preparation time to understanding just how each note will feel and react. And of course you can see that the piece is technically difficult just by looking at the notes on the score – rapid runs of complex arpeggios, soft quiet stretches and dramatically loud passages. Because the hardware tends to shorten the duration of the sound when a prepared note is struck, this music is typically a sequence of single notes and rapid runs with very few long chords – a good test of the performer’s dexterity. Ms. Cheng was up to all of this but what impresses most is her ability to find just the right dynamic and “touch” for each section – even with 45 of the keys prepared. I asked her afterwords if she had much chance to practice on a prepared piano and she responded that at one time she did so but now feels confident given her experience with Cage’s music. In any event the results were well-received by the audience who brought Ms. Cheng back for two curtain calls amid much cheering. Gloria then invited those interested to come on stage to look inside the piano – and help her “de-prepare” it – a gracious gesture from an accomplished performer.
This concert was sponsored by Piano Spheres and information on their upcoming concert season can be found here.
This venue was the location of this past Sunday’s concert featuring Iktus Percussion (Cory Bracken, Chris Graham, Nicholas Woodbury, and Steve Sehman), pianist Taka Kigawa, and toy pianist Phyllis Chen. According to Iktus member Cory Bracken, one of the missions of the evening (focused entirely around composer John Cage) was to take some of his pieces that are almost exclusively performed in academic settings, and begin to inject them into the public concert repertoire. What the audience encountered, therefore, was a healthy mix of both often and not-so-often performed pieces by John Cage.
Ear To Mind
presents
Pianist Jenny Q. Chai in Recital
Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, NYC
April 19th, 2012
Jenny Q. Chai walked out onstage for the first half of her Carnegie Hall debut in a red and black dress and performed for the first half of that first half a mix of Debussy‘s and György Ligeti‘s piano etudes (Debussy: #’s 3 & 6; Ligeti: #’s 2 & 1, Book I). Despite the huge generation gap between these two, the intertwined listing of Debussy and Ligeti had the two composers’ styles offsetting one another in such a way that an unassuming listener would have thought this was one cycle of pieces from the same composer. (more…)
We had just seen John Cage recite his mesostic/theater work, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet. My composition teacher, a tenured faculty member who had won many awards including a Pulitzer Prize, told us, “Everyone should see John Cage once.”
And then, as if to underscore the idea that one only needed to see Cage once, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer added, “But of course, his ideas are much more important than his music.” At that time (the early 1980s), there weren’t many recordings of Cage’s music available, and I rarely encountered any performances of his music, so my professor’s utterance was a reasonable statement for many.
Three decades later, there are 279 recordings featuring one or more works by John Cage available on arkivmusic.com; my old teacher has under 30 listed. It isn’t just that Cage is the most-recorded member of the postwar avant-garde—he has more recordings than plenty of conservative composers. Here’s a list of the top 10 recorded composers born in the 20th century at arkivmusic.com
1. Shostakovich 1449
2. Britten 958
3. Bernstein 632
4. Barber 541
5. Rodrigo 461 (and 103 of those are the Concierto de Aranjuez)
6. Messiaen 431
7. Walton 413
8. Khachaturian 357 (138 of those are the Sabre Dance)
9. Cage 279
10. Arvo Part 239
Clearly, Cage’s compositions, as well as his ideas, are very important in the classical music industry. This year you’ll be hearing a lot of his music, as various cities and organizations celebrate the 100th anniversary of John Cage’s birth. The John Cage trust is a useful web site to learn about upcoming performances, but if you live in Southern California, you’ll want to consult this list I compiled for the LA Weekly of Cage events this year.
Vicky Chow performing with Ekmeles at the Avant Festival about a year ago; 2/12/11 (Photo courtesy of Avant Media)
Celebrating John Cage at 100
Avant Music Festival
The Wild Project, NYC
February 11th, 2012
The Wild Project (a tiny venue that is kind of like The Stone with bleachers) is where the Avant Music Festival is going on from now (it started on Fri, Feb 10) until Saturday the 18th. This is the third annual festival, and on this particular night, I witnessed a program that I never dreamed I would have been able to sit through when I was younger and still shunning the works of modern composers like David Del Tredici. An entire program of John Cage in person seems like a lot to swallow, but it seemed to have something for everyone. (more…)
The Avant Music Festival, a 5-night event being held at The Wild Project in NYC between Friday, Feb 10th and Saturday the 18th, promises to be a compelling series of shows of music in the vein of avant-garde. Along with music by living composers Randy Gibson (whom you are about to hear from), Eve Beglarian (Songs From The River and Elsewhere) and Jenny Olivia Johnson (After School Vespers), there is a performance of Schoenberg‘s ground-breaking work Pierrot Lunaire and a 2-part show on Saturday the 11th celebrating the 100th Birthday of John Cage at 4 PM and 8 PM respectively (This concert, by the way, features Vicky Chow performing the great Sonatas and Interludes on prepared piano). Randy, who is one of the curators of the event, spoke briefly about the festival as well as himself. (more…)
