OgreOgress productions adds to its exclusive catalog with this release of John Cage’s final percussion work - Four⁴ -, which is performed by one of the persons behind the label itself; Glenn Freeman.

The booklet – or rather the CD cover – contains an interesting essay by Rob Haskins, titled ”Cage’s Number Pieces”, from which I will quote a few passages:

”As he approached his eightieth birthday, John Cage (1912 – 1992) found himself the grand old man of the avant-garde; a composer, writer and artist who had attained notoriety and visibility on a worldwide scale. Once only a small circle of brilliant performers had been associated with his work; now ensembles and soloists awarded him commission after commission for new compositions. In order to keep up with the demand for new compositions, Cage turned once more to his long-time assistant Andrew Culver, who developed new software that enabled Cage to write music very quickly.
These new works, which occupied almost all of Cage’s compositional attention between 1987 and 1992, came to be known as the Number Pieces. Each work’s title consists only of a number written out as a word (One, Two, Fourteen etc.) that indicates the number of performers for which the piece was composed. If Cage wrote several works for the same number of performers, he would make a further distinction in the title by adding a superscript numeral; for instance, Four (1989) is for string quartet, while Four⁴ (1991) – Cage would have read the title as ’Four for the Fourth Time’ – is for a quartet of percussion.”

In Four⁴ Cage worked with ”time brackets”, as he has done in many other works. This is a way of determining the duration of a piece without exactly forcing the performer(s) into a totally rigid system, which is why, in Four⁴, Cage lets player 1 start his first time bracket any time between 0’00 and 1’00, whereas it must end somewhere between 0’40 and 1’40. Of course, when these various time brackets are induced on a number of players, the result may vary a lot from performance to performance, thus leaving the door wide open to chance as well as artistic nuance and sensitivity on the part of the performers.

Cage wrote a mesostic called ”Composition in Retrospect”, in which he described the usage of time brackets. The mesostic is reprinted on the back of the CD cover.

In Four⁴ Cage left the choice of percussive instruments up to the performers. Rob Haskins comments on this: ”By leaving the choice of instruments up to the performers, I believe Cage was expressing not a disinterest in the choice but rather a Zen-like absence from choice, the ultimate certainty that his ego need not influence the sounds that would appear in his percussion music. This absence and the extreme economy of content gives Cage’s Number Pieces a transparency that is always a surprise for those who know the composer’s more extravagant or virtuosic works.”

Having just returned from the mountains and valleys and vast expanses of Lapland, I can’t help but notice the similarities between those open landscapes and this music. In the mountains all you hear is the wind, and not in the trees, because you’re always above the timberline when you’re hiking in the northernmost parts; no – you hear the wind itself, the wind. Then there are the different pitches of water. You may hear the close trickling of small brooks, finding their way down from glaciers or high altitude snow, left over from last winter. This sound is brittle, near, appearing fast and disappearing as fast when you walk by. Sometimes you may discover a deep murmur from some undetermined direction, just suddenly apparent as a deep pitch. Then you know that you are approaching a big mountain stream or even violent rapids. A somewhat higher pitch, ever-present – or present for a long while (hours, half days) – is the pitch from waterfalls on the other side of the valley, cascading down from on high in a mighty roar that is diluted when passing across great distances across the mighty valleys, reaching you like a steadfast background pitch. When there are several waterfalls present, they all appear in different pitches, and you can imagine the vividness of these water pitches on passages of the hike when all these different water pitches mix, at times masked by a close, big torrent, at times thinning out, with just a distant waterfall providing the pitch of the valley.

Then, at times, you might hear one single birdcall, like the lonely voice of Pluvialis apricaria, or – on lower altitudes, where there are areas with mountain birches - the Luscina svecica.
Then again… it’s just the wind, only the wind…

In this long, barren, sparse percussion piece by John Cage there are similar atmospheres, with a lot of wind – or silence – between the audible parts of the composition. For you to truly appreciate this thinned out music you have to distance yourself to a remoter area of the mind – seldom visited in these dense city decades – where you can see eye to eye with yourself; and there is Cage’s Four⁴ in this Freeman rendering, in sweeping glances across the horizons, with the watery pitches of desolate plains and a sense of timing and duration that cares not for clocks, but for the silence in the wind and the constant flowing of water and time in the palm of the Great Spirit.

The piece – in Glenn Freeman’s performance – commences with a feeling and a sound of brittle glass, like frost on the plains, disturbed only by a distant incidental murmur, like a slumbering glacier shifting position in its incredibly slow flow.

The silences are filled with peace – clear big-sky peace - and the sense of the Earth rotating.
A rattling percussion introduces the continuous but subdued metallic mist of tam tams, as a vibrating wooden sound brings rapid life to the foreground, like a swarm of mosquitoes at dusk over the lake.

Then again; Silence… and more silence… beautiful silence… restful silence… nose-tip-viewing silence…

And more metal, loud metal – but in misty showers – not in bangs! In some sections of the music the metallic percussion takes on the character of standing waves, making associations to early musics by LaMonte Young possible.

This beautiful, meditative – truly arctic – kind of musical progression continues in many variations of percussion and silences, and if you’re ready for this kind of experience, you feel aloft, soaring, elevated through the weightlessness of sounding rocks and watery pitches.

Breathe! Soar! Breathe!