It’s slowly but steadily sinking in how vast a legacy John Cage left us. Another Timbre’s new box set of Cage’s late number pieces, performed by Apartment House, was immediately received with widespread wonder and gratitude. Critics have suggested that this is a landmark release that will redefine Cage’s reputation, but this has happened before, more than once. Cage’s gradual acceptance into the musical pantheon has been a process of repeated adjustments into how the audience perceives him, a view of ever-widening horizons as more aspects of his art are brought to light. For the next stage, many critics will realise that, as with all great artists, no interpretation of Cage will ever be definitive.
In his generous sleeve notes, producer Simon Reynell observes that many of the pieces presented here have not had a new recording in close to a generation. This was a shock, as it made me realise that (a) I’m that old, (b) Cage’s oeuvre is that big, and (c) my much-loved recordings of these pieces need a fresh perspective. [The Number Pieces are a collective name given to a series of forty-odd works Cage wrote over the last five years of his life. They share the same basic principle: flexible time brackets without coordination between parts, more or less filled with more or less specification. Each is titled for the number of performers needed to play it. Cage could write them quickly, typically to fulfil commissions – he referred to them as his “watercolors” – but he was genuinely fascinated by the almost effortless variation and beauty that could be produced by his skillful employment of this simple premise.] Of course they come out differently each time, but as the ensemble Apartment House show in this collection, there can be great variation in larger-scale matters of interpretation, not just in detail. Several of the musicians here have recorded other late Cage works, particularly for Another Timbre, always finding new perspectives to what may have once been considered stable essays in random patterns. (The other great lie about Cage is that his aesthetic breakthrough was adopting chance, when the true breakthrough was his reason for adopting chance: his aesthetic judgements were now framed as questions instead of answers.) The five-plus hours of music in John Cage: Number Pieces both underlines and extends their work in expanding our appreciation of Cage. This set collects all the works written for larger ensembles: five to fourteen musicians.
One of my formative new music listening experiences was with a CD of Cage’s last completed composition, Thirteen, played twice by the ensemble who commissioned it. Both were dull as ditchwater. I’d read about how Cage had had to change his conception of what the piece should be while composing it, but still believed that the poor music was due to the ensemble taking liberties with interpretation, a top-down approach at odds with Cage’s musical instincts. Years later, I was releived to hear a far superior recording made by The Barton Workshop. Apartment House also take liberties, some quite pronounced. Almost all music requires some deviation from the score, however minor it may be; it’s a question of whether that deviation brings the musician closer to or further away from the spirit implied in the letter. Five4, composed for two saxophones and three percussionists, appears here with Heather Roche playing clarinets and only the duo of Simon Limbrick and George Barton on percussion. Limbrick and Barton also overdub themselves three times to produce the brief Six for unspecified percussion, making an oblique collage of timbres that unexpectedly appear and disappear. Five4‘s clarinet tones recall the light, clear sound of soprano sax.
The most questionable choice here is to almost completely avoid Cage’s allowance in most pieces for the possiblity of short sounds and the concomitant permission that they may be played loud or soft. Almost everything here is soft and sustained. It seems like a needless restriction to the variety these compositions allow and also threatens to limit Cage’s expressive range as a composer. Listening to hours of it should become numbing. Strangely, it just about works, to the credit of composer and interpreters alike. The opening three pieces, each five minutes long for five musicians, suggest we’re in for an extended survey of subtle differences. This changes with the longer Fourteen for bowed piano and ensemble, as the expanded colouration with piano strings and brass highlight the way Cage manipulated the parameters for his chance-determined time brackets to produce distinct changes in texture, phrasing and pace. There’s some wicked low-end sounds throughout this whole set which reward the indulgence of playing it loud, in contrast to the post-Feldman ambient haze sometimes assumed for these pieces. It’s about knowing what liberties to take.
Fourteen minimises the timbral novelty of the bowed piano strings, setting it back amongst the ensemble instead of being a de facto soloist. Conversely, the group’s approach to Seven presents a more concertante approach to the piano in the ensemble, using its more active part as a striking contrast to much of the other playing throughout the set. In other performances I’ve heard, this piece’s emphasis on wonky intonation has turned it into a buzzing microtonal cloud. Apartment House’s approach to Cage’s use of microtonality is subdued and undemonstrative. In the lengthy Five3 trombone and string quartet don’t so much clash as colour each other in fine skeins of sound that separate out, a piece that slowly breathes. In the ambitious Ten Cage envisioned an ensemble engaged in microtonal melisma until they lost sense of exact pitch. Apartment House play it without momentum, effacing pauses and changes in pace to produce one frozen moment in which tonal certainty is never a given, even with occasional interjections from a piano.
So far, my one disappointment has been Eight, an hour-long work for winds and brass. Cage gave greater leeway in expression and dynamics for this piece, which the ensemble here employ but once. Having never heard this piece before, it feels like the score’s expectation for a distinctive contrasting quality in this work was passed by to make something that, by comparison, too similar to the other works. On the other hand, the next longest piece, the fifty-two minute Seven2 for low instruments, makes a virtue of eschewing abrupt notes by emphasising the layering of soft, low tones into complex sounds that are transparent and indelible, with each instrument’s enforced absence made all the more notable. Coming back to Thirteen: The Barton Workshop’s version made full use of the ebb and flow permissible in the varied amounts of activity assigned to each instrument, all within a pitch range of a major sixth, creating a strange beauty out of inert materials. Apartment House remove the unsynchronised ebb and flow, but in doing so manage to transform the work into a lush and sonorous work of understated grandeur as they steadily unroll each new change to the gamut. It makes for a remarkably dignified commemoration to Cage’s passing.
The download comes with bonus alternative takes of several pieces and Reynell’s notes are also posted on his website: it’s recommended reading to learn more about these works. One final thought: the Number Pieces are frequently compared to Morton Feldman’s late music, particularly with the observation that Cage started them after Feldman’s death. I wonder if there’s another connection, besides that of slow, soft sounds. The scores (parts really, without overall scores) give freedom to the musician within greater bounds allowed by chance, but it places a burden on the musician as to how that freedom is to be used. Does a conscientious performer take a Cageian approach of impartiality when deciding entrances and exits, or should they play intuitively, with regard only for the strictures of the time brackets? Should the ensemble play as a group, accounting for each other’s choices, or as individuals. The Number Pieces could accommodate either approach but the pros and cons of both are unresolved. The possible indulgence of taste is a marked change in Cage’s scores, and it brings with it an anxiety that is seen throughout Feldman’s scores, where each of his manuscripts was a constant probing of the musicians’ psychology. Was this another patch of Feldman’s ‘turf’ that Cage felt he could now explore?
[…] John Cage for granted, forgetting how long it’s been since heard any played live. After the much-discussed box set of Number Pieces played by Apartment House on Another Timbre last year, it was good to hear the […]