The compositional style of these three pieces is the result of work with the improvisation group F& W Hat.This was formed in 1972 at the University of York by Jan Steele, pianist Dave Jones and flutist Mike Dean. The group was directed towards playing a very quiet, repetitive form of improvised rock-based music, a principle which has to some extent survived in these compositions.


All Day

All day I hear the noise of waters
Making moan
Sad as the seabird is when going
Forth alone
He hears the winds cry to the waters’
Monotone.

The grey winds, the cold winds are blowing
Where I go.
I hear the noise of many waters
Far below.
All day, all night, I hear them flowing
To and fro.

(From ‘‘Chamber Music’’ by James Joyce, 1907 No. XXXV)


"All Day" was written for the York University Pop Music Project of 1972. It arose from a long study of Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande and the method of word setting is a direct result of this. The words are a lyric by James Joyce from Chamber Music 1907. The harmonic and general style are again derived from the playing of F & W Hat. In structure it is a 12-bar blues with a short interlude over which the guitar-solo takes place.

Distant Saxophones
‘‘Distant Saxophones’’ was composed primarily as a didactic piece, an attempt to describe the kind of improvised music envisaged. The piece is particularly addressed to Dominic Muldowney, who plays the viola solo. It was first performed in 1972 by the then-reformed F & W Hat and consists of material from a rejected 1969 composition and new material in imitation of the style of improvising which the group had by then evolved, especially the harmonic style of Dave Jones.

Rhapsody Spaniel
‘‘Rhapsody Spaniel’’ also began life as a composition for F & W Hat, but by that time the group had moved away from the possibility of incorporating composed material. Rhapsody Spaniel was eventually completed as a piece for 2 players at one piano in April 1975.

Like Beethoven’s, Cage’s work to date can be conveniently divided into three periods. He is best known for the aesthetic and (to a lesser extent) the music of his middle period: chance procedures, indeterminacy; the supposed liberation of sound, the composer, the performer and the listener from traditional stereotypes and limitations; the acceptance of noise and environmental (non-intentional) sounds into music; the redefinition of musical space and time; the abandonment of the fixed reproducible musical object in favour of quasi-natural processes, etc. This period runs from around 1950, when Cage first began using chance operations, through to 1969 when he made his note-for-note recomposition of the melodic line of Satie’s ‘‘Socrate’’ in the form of ‘‘Cheap Imitation’’.This piece links third and first periods both technically – the return to fully-notated, modal, monodic time-objects – but also circumstantially.
Cage gave the first performances of ‘‘Experiences No. 1’’and ‘‘In a Landscape’’ in a concert of his own work during his summer course at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, in August 1948. His other 25 concerts were devoted to the performance of all the works of Satie he could lay his hands on. Cage delivered a lecture to introduce (or justify) the Satie series, and in it one finds the fullest explanation of the methods of structuring that Cage evolved in his earlier music.
He pointed out that ‘In the field of structure, the field of the definition of parts and their relation to a whole, there has been only one new idea since Beethoven. With Beethoven the parts of a composition were defined by means of harmony. With Satie and Webern they are defined by means of time lengths.
. . . Before Beethoven wrote a composition, he planned its movement from one key to another – that is, he planned its harmonic structure. Before Satie wrote a piece, he planned the lengths of its phrases’.
This in fact was Cage’s method in his early period. And, like ‘‘Idyllic Song’’ of 1945 – Cage’s first use of ‘‘Socrate’’, four of the five pieces on this record were based on dance structures, which provided him with the basis ‘for a study of numbers with which I find it congenial to begin a musical composition’. ‘‘Experiences Nos 1 and 2’’ (1945-48) were written in the rhythmic structure of a dance by Merce Cunningham; ‘‘Forever and Sunsmell’’ (1942) ‘follows the phraseology’ of the dance of the same name by Jean Erdman for which it was composed (and first performed at the Studio Theatre, New York City, on 21 October 1942 by Vivian Bower, mezzo, and John and Xenia Cage, percussionists).
‘‘In a Landscape’’, the most extended of these five pieces, uses the most common method of rhythmic structuring that Cage developed during the 30s and 40s. It is based on the square root principle whereby the larger parts have the same proportion to the whole as the smaller parts have to the larger. For this piece Cage uses a rhythmic structure of 15 x 15 (5.7.3).Thus the piece has 15 15-bar sections which are grouped in three batches of 5, 7 and 3 sections (though this division may not be apparent to the listener, since the sections are made to overlap by means of anacrusis, and since the new slow octave theme in the high register introduced about a third of the way through the piece is the last section of the 5 group rather than the first of the 7 as one might expect). Similarly on the small scale each 15-bar section is built from three phrases, of 5, 7 and 3 bars in length.
The rhythmic structure principle represents Cage’s major achievement in his earlier music. This principle was of course, extended and modified in his chance and indeterminate music: in 1958 Cage wrote that ‘In contrast to a structure based on the frequency aspect of sound, tonality, that is, this rhythmic structure was as hospitable to non-musical sounds, noises, as it was to those of the conventional scales and instruments. For nothing about the structure was determined by the materials which were to occur in it; it was conceived, in fact, so that it could be as well expressed by the absence of those materials as by their presence.’
Melodically all five pieces use limited, fixed gamuts of notes. ‘‘Experiences No 1’’ for two pianos employs an A minor-ish pentatonic scale, A C DEG as does ‘‘Experiences No 2’’, whose melodic line closely resembles that of‘‘Experiences No1’’.
‘‘The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs’’ for voice and piano was written in 1942, commissioned by the mezzo Janet Fairbank. Cage has. said that no rhythmic structure or method was consciously employed in this composition. All the elements of the melodic line and its percussive accompaniment resulted from impressions received from the text. The piano is treated as a non-pitched percussion instrument not by inserting objects between its strings (as with the prepared piano) but by using its wooden surfaces. The pianist is asked to close a grand piano completely (strings and keyboard) and the notation indicates whether the under part of the piano structure, the front or back and upper part of the keyboard-lid or the top of the piano is to be struck, with the fingers or knuckles of the right or left hand. The voice production is without vibrato, as in folk-singing, and the melodic material consists simply of permutations of the notes A B and E, though in order to employ a low and comfortable range, the singer is permitted to make any transposition of the written notes.
‘‘Forever and Sunsmell’’, song with percussion duet was also written in 1942, and is a setting of a text taken from ee cummings.The percussion instruments used are two large tom toms (played first with timpani sticks, later with fingers) and a large suspended chinese cymbal of at least 24 inches in diameter. The song is in two parts (the first dramatic, the second lyrical, according to Cage) connected by an unaccompanied hummed interlude. The first section itself is in two parts, the first (unaccompanied) using only the notes G and D and a solitary E, the second uses only D and E (later chromatically inflected), ending on an ‘indefinite pitch and unmusical timbre’. The hummed episode is a pentatonic D EGA B, which (minus the E) is the scale employed for the (accompanied) first part of the second section.The ending of the piece parallels the opening, adding two extra notes, A and E.
‘‘In a Landscape’’ for piano (or harp) solo is the most involved melodically as it is structurally. Cage asks for both pedals to be kept down throughout and despite the presence of almost continuous ‘unaccompaniment’ figuration, this piece, too, is essentially monodic. Its quite elaborate fixed gamut of notes is a pentatonic scale, DFGAC, with two added semitones – a B flat (used consistently below middle C) and a B natural (used above middle C).

Michael Nyman


Experiences No. 2
The text is from III, one of Sonnets-Unrealities of Tulips and Chimneys by ee cummings. The two last lines have been omitted. Other lines and a word have been repeated or used in an order other than that of the original.The humming passages (not part of the poem) are interpolations. The original poem is as follows:

it is at moments after i have dreamed
of the rare entertainment of your eyes
when (being fool to fancy) i have deemed

with your peculiar mouth my heart made wise;
at moments when the glassy darkness holds

the genuine apparition of your smile
(it was through tears always) and silences moulds
such strangeness as was mine a little while;

moments when my once more illustrious arms
are filled with fascination, when my breast
wears the intolerant brightness of your charms:

one pierced moment whiter than the rest

– turning from the tremendous lie of sleep
i watch the roses of the day grow deep.


The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs
(the words of this song are adapted from page 556 of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake)

night by silent sailing night isobel wildwood’s eyes and primarose hair, quietly, all the woods so wild, in mauves of moss and daphnedews, how all so still she lay, neath of the whitethorn, child of tree, like some lost happy leaf, like blowing flower stilled, as fain would she anon for soon again 'twill be, win me, woo me, wed me, ah! weary me! deeply, now evencalm lay sleeping; night; Isobel, sister Isobel, Saintette Isobel, Madame Is a Veuve La Belle.

Forever and Sunsmell
The title and text of ‘Forever and Sunsmell’ are from 26, one of 50 poems (1940) by e e cummings. Some lines and words have been omitted, others have been repeated or used in an order other than the original.The humming and vocalise (not part of the poem) are an interpolation.The original poem is as follows:

wherelings whenlings
(daughters of if but offspring of hope fear
sons of unless and children of almost)
never shall guess the dimension of

him whose
each
foot likes the
here of this earth

whose both
eyes
love
this now of the sky

– endlings of isn’t
shall never
begin
to begin to

imagine how (only are shall be were
dawn dark rain snow rain
-bow & a

moon
’s whis-
per
in sunset

or thrushes toward dusk among whippoorwills or
tree field rock hollyhock forest brook chickadee
mountain. Mountain)
why coloured worlds of because do

not stand against yes which is built by
forever & sunsmell
(sometimes a wonder
of wild roses

sometimes)
with north
over
the barn