Word: cage
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Cage's sounds are slowly catching on with concert performers, two or three of whom have already learned how to jimmy bolts and screws among the strings of their own pianos. Most music lovers are still doubtful. Explains Cage: "People want the newest thing in their houses and automobiles, but in the arts the newest thing seems to be too frightening...
Muzak's piped-in music programs had no spot for a composition in dead silence. But last week, hardy Manhattan concertgoers made a spot for Composer Cage's rhythmic, percussive "sounds & silence" music. At Carnegie Recital Hall for two nights in a row, Pianist Maro Ajemian thudded, clanked, bonged and chimed through 16 sonatas and four interludes on a "prepared" piano outfitted with bolts, screws, pieces of rubber and plastic stuck inside to short-circuit the tones. (After the first night, someone unCaged the piano, and the composer himself took three hours getting all the gadgets back into...
After Carnegie, balletomanes at City Center heard what a Caged orchestra sounded like. His music for the ballet, The Seasons, was full of grunting fragments of brass and woodwinds, but Composer Cage proved he could write a melody, too, when he wants to. And to his fans, Cage's two-finger piano solo, surrounded by silence in mid-ballet, was almost a showstopper...
Crop-haired Composer Cage, who looks like a Huck Finn grown to 36, is trying to compose music that is really "atonal." Says he: "Atonal music was excellent in theory, but there were no atonal instruments to play it." He wanted "sounds" instead of "tones"; he found them in junk yards, bone yards and hardware stores-brake drums, pipe lengths, asses' jaws-and in his prepared pianos...
After 13 years of experimenting, Cage has managed to weld together ten works (Construction in Metal, Second Construction, etc.) for pipe-length, brake-drum orchestras, and, with six different "preparations," nine major works for piano. Necessarily expressionistic, one of his sonatas last week moved the New York Times to get a faraway look in its good, grey eyes: "The fourteenth sonata . . . suggested burro's hoofs on far-off cobbles, while a gentle church bell sounded sadly in the distance...