While we are now fairly used to the idea of the chance operations
in his music,
it all had to start somewhere for John Cage, and
Sixteen Dances is seen
as a turning point in his career. This was the last work Cage composed before
he committed himself entirely to the use of chance operations. It also represents
an intermediate step on the way towards Cage’s deployment of techniques
that work with predefined collections of sounds.
Like many of his other pieces,
Sixteen Dances was created alongside Cage’s
closest artistic collaborator, Merce Cunningham. The choreography was concerned
with the nine emotions of the Hindu classical aesthetic, using titles such as “Anger”, “Sorrow”, “Fear” and “Tranquillity”.
This commission was closely attuned to Cage’s own study of Indian philosophy,
and acted as a stimulus to the changes in his compositional approach in
this period.
Sixteen Dances is sparingly scored for flute, trumpet, four
percussionists, piano, violin, and cello. It has nine movements and seven related
interludes, all of which are developed by chance methodology. The individual
sequences, and durations for each were discovered by a combination of using the
I
Ching and tossing coins.
There are plenty more fascinating ideas and concepts which create their own aura
around this piece and Cage’s work in general, but an impression of what
you might expect to hear from this disc is of more interest in a review of this
nature. Having heard the piece live many years ago, I do have some kind of reference,
and consider this performance to be very fine indeed. The instrumentation promises
and delivers a kind of restrained, thoughtful drama, in which the potential for
peaks of high-pressure percussion is always present and does indeed appear to
great effect, but always in proportion and with a sense of refined musical scale.
There is a feel of process in the music, but this forms a kind of background
or framework rather than anything exposed and skeletal. The reason for this is
that the musical ideas are so richly varied that the ear is kept alert and guessing,
as well as being constantly provided with handy little repetitions and references.
The clarity of the instrumentation and definition between the instruments means
that there is a sonic counterpoint as well as a purely musical interplay. The
overall effect is of superbly crafted and cleverly formulated chamber music,
which also happens to have a high ‘entertainment’ factor.
The music is both atonal, and teasingly full of moments in which tonality peeks
over the parapet: little flute melodies, chords in the piano, moments of unity
between instruments and recurring ‘hooks’ are all deliberately built
in to generate micro-contrasts. Confluence and diffusion exist side by side,
percussion is both rhythm and colour; instruments are both mechanical and melodic.
The titles previously mentioned give some indication as to musical content, but
the emotions described are alluded to rather than expressed explicitly - allowing
space for the dancers to add their own elements to each mood.
No.1 [Anger] opens
the work, and while creating a brief and intense statement also sets out the ‘zen’ feel
which runs through the works as a whole - it’s not “Anger” as
a statement, more as a channel through which we witness abstract ideas of “Anger” flowing
before us, like a bowl of food at an automated sushi bar. Webernesque floating
notes and connections are a characteristic of the subsequent
No.2 [Interlude],
melodic shapes and gestures forming horizontally and shared over the diverse
timbres of the instruments. Much as “Anger” isn’t played for
shouting and stamping,
No.3 [Humor] isn’t played for laughs, though “The
Heroic” does allow symbolically defiant open fifth intervals to appear
from the cello and piano. Swinging rhythms in
No.8 [Interlude] form a
central axis around which the other movements can orbit. Leading notes in the
recurring trumpet figure in
No.10 [Interlude] give a momentary Miles Davis
jazz feel. The general sense is of a slowly turning circle, of movements which
evolve, but have an inner sense of return, and which present impressions of symmetry
and permanence while at the same time sounding free and ethereal.
No.12 [Interlude] has
a marvellous feel of an Irish folk gigue in its dotted rhythms and restricted
melodic line. Most of the dances are short, the more extended five-minute
No.14
[Interlude] allowing the sense of process to develop its own clarity through
the multiple repetitions of each instrument’s material. This is followed
by
No.15 [The Erotic], which has some softly seductive nuances amongst
the more angular lines. The work finishes with
No.16 [Tranquillity], which
puts the piece to bed on a rich palette of deep gongs.
This piece is full of magical moments, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project
(BMOP) plays with superb control and sensitivity. The label BMOP/sound, launched
by the orchestra and devoted exclusively to new music recordings, has created
a stunning sound picture, with convincingly deep lows from the bass drum and
a realistic perspective from the ensemble as a whole. The instruments are not
recorded too closely, and, being set in a pleasant resonance, the recording is
inviting and non-fatiguing. Not quite as shocking as it would have sounded in
1951, this music still sounds avant-garde and uncompromisingly modern nearly
60 years on. Like Cage’s abstract watercolour on the cover of this release,
it is however a landscape on which the imagination has no problem drawing its
own rich range of interpretations. This is not music which stands alone on some
kind of island. As mentioned, one can trace the line back through Webern to the
strictness of J.S. Bach’s baroque, and forward, informing the repetitions
and cycles of something like Karel Goeyvaerts’
Litanies of the early
1980s. Cage himself moved more towards experimenting with sound for sound’s
sake, but the techniques which appear in his later number works can also be traced
back to
Sixteen Dances. This won’t be everyone’s cup of tea,
but for those prepared to sample and rejoice in exotic blends from India and
China rather than jut their usual mug of builders’ there is a great deal
to be discovered and enjoyed here. Don’t be put off by the relatively short
playing time either: this is a substantial work which deserves to stand on its
own. If you are like me, you’ll want to go back immediately and cover some
of this fascinatingly fertile ground again having heard it once, but you won’t
have the feeling that you have been short-changed.
Sixteen Dances is a
central work of our 20
th century Western musical heritage, and having
it in such a fine SACD recording as this is a genuine delight.
Dominy Clements
Boston Modern Orchestra Project/Gil Rose 
[42:12] 
