Cage was in his late twenties, a Californian, who had served an unlikely apprenticeship under two of the century’s great opposites: Arnold Schoenberg, who thought him gifted but harmonically hopeless, is said to have called him “not a composer, but an inventor of genius”, and Henry Cowell whom he had watched reach inside a grand piano to pluck and sweep its strings by hand. The music on this recording follows Cage through this early decade of his life, his twenties. But this is not the music before the transformation. This is the transformation, caught at its threshold, in the years it was actually happening. The selection of works is a very personal statement by pianist Hayk Melikyan.