Steffen Schleiermacher’s complete edition of the piano compositions
of John Cage has been examined on these pages, and generally very
well received. This set launched his career as a recording artist,
and MDG sees this new release as a complement to his discography
with what amounts to Cage’s complete work for piano and trombone.
Teamed with American
trombonist Mike Svoboda, both musicians have written their
own response to Cage and the works on this disc. It turns
out that only Two5 is explicitly written for trombone,
Variations I being for “any number of players and any
sound producing means”, and Music for Two is only part
of a work which can be performed with larger forces.
As with many of
Cage’s late ‘number’ works, Two5 is a vast field of
silences, sparse intervals, lonely and isolated notes. There
is precision in the timings for each section – something which
is reflected in the almost identical duration of the only
other recorded version of this piece I could find, that on
James Fulkerson’s album for the Etcetera label. There are
also precise instructions for a variety of microintervals,
but the ultimate effect is, and should be “absent minded,
without regularity or presence.” The meditative 40 minute
span contains elements of disorientation, such as the note
being ‘bent’ subtly by the trombonist, which can sound strange
enough in isolation, but against the piano can have a dramatic
‘out of tune’ effect. The span of tones used by the piano
is restricted to a little over two octaves in the middle register.
This might seem strange, but if you relate this to the range
of an average human voice then it does make the piano part
something less alien in terms of character. If you know Cage’s
late ‘number’ pieces then you will have some frame of reference
for appreciating this music as a slowly rotating kaleidoscope
in which the notes gently drop at seemingly random moments
against a black velvet background of silence.
The opening foghorn
blast of the compact Variations I comes as a shock
after Two5. This is one of those scores where the music
is notated in terms of shapes, lines and dots, and in which
the interpretation should change with each performance – based
of course on a great deal of meticulous preparation. This
duo’s approach is replete with avant-garde effects – vocal
and Aeolian sounds through the trombone, with mutes also playing
an important role in terms of sonority and colour. The piano
strings are struck in a variety of ways, those with the keys
of the piano being in a minority. In all, this sounds like
a potent improvisation, which I can imagine was the effect
Cage would have wanted though my confidence in this was entirely
destroyed when we students were told by the composer that
we were “doing it all wrong” with a similar score way back
in the early 1980s. Even without Cage himself to cast his
magic I very much have the sense of this being a strong performance,
but it would be intriguing to have more than one performance,
so that a more 3D sense of the parameters and variations in
this kind of piece might be communicated.
The same goes
for Music for Two, which is however notated in a more
traditional way. This comes across in how the music is played
– one senses the lines and phrases coming from a score rather
than from a semi-spontaneous discovery which just happens
to have been recorded. This is not to say that the music lacks
spark and energy, and the startling contrasts and interactions
between the instruments make for stimulating listening. There
are some subtle effects, such as what sounds like a small
handheld electric fan being allowed to create sustained notes
on the piano strings. Michael Svoboda has a wealth of modern
music credits, including being the trombone sound for Frank
Zappa’s ‘Yellow Shark’ project with Ensemble Modern and a
collaboration with Karlheinz Stockhausen, performing as soloist
in part of the opera cycle LICHT. This security and depth
of technical inventiveness and expertise comes across throughout
this disc, and I especially love his intense vibrato-laden
passion – only occasionally allowed to let rip, but nonetheless
a fulsome experience each time. This piece gives the overall
impression of having some kind of extreme serialist atonality
as part of its structural basis, but Cage’s exploratory spirit
is always ever-present, and elements of surprise and surrealist
charm are never far away.
Two5 appears
as recorded by James Fulkerson for the Etcetera label, coupled
with Ryoanji and a version of Solo for sliding trombone,
but a brief online search shows that few of the works on this
disc have been readily available until now. The recording has
all of the immediacy and clarity one would expect from MDG, and
the texture and shapes in Cage’s music leap out from you speakers
in full Technicolor. This is pretty much a disc for modern music
aficionados, but those who appreciate Christian Lindberg’s pioneering
trombone work via the BIS label can extend their depth of experience
with this disc, both in terms of performance and programme.
Dominy Clements
Mike Svoboda (trombone)
