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A Room (1943). John Cage /links/

Blogs: "a rumbling sound, this time well prepared, and miscellanous other unprepared notes sprinkled in" The John Cageblog | "favorite pulse and timbre" aworks | "a minimal piano piece of surprising intensity" awol | "The first, Eric Salzman's Five Dances (1996-97), is an arrangement for string quartet of five works by Cage originally composed for prepared piano: Our Spring Will Come (1943), Dream (1948), Totem Ancestor (1943), In a Landscape (1948), and A Room (1943)." John Cage Trust

Recordings:  Bruce Brubaker Amazon | Andrew Chubb YouTube | Floraleda Sacchi YouTube | Chris Owen YouTube | Aki Takahashi ArkivMusic | Philipp Vandré ArkivMusic | Alberto Rosado ArkivMusic | Anthony de Mare ArkivMusic emusic Amazon | Steffen Schleiermacher ArkivMusic ArkivMusic Amazon Amazon | Boris Berman ArkivMusic emusic Amazon | Markus Hinterhäuser ArkivMusic emusic Amazon

Reviews: "Listeners familiar with the prepared piano piece A Room (1943)...will be fascinated to compare it to the work's "unprepared" counterpart presented here." ClassicsToday | "compare Schleiermacher's murky, mysterious sounds in A Room, to Berman's simpler, funkier palette" ClassicsToday | Charlemagne Palestine's "insect-like intentness that suggests a radically stripped down version of Gyorgi Ligeti, perhaps Ligeti arranged by Reich via the early John Cage circa A Room" themilkfactory

Web: "Composed in 1943, originally conceived as the third part of She Is Asleep" Wikipedia | "an intriguing foretaste of Minimalism" Naxos | "Both Prelude to a Meditation (1944) and A Room (1943) are short "prepared" piano pieces. They involve the use of bolts, screws, dampers, tacks, and various objects placed as part of the piano strings and hammers to alter the sound and pitch of any given note." Present Music

updated 5/14/10

A Room (1943). John Cage /pulse and timbre/

John Cage via last.fm

As a small thought exercise, I decided to list my current favorite music:

• Music for 18 Musicians. Steve Reich
• Music in Twelve Parts. Philip Glass
• A Room. John Cage
• Scircura. Chas Smith
• Well, You Needn't. Thelonius Monk. Especially the version with John Coltrane.
• John McLaughlin. Miles Davis. The song from Bitches Brew, not the musician, although he is good too.
• The Wire. Alvin Lucier
• Violin Concerto No.1. Robert Kyr
• Radar Love. Golden Earring. 70s nostalgia.

The common pattern I think among at least the top of the above list is timbre and pulse.

That jives with the Philip Glass that I like which tends to have the more interesting textures, amidst all the repetition. And this may also explain why I'm not all that enamored by the music of Morton Feldman with its lack of forward movement.

A Room - Boris Berman, John Ca...

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