John Cage ‘Winter Music’ (1957) for 2 pianos and ‘Atlas Eclipticalis’ (1961) for violin 6 and violoncello 6
Performed by Takuji Kawai (piano), Reina Nishioka (piano), Maya Egashira (violin), Kenta Uno (violoncello)
Programme Note:
‘Winter Music’, written in 1957 for 1-20 pianos and ‘Atlas Eclipticalis’ written in 1961 for 1-86 orchestral instruments (ie, anything from a soloist to full orchestra), are frequently played together. The scores share a great deal in common, but there are also some differences which are interesting to note.
Cage was very interested in nature - which he viewed as contiguous with the human world, humans being animals and thus we and everything we make are also ‘nature’ - and the seasons. His view of winter, adopted from Indian philosophy, is one of frozen immobility; winter is the season of the dead, of monochrome, of blizzards, of icy quiet tension.
‘Winter Music’ is a piece in which a great number of chance operations occur - chance was Cage’s way of removing his ego from the compositional process, of being more like ‘nature’. The placement of notes on the page were decided by the chance imperfections of the paper itself; the music staves were imposed later. There are twenty pages in the score, which can be played in any order, and no speed is specified. In this performance, each player plays four pages, which were chosen using the ‘I Ching’, and the order of the pages will be decided using the ‘I Ching’ directly before the performance, so the soundworld will be fresh to all of us, including the performers. The speed is 10 minutes per page, chosen to match the speed of ‘Atlas Eclipticalis’.
‘Atlas Eclipticalis’ was composed using the ‘Atlas Eclipticalis 1950.0’ (an atlas of the stars published in 1958 by Antonín Becvár [1901-1965], a Czech astronomer), superimposing musical staves over its star-charts. Most of the parts were actually made by Cage’s assistants under his supervision, headed by Ichiyanagi Toshi. Each musical event (i.e., constellation of notes) contains from one to ten notes, divided randomly into two groups (very short and not so short). Pitches are notated clearly, though in a somewhat unusual way, i.e. the sizes of notes determine amplitudes, and their vertical placement in relation to the staff indicates microtonal deviations from standard well-tempered pitches. In this performance, two parts of the possible 86 are performed (violin 6 and cello 6). The two parts were chosen randomly, using the ‘I Ching’.
Freedom of interpretation is an absolute right of the listener of course, but it would surely not be out of order to take the titles of these pieces at their word, imagining the central, earthly, alternately noisily destructive and tensely quiet pianos surrounded by the void of the universe, pinpricked by occasional quiet string-instrument starlight, audible through the piano’s resonance.
-Daryl Jamieson (with reference to johncage.org)
------------------------------------------
Music and the Non-Human
2023 Concert Series, Concert 2
11 February 2024, Kyushu University, Faculty of Design, Acoustic Research Centre
Series Concept:
This year's concert series ‘Music and the Non-Human’ is part of a three-year research project that draws on Japanese philosophy and aesthetics rooted in premodern, non-Western ontologies to interpret the relationship between human and non-human sounds from a new perspective.
The composers explore their relationship with nature and spiritual elements, drawing inspiration from pre-modern philosophy and nō theatre works. Inspiration from nature, field recordings and contemporary music with traditional instruments intersect to define meaningful ways of creating, listening to, sharing (and discussing) music in unstable times.
19 май 2024
