John Cage

"I now think that after all these years I'm finally writing beautiful music", John Cage said in 1990. Two3, written the following year for shō and five water-filled conch shells, belongs to that late period. This two-disc recording stretches the piece over more than an hour and forty minutes, in a reading for sheng, accordion and conch shells.

Cage (Los Angeles 1912 - New York 1992) was an American composer and a pioneer of indeterminacy. In 1990 he met the shō player Mayumi Miyata, who asked him for a piece for the ancient Japanese mouth organ. He was struck by its sound and by its seventeen pipes, up to six of which can be blown at once to produce single pitches or complex chords. The instrument, at home in gagaku court music, also closed a circle that began in the late 1940s with his interest in Zen Buddhism. Here the accordionist Stefan Hussong and the sheng player Wu Wei perform, both also playing the conch shells, in a co-production with Deutschlandradio. Hussong is a German classical accordionist; Wu Wei is a Chinese sheng player based in Germany who moves between traditional repertoire, contemporary music and jazz.

Two3 is one of the Number Pieces of Cage's last years. The first number in the title gives the number of players, the raised number the piece's place among the works for that number. Each part is notated separately as a sequence of sounds placed in what Cage called time brackets. The music moves fluidly, a band of sound that ebbs and flows, broken by phases of silence from which isolated sounds emerge like signals.

This version has two particular features. Wu Wei plays the Chinese sheng instead of the Japanese shō, an instrument whose history goes back some three thousand years. And beside the prescribed conch shells there is the accordion. Hussong and Wu Wei work on the kinship of sound between the two instruments, keeping the character of each while letting their rich, delicate overtone spectra merge.

Two CDs, Wergo WER 6758 2, released in 2015 in the Edition John Cage series, 102 minutes.