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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Music for Mallet Instruments

Steve Reich and Amadinda Percussion Group - Music for Mallet Instruments

Performers:
Amadinda Percussion group: Karoly Bojtos, Zoltan Racz, Zsolt Sarkany, Zoltan Vaczi

Agnes Dobszay, Erzsebet Hajdu, Zsuzsanna Lukin - voices (track 1)
Aurel Hollo, Tibor Nemes, Balazs Papp, Benedek Toth - mallet instruments (track 1)
Bela Farago - electric organ (track 1)
Barnabas Dukay - claves (track 2)
Karoly Binder, Gyorgy Oravecz - pianos, synthesizers (track 3)

While working on Six Pianos I also began work on another piece that seemed to grow very spontaneously from one simple marimba pattern to many patterns played by different instruments. Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ was completed in May of 1973, and deals with two simultaneous interrelated rhythmic processes. The first is that of constructing, beat by beat, a duplicate of a pre-existing pattern, with the second one or more beats out of phase with the first exactly as in Six Pianos. This then triggers the second process of augmentation or lengthening of another simultaneous, but different repeating pattern. Augmentation is the lengthening of duration of notes previously played in shorter note values creating the sense of slowing down the musical motion.
...
The first process of rhythmic construction, or substitution of beats for rests, is performed by marimbas against marimbas, or glockenspiel against glockenspiel. These rhythmic constructions, which have the effect of creating more fast moving activity in the mallet parts then trigger two women's voices and electric organ into doubling, quadrupling, and further elongating the durations of the notes they sing and play.
When the marimbas and glockenspiels have built up to maximum activity, causing the coices and organ to elongate to maximum length and slowness, then a third woman's voice doubles some of the short melodic patterns resulting from the combination of the four marimba players, using her voice to precisely imitate the sound of these instruments (exactly as in part two of Drumming). During the rhythmic constructions in the marimbas and glockenspiels, the metallophone plays long ringing tones for the same duration as the voices and organ. When the voices and organ get longer, so do the tones of the metallophone.
...
One of the most important aspects of this piece for me is the use of voices to double the electric organ and produce a new timbre which is both instrumental and vocal at the same time. The choice of two women's voices and electric organ took several months of experimentation to arrive at. My first impulse was not to use the electric organ because I wanted to avoid working with electronic instruments.
...
Music for Pieces of Wood (1973) and Clapping Music (1972) are of the same breed: I intended to compose music employing the simplest instruments possible. My choice fell on the claves (or rather pipes made of hard wood, in this case) because of their different and exact pitches (A, B, C sharp, D sharp and another D sharp pitched an octave higher) and timbre. This happens to be one of the loudest pieces of music I have ever written though it uses no amplification whatsoever.
...
Sextet (1985) is five movements played without pause. The relationship of the live movements is that of an arch form A-B-C-B-A. The first and last movements are fast, the second and fourth moderate, and the third is slow. Changes of tempo are made abruptly at the beginning of new movements by metric modulation to either get slower or faster. Movements are also organized harmonically with a chord cycle for the first and fifth, another for the second and fourth, and yet another for the third. The harmonies used are largely dominant chords with added tones creating a somewhat darker, chromatic, and more varied harmonic language than in my earlier works.
...
Percussion instruments primarily produce sounds of relatively short duration. In Sextet I was interested in overcoming that limitation. In the second movement, the use of the bowed vibraphone, not merely as a passing effect but as a basic instrumental voice, was one means of getting long tones. The use of the synthesizer as electric organ supplied long continuous sounds not possible with piano. The mallet instruments (marimba, vibraphone, etc.) are basically instruments of high and middle register without a low range. To overcome this limit the bass drum was used, doubling piano or synthesizer played in their lower registers, particularly in the second, third, and fourth movements.
...
Composed in 1984-85, Sextet was co-commissioned by Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians and by the French government for the Nexus ensemble. The scoring is for three marimbas, two vibraphones, two bass drums, crotales, sticks, tam-tam, two pianos, and two synthesizers. There are six performers: four percussionists and two keyboard players. (Steve Reich)

Tracklisting:

1. Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ {15:59}

2. Music for Pieces of Wood {10:34}

3. Sextet {25:58}

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Six Pianos/Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ

Steve Reich - Six Pianos/Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ

Performers:

Six Pianos

Steve Chambers, James Preiss, Russ Hartenberger, Bob Becker, Steve Reich, Glen Velez - pianos

Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ

Russ Hartenberger, Bob Becker, Tim Ferchen, Steve Reich - marimbas

Glen Velez, Ben Harms - glockenspiels

James Preiss - metallophone

Janice Jarrett, Joan LaBarbara - voice (long tones with organ)

Jan Clayton - voice (melodic patterns with marimbas)

Steve Chambers - electric organ

"Six Pianos" (1973) grew out of the idea I had for several years to do a piece for all the pianos in a piano store. The piece which actually resulted is a bit more modest in scope since too many pianos (especially if they are very large grands) can begin to sound thick and unmanageable. Using six smaller grands or spinet pianos made it possible to play the fast, rhythmically intricate kind of music I am drawn to while at the same time allowing the players to be physically close together so as to hear each other clearly.

The piece begins with three pianists all playing the same eight-beat rhythmic pattern, but with different notes for each pianist. Two of the other pianists then begin in unison to build up gradually the exact pattern of one of the pianists already playing by putting the notes of his fifth beat on the seventh beat of their measure, then his first beat on their third beat, and so on until they have constructed the same pattern with the same notes, but two beats out of phase. The end result is that of a pattern played against itself, but one or more beats out of phase. Though this result is similar to many older pieces of mine, the process of arriving at that result is new. Instead of slow shifts of phase, there is a percussive buildup of beats in place of rests. The use of the pianos here is truly more like sets of tuned drums.

...

"Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ" (1973) deals with two simultaneous, interrelated rhythmic processes. The first is that of constructing, beat by beat, a duplicate of a pre-existing repeating musical pattern, the duplicate being one or more beats out of phase with the original pattern, exactly as in "Six Pianos". This then triggers the second process, augmentation of another simultaneous but different repeating musical pattern. The first process is performed by marimbas against marimbas and glockenspiel against glockenspiel. These rhythmic constructions, which have the effect of creating more fast moving activity in the mallet instruments, then trigger the two women's voices and organ into doubling, quadrupling and further elongating the duration of the notes they sing and play. When the marimbas and glockenspiels have built up to maximum activity, causing the voices and organ (and metallophone) to elongate to maximum length and slowness, a third woman's voice doubles some of the short melodic patterns resulting from the combination of the four marimba players, using her voice to precisely imitate the sound of these instruments. (Steve Reich)

Tracklisting:

Side 1

1. Six Pianos {23:58}

Side 2

1. Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ {18:12}

(1)  [may be reposted soon]

New Sounds in Electronic Music

various artists compilation - New Sounds in Electronic Music

Released sometime during the mid 1970s on LP

Less than twenty years have elapsed since the advent of electronic music. The early novelty of the medium has now worn off, and an entire generation has grown up with the sound of amplified guitars, reverb, tape delay and electronic synthesizers in its ears. Today, the number of electronic studios in the United States alone has grown to nearly one hundred, and the number of electronic compositions made all over the world, both "live" and "taped," is in the thousands. With so many composers now at work in the new medium, the question of whether one likes electronic music is giving way to that of which composers one prefers.
In this album, three works by three talented composers are presented for the first time. Written in the 1960s, each work bears the mark of an original musical personality of the new "electronic" generation. (liner notes)

Tracklisting:

Side 1

1. Richard Maxfield - Night Music {9:01}

2. Steve Reich - Come Out {12:44}

Side 2

1. Pauline Oliveros - I of IV {20:25}

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