John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra

Abstract

The book is a comprehensive examination of John Cage’s seminal Concert for Piano and Orchestra. It places the piece into its many contexts, examining its relationship with Cage’s compositional practice of indeterminacy more generally, the importance of Cage’s teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, on the development of his structural thought, and the impact of Cage’s (mis)understanding of jazz. It discusses, on the basis of Cage’s sketches and manuscripts, the compositional process at play in the piece. It details the circumstances of the piece’s early performances—often described as catastrophes—its recording and promotion, and the part it played in Cage’s (successful) hunt for a publisher. It examines in detail the various ways in which Cage’s pianist of choice, David Tudor, approached the piece, differing according to whether it was to be performed with an orchestra, alongside Cage delivering the lecture, ‘Indeterminacy’, or as a piano solo to accompany Merce Cunningham’s choreography Antic Meet. It demonstrates the ways in which, despite indeterminacy, the instrumental parts of the piece are amenable to analytical interpretation, especially through a method which exposes the way in which those parts form a sort of network of statistical commonality and difference, analysing, too, the pianist’s part, the Solo for Piano, on a similar basis, discussing throughout the practical consequences of Cage’s notations for a performer. It shows the way in which the piece played a central role, first, in the construction of who Cage was and what sort of composer he was within the new musical world but, second, how it came to be an important example for professional philosophers in discussing what the limits of the musical work are.

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“…Cage maintained that his modus operandi in composing its centrepiece, the Solo for Piano , had drawn on ideas about repetition and variation picked up from his former teacher, Arnold Schoenberg (Cage and Retallack 1996, pp. 296–7, and Cage 2016, p. 451), and this suggestion has been developed by Martin Iddon and Philip Thomas, who portray Schoenberg's ideas as providing ‘the central impulse for the formal characteristics of the Solo for Piano ’ (Iddon and Thomas 2020, p. 6). These formal characteristics bear on interrelationships between its 146 individually labelled components, because many of them employ notations which are repetitions or variations of those used previously within it.…”

“…These formal characteristics bear on interrelationships between its 146 individually labelled components, because many of them employ notations which are repetitions or variations of those used previously within it. This arrangement is traced back to a reading of Schoenberg's views on developing variation, which Cage expressed thus: ‘Composition, according to him, consisted in establishing an idea (a motif) and then proceeding farther and farther away from it by means of repetition and variation’ (Cage, quoted in Iddon and Thomas 2020, p. 43). The fusion between American Experimentalism and Schoenberg's thinking is deliberately imperfect, however, because Cage, in deciding on which notation to employ in a given component, also presented the I Ching with the possibility of selecting something completely new (Cage and Retallack 1996, p. 297, and Iddon and Thomas 2020, pp.…”

“…6, 44). Consequently, ‘each fresh notation in the Solo for Piano is either a repetition of an existing notation […] a variation of an existing notation, or an entirely new notation’ (Iddon and Thomas 2020, p. 43). Moreover, the fusion, such as it is, exists at a very general level; it certainly affected the presentation of each component and therefore the character of the indeterminacy employed, but, by the same token, it left everything else untouched.…”

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“…For example, Martin Iddon and Phillip Thomas have observed Cage's handwritten annotations in the premiere score of Solo for Viola, indicating which pages should be performed, their order, and calculations for the time-space durations in relation to the conductor. 49 The score is apparently open, suggesting that there is not a 'wrong' or 'right' way to realise them, yet Cage appears to have 'better' and 'worse' ways to 'invent' performances in mind.…”

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“…Brian Ingliss proposed an analytical quasi‐treatise in 2015, modelling his work from Anderson's performative approach to graphic scores and making the salient point that ‘graphic scores form a vital and actually bigger part of our musical culture than is usually acknowledged, providing […] a largely untapped phenomenon for music analysis’ (Ingliss 2015, p. 11). Martin Iddon and Philip Thomas's mammoth volume dedicated to John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958; Iddon and Thomas 2020) is a testament to this cultural significance 1 . Clarke (2016) offers reflections on a small section of Cage's Solo for Piano (1957), drawing upon and critiquing Jean‐Jacques Nattiez's (1990) semiotic approach to poetics and aesthetics to demonstrate the issues surrounding the analysis of indeterminate music, deeming graphic scores to exhibit ‘radical ambiguity [which] render[s] the work ambiguous at a fundamentally ontological level’ (Clarke 2016, p. 177).…”