Let me just bide in this lonely air of fall… where the faint murmur of distant cars traveling a dusky freeway can be heard as a backdrop to the silence of mist, contoured by introverted Turdus viscivorus thrushes in wet arbors as Time halts, takes a deep breath… and then continues on tip-toe down the chronologies… Cage…

“Six Melodies” (1950) – and much of the content of this CD – breeds such melancholic, lofty visions in the atmosphere of my mind as I listen in pure attention to the violin of Irvine Arditti and the piano of Stephen Drury on mode’s 100th release.

We’ve heard magical performances by Irvine Arditti before in this important ongoing series, for example on the two CDs with the complete “Freeman Etudes” (mode 32 & 37), constituting a revelatory glimpse into the possibilities of the impossible, and Stephen Drury appears on a number of CDs with the piano works of John Cage, like mode 63; “The Seasons”, “Cheap Imitation” and “ASLSP”. This underlines the fact that these performers are at one with their task, that of presenting John Cage’s works in the most accurate of lightings, with shadings and nuances hitherto unheard – and they do not disappoint; these are precise incisions into an oeuvre that may seem mystical and austere, and sure enough – those are two of its properties, but there are other aspects of John Cage’s music too, which can be sensed in your own pure, attentive and restful listening, in the spacious reverberation it makes inside your own privacy, where you can stay perched on your skeleton as the Cageian scent comes and goes – and it can be pure pleasure or a bewildering venomousness, or even both…

“Six Melodies” progresses in a calm, inward balancing act as the tightrope stretches out, and it’s in mid space, with no ground, no celestial bodies in sight, and it may be that you’re taken by the hand by a guiding angel, through your Bardo passage – such is the delicacy of this playing, this trusting motion through the silence surrounding… and Karma works for everyone, and if this gentle, then nothing to fear… just soar on ahead, no need looking at the tightrope…
Naturally, these melodies – some jolly, fast slingshots – are melodious in a way that may surprise, but then again, they’re early pieces in Cage’s work list. You cannot mistake the precise weighing, though, of attitude, of breathing – it’s Cage! He might say to you; “You might as well go biking!” – and why not? The main thing here, it seems to me, is to open up yourself to yourself, and realize the freedom. Cage’s music says, over and over again, that we’re free, but that we maybe not yet know it, and I believe that is one of the wonders of his music, that it opens up to a sense of personal freedom which is a part of a universal freedom, which I think Cage always tried to envision, for instance through his chance operations, where he tried to free himself of the role of the composer, and free the music of a composer other than the universal principles behind chance, behind life, behind the sparkling life of minerals deep inside the rock!

“Nocturne” (1947) for violin and piano is the earliest piece on the CD. It has a prelude type of beginning, but you cannot mistake the high, hesitant pitch of the violin, slowly bowing downwards (microtonal slides) at certain instances, hardly noticeable, forbearing a later, more barren Cage. The meditative aspect is there, point blank, as it seems to have been all along, probably as an inherent atmosphere in the life of the composer long before he started composing, as the scent of an orchard in fall, with ripe fruit, moist with the evening dampness of the cooling air – and you walk there by yourself… (as you do on all your really important walks…)

A much later piece is “Eight Whiskus” (1985) for violin. As the title indicates, it comes in eight miniatures. The tones are etched on your tympanic membranes, or burned onto paper, crumbling aways as the piece progresses. Or is this cat music, taking a few steps, halting in the middle of a step, one paw protruding – the cat in a freeze! – then taking a few steps again, tail nervously jerking, the attention straight ahead…

I have one complaint about this recording of “Eight Whiskus”, and it has to do with the ventilation system not being turned off while recording. It provides the recording with an undesirable, constant murmur, which blurs the impression if you’re sensitive to it. I guess we’ll have to blame the producer – Christophe Franke – for contaminating “Eight Whiskus” with a roaring ventilation system… Those things are so easy to avoid, and it should of course be standard procedure to shut all that humming off while recording!

The melodies of the piece give an impression of un-intent… but they are melodies, indeed melodies, easy to follow, but sort of collected from the absolute unintention of a five year old child’s wandering thoughts as he sits in shorts and sandals on the steps of his father’s house, staring blankly into the garden, absorbing the chill of the concrete steps and the fondling, passing touch of an airy gust out of the afternoon, and the pleasurable scents it carries from late bloomers in the flowerbeds of September.

“Two⁶” (1992) was – as the dating indicates – written the year Cage entered his own Bardo passage. It belongs in the set of compositions that has been named the Number Pieces. The numbering in this case simply means that it is the 6th composition Cage made for 2 performers; here played by Irvine Arditti on violin and Stephen Drury on piano. This piece is quite a bit longer than the previous ones on this set, with almost 20 minutes to its credit.
The violin – the fiddle! – swirls around in dusty up-risings of hidden paraphernalia from behind the sofa, and the piano takes bold, punctuating steps with hard heels on the floor. A cowboy is cleaning up his room, having just come back from a lot of herding… Those old Space Cattle Herders again…
There are many ways to approach this thin spidery music, or let it approach you, while the best way to enjoy it probably is to take the position of the five-year-old child mentioned above, just sitting there with un-intent and unforeseeable influx in his mind… Just receive… just relax… just let go… In a way, this violin-piano stretch might be utilized as therapy for anyone able to stand up and state: “My name is so-and-so, and I’m a polluted contemporary!” Yes, because it is an act of cleansing, tiding-up, seeing-what’s-beneath-all-that-junk, to really let yourself be devoured by these sketchy, fragile progressions of the sharp, scratchy, incisive violin and the solid, bluish or brownish, rounded trustworthiness of the piano chords; lines and dots, lines and dots, like Morse codes across the ocean!

“One¹⁰” (1992) is the concluding piece, in excess of 24 minutes; 24:36 to be exact. It is interesting to note that another recording I have of the same piece, made by Christina Fong (OgreOgress productions), has almost exactly the same duration; 24:30!
The piece is a worthy exercise for anyone, listener and performer alike, since these long, thin lines of a violin - as if the wanderer causally lets the bow drag behind on the ground on a long journey across the topographies - are out of the ordinary… It may be an exercise in concentration for both parties, and a fixture of thoughts and dreams (what is the difference?) on glass plates. This is a glass music. You are circling a light bulb, just barely touching its curvature in spidery movements, and you realize that space is a meeting place- a rendezvous – for noses and necks.
Cage has stripped this music bare of all but the last piece of outlining structure; that last spider-thread component; pure, barren life force without any additives… - “One¹⁰”!