Works for prepared piano by John Cage

American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912–1992) began composing pieces for solo prepared piano around 1938–40. The majority of early works for this instrument were created to accompany dances by Cage's various collaborators, most frequently Merce Cunningham. In response to frequent criticisms of prepared piano, Cage cited numerous predecessors (such as Henry Cowell). In the liner notes for the very first recording of his most highly acclaimed work for prepared piano, Sonatas and Interludes, Cage wrote: "Composing for the prepared piano is not a criticism of the instrument. I'm only being practical."Cage, booklet text for Ajemian's recording of the cycle: John Cage: Sonatas and Interludes, Composers Recordings Inc. CRI 700 (reissue) This article presents a complete list of Cage's works for prepared piano, with comments on each composition. All of Cage's indeterminate works for unspecified forces (the Variations series, Fontana Mix, Cartridge Music, etc.) can also be performed on or with Prepared Piano.

Solo

Bacchanale In interviews conducted in 1974 and 1982, Cage specified that this piece was composed in 1938.Kostelanetz 2003, 62Kostelanetz 1974, 39 However, the manuscript used for Edition Peters' edition of Bacchanale specified 1940 as the date,Score: Edition Peters 6784. (c) 1960 by Henmar Press. and this has been used by numerous scholars since.Nicholls, 77Pritchett 1993, 22Revill, Seven. I. The circumstances of the piece's composition are much clearer: it was created for a choreography by the American dancer Syvilla Fort. Cage and Fort were both working at the Cornish School in Seattle, Washington at the time. The room where the dance was to be performed was not large enough to allow for a percussion ensemble, but had enough space for a grand piano. Cage decided to try placing various objects on the strings of the instrument in order to produce percussive sounds, inspired by Henry Cowell's experiments with extended piano techniques. In 1982 Cage mentioned that the whole piece was completed in just three days. Twelve notes are prepared, mostly using weather strippings. In the score, in 11 cases out of 12, the performer is instructed to "determine position and size of mutes by experiment."

Totem Ancestor Composed in 1942 for a dance by Merce Cunningham. Eleven notes are prepared, eight of them by screws.Pritchett, 25 This is the only Cage-Cunningham collaboration from the 1940s for which original choreography has survived.William Fetterman. John Cage's Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances, p. 14. Routledge, 1996.

And the Earth Shall Bear Again Composed in 1942 for a dance by Valerie Bettis. Ten individual notes are prepared, mostly with small screws, and a whole range from G1 to C3 is prepared using "two thicknesses of woolen material". This material is placed between the strings in the following manner: over the first string, under the second, over the third, under the fourth, etc.Score: Edition Peters 6811. (c) 1960 by Henmar Press.

Primitive Composed in 1942 for a dance by Wilson Williams. Thirteen notes are prepared, all using screws or bolts.Score: Edition Peters 66756. (c) 1977 by Henmar Press.

In the Name of the Holocaust Composed in late 1942 for a dance by Merce Cunningham. The title references World War II (like in the lost prepared piano work Lidice (see Lidice) from 1943). Piano preparation involves only screws or bolts. Various extended techniques are used, such as producing sound by plucking strings. The piece starts with quiet, muted tones and gradually becomes louder, climaxing in several successions of large tone clusters, executed using the entire length of the forearm.Nicholls, 217

Our Spring Will Come Composed in 1943 for a dance by Pearl Primus. Piano preparation involves bamboo strips, as well as screws and nuts. The music and the dance were to be accompanied by a speaker reading a poem by Langston Hughes about the condition of Black people in the United States.

A Room Composed in 1943, originally conceived as the third part of She Is Asleep (see below). May be performed with or without preparations, which involve 11 notes. Most are to be prepared using bolts, one new material is a penny. The music is written down on a single staff and follows the structure 4, 7, 2, 5, 4, 7, 2, 3, 5 (numbers denote the number of bars dedicated to a particular part of the section), repeated twice.Score: Edition Peters 6790. (c) 1968 by Henmar Press.

Tossed As It Is Untroubled Composed in 1944 for a dance by Merce Cunningham, and dedicated to Valerie Bettis. Originally titled Meditation. Only eight notes are prepared, mostly with weather strippings.Score: Edition Peters 6722. (c) 1960 by Henmar Press. Roughly two thirds of the piece are written down on a single staff; the melodic line which makes up most of the piece uses just five tones, all prepared with weather strippings. The two heavily prepared notes are only used for a trill at the very end of the work.Pritchett, 26

A Valentine Out of Season A suite of three pieces, composed in 1944. Choreographed by Merce Cunningham as Effusions avant l'heure / Games / Trio. The title references Cage's separation from his wife Xenia, which happened in 1945.

Prelude for Meditation Composed in 1944. A very short work that only uses four tones.Robert Dunn. John Cage: A Catalogue of His Work, p. 17. C.F. Peters, 1952.

Root of an Unfocus

Composed in 1944 for a dance by Merce Cunningham. A work in three sections: Section 1 contains seven parts, seven bars each; Section 2 juxtaposes bars in 4/4 and 3/4 metres; Section 3 divides 100 half notes into three groups of 23 and a coda. According to Cunningham, the subject of the work is fear: it describes "awareness of the unknown, struggle, and the final defeat".Nicholls, 156–7)

Spontaneous Earth Composed in 1944 for a dance by Merce Cunningham.

The Unavailable Memory of Composed in 1944 for a dance by Merce Cunningham. Written entirely on a single staff, primarily scored as a single melodic line.Nicholls, 79

Triple-Paced No. 2 This work, composed in 1944, is a revision of a 1943 piano piece titled Triple-Paced. The 1944 version was choreographed by Merce Cunningham.

The Perilous Night Composed in 1944. This is Cage's first large-scale work for prepared piano. Twenty-six notes are prepared with various materials. The piece contains six separate sections with different rhythmic structures. According to Cage, The Perilous Night expresses "the loneliness and terror that comes to one when love becomes unhappy".Cage quoted in Pritchett, 27 All of the six movements of this work are untitled. 38 years after its composition, his longtime friend artist Jasper Johns included a silkscreen of the score in a large mixed-media diptych which itself is also titled “Perilous Night.”

Mysterious Adventure Composed in 1945 for a dance by Merce Cunningham. This is another large-scale work with moderately complex piano preparation, involving 27 notes. It contains five sections.

Daughters of the Lonesome Isle Composed in 1945 for a dance by Jean Erdman.Pritchett, Grove Contains nineteen sections. Thirty-nine notes are prepared.

Music for Marcel Duchamp

Composed in 1947 for a segment of Hans Richter's surrealist film Dreams That Money Can Buy. The film contains several segments designed by different artists, and Cage's music was composed for a segment designed by Marcel Duchamp. The segment—a dream one of the characters is having—is titled "Discs" and consists mostly of Duchamp's rotoreliefs. These are designs painted on flat cardboard circles, which are to be spun on a phonographic turntable.William Fetterman. John Cage's Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances, p. 91. Routledge, 1996. Tomkins, Calvin. Duchamp: A Biography, p. 301–3. Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1996. . For more information on rotoreliefs, see Marcel Duchamp, and The work was later choreographed by Merce Cunningham. The global structure is 11x11 (eleven sections of eleven bars each), the rhythmic proportion is 2, 1, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1.The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, p. 598. Grove's Dictionaries of Music, 1980. Vol. 3. Similarly to Tossed As It Is Untroubled and The Unavailable Memory of, the work mostly builds on a single melodic line, which uses notes muted by weather strippings. This piece is one of the first to explore the idea of silence systematically: empty bars are juxtaposed with melodic passages throughout the piece.

Sonatas and Interludes

A cycle of 20 short works (16 sonatas and 4 interludes) composed in 1946–48. Dedicated to pianist Maro Ajemian. This is Cage's most famous work for prepared piano,Nicholls, 80 and also the most complex:Ishii, 41 piano preparation takes about 2–3 hours and involves forty-five notes,Score: Edition Peters 6755. (c) 1960 by Henmar Press and the proportions governing the structure of individual pieces include fractions as well as natural numbers.Pritchett, 29–33 Sonatas and Interludes was inspired by Cage's interest in Indian philosophy and the Rasa aesthetic as explained in Ananda K. Coomaraswamy's writings. The pieces express the eight "permanent" emotions (the humorous, the wondrous, the erotic, the heroic, anger, fear, disgust and sorrow) and their common tendency toward tranquility.Cage quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, 67.

Music for Works of Calder Composed in 1950 for Herbert Matter's short film on sculptor Alexander Calder, Works of Calder. The idea of the film was suggested by Burgess Meredith, whom Calder met in spring 1948. The decision to ask Matter to direct was Calder's: the two had worked with each other previously when Matter made photographs of Calder's works.Alexander Calder. Calder; an Autobiography with Pictures, p. 197. Pantheon Books, 1966. The 20-minute color film, produced and narrated by Meredith (narration by John Latouche) and photographed and directed by Matter,Details from: Victor D'Amico, Arlette Buchman. Assemblage: A New Dimension in Creative Teaching in Action, p. 168. Museum of Modern Art; distributed by New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1972. was completed in 1949, but since Matter insisted on asking Cage to compose the music, the team had to wait for about a year until Cage returned from Europe. The piece consists of three sequences, two of which (numbers 1 and 3) are for prepared piano, and one (number 2) is for tape: Cage recorded the sounds of Calder's studio while the sculptor was working —mobiles bumping into one another, etc.—then edited the resulting two-hour recording in order to produce the desired sequence of sounds.Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Robert Samuels, Jean-Jacques Nattiez. The Boulez-Cage Correspondence, p. 93. Translated by Robert Samuels. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Two Pastorales Composed in November 1951 (first piece) and January 1952 (second piece). Both pastorales use chance operations applied using charts of layers, sounds, durations, etc. and the I Ching, similarly to Music of Changes. Because the number of layers was smaller than in the latter work (specifically, there are just two layers), the texture of Two Pastorales is thinner, with long silences between notes.Pritchett, 89 Like in Music of Changes, the notation is proportional, one inch equals one quarter note. Extended techniques are used: strings are sometimes plucked by fingers or cymbal sticks, or muted by hand.

34'46.776" For a Pianist