Music for Piano No. 2

The allure of China for radical 20th-century American composer John Cage was certainly more philosophical than Debussy’s visceral, aesthetic sympathy. Cage helped promote Dadaist anti-art tendencies in the stuffy realm of classical art music in the post-WWII era. His works pushed the boundaries of what could be called music, or even art, and he was—like many of his contemporaries—profoundly inspired by the flowering of Eastern philosophy that swept Europe and America in the 1940s and 50s. In his search for anti-traditional, non-specific musical experiences, Cage rediscovered the power of chance. For that effort his reading of the classic text I-Ching of “Book of Changes” was critical. The I-Ching (pronounced yi-jīng) contains symbols that help determine order or structure among chance events. It demonstrates an ancient cosmological system centering on three primary beliefs: the balance of opposed forces, life as an evolving process, and the acceptance of the inevitability of change. From 1950 to the end of his life (1992), the I-Ching was Cage’s basic compositional tool. He used it to select when and which notes to play, what guidance, if any, to give the performer, and ways to compose from a fundamentally chance-based perspective. For instance, most of the 85 pieces in his collection Music for Piano (1952-62) involve pitch selection based around Cage’s observing random imperfections in the piece of paper upon which he wrote. In Music for Piano No. 2, which we hear this evening, pitches are determined in this manner, and their density is fixed by a pre-given rhythmic figure. Everything else, from tempo to articulation to dynamics, is left to performer and the moment.

(c) Jason Stell