The Choral Works I

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As Cage's best-known music dates from relatively early in his career, we tend to forget that the delicate clangour of the prepared piano music which defines his work to so many was created about half a century before his death. Almost everything on Choral Works Volume I was composed in the last decade and a half of his long, prolific life, offering us an insight into some of his later musical concerns, and in principle, there is nothing any less radical in these late works than in his most popular experimental music in the sense that all are products of compositional techniques he developed in order to fulfil his aims of expanding ideas about what music is or can be, ultimately leading towards an objectification of sound; sound free from association and reference. There are, predictably, no conventional "songs" here: half the pieces are vocalisations only and wherever text is used, Cage randomly selected it from volumes on his bookshelf, newspapers, or whatever happened to be lying around when he was working (for instance, the words "by Kodak", borrowed from a slide he picked up while preparing Four Solos). Then there is something rather introspective about this collection, a feeling that Cage was tying up loose ends, at last finding an approach to harmony which suited him and perhaps answered the charges of onetime teacher Schoenberg, who asserted that Cage's achievements as a composer would be forever impeded by what he determined was a lack of aptitude for harmony. It is the harmony which is the most striking aspect of the opening work, Four² (1990), one of Cage's number pieces, in fact the second working of Four for string quartet. He composed his first number piece in the late eighties, and there are many (from solos, One to full orchestra, 103, different versions for the same number of performers being indicated by superscript), consisting for the most part of single, sustained notes, sometimes sounding together, sometimes not, generating a harmony with a Feldman-like flavour. Two separate performances of Four² are recorded here, partly I suspect for the sheer enjoyment of both listener and singers, but also to illustrate the element of controlled indeterminacy which is a component of the number pieces, each section existing inside a "time bracket" indicating a time range within which the section must begin and end. The most recognisably Cagean work is unsurprisingly from 1940, the short four-movement Living Room Music for percussion and speech quartet. Anti-elitist and substituting household objects for actual percussion instruments, this is light-hearted music for an informal occasion which is suitable for performance by amateur musicians (one of Cage's early ensembles consisted of bookbinders), and it sounds surprisingly fresh, possibly due to having been filtered down to us through the works of such composers as Meredith Monk. Next comes ear for EAR (Antiphonies) from 1983, a stunningly simple chant-style statement and response written for the tenth anniversary of EAR magazine, representative of the numerous works Cage composed for such occasions. After a second version of Four², we hear Four Solos, of 1988, and here some of the most startling and engaging moments of the disc emerge. The various texts are set in a mixture of overlapping styles, embracing everything from children's songs tospirituals to opera as the listener eavesdrops on a kaleidoscopic composite of American musical history. This captivating work deserves a place in the canon of twentieth-century experimental vocal music. Five is another number piece, composed for any combination of voices and instruments, shorter and spicier than its predecessor, then finally Hymns and Variations (1979) for twelve amplified voices, is the longest work of the disc at almost 30 minutes. It is based on two hymns of William Billings extracted from one of the earliest New World choral anthologies, and Cage utilises a harmonic subtraction technique whereby chance operations are applied within each voice to determine which tones will be omitted, the process being repeated five times to create ten "variations". What remains is not a skeleton of the original but rather a distillation of it down to its essence, capturing something of the very essence of choral music itself. The Danish Ars Nova vocal ensemble under the direction of Hungarian-born conductor Támas Vetö give performances true to the spirit of Cage's music in this as in all the works. Highly recommended.