Name: John Cage: Music for Piano 1-84
SKU: NEOS 10703/04
Price: 24.99 EUR
Availability: InStock

infotext:

By doing John Cage let the gaze wander over blank, white paper - in 1952, the same year in which the piece "4'33" was written and he thus promoted the realization that there can be no silence that is not sonorous - Cage discovered one of his most radical Solutions: "Suddenly I saw that the notes, all the notes, were already there". Thus the basic idea for the multi-part series of "Music for Piano" was found.

Cage had discovered small irregularities, elevations or tiny spots on the surface structure of the sheet of paper, distributed completely randomly. Within a preselected time interval, he marked in ink as many of these irregularities as he could discern. He thus received the absolutely random constellation of a point field. He then placed transparent music paper over it in order to determine the points as exact pitches using coding and auxiliary lines. A dynamic value between pianissimo and fortissimo and, if necessary, an accidental were assigned to each of the tones found in this way using a random method.

In this way, “Music for Piano 1952” was created in 1 to a choreography by Jo Anne Melcher and, a year later, “Music for Piano 2” for the dancer Louise Lippold.

In 1954/55, as a balance to his incessant artistic endeavors to repeatedly identify coincidence at the coincidence and crossing points of independent series of events, he began to feel more at home in the universe of mycology. Perhaps another metaphysics of finding drove him? From then on, wherever he had the opportunity to look for and identify mushrooms, Cage pursued this passion with professional depth - also, and he pointed out this with a smile, because the words "mushroom" for mushroom and "music" for music are the same in many encyclopedias follow each other.

Over the years he became a mushroom expert. He wrote a mushroom book with illustrations covered with Japanese tissue paper. In an Italian TV quiz, he won a lot of money with his expertise. Meditating on the mysterious subterranean growth of mycelia, lichens and fruiting bodies in Japanese Zen gardens or American forests, he could enthuse and empathize with the horizons of sound and stillness of this or that mushroom, "growing singly or in clusters, occasionally in Clusters of five to six individual plants. Such a patch of earth is precious…”

Within the framework of John Cage's huge oeuvre, the 84 solo pieces of the "Music for Piano" form one of the key works from the middle creative period.

With Sabine Liebner we have found a congenial interpreter for this music. She is particularly interested in 20th-century American composers. Her repertoire of American music includes works by Henry Cowell, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, Tom Johnson, and she plays almost all compositions for piano by John Cage and Morton Feldman. In 1998 and 2007 she received the music award from the city of Munich, in 2005 a scholarship for music from the city of Munich, and in 2007 she was chosen as the German pianist recommended by the Goethe Institute.

program:

CD 1

[01] 03:39 p.m Music for Piano 1 (1952)
[02] 04:29 p.m Music for Piano 2 (1953)

[03] 01:30 p.m Music for Piano 3 (1953)
[04] 17:20 p.m Music for Piano 4-19 (1953)
[05] 02:16 p.m Music for Piano 20 (1953)
[06] 31:01 p.m Music for Piano 21-36 (1955)

total: 60:34

CD 2

[01] 21:09 p.m Music for Piano 37-52 (1955)
[02] 16:29 p.m Music for Piano 53-68 (1956)

[03] 16:01 p.m Music for Piano 69-84 (1956)

total: 53:50

Sabine Liebner, Piano

Press:

01.01.2008

Una soberbia division de los planos sonoros, de an extraordinario efecto de espacialización. El resultado es deslumbrante.

24.01.2008

Sabine Liebner: CAGE Music for Piano 1-84 on NEOS

This is essential Cage, and Sabine Liebner has created a magical performance of it. The term “created” is not used lightly here. Music for Piano , composed between 1952 and 1956, consists of 84 brief pieces for unmodified (ie, not prepared) piano. These are based on a scheme of composition that presents a performer with, minimally, all of the notes to be played. How, and exactly when, these notes should be played in any given performance, is left indeterminate in specific ways that vary among the pieces. For example, no. 1 of the series consists of conventionally notated whole notes, which have been assigned specific dynamics and accidentals by the composer. There are no bar lines; the individual notes are to be played as encountered in a uniform time flow. A preface lays down rules for performance in Cage's neat capital letters: “DURATIONS FREE. PEDALLING FREE. MANNER OF PRODUCING PIANO SOUNDS FREE, INCLUDING PIZZ STRING, SCRATCHING AND MUTING STRINGS, PRODUCTION OF HARMONICS, ETC.”

wow! What is a performer to do? The notes accompanying this release suggest what is required: “A valid interpretation can . . . only be achieved by a player who has a fine sense of the integrity and secret life of the individual sound event, who has an unerring sense for proportions in pitch space that are non causal with respect to time. . . . His or her playing should be precise and should pay attention to the balancing of indifferent beauties.”

Those of us who first heard this music played by John Cage and David Tudor, who surely epitomized these very qualities, were struck by the way they made the integrity and cold beauty of this music seem somehow inevitable. That is just what Liebner does here. In Fanfare 29:3, Art Lange reviewed her performance of Morton Feldman's Triadic Memories , another colossal work amenable to a rich variety of interpretive approaches. He observed that “Liebner suggests a view towards infinity, the kind of mythic resonance projected in Mark Rothko's paintings.” Music for Piano has nothing to do with Rothko. (Cage “discovered” the actual notes of Music for Piano by circling the imperfections he found on blank sheets of paper.) But here too, Liebner has created a performance suffused with “mythic resonance.”

There are no beginnings, middles or ends, no chords, no tempos. Much of the music consists of silences (sometimes very long ones), which are broken by the appearance, always anticipated, always unexpected, of a single note, or a sudden cluster of them, each with a life of its own. In Liebner's hands, the different voices of the piano, invoked from inside the piano or keyboard, at times evoke the illusion of an ensemble whose members are engaging in momentary dialogues or counterpoints with each other. It is simultaneously riveting and peaceful. The subtlety and range of the timbres Liebner summons from the instrument are well night inexhaustible, but entirely natural; the music remains always itself. You can't (or at least I can't) hear the ending of one piece and the beginning of the next. Such things are just another source of silences (and not necessarily the longest ones).

Over the nearly two-hour span of this music, you can find yourself at some points intensely—electrically—involved, at other times wandering around the house or outside, listening to how the music changes as you change perspective, or listening to how others sounds in the environment interact with the music. It will never sound exactly the same, or be experienced exactly the same, twice. It is not music that compels you to react to it in a specific way, but rather invites you to wander through it in ways that will change on each hearing.

Cage sought new ways of composing, performing, and hearing music in all his many works of indeterminacy, of which this is one of the first. How he did this is the subject of many fascinating anecdotes and philosophical discussions, with the consequence that the point of it all—the music itself—can sometimes get lost in the Zen. Liebner gives us a performance that reminds us how compelling this music actually can be. The recording is superb.

I have yet to hear other recorded performances of this particular work, which intrinsically can have no “best” or “definitive” realization. Another complete traversal is on Volume 2 of Steffen Schleirmacher's complete traversal of Cage's piano music. Art Lange reviewed this in Fanfare 22:2. All of Music for Piano is on it, including a final piece from 1962, No. 85, which departs from the earlier ones by introducing electronics into the mix. Several other pianists have tackled at least portions of the series. They will all “sound” completely different, of course. Cage wanted both performers and listeners to explore ways this music can be experienced. Sabine Liebner's splendid performance (coupled with a timely Amazon gift certificate) has kindled a strong desire on my part to do so. It may well have the same effect on you. In any event, don't miss this one.

Peter Stokelly

11/12.2007

11.2007

Review by Uncle Dave Lewis

John Cage: Music for Piano 1-84 (or 85, if you count an appended piece for piano and electronics not composed until 1962; the main work dates from 1952-1956) is a cycle of piano pieces closely related to his Music of Changes (1951). The main difference, if one cares to observe it, is in terms of instrumentation — Music for Piano 4-19 and 21-84 are scored for “piano, or any number of pianos.” Pianist Sabine Liebner opts to perform this unwieldy, two -hour-long cycle on solo piano in German label NEOS' ambitious John Cage: Music for Piano 1-84.

Like Music of Changes, the 84 pieces in the cycle, ranging from the longest (Music for Piano 2 at four and a half minutes) to many tiny miniatures only a few seconds long, were composed through chance procedures. Amplification of imperfections in the music paper Cage was writing on was the main method of determining pitch; duration, dynamics, and other parameters were arrived at through a mixture of other methods, coin tosses and the use of playing cards, yarrow sticks, and so forth. Cage was consciously attempting to bring into the world music that, as much as possible, generated himself without his intervention, and just like everything else he tried, the result sounds just like — John Cage.

Playing such music is a lot more difficult than it sounds on the other end. With his earliest chance derived compositions, such as Music for Piano 1 here, Cage discovered that his process was very work intensive and yielded results that were denser than what he most likely desired; These pieces were intended for use in dance performances, where a certain amount of negative space was desirable. By adding silence into the mix, Cage achieved the lightness of texture that he wanted. This calls for extreme concentration on the part of the performer; you have to be patient enough to wait out the long silences Cage calls for and put the right note in the right place in a texture in which predictable patterns are completely absent. In this respect, Liebner does an admirable job in this set and she plays close attention to the widely ranging dynamics in this long work, most often assigned to single pitches, rather than passages. NEOS' close, nicely atmospheric recording captures Liebner's playing in its essence without extraneous noises in music often so quiet that the breathing of the pianist would be in danger of showing up in the finished product.

None of this, of course, answers the essential question, should you listen? Absolutely. Once you are past the uncharacteristically dense Music for Piano 1, the music opens up into its regular, spatial realm and this unobtrusive, graceful, and surprisingly pianistic music can make for a great accompaniment to late-night reading or any other instance where one wants music that fills a space, but does not take over.

08.2007