With this CD the mighty John Cage Piano Music Edition on Dabringhaus & Grimm reaches its conclusion. It has been a great adventure to listen through all these CDs; all extremely well recorded, technically as well as artistically. Many recording companies have a lot to learn from Dabringhaus & Grimm.
It is with an unusual fit of mischievous humor that Schleiermacher breaks loose from his former, quite strict orderliness, and jokes around in his booklet text. One reason could be that he was very happy at the completion of the Cage Piano Edition (which he should be), or it could be in line with the haphazard occurrence of this extra CD. Yes, Volume 10 wasn’t planned, but came about as an appendix of odds and ends, since, for a few reasons, some pieces turned up which now really do make this edition complete! In short, the story, as told by Schleiermacher, goes like this:
He (Schleiermacher) received an email from André Chaudron in Holland. He told Schleiermacher that he’s stumbled upon an unknown Cage work in the online library at Mills College. It was Opening Dance, which is presented here at track 1, fittingly. Upon request, Schleiermacher was graciously sent the bit by the library.
Then, while riding a car through Chicago with Amy Williams, the daughter of percussionist Jan Williams, who himself has done, for example, celebrated recordings of the music of Morton Feldman on Hat Art, Amy Williams told Schleiermacher that she and her piano duo partner had performed a piece by Cage that constituted a mix of Cage and Satie! As Schleiermacher investigated the matter he found that this indeed was a work by Cage by the name of Furniture Music, which had been considered lost. Jan Williams was the administrator of Yvar Mikhashoff’s estate, from which Amy Williams had acquired a copy of Furniture Music. This is the basis for Schleiermacher’s recording here, presented at track 2, with the addition Etcetera to the title. This calls for an explanation, which is found right in the CD booklet, briefly as follows:
The piece Furniture Music Etcetera was an occasional work – i.e. written for a special event – at a concert with Aki Takahashi and Mikhashoff. It contains citations from Satie’s Musique d’ameublement and from the piano sections in Cage’s own Etcetera. Much is left up to the interpreter for the actual performance.
Satie’s Musique d’ameublement was composed as an accessory to an exhibition, remaining only in a version for instrumental ensemble. Schleiermacher thus had to decide what sections to use, where after he set them for piano, and treating them according to a barely readable score of sorts. Etcetera provides only approximate parameters, within which the player can move.
The Suite for Toy Piano was composed when Cage resided at Black Mountain College. It seems the idea for the composition arose when the opportunity materialized in the shape of a toy piano sitting around somewhere at the College. The composition is also written for the alternate regular piano.
Schleiermacher bought his own toy piano for the recording from the company Schoenhut in the States.
In Ulrike Rausch’s book Grenzgänge on the Pfau-Verlag Schleiermacher found the score for the film Works by Calder. Peters Company gave the green light for a recording, and here it is! The film about Alexander Calder, by Herbert Matter, was done in 1950. The score implies prepared piano and electroacoustics. Cage shared his enthusiasm for the new electroacoustic art in letters to Pierre Boulez.
The last work on this extra CD is Four3 from as late as 1991!
The piece is written, even in that late year, for choreography by Merce Cunningham! Schleiermacher explains how he saw the performance of it with Cunningham and the very ill David Tudor in the early 1990s.
Schleiermacher has investigated the tone series played on a close piano and a distant piano, and found that they’re indeed distorted citations from the bass figure of Satie’s Vexations! It turns out Cage’s performance instructions exclude all coordination between the four performers, who are instructed not to react to one another in any way.
Now, the way these recordings come across on this CD is stunning as ever, with a quirky smile from the gifted interpreter at the extras!
Opening Dance is a rock n’ rolling jester’s dance across the keyboard, lively jerky, rhythmic as ever, solid and sometimes rolling out like a barbed wire fence through the morning mist of the meadow! It’s short and sweet!
Furniture Music Etcetera is indeed peculiar; what could you expect! These are two worlds merging, or maybe not even merging; simply existing in parallel lives along the time line. A grave melody – I suppose Satie’s – stakes out some kind of funeral march, and the funky layering of the progressions make me feel like the music has been done right here in the Macintosh with some sound software like SoundMaker or Protools, even though I know this is not the case. These flakes of music are inserted behind each other half way through recognizable melodic gestures, like masonite boards stacked on a construction site. There is clarity in the confusion, though; a clarity that seems almost etched, so sharp and contoured!
The Suite for Toy Piano is delicate, of course, as the instrument demands, or as the voice of the instrument can only sound. It’s a hesitant, thoughtful passage of a tin soldier in love across the floor, along the thresholds of a fairytale. It could be a piece played by little dolls with pencils and bicycle bells, except maybe the conclusion, which hammers away madly at whatever is provided by the small means at hand! All in all, it’s an atmosphere, though, in which to dream about love and forlorn, dream-drifted summery orchards…
Music for the Film Works by Calder is a more Asian piece, in a serene gamelan luster, plotting the course to be taken through the score. The recording is, once again, stunning in its beauty, with the radiance of overtones from the gamelan preparations of the piano! Absolutely brilliant!
Four3 is by far the longest piece on the CD; more than 32 minutes. The beginning sounds like s drizzling rain, from the twelve rain sticks. A widely spaced progression of piano tones spread out like a hilly landscape, shrouded in the silence of mist or smoke from campfires. At times the thin stretch of piano tones appear with the drizzling rain sticks and the straight, thin lineage of the violin. It’s philosophy, meditation and music in one breath, one liberating sequence of in- and exhalations through a peaceful landscape which is an introspective soundscape, an outer materialization of an inner state of mind, that of Maestro Cage in his old age, speaking right out of the wealth of insights he tapped into during a life of thinking
Check out these interesting sites:
http://www.newalbion.com/artists/cagej/autobiog.html
http://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/
