John Cage
American composer, philosopher, writer and printmaker. He was educated in California and then made a study tour of Europe (1930-31), concentrating on art, architecture and music. On his return to the USA he studied music with Richard Buhlig, Adolph Weiss, Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg; in 1934 he abandoned abstract painting for music. An interest in extending the existing range of percussion instruments led him, in 1940, to devise the 'prepared piano' (in which the sound is transformed by the insertion of various objects between the strings) and to pioneer electronic sound sources.
American composer, philosopher, writer and printmaker. He was educated in California and then made a study tour of Europe (1930-31), concentrating on art, architecture and music. On his return to the USA he studied music with Richard Buhlig, Adolph Weiss, Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg; in 1934 he abandoned abstract painting for music. An interest in extending the existing range of percussion instruments led him, in 1940, to devise the 'prepared piano' (in which the sound is transformed by the insertion of various objects between the strings) and to pioneer electronic sound sources.
Works For Percussion Vol.3-Four4
World Premiere RecordingRecorded at the Hungaroton Studio in March, 2000Score: Henmar Press, Inc., New York (corrected after the autographs and J. Cage's indications)Ensemble – Amadinda Percussion GroupPercussion – Aurél Holló, Károly Bojtos, Zoltán Rácz, Zoltán Váczi
Works For Percussion Vol.2 (1941 - 1950)
Recorded at the Hungaroton Studio in December 1998 and February-March and May 2000Includes a 20-page booklet in English, French, German and HungarianPercussion – Aurél Holló (tracks: 1 to 6, 11, 13), Károly Bojtos (tracks: 1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 11), Zoltán Rácz (tracks: 1 to 4, 6, 8, 9 ,11), Zoltán Váczi (tracks: 1 to 4, 8, 9 ,11)Piano – Zoltán Kocsis (tracks: 2, 7, 10, 12)Piano [Closed Piano] – Aurél Holló (tracks: 5, 13)Voice – Katalin Károlyi (tracks: 5, 6, 12, 13)
Four walls - Complete works for piano, voice & violin
John Cage may still be known as avant-garde, a musical rebel, who greatly influenced music all over the world. But not all his music was written for prepared piano or consisted of electronic sounds. He also wrote several pieces for the ‘traditional’ combination of violin and piano. One CD of this album is devoted to this complete part of Cage’s output. He developed a keen interest in percussion, hence his prepared piano compositions. This lead to a number of unusual works, including one f…
Complete music for prepared piano
Awesome complete prepared piano recordings by Giancarlo Simonacci. The prepared piano, which Cage invented in the early 1940s, was such a brilliant invention that no one would have blamed him for spending the rest of his life writing for it. A lesser composer would have done that; Cage being Cage he spent the best part of a decade creating a sublime body of work for it and then promptly moved directly onto his next preoccupation - indeterminacy - and never wrote for the prepared piano agai…
How To Get Started
"John Cage conceived How To Get Started almost as an afterthought -- a performance substituting for another that was previously planned in 1989 for delivery at 'Sound Design: An Invitational Conference on the Uses of Sound for Radio Drama, Film, Video, Theater and Music' presented by Bay Area Radio Drama at Sprocket Systems, Skywalker Ranch, in Nicasio, California. In his introduction, Cage talks about the difficulty of initiating the creative process, while exploring the usefulness of im…
The Works for Percussion I
After 42 Volumes in Mode’s Cage Edition, Mode is releasing the first volume dedicated to his percussion music. Percussion Group Cincinnati is particularly respected for its knowledge of and experience with the entire range of John Cage’s music, having made tours and festival appearances with him on a number of occassions in Europe and in America, and having had pieces created by Cage especially for the Group. Volume 1 consists of the complete Imaginary Landscapes 1-5 (1939-52) and Credo in US (…
Radio music (1956)
Four different versions of Radio Music (1956) from John Cage performed by S. Pittis, JH Peron, Z. Diermaier. Each version is 6 minutes long and uses radio as only sound source.
The City Wears A Slouch Hat
Long out of print, original copies on the legendary Cortical label, this is the never-before-released radio play collaboration between John Cage and writer/artist Kenneth Patchen performed in 1942. In what has to be one of the oddest Cage pieces ever, professional radio voice talents unravel a truly surreal story in straight '40s radio drama style. Replacing the usual radio drama sound effects is a percussion ensemble led by John Cage which punctuates the dialog throughout. Along with mute…
In Norway
CD in 64-page hardcover book with photos, interviews with the musicans and a transcription of Cage's Q&A at the Oslo Art Academy. Having received an invitation from Ole Henrik Moe, the Director of the Henie Onstad Art Centre, John Cage arrived at Fornebu Airport one November day in 1983 and was quickly lodged into a guest apartment in the basement of the museum. Cage had brought with him to Norway a heavy suitcase containing amongst other things a water distiller, a selection of fungi an…
Four4
Four4 for four percussionists (1991). By Simon Allen, Chris Burn, Lee Patterson, Mark Wastell. A unique realisation of one of Cage's late 'number pieces' by an ensemble of musicians better known for their work as improvisers. The 72-minute piece uses a system of flexible time brackets which were determined randomly according to a computer programme. Each musician chooses a number of sounds and assigns each of them them a number. Every time that number occurs above one of the time brackets, they …
Piano Music
JUST ARRIVED, awesome and low priced essential triple CD set with the piano compositions by John Cage (1912–92) regarded as one of the most influential and controversial composers of the 20th century. It is not only his music that this reputation is based on – his ideas were revolutionary, and he cast doubt on the supremacy of European art and music, when it was unchallenged and such views were considered heretic. Cage rejected the status held by harmony, instrumentation and even the devel…
Melodies & Harmonies
Cage is by no means a synonym for obligingness. All the more astonished we listen to the melodious and harmonious objects Annelie Gahl and Klaus Lang present on this album. Lang, the trained organist and internationally renowned composer, performs these pieces on a Fender Rhodes for the first time. Gahl, known as a versatile interpreter of both Old and New Music, plays the violin exactly as requested by Cage, without vibrato and with minimum weight on the bow. The musical material dates …
Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra / Sixty-Eight
For each of his compositions for prepared piano Cage created a specific piano preparation chart, setting out in meticulous detail the strings to be prepared, and the materials and manipulations to be used for preparing them. For the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1951), 53 tones of the keyboard must be prepared; and in this case Cage himself was astonished at the complexity of these preparations. The range of sounds is further expanded by an extra bridge installed in the pian…
Works For Prepared Piano
John Cage was a student of Henry Cowell and Arnold Schönberg and made use of innovations of both of his teachers, promptly integrating them into his own creativity – and turning them into something completely different. He adopted Henry Cowell's idea of altering the sound of a piano by interfering with the strings, thereby expanding the instrument's range of expression to a downright undreamed of extent. And as for Schönberg's twelve-tone system, Cage playfully extended it to a 25-tone system, o…
Music For Percussion Quartet
As early as in 1942, in Credo in Us, Cage employed not only a percussion ensemble but also sounds from the radio and records. Therefore, quite in accordance with what the composer would have wished, the materials used by the Percussion Ensemble Mainz in this recording range from Beethoven's fifth symphony (vinyl record, including the rustling) to ABBA, Tina Turner and advertising slogans. It goes without saying that rhythms play an important part in music for percussion. Cage, though, was also i…
Sonatas & Inteludes
The sonata originated in the Baroque as a small, one-movement form, which nevertheless already contained the core of the sonata to be later developed and composed in elaborate detail by the Viennese Classics. In his Sonatas and Interludes John Cage stuck to the concise, one-movement form, thus establishing a link to Scarlatti and Bach's preludes as well as to Chopin's Préludes and Satie's piano pieces. Other than many of his later, freer works, these small but complex gems are fixed and noted do…
Cage Performs Cage
Empty Words (1973-74) with Music for Piano (1952-56). John Cage, voice. Yvar Mikhashoff, piano. One7 (1991) for any way of producing sounds. John cage, voice. Mode celebrates its 200th release with a special installment in its John cage Edition - works performed by John cage himself, released for the first time. These recordings were made in Buffalo, New York in April 1991. cage and Mode Records were in Buffalo to work on the premiere of his Europera 5, which he wrote for Yvar Mikhashoff, a long…
Etudes Australes
With a score derived from star maps - the "Atlas Australis", a book of maps of stars as they can be seen from Australia - and the "I Ching" (64-choice Old-Chinese chance manual) "Etudes Australes" is a quintessentially Cageian work. Grete Sultan is an active recitalist who has performed music both classic and contemporary around the world. "When I wrote the 'Sonatas and Interludes', it was with Maro Amian in mind", Cage said. "David Tudor was in my mind when I wrote the 'Music of Changes'. Witho…
49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs
A complete video realization by Don Gillespie, Roberta Friedman and Gene Caprioglio. John Cage's artwork, "49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs", appeared in the October 6, 1977 Rolling Stone magazine - a gala issue celebrating their move to New York. He constructed his "waltzes" through chance operations as a series of 49 multi-colored triangles superimposed on the Hagstrom map of New York City. Later, he published a score for "performer(s) or listener(s) or record maker(s)" with the exact street l…
High Fidelity
Housed in a gatefold sleeve with a 36-page catalogue. The first LP is John Cage Speaks MUREAU by John Cage, its title assembled from the first syllable of the word "music" and the author's name "Thoreau." Malte Hubrig writes "The performance of Mureau -- its letters, syllables and words read by John Cage in a uniform intonation of the voice -- frees language of its meaning and opens it to sound." The second LP is Terry Fox's Culvert, a performance that took place at the University of Montana in …