Complete Piano Music Vol. 1: The Prepared Piano 1940-1952

John Cage - Complete Piano Music Vol. 1: The Prepared Piano 1940-1952

performer: Steffen Schleiermacher

From the liner notes:

It made the composer John Cage especially famous, more so than his percussion pieces, more so than his famous tecet 4:33, more so than his philosophy of music or his unique late oeuvre, more so than his performances. For many his name, insofar as it is a known quantity, is still bound up with it today. And yet hardly any other of his inventions has set so little of an example, has had so few imitators: we are referring, of course, to the prepared piano.

Cage's invention or discovery of the preparation potential of the grand piano owed more to practical considerations than to deliberate artistic intention. Cage was supposed to compose a piece of ballet music for Syvilla Fort in 1940. The performance space was simply too small for the percussion music intended by him, and so he got to thinking about experiments conducted by Henry Cowell. These experiments has employed the piano in an unconventional way and involved playing on the strings. Continuing along these lines (half in jest, in part with kitchen gadgets), Cage hit upon the all-important solution: one was not to lay something on the strings but to insert suitable objects between the strings (erasers of all sorts of different sizes, screws of all sorts of different types, bamboo, cloth, pieces of wood, etc.) In Bacchanale, his first piece for prepared piano, the preparation is very simple, and the sound recalls percussion instruments such as bongos or drums. Cage exhibited increasing refinement in his quest for the most unusual sorts of sound combinations. He employed prepared tones alone in his first pieces but included nonprepared tones in his later pieces as a sort of special form of preparation. They sounded very strange in this connection and at least as unusual as the prepared tones (cf. And the Earth Shall Bear Again, Our Spring Will Come, Two Pastorales).

Cage composed almost all his pieces for prepared piano for dance performances. As was often the case with him, there were practical reasons behind this: a bag containing screws and nuts, erasers, and pieces of wood is much easier (and cheaper!) to transport than a whole percussion ensemble, and every performance space has room enough for a small grand piano. Cage traveled throughout the country a great deal during the 1940s as a piano accompanist with a number of dance groups, in particular with Merce Cunningham.

Tracklisting:

CD1

1. Bacchanale {8:05}

2. Totem Ancestor {2:19}

3. And the Earth Shall Bear Again {3:31}

4. Primitive {4:12}

5. In the Name of the Holocaust: I {4:19}

6. In the Name of the Holocaust: II {2:12}

7. Our Spring Will Come {4:49}

8. A Room {2:42}

9. Tossed as it is Untroubled {2:50}

10. The Perilous Night: I {2:28}

11. The Perilous Night: II {0:52}

12. The Perilous Night: III {4:17}

13. The Perilous Night: IV {1:19}

14. The Perilous Night: V {0:40}

15. The Perilous Night: VI {4:05}

16. Root of an Unfocus {5:01}

CD2

1. The Unavailable Memory Of {2:21}

2. Spontaneous Earth {3:17}

3. Triple Paced {2:35}

4. A Valentine Out of Season: I {1:35}

5. A Valentine Out of Season: II {1:00}

6. A Valentine Out of Season: III {1:13}

7. Prelude for Meditation {1:21}

8. Mysterious Adventure {9:11}

9. Daughters of the Lonesome Isle {9:39}

10. Music for Marcel Duchamp {6:01}

11. Two Pastorales: I {6:16}

12. Two Pastorales: II {7:34}

CD3

1. Sonata I {3:17}

2. Sonata II {1:59}

3. Sonata III {2:21}

4. Sonata IV {2:02}

5. Interlude I {3:27}

6. Sonata V {1:45}

7. Sonata VI {2:37}

8. Sonata VII {2:15}

9. Sonata VIII {3:36}

10. Interlude II {4:44}

11. Interlude III {2:52}

12. Sonata IX {4:39}

13. Sonata X {4:00}

14. Sonata XI {3:35}

15. Sonata XII {3:22}

16. Interlude IV {2:29}

17. Sonata XIII {4:02}

18. Sonata XIV {3:28}

19. Sonata XV {3:26}

20. Sonata XVI {5:15}

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