With this release, the label ANTS – formerly known for its somewhat austere, minimal and, to some, a bit nerve-racking output – expands its scope dramatically, producing one of the really interesting Cage ventures of late.

The pianist Joshua Pierce is known to most people on the contemporary scene, especially through his many John Cage recordings on Wergo Schallplatten in Germany.

The first CD kicks off with a magnificent recording of Four Walls [1944], for piano and – at one instance – voice!
During Cage’s early heydays, this was performed but once, only to fall into oblivion, with the exception of one part of it, which Cage continued to play, calling it Soliloquy. It is a piece of dancing that Cunningham saved from the sinking piece…

The music was written for a Merce Cunningham choreography, or, as they called it, a “dance play”. A dance play in the vocabulary of Cage and Cunningham in the 1940s was an experimental form mixing spoken word and dance. Four Walls sports two acts, fourteen scenes. To quote the booklet, “the subject matter concerned a dysfunctional family consisting of […] a weak but loving mother, silent father, rebellious son and daughter […], the daughter’s ineffectual fiancé, a speaking chorus of six friends and relations, and a dancing chorus of six mad ones”.

The complete score surfaced again as late as the 1980s.

The text that appears at track 9 was written by Merce Cunningham, and is performed here by tenor Robert White:

For this piece Cage decided not to prepare the piano. It’s a straight piano! However, other peculiarities arise. Only the white keys are used, for instance, making the music diatonic. A striking feature is the constant contrasting of opposites, like, as the booklet says, “loud and soft, high and low, rhythmic and sustained, single tone and cluster, unaccompanied melody and percussive accent, sound and silence”.
The rests are sometimes felt in an almost obtrusive way, lasting up to almost a minute before scene 8.
A repetitious chordal behavior is felt throughout, often, as Steffen Schleiermacher says in the booklet to his recording of Four Walls [Dabringhaus & Grimm MDG 613 1076-2], “in a ritualized slowness”. Schleiermacher defines Cage’s compositional method herein as “a sort of building-block principle”. There is an ongoing “grouping and regrouping” going on in Four Walls. Steffen Schleiermacher, who also records the oeuvre of Erik Satie, says that he realizes that there is a heavy Satie influence on Four Walls, for example from “Le fils des étoiles”, which can be heard on another Dabringhaus & Grimm CD; MDG 613 1063-2.
Schleiermacher finishes his text on Four Walls, saying that

An observation is that Joshua Pierce’s interpretation of Four Walls is much shorter, i.e. faster [52:25] than Steffen Schleiermacher’s [58:54].

I don’t know what that really means, except maybe a diverging opinion on tempi, but ANTS’ Joshua Pierce recording is gem.

Four Walls comes across elastic, dreamy, up front, obtrusively absentminded! This piece is full of close calls looking to the side while cutting past you as you travel fast backwards in a stillness which presses on your back like a gravity-resistant mattress – but the stillness of Four Walls is full of hidden speed and force, way down in quantum mechanic dimensions, hard to imagine but real to dream.
The transparent dream of veiled velocity soon breaks out in conscious and supra-real motion surfacing in whirlwind spreads of towering, spinning percussion piano.

This is exemplary played and decently recorded, and I burn some Tibetan incense and let myself soar and float ungravitated and weightless through this Cageian Eastern luminosity.

As the music travels the score from movement to movement, it shifts attitude and aspect, at times moving through Western saloons and bars and dance halls, but always glancing back at those Japanese landscapes, Mount Fuji snow-capped, mists covering the forested slopes, Zen master in rock garden; tea a holy fluid in ceremonies of old, death no problem; simply a passageway..

Cage emits a diligent equilibrium of haste and slow motion in Four Walls, of eagerness and abstention, building a peculiar spider web stronghold of opposing torques, sun shining through, dew clinging; beauty shimmering through turned-away spider forests on remote islands (of Suomi, of Karelia - Särkisalmi, oh, Porkala... my love never stops, never ceases -, of Greece, of Thailand) – and remote motions rise in my mind as I listen…

The music emerges like proud horses maneuvering across the meadow, rigidly passing from left to right in regularly cut-off amblings, circus horses broken free of their ring restrictions, in pride and beauty and health in this world so concentrated on sickness, weakness and perversion; in fresh air and sound convictions; forthright cruelty towards the cruel, towards those found lost in their cruelty.

There is a fine-tuned balance at work when I sit in my arm-chair, leaning forward, my left elbow resting on my left knee, my hand holding a mug of black coffee, the force of planetary gravity making the coffee surface look flat, though actually very slightly bent along the curvature of this sphere of Tellus – and a whole Universe’s equilibrium results in the diligent balancing of this coffee mug in my hand, out there at the end of one of my extremities, under the gaze of the lookout of my eyes from my head up there at another outpost of my anatomy… and the worlds turn… the music continues in the fluency of black and blue spheres trickling out of the loudspeakers, onto the floor, eventually filling this indoors situation with magic spheres of solid sound; inside these Four Walls!

Primitive is a fairly straightforward work, in a staggering staccato tumble from clinking to pounding, from silver metal to black hardwood, mostly very rhythmical, almost mechanical, like much of Cage’s prepared piano music, like A Book of Music or Three Dances for Two Prepared Pianos, but Primitive is much shorter. It’s always a pleasure of sound and rhythm to hear these pieces, which shine with a rare glow, even though, basically, they are very simple pieces – or maybe the seemingly contradictory relationship between structural simplicity and high aesthetical emission of a shining, glaring kind is the striking factor, the creative leap, in these pieces. It was written as a choreographic piece, in which the pianist was to be a one-man percussion band. The choreographer was not Merce Cunningham, but Wilson Williams.

Even though its date may suggest another origin of the title, In the Name of the Holocaust has nothing to do with the German atrocities. They were not widely known in America in 1942, when the piece was written, and it would have been quite un-becoming to write a piano tune (albeit prepared) for the victims while the murdering was still picking up speed and efficiency in Theresienstadt and Treblinka and all the other black holes of Europe. No, this title was taken from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Mr. Joyce had come up with the wordings as a pun for In the Name of the Holy Ghost. Admittedly, though, it was a ghostly thing to present a piece by that name during those times, though unknowingly.

In the Name of the Holocaust was written for a Cunningham dance venture, and the punned-on title was a reference to Cunningham’s Catholic backdrop.
The piece is strewn with new piano techniques, some of which originate in Henry Cowell (of which you can hear a talk at Other Minds Radio on the web, streaming!). The techniques, in addition to customary insertion of objects, include notes held open for resonance without being sounded, strings, open and muted, plucked with fingernails, plus clusters, chromatic, diatonic and pentatonic, achieved with the flat hand or the arm.

A very tentative speculation, or apprehensive research, characterizes the beauty of the beginning, rattling, jingling and soaring sounds arising out of the piano preparations, simultaneous and in beat with the trembling Schönheit of the ground out piano tones of origin. Masterly! The preparations as well as the execution are magnificent, sparkling with inward musical and thoughtful beauty! This is sculpturing! This is Nietzsche talking about the image that lies dormant in the rock, waiting for a sculptor to release it, for all to see, in awe.
Joshua Pierce chisels out that image by his playing, the score indicating how to apply the chisel, with what strength to bear down on the hammer, with what care to polish the emerging contours to really liberate the possibilities of the rock.

Next piece is a first recording; Quest [1935]. However, it’s not a first release! This is because Steffen Schleiermacher released it on Dabringhaus & Grimm (MDG 613 0793-2) in 2001, but it was recorded in 2000, whereas Joshua Pierce recorded the version on ANTS already in 1994 or 1995 – so we have one first release that is not the first recording, and one first recording, which isn’t a first release!
It’s short; just one minute. Cage had just returned to California after a study period with Henry Cowell in New York. Now he studied with, among others, Arnold Schönberg. Quest is one of the few pieces to have survived from this early period.

Quest is marked “2nd Movement”, thus indicating a preceding one. Paul van Emmerik, a Dutch musicologist, maintains that the lost first movement “was an improvisation with a microphone, amplifier and loudspeaker set up on a table, approached by different sound-producing objects such as a watch, mechanical toys and so forth.”
Indeed, like Eric Salzman, who wrote the text of the booklet says, this is “an extraordinary anticipation of things to come”.

There is a slight question mark attached by Salzman here, as if he couldn’t vouch 100% for the authenticity of this piece of information, but Wolfgang Thein in the Dabringhaus & Grimm booklet simply states, without any reservation, that “the first movement consists of an improvisation for objects, microphone, amplifier and loudspeaker.”
Thein gives the additional information that the score was published for the first time in 1977, and that Quest originally was written for a choreography by Martha Deane.

The observation is made by Salzman that the open fifths in Quest sound untypical for Cage, while “the sectional writing and the symmetry of structure” are more reminiscent of other early Cage pieces.
On listening I have to agree. This miniature is more associated with Schönberg, but it also points in the direction of much later pieces, like Etudes Australes, though remotely, and with the knowledge of totally different compositional methods, with the employment of the I Ching and chance operations – but, in a sense, a composer that can temporarily free his mind of here and now and self – like Cage, perhaps – might be able to simply let the chance operations of random intuitive creativity lay out a score that wouldn’t differ much in expression from a true chance operative piece.

Our Spring Will Come is another first recording, but as in the case of Quest, Dabringhaus & Grimm has the first release, in 1997 (MDG 613 0781-2), while ANTS releases it in 2004, though it was recorded in 1994 or 1995, while Schleiermacher recorded his rendition in 1996.

This is another of Cage’s many choreographic pieces, in this case intended for Pearl Primus. The table of preparations for Our Spring Will Come is most detailed, prescribing exactly what objects to insert, exactly where and how to insert them, even stating the distance from the damper. The original score, though detailed as described, was a bit “sprawling”, so Richard Bunger made a concert version in 1977 with the consent of Mr. Cage, which is performed here by Joshua Pierce.

Steffen Schleiermacher says about this work and others of the period, that

Eric Salzman in the ANTS booklet says that

The descriptions by Schleiermacher and Salzman may give the secrets of the piece away, but you can never be fully prepared for this (‘scuse the pun!), as it immediately picks you up and blows you away!

It’s intricate, highbrow art texture, leaving nothing to wish or ask for, simply grabbing hold of you and sweeping you past the furniture of your mind at a distance of a fraction of an inch at incredible speeds, dizzying your musical senses and pouring the honey of flabbergasting rhythmization right into your universal feel for tempi and beat. Marvelous!
I can only compare this with some extra jubilant exercise rides on my racing bike through the pastoral landscapes of the District of Södermanland in Sweden, as I move effortlessly ahead past pastures and by lakes glittering, though dense coniferous forests that give some refreshing cool while I sit on the bike in sweat, watching in a biking trance as the body does the work for me! Yeah man! Cage is un-caged here! Freedom calls with its thorny brushwood and lightning falcons! Let the winds blow high!

Prelude (Piano Sextet) for Six Instruments in A Minor is next. This is indicated by ANTS as a premier recording and also a premier release, and indeed, I cannot find the work on Dabringhaus & Grimm, so it is a truly original first occurrence.
It’s performed by the AFMM Ensemble on flute, bassoon, trumpet, violin, cello and unprepared piano. Salzman explains that the piece is “based on a pattern of 10, divided into 4 uneven groups”. Salzman says that there is an influence of Indian esthetics in Cage’s output from this period in the 1940s.

This piece has me associate to a spacious room with high white walls; colorful mid-size paintings hung at different levels, while the light seeps down from windows high up under the ceiling.
It’s peaceful and restful, yet seasoned with clear-cut pointillist exclamations, coming across in remarkable clarity in the piano and the trumpet. The music is a point of departure or a point of retreat, or a sounding rest in between the formidable silences of the before and the hereafter…
I wish I had a clean room of glass and wood and daylight, to really listen to this piece in an environment that would do it justice.

The last piece of CD 1 is neither a first recording nor a first release, but it’s here! It’s Ophelia. Again, it’s a choreographic work, but this time for Jean Erdman (a Martha Graham pupil). Like Eric Salzman says, it’s a piece for straight, non-prepared piano, with a “strongly rhythmic character and typically sectional form. The piece makes extensive use of the sustaining pedal, and as it proceeds, the rhythmic elements are more and more interrupted by long, held and punctuated sonorities.”

Cage is quoted in the booklet as having described the piece as a work of “dramatic character having a phraseology corresponding to that of the dance by Jean Erdman”.

A quote from Wolfgang Thein may be useful in this context:

Ballet – a jerky, quirky, irregular kind of hopscotch ballet – comes into mind when hearing Ophelia. I rather – at first – get this old feel of tin soldiers and little dolls with big, apprehensive eyes on a shelf in a room of the 1940s occupied by a brother and a sister who are unaware of the doings and dealings of their toys when they’re asleep… Yes, a classical picture – and I remember Donovan’s beautiful ballad of The Little Tin Soldier from 1965, right before the mods times inched over into the hippie times. Stockhausen also gave me these associations with his first pieces. I told him. He agreed that that was the way it sounded, though nobody had told him that before…

CD 2 begins with a 50 minute Pierce rendition of Cage’s most known work, the masterwork Sonatas & Interludes for Prepared Piano from 1946 – 1948, which brought Cage from an infamous estrangement to an almost accepted estrangement and later rendered him his status of a Maestro and of late a revered Maestro.

These Sonatas & Interludes shouldn’t – if there is a choice - be recorded live; there are too many minuscule nuances to do justice in just one take. If Glenn Gould had considered doing this on record, he would record just a few bars at a time, cutting and splicing for months. It would’ve been interesting; he could well have done it, if he’d gotten the urge. He did quite experimental radio documentaries and other things well off the traditional scene, and he was quite open to many things – but he didn’t do it anyway.

Many others have. Joshua Pierce is one. I have his old recording of it on Wergo, from 1975 (WER 60156-50), and other recordings by Maro Ajemian [1950] (Composer’s Recordings CRI 700) and a partial recording by Ajemian [1958] (Wergo WER 6247-02), Yuji Takahashi [1965] (Fylkingen Records FYCD 1010), Gerard Fremy [1983] (Etcetera KTC 2001), Philippe Vandré [1994] (Mode 50), Julie Steinberg [1995] (Music & Arts CD 937), Louie Goldstein [1996] (Greensye 4794), Steffen Schleiermacher [1996] (Dabringhaus & Grimm MDG 6130781-2) and Boris Berman [1998] (Naxos 8.554345).

It is interesting to check the durations of these recordings:
Ajemian [1950]: 66:54 – Takahashi [1965]: 58:30 – Pierce [1975]: 55:50 – Fremy [1983]: 70:06 – Vandré (1994): 64:13 – Steinberg [1995]: 66:09 – Goldstein [1996]: 63:12 – Schleiermacher [1996]: 65:22 - Berman [1998]: 63:36.
This new Pierce recording on ANTS, recorded in 1999, has a duration of a mere 50:13, rivaled only by Pierce’s own older recording from 1975, running at 55:50, almost 20 minutes shorter than Gerard Fremy’s 1983 recording! Most recordings end up somewheres in the middle 60s.
This shows that this is a work of which the performers have widely disparate performing opinions, but I think it’s very nice and convenient that these differences do occur, enabling various tonal and timing aspects, for the benefit of the listeners… and the work! Cage smiles in the wings!

This is a very important work, but not only so; it’s a very much enjoyable and ear-catching one too, so let’s see how Eric Salzman describes it in the ANTS booklet:

It is interesting to see what the knowledgeable pianist and writer Steffen Schleiermacher – who has recorded Cage’s entire piano output on Dabringhaus & Grimm - says on Cage’s Sonatas & Interludes:

If I had the time I’d like to sit down and compare the sounding results of preparations and the various recording procedures of all the recordings readily available to me in my home, but that would be a time-consuming feat that I can’t involve myself in now. However, from earlier run-throughs and lustful auditions, I can deduce that the most successful recordings, sound wise, that I’ve heard, are Julie Steinberg’s on Music & Arts, Louie Goldstein’s on Greensye and Philippe Vandré’s on Mode.
For an all-time, ultimate listening experience, I’d go for Julie Steinberg’s rendition. I’d say it leaves all the other recordings way behind; partly because of her diligent and masterly performance, but also for the careful miking of the piano, which reveals nuances and details hitherto unknown, making the piece unbelievably vibrant and alive.
There is one other rendition that I’d like to recommend to one and all too; the Takahashi mono recording from Fylkingen, Stockholm in 1965, which doesn’t fall much short of Steinberg’s recording, but as it is a monaural recording (which of course Ajemian's 1950 recording also is) I left it out of the grading above – even though it is an astounding recording.

Takahashi’s recording is a live one, and I began this text on Sonatas & Interludes with the opinion that the work should not be recorded live. This is true, in the sense that you absolutely ought to take the time and effort of a studio recording with numerous cuts and splices and inserts – Glenn Gould style – to approach the perfect take of each detail. It was not possible in the Takahashi case at Fylkingen, and the result is a brilliant document, but… I feel it’s a bit of a letdown to publish this Pierce live version on this new ANTS record, for reasons already stated. One could see it as a document, ok, but there are too many extraneous sounds, people coughing and so forth, and a live recording cannot reach the heights of concentration throughout that we have become spoiled with over the years. I choose to view this ANTS recording of the Sonatas & Interludes purely as a documentary recording, and then its, at the very least, passable.

Three Early Songs were written as early as 1933, and here we hear the songs on a premier recording and issue.
The songs – Twenty Years After; Is It As It Was; At East and Ingredients – are settings of texts by Gertrude Stein (a feat which Petr Kotik has made his own in grand ventures since a few decades).
These songs basically employ a single, simple vocal line against an equally simple piano line. The tenor is Robert White. This is interesting only because of the novelty of a first recording and issue. Otherwise it really is… nothing, except for the Stein quality of the text itself, which is, as always with Stein, joyously confusing and contextually playful!

Two Pieces for Piano is next, a set from 1946. Salzman thinks that they show a clear influence from Schönberg. He also explains that these piano pieces are closely related to a Merce Cunningham work called The Seasons.
The atmosphere of this music is quite withheld, subdued, calmly reflecting, finger on cheek, eyes gazing inwards and into memory. It’s peaceful and restful and straight, i.e. unprepared. The notes fall like seeds in soil, a little unevenly distributed by the sower/pianist.
Later in the work, wilder figures are rising out of the piano, louder and straggly, thorn-like or crystal-like, with sharp edges and hard cuts; a slashing kind of music, glass-splintering.
Unfortunately, there is too much room reverberation in this recording (not on the rest of the set!), or perhaps I hear humming ventilation in the recording space. This is a common, all-too-common, problem in recordings, and I’ve even returned some CDs from a couple of the bigger record companies for this. It is an absolute requirement that all ventilation is turned off at concerts, and of course at recordings. It’s just a simple act of decency.

Music for Marcel Duchamp was written in 1947. It was composed for Hans Richter’s film Dreams That Money Can Buy, i.e. for the Duchamp sequence in that movie. The piece employs relatively few notes and a lot of silence. Salzman gives the information in the booklet that Cage used a kind of preparation and playing technique that he believed would register the best on the optical track for the film. Therefore the percussive sounds from the preparations of the piano are relatively unaggressive.
I’d say they sound quite a lot like the preparations used by Cage when he played his Cheap Imitation at Mills College in 1976 (Cramps Records CRSCD 117). It is very beautiful, with a certain withheld bamboo ring to the tones, presented in an enchanted hue, mist in the elves’ forest. Spellbinding!

Spontaneous Earth is a very brief piece for a Cunningham choreography. It has a deep, soaring, muffled character, merrily jumping or marching along, with sharper, clearer fork-and-knife attacks soaring between elastic rubber thumps, in an unusually complex and foggy preparative sound world. Highly interesting, and the brevity is a disappointment. I’d like to listen to this much longer!

Three Easy Pieces from 1933 don’t take long to execute either; just below three minutes. They are two-part inventions each notated on a single stave, but maybe they can be heard as school exercises. I don’t hear Cage in here, I must say. Their age, however, vouches for their inclusion, and maybe their historical significance. Cage was 21 at the time! He wasn’t always that old wise sage!

The Unavailable Memory of from 1944 sure has an intriguing title, written for a Cunningham dance of the same name. The preparations are deep and the miking is close. I like this very much. Thus is how I like the preparations; close and right on, no doubts or worries. Magnificent overtones soar, bend and pull in an adventurous musical torque. Brilliant! Brilliantly prepared, brilliantly played, brilliantly recorded!

Two Pieces for Piano from 1935, revised in 1974, wrap up this two-CD set of John Cage music.
Schönberg’s shadow again fall hard across this early score, but the lack of phrasing or dynamic markings makes it easy for Joshua Pierce to chisel out his own interpretation, adding some color and rhythmic life.
These are, of course, non-prepared pieces, and they fall easily along the keyboard, it seems, with the sense of gusts of summery breezes through the curtains of a Midwestern home in the Americas of old. On this light, summery breeze the last tones of this interesting ANTS set seep out into the silence from whence all sounds arise, and I sit back and stare for a good while, in a peaceful position as the Macintosh hums and my feelings rest…