John Cage Albums (63)
'One4, Four/Twenty-Nine/Fong, Krummel, Freeman, Crawford'
Release Date 11/30/2005
Tracks 8
Label OgreOgress
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What The Critics Say
This beautiful piece for piano solo (Richard Bunger), with a scene for the unaccompanied solo voice of Jay Clayton in the middle, is of approximately one hour's duration. It was written originally as music for a theater piece, a "dance play" psychodrama about a family conceived by the dancer Merce Cunningham, which had only one performance in Steamboat Springs, CO on August 22, 1944. The music is played entirely on the white keys of the piano, which gives the work natural modal qualities, and the music is not complex, as it was designed to be easily played by a pianist unknown to either Cage or Cunningham, and there was no travel money for Cage to attend the rehearsals with the pianist. All of these circumstances resulted in a work of direct, evocative, mesmerizing musical gestures, some set off by silences of varying length, some of insistent rhythm with simple variation. There are 14 Scenes, plus two sections for dance alone, each with a different dynamic -- the text they were to accompany, now lost, can only be imagined by the listener. The text for the solo singer in Scene VII reads "Sweet love, my throat is gurgling, the mystic mouth, leads me so defted, and the black nightingale, turned willowly by love's tossed treatment, berefted." Written at a time when Cage was considering the serious move of ceasing to write music in order to devote time to being psychoanalyzed, the title (as in the expression "staring at four walls" for intense, cabin-fever boredom) must have taken on poignant personal significance for the composer. He resolved to keep on with music, which lead to the radical and highly influential solutions of his post-1950 work. ~ "Blue" Gene Tyranny, All Music Guide
'Will You Give Me to Tell You'
Release Date 10/21/2003
Tracks 14
Label Norway Music
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'Locations: Sonatas and Interludes/Festeburger Fantasien (Piano Improvisations)'
Release Date 7/22/2003
Tracks 37
Label ECM New Series
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'3 Compositions by John Cage'
Release Date 5/6/2003
Tracks 5
Label Winter & Winter
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What The Critics Say
Part of the Ogreogress label's project to record the late, so-called "number pieces" of John Cage, this disc contains three versions of "One 6" and one of "One 10" performed by Christina Fong on violin and viola (occasionally overdubbed). "One 6" is a fairly harsh work, largely consisting of single, minutely varying lines held for 20 to 30 seconds interspersed with silent periods of similar length. Listeners may be reminded of Tony Conrad's experiments in microtonal violin drones, although the austerity of these works may also recall some of Alvin Lucier's more rarefied compositions. Fong, however, elicits a palpable emotionalism that those composers tend to eschew. Her playing throughout is tough, intelligent, and richly sonorous. The three variations are pitched slightly differently with a lower, grainier attack in the first contrasting with a higher, more liquid approach in the second. The third, longest version combines aspects of both and also ups the intensity level. "One 10" is structurally similar but pitched higher still, injecting an airy, sometimes flute-like quality. One feature that holds here (and in the following disc) is that the stretches of silence are not "live" time where the performer just stops playing, but are portions of dead air. This can be a little off-putting, as the listener clearly loses the room ambience -- although it might be argued that it thrusts you with extra force into the sound world you're actually occupying. The astringency of these pieces sets them off against the relative lushness of works like "Twenty-Three" and "Twenty-Six" (see the related Ogreogress release), but provides its own unique kind of reward insofar as making you hyper-aware of your surroundings. Recommended. ~ Brian Olewnick, All Music Guide
'Three2/Twenty-Three/Six/Twenty-Six'
Release Date 1/1/2003
Tracks 4
Label OgreOgress
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What The Critics Say
This recording collects four of John Cage's very late works, part of a series known as the "number pieces" written in the late '80s and early '90s. In these compositions, instrumentalists are presented with "time brackets" during which they either play or do not play, but the specific durations of activities, as well as modes of attack, are left up to them. Included here are two works for percussion ensemble and two for large string ensembles (both achieved through overdubbing). A feature in common to all of the pieces on the three discs is the utilization of extended tones. With the percussion works, this generally means lengthy washes of cymbals, cascades of small bells, and a prominent use of ringing, flex-a-tone kinds of sounds. "Three 2," performed by Glenn Freeman in three increasingly short portions, typifies this approach. For all its surface attractiveness, it's a difficult thing to get a good grasp on, the sequences of percussion passing by in seemingly random stages; one gets an impression of watching particularly mellifluous cars driving slowly by, different models or colors represented by different instruments. "Twenty-Three," for massed violins, violas, and celli (Christina Fong on the first two, Karen Krummel on the latter), is a gorgeous lattice of densely layered drones occupying a very small note range but varying widely in intensity of attack. Tony Conrad's violin music inevitably comes to mind, but there's nothing that remotely smacks of physics experiments here. More, there's a surprising (for Cage) amount of palpable, human striving and emotion. Sometimes, one imagines a luscious melding of Conrad and Gavin Bryars. It also contains something of a brief coda after the 21-minute mark, a slight but lovely mood shift away from the urgency expressed previously, more toward an uneasy acceptance. The short "Six" (which, unlike the other pieces whose durations in minutes are indicated by their titles -- read "Three 2" as "three squared") lasts but three minutes and, not unlike the first track, consists of a series of bowed cymbals, jingle bell shakes, and timpani rolls, sliding segmentally across one's field of hearing. It's a rather strong work though, with an odd, alien kind of power, as though one is observing some baffling procession of unknown purpose. "Twenty-Six" is something of a counterpart to "Twenty-Three," save that all the parts are for violin and, perhaps simply due to Fong's persona, the emotional intensity is ratcheted up a notch or two. Again, one finds comparisons to music that one doesn't normally associate with Cage, in this case to some of Penderecki's writing for string orchestras from the '60s; there's something of a similar raw, naked vibrancy. It's a marvelous, searing performance, capping a very fine recording that should be far more widely heard than it's likely to be. ~ Brian Olewnick, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
"Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake" is a 60-minute radio piece based on James Joyce's book Finnegans Wake. At its core is John Cage's text "Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake," a series of mesostics that form an objective reduction of Joyce's overwhelming text. "Roaratorio" consists of four "layers" of sounds. First is the voice of Cage himself speak-singing his text, thus providing a space-time line. Second is a collection of field recordings from the places mentioned in the book. Third is a collection of sounds mentioned in the book. Finally, Cage recorded Irish musicians (Joyce was Irish) and added their pieces to the mix, for a total of 62 tracks of constantly shifting sonic magma that live a dizzying life, just like Joyce's novel. Even though Cage used chance operations to make editing and mixing choices, the piece doesn't have the gratuitous or aleatory feel of some of his other hörspiels and is simply a fascinating (although highly complex) work. In 1992, Mode released this well-conceived two-CD set that brings all the necessary elements to the "Roaratorio" file. Alongside the piece there is a highly informative conversation between the composer and Klaus Schöning titled "Laughtears" and recorded in August 1979, right after the final mix of the piece was completed. Also included is Cage's reading. The booklet includes the full text of "Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake," a transcript of the conversation, and a number of other related documents. A second edition came out in 2002 with remastered 24-bit sound. The piece will fascinate aficionados of Cage's music and Joyce scholars. ~ François Couture, All Music Guide
