John Cage/Steve Reich: Three Dances/Four Organs (Angel 1974)

 






















From the back cover notes (enclosed):
 
John Cage:Three Dances For Two Amplified Prepared Pianos

The prepared piano, a Cage innovation, is a grand piano with screws, bolts, washers, plastic, rubber, felt etc. inserted according to precisely detailed instructions between the strings- completely changing the tone color, attack and volume and duration of each note.
More simply, it transforms the piano into a kind of percussion orchestra of steel drums, gamelans, rattles and low congas, all under the control of one keyboard player. Cage used the prepared instrument first in the dance piece Bacchanale in 1938 and subsequently in many pieces of the '40's- all concerned with dance rhythms and exotic Eastern color and mood. By 1945 Cage's ideas had advanced to the point of writing his most ambitious prepared piano work, these Three Dances.

Cage calls them "virtuoso" pieces, and indeed they are in many ways. Most obviously, the third dance is a moto-perpetuo tour-de-force of pounding jungle rhythms.But the subtleties of the gamelan-like music of the first dance and the melodic second dance provide plenty of finger and brain numbing complexities. "Virtuoso" too is the preparation of the instruments (the most complex he ever devised; with as many as
six objects altering the sound of a single note. Finally there is the composition itself, a maze of ostinati, rhythmic canons, talas, mirror images, number series and changing textures all totally determined by the composer.

Perhaps most remarkable in these pieces is Cage's ability to escape entirely from thinking in terms of the keyboard - of G's and A-flat's - and to plunge into uncharted regions of complex and then-unknown sounds that the prepared piano actually produces. (For the performer this is enough of a problem to produce temporary schizophrenia, as he fingers his ever trustworthy A-flat only to have it go "Kahbong".

For Cage to have solved this problem so brilliantly is a testament to his compositional technique, imagination, and taste - all of which are plainly revealed in these Three Dances. -Michael Tilson-Thomas


Steve Reich: Four Organs

Four Organs was composed in January 1970. It begins with a short pulsing chord which gradually gets longer and longer in duration. As the chord stretches out, slowly resolving and unresolving, a sort of slow-motion music is created. The maracas lay down a steady time grid of even eighth notes throughout, enabling the performers to play together while mentally counting up to as much as 200 beats and more on a given cycle of sustained notes.

Four Organs is the only piece of work I am aware of that is composed exclusively of the gradual augmentation (lengthening) of individual tones within a single chord.From beginning to end there are no changes of pitch or timbre..All changes are rhythmic and simply consist of gradually increasing durations.

The original idea for Four Organs came out of anelectronic musical device I built in 1968-69 with the help of an engineer from Bell Labrotories. This device, the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate,  could gradually alter the phase position between a number of continuously pulsing tones. If all tones were in phase (pulsed at the same instant) a  repeating chord would be heard. If the tones were moved slightly out of phase a repeating rippling broken chord would be heard, and if moved further out of phase, a repeating melodic pattern would result. There was also a control on the device to shorten or lenghtn the duration of each pulse. I began to think of gradually extending the durations of individual pulsing tones but like a sort of horizontal bar graph in time.

since I was becoming disenchanted with electronic devices, largely because of their mechanical sounding rhythms and pitches and the lack of bodily involvement in making music with them, I began to think instead of simply holding down individual notes longer and longer on an organ. Insted of a digital clock to count and produce regular pulses, I began to think of a musician playing a steady pulse with a rattle (maracas) which the organists could then count  together from.

Four Organs is thus an example of a piece of live music with a rhythmic structure, the basic idea of which derives from an electronic device.This feedback of ideas from electro-mechanical devices to instrumental and vocal music has been important in several compositions of mine and has brought me to think of electronic music as primarily an interlude filled with new ideas for the ongoing history of instrumental and vocal music. -Steve Reich

Side One:John Cage: Three Dances For Two Amplified Prepared Pianos (1945)

a1: No.1 (6:29)
a2: No.2 (7:07)
a3: No.3 (8:52)

Michael Tilson-Thomas & Ralph Grierson : Prepared Pianos

Side Two: Steve Reich: Four Organs (1970) For four electric organs and maracas

b1: Four Organs (24:13)

Michael Tilson-Thomas
Ralph Grierson
Roger Kellaway
Steve Reich: Electric Organs
Tom Raney: Maracas

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