John Cage - Complete Piano Music Vol.2 (1998)

Tracklist:

CD 1:
1. Music for 5 Pianos
2. Music for Piano 1 for Joanne Melcher [1952]
3. Music for Piano 2 for Luise Lippold [1953]
4. Music for Piano 3 for Morton Feldman [1953]
5-8. Music for Piano 4 – 19 [1953]
9. Music for Piano 20 for Jimmy Curley [1953]
10. Music for 4 Pianos
11-13. Music for Piano 21 – 36 [1955]

CD 2:
1. Music for 3 Pianos
2-5. Music for Piano 37 – 52 for David Weinrib [1955]
6. Music for 2 Pianos I
7. Music for Piano 53 – 68 for Grete Sultan [1956]
8. Music for 2 Pianos II
9-24. Music for Piano 69 – 84 for Lois and Emile De Antonio [1956]
25. Music for Piano 85 for Moriyasu Harumi [1962]
26. Electronic Music for 2 Pianos for David Tudor [1964]

Steffen Schleiermacher [piano]

It is with some awe and a lot of respect that I experience these two CDs of Volume 2 of the Complete Piano Music by John Cage on Dabringhaus & Grimm. I have read the concentrated and elaborated booklet through and through, and the respect I feel comes at first from the intellectual and scientific strength that permeates the text, and my understanding of the hard studies that has foregone this issue. Secondly my respect and admiration is felt on account of the brilliant technical knowledge that has made a sound this crisp and clear and completely undisturbed by extraneous sounds possible, proving the extreme care that Dabringhaus & Grimm invests in its issues. It is hard to find completely undisturbed recordings these days even from major companies. An example can be Sony Classical’s hailed release of Murray Perahia’s recent recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Goldberg-Variationen”, which is soiled by extraneous sounds from trucks and ventilation and what not…
Thirdly my respect is felt greatly on account on the playing of Steffen Schleiermacher, which really is as exemplary as it gets!

I have to sort of get through this sense of respect and admiration, and get more relaxed and easy-going before I sit down in concentration to simply listen, just hear, let be, let sound, let live… let Cage materialize in my room. John Cage is a composer and thinker and freewheeling crew-cut American that has the right to be judged only by his best moments, and surely these crystal interpretations are some of his best moments.

The booklet contains – among many other things – Cage’s own description of how he went about composing part of the content of this issue; “Music for Piano 21 – 52”. In short, abbreviated and concentrated by the reviewer, the story goes like this:

With ink, pen and transparent sheets of paper of determined dimensions a master page without notations is equipped with 4 systems. There must be enough space above and below each staff to allow for its being either bass or treble. With the conventional 2 staves – one for each hand – in place, each has enough space above to accommodate 9 ledger lines and enough space below for 6 ledger lines, leaving room for the extreme low piano key and string. In between the two a narrow field, divided by a line, is used to notate different noises that are produced by hand or beater upon the interior (above the line) or the exterior (below the line) of the piano.
The master page is set aside, while chance operations derived from I Ching, channeled through certain limits, are employed to determine the number of sounds per page. Then a blank sheet of transparent paper is placed so that its pointal imperfections are visible. The number of imperfections corresponding to the determined number of sounds is intensified with a pencil.
Thereafter the penciled page is placed in a registered way upon the master page, and the staves and interline and lastly the ledger lines – where necessary – are inscribed in ink. Then conventional whole notes are placed and inscribed in ink wherever a penciled point falls within an area of staves or ledger lines.
Eight single coins are tossed to determine clefs, bass or treble, which are then inscribed in ink.
The 64 possibilities of I Ching are divided – by chance operations! - into 3 groups relative to 3 categories: normal (played on keyboard), muted and plucked (the two latter played directly on the piano strings). A similar method is employed to decide whether a note is natural, sharp or flat.
Then Cage says: “The notation of the composition is thus completed. Much that occurs in performance has not been determined. Therefore, the following note is fixed at the head of the manuscript: ‘These pieces constitute 2 groups of 16 pieces (21 – 36; 37 – 52) which may be played alone or together and with or without Music for Piano 4 – 19. Their length in time is free; there may or may not be silence between them; they may be overlapped. […] Duration of individual tones and dynamics are free.”

Steffen Schleiermacher comments on these pieces, and a summary of his deliberations may include the following shortened statements:
Many decisions have to be made before the actual act of performing, of playing the cycle “Music for Piano”. Then Schleiermacher says something that may seem an unnecessary remark, but which harbors a lot of experience and wisdom vis-à-vis Cage and his compositions: One has to take the pieces seriously! This statement encourages the working out of the obvious questions that do arise at the outset of interpreting Cage, such as: “What is given? What do I as the interpreter have to decide? What guidelines does Cage set for such decisions? How should I proceed with questions to which Cage does not give an answer?”
Schleiermacher goes on to note that the level of compositional determination in the score fluctuates and changes throughout the cycle. At instances Cage has scored things exactly, while at other places in the score most decisions are left to the interpreter, except how the sound should be produced, i.e. plucked or muted.
In the booklet Steffen Schleiermacher gets downright scientific about it, and I direct anyone pointedly interested to this booklet. It is exciting and revealing reading!
An aspect of these pieces that Schleiermacher dwells on a while is the possibility of simultaneous playing of a number of the pieces of the cycle. There are different ways of interpreting Cage’s instructions concerning this. Schleiermacher describes his method:
“For the simultaneous versions I formed in each case little sequences from the five cycles and played them one after the other (on the same piano in five different position): all the way to left […], half the way to the left […], in the middle […], half way to the right […] and all the way to the right […].”
Selection of pieces was made through chance operations. The only determined aspect was duration; 7 minutes. Schleiermacher reveals that the same material is heard in all these simultaneous versions, albeit in different selections and different degree of overlapping.

The case of “Electronic Music for Piano” is quite complicated. Cage originally jotted down the idea and the instructions on a sheet of paper from the letterhead of a Stockholm hotel (Hotell Malmen), and the work was first performed at Fylkingen, Stockholm by David Tudor on 10th September 1964. The deciphering of the notes was done by Volker Straebel.
Schleiermacher recorded a selection of the pieces in sequence and at different position on the piano. No modifications were applied to the played, plucked or muted tones. Microphones were installed in numerous places at different distances from the sounding source; the strings – even outside of the recording space, through an open window! A procedure involving astronomical chards was utilized in reaching a determination of durations, so as to arrive at the 10 minutes the piece is supposed to last. In accordance with this the modifications were set. Two versions were recorded, mixed and overlapped.

A very important statement that Schleiermacher makes is that there is no “correct” or “incorrect” version of “Music for Piano”, but instead “boring” or “interesting”, “appealing” or “monotonous” interpretations. This does not leave the interpreter to completely haphazard interpretations, though. He has to be conscious of how an interpretation may stay the closest to what he perceives as Cage’s original intention of non-intention. This of course lays higher demands on the shoulders of any interpreter, since this freedom of speculation versus the common knowledge of Cageian thought makes decisions much harder to arrive at, than when a score is complete in all its aspects.

CD 1 begins with “Music for 5 Pianos”, i.e. the first of Schleiermacher’s interpretations of the simultaneous versions. The web of sounds is that out of a great cave with stalactites and stalagmites somewhere in China, because in addition to this watery, subterranean feel, there is a richness of Eastern percussive metal throughout, and a sparseness of fabric that is transparent as well as glistening, shining in little details that shoot like reflections from eye to eye in the sounding space. The sound of the deeper tones is brittle but pregnant, like shiny chocolate candies with brittle, colored shells.

“Music for Piano 3” for Morton Feldman is silent, very thinned out, like a homeopathic medicine, diluted to a transparency of a few layers of atoms! These are just a few lines on a sketch, absentmindedly applied, in a certain, turned-away fall-time apple orchard feeling, as God looks away for a second and forgets his Creation.

A general feeling I get from the music on these two CDs is that of the foreign speech of matter and light, rising in these jagged shapes out of the piano, like a seismographic chart of the core of Existence, liberated by Cage’s methods of letting impulses from the unconscious of himself and the vibrating property of matter seep out into daylight and speak this foreign language that can not be fully understood but sincerely felt, as the alien wordings press on our tympanic membranes; and listen – it is very good!

Since the duration of the two CDs is long; 2 hours and 33 minutes, there is ample time to sink into this world and these structures, which can be experienced in a strictly abstract way as well as in a matter-of-factly, palpable, tangible way, as were you climbing a skeleton structure of an immensely complicated but clearly contoured spider web of a construction dreamt by Maurits Cornelis Escher.

The concluding piece on CD2 – “Electronic Music for 2 Pianos” – is a great adventure and a dreamscape composition of pianistic and extraneous sounds (a microphone placed outside the recording space, outside and open window). Electronic sounds as of acoustic feedback are heard in the piano sounds, and the space opens up into a garden with lush brancheries were garden birds are singing. Children pass by, chatting, and the piano is suddenly heard at a distance, watery, afar, while a truck seems more important or just as important… a certain panning of the sound at times make you feel nauseous, at least if you listen through earphones, but this piece is well suited for earphones, given the many details and the many different distances at which you hear the sound, depending on which of the many microphones are used to record, or rather, which of the recordings through the different microphones are used for the mix-down.

Again I have to focus my admiration on the exemplary and totally unparalleled sound quality of these recordings on Dabringhaus & Grimm. Other labels certainly would have much to learn from this company.

The artistic significance of these recordings cannot be justly presented in a short review like this. The mastery must be heard. It is a mystery to me that this series of Cage recordings are rather anonymous in the world of contemporary music. This is extremely strange, since I believe that no other recording venture so far – with the possible exception of Wergo’s and Mode’s efforts, which nonetheless don’t reach Dabringhaus & Grimm’s clarity and focus of sound – has achieved the philosophical and musical fidelity to John Cage’s intentions that I feel Dabringhaus & Grimm, with Steffen Schleiermacher, has succeeded in doing.




download:
CD 1
part 1
part 2
part 3

CD 2
part 1
part 2

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