Steffen Schleiermacher:

Rob Haskins has written an interesting text on Cage’s Number Pieces, called “Anarchism and the Everyday”, where he characterizes time bracket composition as an elastic measure to introduce an element of unpredictability. This method was used by Cage already early on, in the 1952 piece “Untitled Event” at Black Mountain College. However, as Haskins observes, in the Number Pieces the brackets are smaller and more subtle.
Cage wrote an autobiographical mesostic 1981 / 1988 called “Composition in Retrospect”, wherein he describes the act of composing with time brackets. This mesostic is reprinted on the cover of a very interesting release from OgreOgress productions; “Cage Four 4”, on which Glenn Freeman plays Cage’s last percussion work, a 72-minute Cageian feast!
All in all Cage completed 48 Number Pieces, predominantly in the period from 1987 to 1992, i.e. his last years in this particular life. The titles simply indicate the number of players, and if there are more than one Number Piece for the same number of players, the different compositions are numbered too, as in the case of the piece on the OgreOgress CD above, which in reality would be written 44, which means that it is Cage’s fourth composition for four players.

On this CD from Dabringhaus & Grimm “Music for Eight” is the introductory – and, if duration counts, the main – piece, with its in excess of 30 minutes. It also features the largest number of sounding entities, such as flute, clarinet, trumpet, piano x 2, percussion x 2 and voice.
Of course, these Cageian indications or sometimes un-indications make for very different performances from time to time. Sometimes Cage determines the instruments to be used, sometimes not, and the individual decisions on the part of the performers concerning where to start and stop within the limitations of the time brackets produce a highly diverse end result each time. However, within a fixed group of musicians, who may be very used to each other, and who have performed the same piece many times, a certain structure of habit or necessity or artistic preferences may arrive at something that is not so haphazard after all, and that simply means that the freedom within brackets (etcetera) that Cage gave in his compositions simply engages the musical and artistic senses of the performers more vividly than in “traditional” compositions, opening the flow of creativity. I believe that this is Cage’s great gift to art; the opening up of the doors of creativity for anyone indulging in his music or his writings. He was a freedom fighter in the finest sense of the word; a liberator of mind and creativity!
In this sense he is on the level with Stockhausen, who has invented many – really numerous! - compositional methods that he has put to work in his scores, giving a certain freedom to the interpreters within very specialized frames or rules, so that his compositions – many of them – may sound quite different from time to time, even though the players adhere completely to the set rules. It can have to do with where to start in a piece, or with which part of a piece to start, like for example in “Tierkreis” and it's offsprings, where you start with the star sign which you’re in at the time of the performance, or it can have to do with certain signals in the music which serve as stimuli for some other player(s) to begin something, which in turn starts other things off, the result being unforeseeable but always a consequence of very strict rules. Both Stockhausen and Cage thereby further the importance of the individual players and their flowing creativity and their tuned ears.

“Music for Eight” is a good example of this creative freedom within a set of rules, and as Ensemble Avantgarde of Leipzig consists of highly trained and also very creative musicians, the result is interesting and lucid, a result of skill, good ears and chance! Of course, though the group is very coherent and stable in its inter-relations of the musicians, there are moments when chance and unforeseen tendencies either amass the instruments in shimmering walls of sound, trembling with the full weight of a woman ready to give birth, while at other times the web of sounds thin out in to a ghostlike transparency or misty sketches on the horizon. This is the sublimity of the effort; that effortlessness may turn the whole ensemble intention into something unintended, that nonetheless is accepted in the compositional construction of the composer – actually called for in his meditative act of composing! – and that this surprises of weight-shifts in the ensemble are so well taken care of by the musicians, who are balancing this fresh fluid of a composition in crystal vessels on ahead.

Of “Five” there are two versions on this CD. However, they are not called Five¹ and Five², because it’s the same Cage composition, simply performed twice by the ensemble.
In “Five”, the pitches and the dynamics are determined, but the instruments are not indicated. Your choice! The musicians chose for the first version solely stringed instruments, whereas only instruments where the tones are produced by breath are used in the second version. (The opposite is stated in the booklet, but when listening to the CD it is obvious what is correct). Steffen Schleiermacher adds: “The tones of the grand piano were not produced by pressing the keys, but by quasi-bowing of the strings with bow hairs”.

A beautiful, extended line of serenity calms you along the breadth of the composition, in a tonal landscape of ice and glass, of chilly air and light of day. In the silence of long pauses you contemplate the stillness of life without intention, existence without a cause…

“Aria” is a vocal work which many vocal soloists have had a go at, the most prominent probably Cathy Berberian, for whom Cage wrote the piece in Milan between November 1958 and February 1959.
Salome Kammer says that she felt a great resistance when approaching “Aria”, referring to the imprecision of the text and the haphazard graphics. It seemed to Kammer that everything was left up to her – but here we have a case again of a fruitful freedom provided by Cage, which eventually would result in decisions being made and an interpretation taking shape within Salome Kammer. One of her interpretations found its way onto this disc, where the liveliness of her voice can be enjoyed in this Cageian setting. I’ve heard Cathy Berberian sing this, as well as Norwegian jazz singer Karin Krog, and Salome Kammer’s interpretation is an honorable addition to these other performances.

“String Quartet in Four Parts” has imaginative and suggestive names, which of course also – or perhaps primarily – are indications; “Quietly flowing along”, “Slowly rocking”, “Nearly stationary”, “Quodlibet”. This was written already in 1950, and a famous recording was made for Deutsche Grammophon by LaSalle String Quartet in 1967 and 1972.

John Cage:

This string quartet differs a lot from the other works on this CD. Hardly any chance parameters are at work, and everything is thoroughly composed. One property that may be a little unpredictable is the instruction to play with bows that are hardly tightened at all. Else, this piece constitutes the culmination of the part of Cage’s oeuvre that is very strict and lacking of interpretational freedom – so indeed different from the preceding works on the CD!

1^st movement; “Quietly flowing along”: An absentminded melody in the mind of someone twisting a lock of his hair between his fingers while staring out into the garden, or while reading an austere poem of long-lost longings in a book on the table in front of him…

2^nd movement; “Slowly rocking”: The slow, sketchy motions of the bows across the strings bring out some intensely bare, naked emotions, which eventually collide head-on with the hard metal of a tough human situation, for which the only possible remedy is a flight within, toward a lonely core of silence…

3^rd movement; “Nearly stationary”: You’re sitting on a stool in the middle of an empty room; wooden floor, large empty windows through which a bleak and thin daylight flows – and you can barely sense the contours of the apple trees in the unkempt garden outside, and you feel the coldness of the planks of the floor under your bare feet.
Something is over, and you sit for a while before leaving…

4^th movement; “Quodlibet”: An inwardly swirling dance of the mind, jolly in all this sadness, stubbornly innocent in all this guilt of human life; short, quick – then… silent!