Search - John [1] Cage, Tamas Veto, Ars Nova Ensemble :: Cage: The Choral Works I / Ars Nova, Veto

Spanning five decades, these vocal works by the eminent John Cage are widely variable in sound dynamics, energy level, and textual dynamics--even more so than Paul Hillier's spectacular Litany for the Whale. The earliest work, Living Room Music, seems an early (composed in 1940) comment on the "cult of domesticity" that gathered steam in the U.S. during the 1950s. The piece transforms the home into a concatenation of musical instruments, none of them specified. Living Room's "percussion" provides a thumping, irregular nonpitched framework for voices moving rhythmically through spoken parts before the "Melody," played on a vaguely electronic keyboard. More tried-and-true vocal methods emerge too: especially on ear for EAR, which flowers from the higher registers downward, settling into a chant-like drone and then bursting into the tenor range and upward in singly syllabic lines. Four, in two versions, serves the same seamless end, ranging upward with piercing sheerness. Magnificence ensues with Five and the lengthy Hymns and Variations, which give off an endless ring with their long-toned takes on polyphony and subtle oscillations. The latter piece is Cage's 1979 riff on William Billings's 18th-century psalmody compendium and sounds delightfully assertive in rounding tones taken by each Ars Nova vocalist in turn, stretching density to its thinnest points without ever sounding thin. --Andrew Bartlett