John Cage: ONE-ONE2-ONE5

Timing by numbers
John Cage's Number Pieces for piano

Almost the entire output in John Cage's work in recent years (1987-92) consists of the so-called number pieces. The title (a written out number) simply refers to the number of performers. Where there are several pieces for the same number of participants, the additional numbering indicates the number of pieces for this ensemble size (always completely independent of the type of instrumentation).

Beginning in April 1987 with TWO for flute and piano, Cage thus left a late oeuvre catalog of 48 completed number pieces. There were also simple, practical reasons for the highly pragmatic approach to titling: the performers' need for new Cage pieces was immense, and the simple numbering represented an additional simplification compared to the computer program developed by his longtime assistant, which Cage the very made it possible to produce new pieces quickly and efficiently.

The compositional process number pieces combines far-reaching indetermination with a minimum of determination. What is certain is the order of the tones within a system, their degree of strength, as well as the time bracket that defines the absolute duration of the individual sections (Time bracket). The time brackets, for their part, are fixed or flexible: a fixed bracket defines the period between the earliest possible beginning and the latest possible end of the section; a flexible bracket, on the other hand, consists of two tolerance zones: one within which to begin and one within which to complete the section. The consequence of using flexible time brackets is usually an overlapping of the successive sections.

The tone duration and the speed of the sequence for the duration of the bracket is left to the player. Within the time brackets, the voices run independently of each other, i.e. the pianist's right and left hand (theoretically, one hand can use up its entire supply of notes before the other has even taken a step). The sound material is generated by a controlled random principle. Intention is coincidence, or coincidence is intention.

How are these sounds related to each other? Cage has repeatedly emphasized that it is not about bridging the silence through the "musical" connection of the sounds, but about the participation of the silence. One can also conclude: about the "interaction" of eventlessness and event, of nothing and something on the foil of the passing time. The imperceptible is just as much to be visualized as the perceived.

In this way, the listening process is steered into a kind of playful abstraction, which can mean an opening for the unintentional course of time for the community of listeners. It doesn't matter if something happens, because there is no identification with the perceived objects, and a relationship between these objects (tonality) does not want to be established. Everything remains unpredictable, the listener stays "with himself" and is at the same time a "listener", but in emotional neutrality with regard to the relationships between the objects that are trying to develop in his emotional world.

From this perspective, it is more than obvious that Cage had such an affinity for Erik Satie, for his Musiques d'ameublement: »Don't listen! Go around and talk loud!” Cage doesn't want to ask the listener to follow the process triggered by the sounds. No, feel your way from object to object on the ground of stillness, because »nichi nichi kore ko nichi!« (every day is a beautiful day). Even if there are no or only sparse playing instructions, one should keep in mind that in later years Cage preferred proximity to silence to anything noisy - this, so to speak, an affective equivalent to the "absence of space and place" that he only assumed in the continuum of his composition , the time, visited.

ONE for piano solo is one of the first in 1987 number pieces originated and dedicated to the Chilean composer Juan Allende-Blin. The chronological regulation of the events is carried out very simply here by means of fixed time brackets. However, since the musician is free to decide when to begin and when to close and how the right and left hand relate to each other, the sound of the result can vary at most.

In extreme cases, this means either that it starts very late and ends very quickly, framing a rapid succession of events with long pauses and clearly separating the individual sections from one another; or he starts immediately and uses the entire duration of the time clip to distribute the sound events as evenly as possible, so that the sections merge into one another without a break and no boundaries are perceptible anymore.

ONE², written in 1989 for 1-4 pianos, is dedicated to the pianist Margaret Leng Tan, the renowned interpreter of John Cage and George Crumb. In this piece, four pianos are positioned in space. The damper pedal is locked on all of them, which means that the strings always vibrate naturally and the tones continue to sound until they are inaudible. The player goes from instrument to instrument: on the first piano he has to complete 1, on the second 17, on the third 19 and on the fourth 17 sections (all notated as time brackets).

The order of the sections on each of the instruments is unchangeable, but the pianist is free to choose when to move from one instrument to the next. At one extreme of the presentation would be to play through all sections of an instrument before moving on to the next. The other extreme is to continuously cycle through all four instruments. Each of the four voices, which stand out from each other solely because of their spatial position, contains a moment in which the musician adds a sound alien to the instrument (Cage cited a buzzing top as a stimulating example).

ONE⁵, prepared in May 1990, is dedicated to musicologist Ellsworth Snyder, author of the first dissertation on Cage's entire oeuvre. Here Cage has given the independence of the two systems (i.e. the right and left hand) from each other on a larger scale by having each hand its own time brackets, whereby the phases of the right and left hand always overlap.

In return, the density of events is minimized: with a prescribed duration of around 20 minutes, there are only 97 sound events (between one and three events per time bracket). Of course, the rest is not silence, but well-disposed aftertaste, which can be produced in two ways: either the sustain pedal remains depressed the entire time (which requires an extremely finely nuanced touch), or the notes are held on the key, which is certainly the more flexible solution to the task.

Christopher Schlüren