Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1946-1948)
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John Milton Cage was a writer, visual artist and American experimental music composer – undeniably one of the most important contemporary composers of the twentieth century. He used instruments in some very unusual ways, and was later one of the earliest composers of aleatoric music – music where some elements are left up to chance. The piece that he is perhaps most widely known for is the notorious 4’ 33”, in which the musician makes no deliberate sound for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, with the only “pauses” in the silence being in between movements; the performer may then choose to relax his stance, or to close and reopen the piano lid. The idea of this piece is that the music is composed of the sounds from the audience; the piece itself provides rooms for those sounds to fill. Cage believed that “there is no such thing as empty space or empty time…try as we might to make a silence, we cannot…one need not fear about the future of music.” Music as avant-garde as this is representative of Cage’s many works over his lifetime. Some say that John Cage’s music is empty. Most music, such as Bach or popular music, is solid and real; it is something that the composer creates for us to tangibly listen to. The works of Cage, on the other hand, are the mood-evocative structures. They are like the rooms of a house; rich with silences that give the listener freedom, to fill in those spaces with something created of their own imaginations.
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[edit] John Cage Biography
Cage was born in 1912 in Los Angeles, California. His father was rather eccentric and an inventor of odd devices, who told Cage that “if someone says ‘can’t’, that shows you what to do”. Having been born into an Episcopalian family, it did not seem likely from his childhood that Cage would become a composer; his grandfather believed the violin to be an instrument of the devil. Cage himself planned to be a minister and writer when he grew up. He attended Pomona College, but then dropped out in his second year to travel to Europe. There, he wrote some experimental first pieces of music, which he disliked and left behind when he returned to America. He then studied under Richard Buhlig, Henry Cowell, Adolf Weiss, and the famous Arnold Schoenberg. Cowell was later to have a large influence upon Cage’s work, especially in hybridity – the creation of music based upon combining sounds from various sources and cultures. Schoenberg offered to tutor Cage for free if Cage devoted his life to music; although Cage agreed, the lessons stopped after two years because Cage realized that he “had no feeling for harmony”. He then created a new instrument called the "prepared piano", which was the performing instrument for some of his most famous pieces. Later, Cage became interested in Zen, and began his aleatory music period, during which he composed music by flipping a coin or conducting some other random test, as directed by the principles of I-Ching.
[edit] Prepared Piano
The idea for one of his greatest works, which many call his “masterpiece”, was conceived at the dance school Cage was working at, where he was asked to write music to accompany a dance by Syvilla Fort called Bacchanale. Cage wanted to use percussion in his piece, but he had only a piano at the performance venue at his disposal. He tried to compensate by placing a metal sheet over the strings inside the piano, and liked the sound it produced. Eventually, this idea gave birth his invention of the prepared piano, in which screws, bolts, nuts, rubber, plastic, coins, weather stripping, bamboo, or cloth are placed between the piano strings, changing the entire character of the instrument. As Cage was experimenting with materials, he “placed objects on the strings…playing with them on the keyboard in an improvisatory way…found melodies and combinations of sounds that worked with the given structure. Just as you go along the beach and pick up pretty shells that please you, I go into the piano and find sounds I like.” The preparation involved in setting up the prepared piano is considerable, taking between two to four hours. Cage describes in detail, in a table, what material, and where, should be placed on the strings, but doesn’t seem to take into consideration the different dimensions of different grand pianos, or even the difference in the strings of an upright versus a grand piano. (His invention actually originated on an upright.) Cage just mentions that “there are…differences…I would say then that using my table as a set of suggestions, chose objects that do not become dislodged or in other ways stand out of the music. You will often be able to tell whether your preparation is good or not if the cadences “work”. The Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1946-1948) is regarded as his greatest work for this new instrument.
[edit] Sonatas and Interludes
There is a story from an Irish legend that Cage enjoyed telling, of a prince and a magical horse that follow the path of a magic ball that rolls in front of them, leading them from adventure to adventure and finally leading them to the object of their quest. The Sonatas and Interludes can likened to this story. Cage is following his system when writing the piece, and each of the twenty movements is a different adventure. At a time slightly before the composition’s making, Cage was reading the works of the Indian art historian and critic Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Sonatas and Interludes consequently became Cage’s first composition using Hindu philosophy; Cage decided to express, in music, the “permanent motions” of Indian tradition. There are the four “light” moods: heroic, erotic, wondrous, mirthful; the four “dark” moods: sorrow, fear, anger, odious; and tranquility, the common center shared by light and dark. There are bell-like sounds that represent West, and drum-like tones that are reminiscent of the East. This was influence was perhaps in part from Cowell and part from Coomaraswamy, who wrote that some of these philosophies can be found in both the East and the West. The overall structure and order of the set of movements has a mirror symmetry. Cage wrote twenty-six sonatas and four interludes; Interludes II and III are set in the middle of the sequence, while Interludes I and IV are set on either side, an equal number of sonatas from the middle. The resulting order is the first four Sonatas I through IV, Interlude I, the second four Sonatas V through VIII, Interludes II and III, the third four Sonatas IX through XII, Interlude IV, then finally the last four Sonatas XIII through XVI. Each section of Sonatas is like an Act of a play, with Interludes sprinkled methodically within. Sonatas I through IV is Act I. The Sonatas and Interludes was written at a turning point in Cage’s career. Soon after finishing this work, he ventured into the realm of “chance music”, in which he abandoned continuity, structure, and method altogether. A little of this is can already be seen in Sonatas and Interludes in a few of the more entropic movements.
[edit] Sonata I
Within Sonata I, the notes F#5 and A5 are the most often-recurring notes in much of the piece, and they are often paired together or very close to one another. These two notes can be seen together almost as a motive, and not only for the way they often appear together. When a piano is prepared, materials are placed between the strings of each note; this slight nudging apart of the strings detunes, as well as dampens, that note just a little. Since both F#5 and A5 are prepared with a screw, their pitches and tone qualities will be skewed by the same amount, and thus will form a very complementary pair.
[edit] Sonata II
Sonata II is slightly reminiscent of Indonesia, perhaps of an Indonesian dance, with the irregular rhythms and hollow drum-like echoes. Cage makes use of some rhythmic and melodic formations that is surprisingly traditional. For example, the two bars starting at bar 15 contain a right-hand melody, which, in the next two bars, is repeated – but in not quite the same way. Most of the pitches in second two bars are the same as those in the first, but some notes are rearranged within their groupings. The rhythms, when simplified – with a few notes’ difference – also turn out to be very similar.
[edit] Sonata III
In contrast to the rhythmic and varied second Sonata, Sonata III is relatively bare and stark. The steady, repeated A3 played by the left hand is very heavily-prepared with a large bolt, and does not give a definite pitch so much as a percussive sound. The movement begins in 2/2. In the first few measures of the sonata, the stroke of the left hand falls on the first beat of the bar, at the same time as the attack from the more-graceful sounding right hand falls. These two attacks together give a strong downward feeling on the first beat of the bar. When Cage changes to 5/4 for one bar, however, the downbeat of the left hand is no longer with the melody, and the listener is thrown off-balance. The process then begins over again. The primary five notes available to the right-hand melody are those that consist of a chromatic scale beginning on F-natural; Cage manipulates these five notes for his melodic lines.
[edit] Sonata IV
The trend for the sonatas so far has been towards stillness and sparseness in melodic and rhythmic variation. Sonata IV is no exception, and the movement features many rests, with the notes fewer and farther in between than ever before. Cage plays with the permutations of the four notes A, B, C, and G; plus, one heavily-prepared note, E. The melodic line begins languidly, but then bursts with grace-note quickness. Because the percussive E is mixed in with the other notes, played only in short groups, it augments the sparse feel of the movement, as if the percussion were being played randomly, and yet strangely on a perfectly precise portion of the beat.
[edit] Interlude I
The next movement is the first Interlude, which is a transition between the first set of four Sonatas and the next set of four Sonatas. The pedal is held throughout the movement.
[edit] Performance
The performing of this piece proved to be open to interpretation. Not only were the sounds almost guaranteed to be different as the result of variations in the materials used and the pianos themselves, but there are also stylistic differences. Some try to play the set of movements like one would play Chopin; others perform as if they were playing on a percussion set.
