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In the Name of the Holocaust (1942)
Like much of Cage's early dance music (this to accompany a piece by Merce Cunningham), In the Name of the Holocaust was written for what Cage would later refer to as a 'prepared piano': a piano with screws, bolts, or other materials placed between certain strings to create a percussive effect. The music features a number of new piano techniques, many of which Cage borrowed from his teacher Henry Cowell: notes held open for resonance, muted and plucked strings, and clusters played with the arm and flat of the hand. The piece's title comes from a pun on the Catholic liturgical phrase "In the Name of the Holy Ghost" found in James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake.
John Cage (1912-1992), whose career spanned over 50 years, is arguably the most influential American composer of the 20th century. His influence extended well beyond the musical community into the worlds of dance, theater, visual art, and philosophy.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Cage attended Pomona College for two years, and in 1931 began compositional studies with pianist Richard Buhlig. He travelled to New York City to study with Henry Cowell at the New School for Social Research and later with Adolph Weiss. Cage then began work with Arnold Schoenberg, whom he followed to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1934. Schoenberg was an important influence on Cage, whose early pieces attempt to extend his teacher's twelve-tone systems.
In 1938 Cage moved to Seattle, Washington to work as a dance composer and accompanist at the Cornish School of the Arts. There he met choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham, who would become a lifelong artistic colloborator. Cage's early innovations grew out of his work with dance: he focused on the use of time as the primary source of musical structure, created percussion works such as First Construction (in Metal) (1939) using all kinds of objects from tin cans and brake drums to Asian instruments, and worked with electronic devices including variable-speed turntables and frequency recordings as in Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939). The lack of percussion space for a particular dance performance led Cage to experiment with 'preparing' a piano, placing objects on the strings to create a variety of sounds and percussive effects.
Cage's percussion ensemble toured throughout the West Coast and collaborated with composer Lou Harrison's group in San Francisco. In 1941 Cage moved to Chicago, Illinois to teach at the Chicago School of Design; the following year he continued east to New York City, where his work with prepared piano and increasing interest in Indian music and philosophy resulted in the breakthrough Sonatas and Interludes (1946-1948) for prepared piano. For this work he received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Academy of Arts and Letters.
After a year travelling in Europe, Cage returned to New York in 1949 and met composer Morton Feldman, with whom he shared an intense exchange of ideas and music for many years. Cage, Feldman, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff later became known as the New York School of composers. During this creative period, silence began to play a significant role in Cage's music, an outgrowth of his growing interest in Zen Buddhism and Japanese culture. "Lecture on Nothing" (1950) was the first of many literary expressions of his developing musical philosophy, which Cage later described in an autobiographical statement:
"In the late forties I found out by experiment ... that silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around. I devoted my music to it. My work became an exploration of non-intention. To carry it out faithfully I have developed a complicated composing means using I Ching chance operations, making my responsibility that of asking questions instead of making choices."
Inspired by Feldman and the I Ching, an ancient Chinese coin-tossing oracle, Cage began to incorporate these 'chance operations' in his work, making room for "whatever sound comes along" (Cage). Notable compositions from this period include Music of Changes (1951) and the now-infamous silent work 4'33" (1952). Cage's use of chance grew to include what he called 'indeterminacy,' or ambiguous systems of notation which are realized differently with each performance. It is found in works such as the Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-1958) and Variations II (1961).
By the early 1960's Cage had achieved an international reputation, in part due to the publishing of his seminal Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961). As a result his commissions, performances, and speaking engagements increased considerably. Among his significant later compositions are the multimedia orchestral work Renga (1975-1976), the radio play Roaratorio: an Irish circus on Finnegans wake (1979), and the five Europeras (1987-1991). Cage also became more active in other media including poetry, painting, printmaking, and film. The final phase of his musical output began with the composition Two (1987), in which fragments of music are strung together through overlapping periods of time, later referred to as 'number' or 'time bracket' pieces. Cage composed 43 such works in the last five years of his life.
related websites
http://www.johncage.info
Long associated with the music of John Cage, pianist Joshua Pierce made a series of recordings of Cage's keyboard music for the German label Wergo in 1989. Pierce studied at the Juilliard School, the Manhattan School of Music, and Columbia University; his principal teachers were Dorothy Taubman, Artur Balsam, Victor Babin, and Robert Goldsand. He has toured widely as a soloist, performing with orchestras worldwide including the Royal Philharmonic, Moscow State Philharmonic, Orchestra of Slovenian Radio/Television, Slovak Philharmonic, Mexico City Philharmonic and many others. He has also performed extensively for public radio and television in Europe and the United States. A former artistic advisor to the Microtonal Music Ensemble and Festival in York, Pierce's recordings can be found on many major labels as well as Albany, Centaur, Phoenix, Premiere, Pro Arte, and Varèse Sarabande.
related websites
http://www.jamesarts.com/pierce/bio.html
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