Details Written by Stuart Broomer Category: Published: 28 September 2015 John Cage: Four Quatuor Bozzini Quatuor Bozzini CQB1414 (actuellecd.com) Montreal’s Quatuor Bozzini has been together for 16 years and has recorded 15 CDs of the kind of challenging contemporary music that they specialize in, including works by Canadians Malcolm Goldstein, Tim Brady and Jean Derome and international figures like Steve Reich and James Tenney. Broken Angel English Mp3 Songs Free Download here. The experience tells as they take on John Cage’s three works for string quartet, realizing distinctive versions in the process. The earliest of the compositions, String Quartet in Four Parts (1949-50), is a work descriptive of the four seasons with the composer’s notes encouraging light string contact and no vibrato. The work’s structure and minimal harmonies create an unlikely resemblance to the melodic purity of medieval music. Leaping ahead to 1983, Thirty Pieces for String Quartet presents the musicians with both demands and choices: each piece lasts about a minute, with each musician given a sequence of notes to be fitted into the “time bracket.” The musicians individually choose between microtonal, tonal and chromatic options, but the parts are not directly related to one another except for the coordination of segment lengths. The music that emerges within these configurations is rich in complexity and convergence, a kind of collaboration between composer, performer and listener.

The final work, Four, from 1989, is the most radically reductive of these works, still employing time brackets but offering choices from its sparse materials to all the performers. The result is spacious but continuous with tonal structures that may gently evolve or appear transient. The cumulative work is a serene landscape in which mysterious elements emerge and disappear. Quatuor Bozzini assumes the substantial demand that this music makes on its performers: to at once realize the work in shaping its form while allowing the components to maintain their distinct, non-structural identities.

If the Arditti Quartet’s recordings of these works (on Muse from the early 1990s) have long stood as masterful readings (they worked closely with Cage on Four), Quatuor Bozzini does a fine job of traversing this music, inevitably creating new works in the process.

A piano prepared for a performance of Sonatas and Interludes Sonatas and Interludes is a collection of twenty pieces for by American (1912–1992). It was composed in 1946–48, shortly after Cage's introduction to and the teachings of art historian, both of which became major influences on the composer's later work. Significantly more complex than his other works for prepared piano, Sonatas and Interludes is generally recognized as one of Cage's finest achievements.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data. Names: Cage, John. Kuhn, Laura Diane. Title: The selected letters of John Cage / edited by Laura Kuhn. Cage had taken on a. “Wagnerian” role, assuming full charge of every aspect of the work —music, of course, for both orchestra and singers, but also casting,. Send Your Ashes to Republicans Who Voted to Take Away Your Health Insurance. It would be funny, if it weren’t so damn sad. As a protest against the House Republican.

The cycle consists of sixteen sonatas (thirteen of which are cast in, the remaining three in ternary form) and four more freely structured interludes. The aim of the pieces is to express the eight permanent emotions of the Indian tradition.

In Sonatas and Interludes, Cage elevated his technique of rhythmic proportions to a new level of complexity. In each sonata a short sequence of natural numbers and fractions defines the structure of the work and that of its parts, informing structures as localized as individual melodic lines. Contents • • • • • • • • • • • • History of composition [ ] Cage underwent an artistic crisis in the early 1940s. His compositions were rarely accepted by the public, and he grew more and more disillusioned with the idea of art as communication.

He later gave an account of the reasons: 'Frequently I misunderstood what another composer was saying simply because I had little understanding of his language. And I found other people misunderstanding what I myself was saying when I was saying something pointed and direct'. At the beginning of 1946, Cage met Gita Sarabhai, an Indian musician who came to the United States concerned about Western influence on the music of her country. Sarabhai wanted to spend several months in the US, studying Western music. She took lessons in and contemporary music with Cage, who offered to teach her for free if she taught him about in return. Sarabhai agreed and through her Cage became acquainted with Indian music and philosophy. The purpose of music, according to Sarabhai's teacher in India, was 'to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences', and this definition became one of the cornerstones of Cage's view on music and art in general.

At around the same time, Cage began studying the writings of the Indian art historian. Among the ideas that influenced Cage was the description of the aesthetic and of its eight 'permanent emotions'.

These emotions are divided into two groups: four white (humor, wonder, erotic, and heroic—'accepting one's experience', in Cage's words ) and four black (anger, fear, disgust, and sorrow). They are the first eight of the or navrasas ('nine emotions'), and they have a common tendency towards the ninth of the navarasas: tranquility. Cage never specified which of the pieces relate to which emotions, or whether there even exists such direct correspondence between them. He mentioned, though, that the 'pieces with bell-like sounds suggest Europe and others with a drum-like resonance suggest the East'. (A short excerpt from Sonata II, which is clearly inspired by Eastern music: ().) Cage also stated that Sonata XVI, the last of the cycle ( ()), is 'clearly European. It was the signature of a composer from the West.'

Part of the table of preparations of Sonatas and Interludes In the text accompanying the first recording of Sonatas and Interludes, Cage specifically stated that the use of preparations is not a criticism of the instrument, but a simple practical measure. Cage started composing for in 1940, when he wrote a piece called Bacchanale for a dance by, and by 1946 had already composed a large number of works for the instrument. However, in Sonatas and Interludes the preparation is very complex, more so than in any of the earlier pieces. Forty-five notes are prepared, mostly using screws and various types of bolts, but also with fifteen pieces of rubber, four pieces of plastic, several and one eraser. It takes about two or three hours to prepare a piano for performance.

Despite the detailed instructions, any preparation is bound to be different from any other, and Cage himself suggested that there is no strict plan to adhere to: 'if you enjoy playing the Sonatas and Interludes then do it so that it seems right to you'. For the most part Cage avoids using lower registers of the piano, and much of the music's melodic foreground lies in the range. Of the forty-five prepared notes, only three belong to the three lowest octaves below F#3: D3, D2 and D1. Furthermore, D2 is prepared in such a way that the resulting sound has the frequency of a D4 (resulting in two variants of D4 available, one more prepared than the other). The portion of the keyboard above F#3 is divided into roughly three registers: low, middle, and high. The low register has the heaviest preparation, and the high register the lightest.

Different methods are used: certain notes produce sounds that retain the original and a pianistic character; others become drum-like sounds, detuned versions of the original notes, or metallic, rattling sounds that have no sense of the at all. The use of the, which makes the hammers strike only two of the three strings of each note (or one, for notes with only two strings), complicates the matter further. For example, the note C5 is a metallic sound with no fundamental discernible when the soft pedal is depressed, but it sounds fairly normal if the pedal is released. It appears that Cage was fully aware of the implications of this: certain sonatas feature interplay between two versions of one note, others place special emphasis on particular notes, and still others are very dependent on particular note combinations. The first five bars of Sonata XV in Cage's notation.

(The definitive recording by Maro Ajemian, supervised by the composer: ().) All three major groups of sounds used in Sonatas and Interludes are present: the heavily prepared notes with no fundamental frequency discernible (for instance, D6), lightly prepared notes (G ♭-4), and non-prepared notes (G5). The is depressed throughout—otherwise some of the sounds would be different. Structure [ ] The cycle comprises sixteen sonatas and four interludes, arranged symmetrically. Four groups of four sonatas each are separated by interludes in the following way: Sonatas I–IV Interlude 1 Sonatas V–VIII Interludes 2–3 Sonatas IX–XII Interlude 4 Sonatas XIII–XVI Cage refers to his pieces as in the sense that these works are cast in the form that early classical keyboard sonatas (such as those of ) were: AABB. The works are not cast in the later which is far more elaborate. The only exceptions are sonatas IX–XI, which feature three sections: prelude, interlude, and postlude. Sonatas XIV–XV follow the AABB scheme but are paired and given the joint title Gemini—after the work of Richard Lippold, referring to a sculpture.

The interludes, on the other hand, do not have a unifying scheme. The first two are free-form movements, whereas interludes 3 and 4 have a four-section structure with repeats for each section.