John Cage/Lukas Foss - Concerto For Prepared Piano And Orchestra/Baroque Variations (Nonesuch 1970)

Notes excerpted from the inner cover notes (enclosed).

John Cage: Concerto For Prepared Piano And Orchestra
The Concerto for Prepared Piano...uses silence, but does not yet disdain disdain to frame it in sound, albeit extremely wispy sound.. Like the Sixteen Dances which Cage  wrote for Merce Cunningham's dance company in 1950, the Concerto, begun the same year was composed with the help of a set of large charts on which rhythmic structures were drawn up. In the first of the three continuous movements, Cage says, " I let the pianist express the opinion theat music should be improvised or felt, while the orchestra expressed only the chart, with no personal taste involvved. In the  second movement I made large concentric moves on the chart for  both painist and orchestra, with the idea of the pianist beginning to give up personal taste. The third movement had only one set of moves on the chart for both, and a lot of silence..."Until that time my music had been based on the traditional idea that you had to  say something. The charts gave me the first indication of the possibility of saying nothing".


Lukas Foss: Baroque Variations
The use of silence in the Baroque Variations of Lukas Foss may suggest a parallel with Cage, but the purpose of this music (...) completed in 1967 is entirely different. Cage sets up the situation for a piece of music but leaves the result to chance (nature). Foss, in his ensemble improvisations 1957-62 and in indeterminate  moments of his most recent music, sets up a situation which will control the result.

Notes by the composer:

Variation I, on Handel's Concerto Grosso, Op.6,No.12. Groups of instruments play the Larghetto but keep submerging into inaudibility,(rather than pausing). Handel's notes are always present but often inaudible. The inaudible moments leave holes in Handel's music (I composed the holes). The perforated Handel is played by different groups of the orchestra in three different keys at one point, in four different speeds at another. Emerging fragments never render the original unrecognizable.

Variation II, on Scarlatti's Sonata No. 23. The entire Sonata is heard in the distance (harpsichord) but is often obscured by the foreground (orchestral groups playing Scarlatti fragments, emerging, submerging). In this variation the loveliness of the original wants to be preserved, a form of neo-Classicism, a piece of music in love with a piece of music, like  setting a poem, complete in itself (Scarlatti's Sonata does not need my setting), an unsolicited present, an abuse, an Hommage.

Variation III, "Phorion"... On the Prelude from Bach's Partita in E major for solo violin. The submerging and emerging out of inaudibility  is rendered  more hazardous for the players because it is executed at moments varying with each performance. Though the conductor cues the various instruments in and out, he himself cannot keep track of the point at which an instrument will have arrived in it's inaudible rendition when he calls upon it to emerge. As in Variation I, where only Handel's notes were used, Variation III's are entirely made  out of Bach''s violin solo. Even the glissandi are Bach-derived. What I wanted  can perhaps best be described as "torrents of Baroque sixteenth-notes, washed ashore by ocean waves, sucked in again, returning"- a Bach Dream- abruptly changing situations, some humorous, (two flutes racing each other-the xylophone spelling out "Johann Sebastian Bach" in morse code-etc.), some frightening- (the organ and percussion duel at the end).


Side One: John Cage:Concerto For Prepared Piano And Orchestra 

Yuji Takahashi-Piano
Buffalo Phiharmonic Orchestra
cond.Lukas Foss


Side Two: Lukas Foss-Baroque Variations

b1: No.1- On a Handel Larghetto

b2: No.2- On a Scarlatti Sonata

b3: No.3- On a Bach Prelude "Phorion"

Lukas Foss conducting the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra

























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