John Cage - Quartets I-VIII / Music for 17 (1976 - 1992)

1. "Quartets I-VIII" (1976) for 24 instruments 37'18''

2. "Music for Seventeen" (1984-87) 30'05''

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about "Quartets I-VIII"

"Quartets I-VIII" is among Cage's most beautiful works. While there are no restrictions in the score for the number of performers, no more than four can be playing at any one time. None of them are in conscious harmony with one another. The sources of his material are eight early American hymns, all of them known as "shape note hymns." Shape note singing is notated by large drawings on paper for those who didn't read music so they could find the pitch. Harmony was not paid strict attention to; emotions, rather, were to inspire singers and listeners. Cage's lifelong disrespect for musical harmony is held in abeyance here, not because of the hymns -- which have been deconstructed and reconstructed using the I Ching for guidance -- themselves, but because in such a system, over such a large number of pitches and overtones, harmony is bound to occur, perhaps not in specific places, but the chances of it not happening are rare. In the recording, with so much left to the individual, it seems to occur more often that it does not, coming as it does from terribly fragmented material. The result is a shimmering, spare piece of emotional music that reflects the harmony of nature -- human nature"

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about "Music for Seventeen":

"In one of the interviews in Joan Retallack's "Musicage. Cage muses on Words Music Art" John Cage explains that he started writing this composition for the Ensemble 13. Being mistaken about the number of players and the ensemble disliking the microtonal writing, he stopped working on it and composed Thirteen instead. Since no manuscripts of Seventeen exist in the New York Public Library, Cage probably refers to Sixteen instead."

This recording was realized by San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Stephen L.Mosko, Music Director. Joan LaBarbara, Soprano.

Recorded digitally at Skywalker Sound, Marin County, California, USA (no dates mentioned). CD released in 1993 © Newport Classics
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Morton Feldman - Three Voices for Joan La Barbara (1989)

"Three Voices, composed for Joan La Barbara and completed in 1982, uses delicate repeating patterns of precise pitches and rhythms and is indicated to be sung very softly. It is a setting of fragments from the poem Wind, by Frank O'Hara (dedicated to Feldman). The composition is sung in vocalise until just before the midpoint of the piece when the text appears. It was first performed in March 1983 at the California Institute of the Arts at Valencia" (CD Notes)

"Here is one of the great contemporary masterpieces for voice. Three Voices was composed for Joan La Barbara, a singer and performer of avant-garde music in the tradition of Cathy Berberian or Jan DeGaetani. In live performance, the singer stands next to two loudspeakers that play two prerecorded tapes of her voice, to which she synchronizes herself. At the center of the work is a setting of the poem Wind by Frank O'Hara. The various vocal patterns on either side of the poem were inspired, as in all Feldman's late music, by the patterns on Oriental carpets, and you actually can hear the slow modification of shape and form as the music proceeds. It's a remarkable work, and La Barbara's performance is definitive". David Hurwitz

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