Search - Cage, Kubera :: Music of Changes

"Like the Pierre Boulez Sonata, Music of Changes is a manifesto. It marks Cage's first comprehensive "exploration of non-intention" through the systematic use of chance operations to create a complete, major work. Begun in May 1951 and completed on 13 December of that year, Music of Changes was named in honor of the I Ching, or Book of Changes, the ancient Chinese book of oracles that had become Cage's means of synthesizing chance with rigorous discipline. Cage's notation heralded a new concept of musical time, placing the performer in a new relation to the score, one in which orientation is to the occurrence of events rather than to the relations between them, which is to say to action rather than to memory. Performances of Music of Changes have been rare since David Tudor ceased playing the work in the late 1950s; Herbert Henck and, more recently, Joseph Kubera are among the few pianists to have assayed the obstacles posed by its innovations. For all its prominence in the history of postwar music, Music of Changes has remained more discussed than heard, more treatise than artwork." -- John Holzaepfel