John Cage

Featuring: The Barton Workshop

condition (disc/cover): NM / NM

Barton Workshop director James Fulkerson puts it well: “When I look at the Number Pieces’ scores themselves, I see them as a form of conceptual art – instructions which define an attitude.” Traditionally feats of provocation have been noisy and ugly affairs, but Cage’s late “Number Pieces” transform the act of subversion into a thing of majorly profound beauty. Musicians are given material framed by “time brackets” that indicate how long each sound lasts. The different instrumental parts aren’t meant to coordinate, and the random overlapping of colliding time brackets creates a texture where harmony without function and over-exposed instrumental timbre fuse with clandestine intent."

Spare, patient music, indeterminate within fixed durations, defined as much by its silences as by its sounds. Among the most austere and beautiful documents of Cage's late style. On Megadisc Classics.