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John Cage - Music for Piano 1-84

£18.15

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Label: Neos Music

Cat No: NEOS10703

Barcode: 4260063610035

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 2

Genre: Instrumental

Release Date: 1st December 2007

Works

Cage, John

Music for Piano 1-85

Artists

Sabine Liebner (piano)

Works

Cage, John

Music for Piano 1-85

Artists

Sabine Liebner (piano)

About

When turning his gaze to unwritten, white paper – in 1952, the same year he composed 4’33 and thus discovered that there could be no silence that was not filled with sounds – John Cage discovered his most radical solution: “Suddenly I saw that the music, all the music, was already there.” He had discovered the basic idea for the multipart series Music for Piano.

Cage had discovered small irregularities, elevated points, or tiny spots on the surface structure of the paper, distributed completely irregularly. Within a predetermined interval of time he marked with ink as many of these irregularities as he could find. Thus he obtained an absolutely random constellation of a field of points. Then he placed a sheet of transparent music-paper over it to convert the dots into exact pitches by means of the key signature and ledger lines. Using chance procedures each of the notes determined in this way was assigned a dynamic value between pianissimo and fortissimo as well as, in some cases, a sharp or flat. Music for Piano 1 was produced in this way in 1952 and choreographed by Jo Anne Melcher as was Music for Piano 2 of the following year, for the dancer Louise Lippold.

Within the framework of Cage’s enormous œuvre, the eighty-four solo pieces of Music for Piano represent one of the key works from his middle period.

In Sabine Liebner we found a congenial interpreter for this kind of music. In recent years Sabine Liebner’s interests have focused on American composers of the twentieth century. Her repertoire of American music includes Henry Cowell, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, and Tom Johnson. She plays nearly all of the piano works of John Cage and Morton Feldman. In 1998 she received the Förderpreis für Musik der Stadt München, in 2005 a Stipendium für Musik der Stadt München; in 2007 she was named a recommended pianist by the Goethe-Institut.