Music Arcades: John Cage: Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (Grard Frmy)

I've found that making my way through John Cage recordings is a hazardous activity. Well, maybe not hazardous, but the rewards are thin on the ground unless you're in the right frame of mind. By far my most enjoyable, stimulating, inspiring, and even breathtaking, Cage experiences have been the two festivals of live performances of his work. The first, virtually a one man show by Philip Thomas at the Mappin Art Gallery in 2001, and a second featuring a cast of hundreds if not thousands at the Barbican in 2004 (mentioned here).

There was a film shown at the second festival — I wish I'd made proper notes of those films, because there were several fascinating ones — where Cage said that he never listened to recorded music. The whole idea of it was anathema to him. So that's kind of my excuse. Ah, just rediscovered my notes of a conversation between Gavin Bryars and Christopher Cook "C[age] says that recorded music perverts the experience of real music; story of boy at Stravinsky concert conducted by Stravinsky [who complained:] 'that's not the way it goes.'"

As with Bill Drummond, John Cage casts a long shadow over the entire endeavour of Music Arcades.

There's a weird paradox because you'd imagine that Cage's non-intentional compositions ought to be better suited to the disembodied recorded medium than everyone else's music which carries some element of subjective expression. But somehow you have to be there to bear witness to the absence of intention. Listening to Sonata 12 on CD, for example, it's actually quite hard not to project drama and emotion onto it. Or at least it is on this recording and this performance: other performances of the same piece may be quite different, as I'm not sure how much indeterminacy there is in the score. (I've listened a bit to another recording, but not sufficiently closely to play 'spot the difference'.)

Now, putting all that to one side… it was sometime late in 1998 where I read — I think it might have been in something Martin Archer wrote — that the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano were one of Cage's most popular? accessible? representative? works. That was enough for me: hence this CD.

But as you can tell from all I've said, listening to it has never been a wholly fulfilling experience. I like a bit of the old prepared joanna as much as the next man, but I think I'd be more likely to turn to Mike Adcock first, perhaps Hauschka second, and this third. That's like comparing apples and architecture, I know, but that's what it comes down to when I'm sitting down with a book and a coffee. (And the wonderful Goldmund would be ahead of all of them, but his piano is so subtly prepared, and his music so unashamedly lyrical, that I don't really count him in the genre.)