We use cookies on our website to provide you with the best experience. Most of these are essential and already present.
We do require your explicit consent to save your cart and browsing history between visits. Read about cookies we use here.
Your cart and preferences will not be saved if you leave the site.
play

John Cage

Sonata XIII / Music For Marcel Duchamp / Song Books I-II / Empty Words III

Label: Wergo

Format: CD

Genre: Compositional

In stock

€16.20
VAT exempt
+
-

*2022 stock* John Cage's first manifesto, written in 1937, was called The Future of Music: Credo, and the future it described was an "all-sound music" open to every kind of noise. This volume of Wergo's Edition John Cage follows that idea across three decades, from the prepared piano of the 1940s to the vocal and spoken works of the 1970s.

Sonata XIII, from the Sonatas and Interludes, and Music for Marcel Duchamp are pieces for prepared piano, played by Peter Roggenkamp: screws, bolts and rubber placed between the strings turn the instrument into a small, quiet gamelan. With the Song Books the Schola Cantorum Stuttgart under Clytus Gottwald takes on Cage's anthology of solos for voice, a collection of instructions, songs and theatre actions that the performers combine freely.

The disc closes with Empty Words III, read by Cage himself: a text derived by chance operations from the journals of Henry David Thoreau, in which language is reduced to phrases, words, syllables and finally single letters and sounds. Total time 43'00".

Details
Cat. number: WER 6074-2
Notes:
Recorded by Süddeutscher Rundfunk, Stuttgart (tracks 3 and 4 from a concert in Stuttgart, June 22, 1975). With a 14-page booklet with notes in German and English. Dates of composition: Sonata XIII for prepared piano (1946-48); Music for Marcel Duchamp (1951); Song Books I-II (1970-72); Empty Words III (1974-75) (P) 1976/1991 Schott Wergo Music Media GmbH, Mainz, Germany (C) 1991 Schott Wergo Music Media GmbH, Mainz, Germany

More from Wergo

Delusion Of The Fury