Two of John Cage's late Number Pieces, each exactly thirty minutes long, in piano versions by Sabine Liebner. One7 and Four6, both from 1990, are scored "for any way of producing sounds". This is the first recording of the version for piano, and in Four6 Liebner plays all four parts herself.
Cage wrote the Number Pieces in the last six years of his life. Each title gives the number of performers, and a superscript counts the pieces with the same number of players, so One7 is the seventh piece for one musician. The notation rests on time brackets. Fixed brackets state exactly when a sound begins and ends; flexible ones leave the entry and the release to the player within a given span. Liebner recorded One7 on 4 May 2012 and Four6 on 1 and 2 July 2013, in a coproduction with Bayerischer Rundfunk. Jörg Moser was producer, engineer and editor, with Kirsten Ermeler as second engineer. The booklet essay is by Clemens Gresser.
One7 holds a special place among the Number Pieces. It is the only one dedicated to a woman composer, Pauline Oliveros, and it is an extraction from Four6: one part taken out of the four. A live reference recording of it for piano also exists, made with the composer's involvement according to the label. For Four6 Liebner gave each of the four parts its own way of playing. One is played on the keys in the ordinary way, one on a prepared piano, one by plucking strings inside the instrument, and one with noise-like sounds. The four tracks were recorded separately and then superimposed in time, so the result sounds like a live performance by four musicians. Two piano tunings, one for each session, are credited in the booklet. Heard one after the other, the two pieces show the same material alone and then in company.
The disc belongs to Liebner's long series of Cage recordings for Wergo, which Schott groups as the Edition John Cage. That live reference recording gives the piano a precedent in this score. Liebner's versions take up the freedom the brackets allow: she decides each sound, its colour and its place within the given span.
CD, Wergo WER 6797 2, released in 2014, with a 28-page booklet in German and English (total time 60'00").
