John Cage
John Cage’s prepared-piano Sonatas and Interludes turn the instrument into a gamelan of pings, thuds and quiet resonance. His late chamber piece SEVEN is a slow, almost static meditation; Dream floats in mellow sustained colour.
The Sonatas and Interludes (1946–50) form a complete cycle shaped by traditional Indian emotions, fully notated yet different each time because no two prepared pianos sound alike. The music moves between gentle meditation and whimsy, with silences Cage treated as strictly as the notes, and endings that grow ever more inward. Beside the cycle sit Music for Marcel Duchamp and the Joyce setting The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, where the pianist plays on the body of the instrument. First Construction brings the same experimental ear to percussion. SEVEN barely moves; Dream, heard for viola ensemble, is simply mellow. What draws the ear is colour, patience and the strange sensuality of sounds that refuse ordinary piano rhetoric.
Compositions by John Cage appear on
re-sound
re-sound's first, self-titled album gathers chamber works by John Cage and five Australian composers – Brendan Colbert, Paul Moulatlet, Ken Murray, Thomas Reiner and Harvey Sollberger – in a programme of late twentieth-century sound.