Cheap John Cage: Complete Piano Music, Vol. 6 (Pieces 1960-92) (Music) (John Cage, Steffen Schleiermacher) Price

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Customer Reviews of John Cage: Complete Piano Music, Vol. 6 (Pieces 1960-92)

One^2, written in 1989, is one of the late number pieces (the title means second piece for one performer). This work is for a pianist playing between one and four pianos as well as unspecified extra sound sources (which play four times only during the work), and was written for Margaret Leng Tan, who has recorded it on the Mode label. There is a separate score for each of the piano parts that the performer decides to play; these scores are made up of single notes, chords and tremolandi, with dynamics and tempo left up to the performer, who must also decide how to mesh the individual piano parts. Schleiermacher gives us two readings: in the first his additional sound sources are percussion and a mouth-organ; in the second it is a musical box. I prefer the first reading, which is also slower--the musical box sound gets a little irritating after hearing the same kitschy tune four times--but, generally speaking, Tan's swifter, more dramatic performance has the edge over both Schleiermacher ones.

One dates from 1987, and was one of the first of the number pieces. It is written using Cage's time-bracket notation, where the score indicates musical material to play and gives a range of time in which to play it (so, for example, a chord marked as starting between 10 seconds and 30 seconds and ending between 30 seconds and 50 seconds could last any duration between 0 and 40 seconds). The pianist's hands are regarded as two separate musical parts, and are not co-ordinated in performance; the musical result is generally slow-moving, with the dissonances smoothed by long held chords.

Etudes Boreales, from 1978, is a companion piece to the cello solo of the same name (indeed, Cage directed that they may be performed together). It is scored for a percussionist playing a piano, and this description presumably refers to the nature of the work, where the performer is as likely to play directly on the strings or by striking the body of the piano as he is to play using the keys. The musical material is derived from Cage's reading of an astronomical chart of the northern skies (hence the title of the work); in Schleiermacher's hands it is sparse, though often sonically varied, and contains some surprising conventionally dramatic moments.

The Beatles 1962-1970 is a short squib, written in 1989 for Aki Takahashi. Fragments of Beatles songs are placed in time brackets to be played either by six pianists or through overdubbing (Schleiermacher chooses the latter option). It's moderately entertaining, but nothing more.

ASLSP, from 1985 (the title refers both to Finnegans Wake and "as slow as possible") is an set of eight movements, each just two lines on a score, for either piano or organ (The score specifies that one of the movements must be replaced with one of the other eight, and in this reading Schleiermacher places the eighth movement instead of the fourth). This reading fixes the length of all movements at approximately two minutes, which allows for a generally unhurried pace that brings out the chromatic harmonies inherent in the work.

The most extreme of the works here is probably the 1990 number piece One^5. This contains forty-five musical events (either single notes or chords) placed within time brackets that are spread through twenty minutes. Naturally, the musical texture is extremely sparse and progresses very slowly, with each sound being allowed to die away over a long period of time.

This is a good collection, covering a good scross-section of the late Cage style. It also has the virtues of completeness, and of a pianist who is a reliable guide to these works. In individual works Tan or Drury may be marginally preferable, but as an overall package, this is very competitive.