JOHN CAGE SIXTEEN DANCES LP PAUL ZUKOFSKY-AVANT-GARDE-ABSTRACT-MORTON FELDMAN

$

50

JOHN CAGE

 SIXTEEN DANCES LP 

CP2 Musical Observations 

Very rare original from the 80's, one of the masterworks of John Cage from his early days.

Some info on the release:  Rare original issue, released in Usa sometime in the mid 80's on the great Musical Observations label (Joel Chadabe, Morton Feldman, Giacinto Scelsi, Iannis Xenakis, Philip Glass, Jo Kondo, Aki Takahashi, etc.).

In the early 1950's John Cage began to turn his attention toward a new compositional domain. Previously, writing music for percussion and for prepared piano, Cage had concentrated on devising an aesthetic which would accommodate noises and silences as well as pitches. He had divided composition into four components: "structure," which concerned "the division of a whole into parts"; "materials," which were "the sounds and silences" of a composition; "method," which regulated the note-by-note choice of sounds; and "form," which reflected the underlying conception of a work, its overall morphology. 

At first Cage was much preoccupied with "structure" and "materials." He used a "square-root" principle to regulate "structure": a piece was divided into a number of units which were grouped into sections, and then each unit was divided into the same number of subunits grouped the same way. The "materials" of a piece were similarly limited-to a collection of percussion instruments, for example, or a group of preselected piano preparations. But although "materials" and "structure" were rather tightly controlled, "method" and "form" were essentially intuitive; they were guided not by a discipline but by Cage's personality. 

At the same time Cage was composing for dance, and when he and Merce Cunningham began collaborating regularly in the mid-1940's, they agreed to structure the dance and music together, in advance. Cunningham later recalled that "this use of a time structure allowed us to work separately, Cage not having to be with the dance except at structural points, and I was free to make the phrases and movements within the phrases vary their speeds and accents without reference to a musical beat, again only using the structural points as identification between us."  The 16 Dances, first performed on 21 January 1951, were the most ambitious choreographic work to use this structural technique. In scope and content they recalled Cage's musical Sonatas and Interludes (1946-1948): but the 16 Dances also anticipated techniques to come, as Cunningham has explained:
"The 16 Dances . . . was a long piece intended to fill an evening. It was also the first time the use of chance operations entered into the compositional method. The choreography was concerned with expressive behavior, in this case the nine permanent emotions of Indian classical aesthetics, four light and four dark with tranquility the ninth and pervading one. The structure for the piece was to have each of the dances involved with a specific emotion followed by an interlude. Although the order was to alternate light and dark, it didn't seem to matter whether Sorrow or Fear came first, so I tossed a coin. And also in the interlude after Fear, number XIV, I used charts of separated movements for material for each of the four dancers, and let chance operations decide the continuity."

Cunningham's choices yielded the following form for the Dances: Except for the penultimate interlude (no. XII), which is somewhat eccentric, the structure of each movement is straightforward: the first contains 7 sections of 7 measures each; the third, 9 of 9; and so forth. These sections, however, can be clearly discerned only in movements IV, VIII, XII, and XVI. In these, as in Cage's earlier compositions, the "method" was largely intuitive and expressive, with motivic repetition and variation used to mark structural units.  In the other movements, however, Cage used a different "method," which in its effects anticipated chance techniques. Before beginning, Cage chose a gamut of 64 sounds and short gestures, which he arranged in an 8x8 chart, with each square containing a single event. To increase diversity, Cage altered his "materials" as he worked; after each pair of dances he replaced eight elements on his chart with new ones.  These gamuts served somewhat like a prepared piano; but instead of composing with them intuitively, Cage used systematic moves on the chart akin to the moves of pieces on a chessboard. Thus the overall sequence would be unpredictable, although events located near each other on the chart would tend to occur together, producing some recurring patterns. And because the "method" would be applied consistently throughout each movement, the sections would no longer be differentiated; the movements composed this way would be heard as a single continuity.  However, the Dances contained two sorts of choreography; and although Cage's new "method" suited the abstract interludes, the expressionistic solos required something different. For these Cage limited his "material" to the sounds which he judged best suited the subject; in addition, he altered density, dynamics, and other details as needed. Thus movement III, for example, expresses "humor" by means of extreme dynamic and timbral contrasts; while movement IX, the "odious," is pervaded by finicky ostinati.

John Milton Cage Jr. was a pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde and, in the opinion of many, the most influential American composer of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for the most part of the latter's life. Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4?33?, the three movements of which are performed without a single note being played. A performance of 4?33? can be perceived as including the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, rather than merely as four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence and has become one of the most controversial compositions of the century. Another famous creation of Cage's is the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by placing various objects in the strings), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces, the most well-known of which is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).

His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg(1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various Eastern cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text on chance events, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living". Cage collaborated with David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg, and Charles Olson at Black Mountain College where a performance took place amongst the audience. "Happenings", as set forth by Cage, are theatrical events that abandoned the traditional concept of stage-audience and occur without a sense of definite duration; instead, they are left to chance. They have a minimal script, with no plot. In fact, a " Happening" is so-named because it occurs in the present, attempting to arrest the concept of passing time. Cage believed that theater was the closest route to integrating art and (real) life. The term "Happenings" was coined by Allan Kaprow, one of his students, who was to define it as a genre in the late fifties. In following these developments Cage was strongly influenced byAntonin Artaud’s seminal treatiseThe Theatre and Its Double, and the “Happenings” of this period can be viewed a forerunner to the ensuing Fluxus movement. In October of 1960, Mary Baumeister's Cologne studio hosted a joint concert by Cage and the video artist Nam June Paik, who in the course of his 'Etude for Piano' cut off Cage's tie and then washed his co-performer’s hair with shampoo.

Here you can listen to "Sixteen Dances - XII":

John Cage: Sixteen Dances - XII - YouTube

Video will open in a new window

Condition: Vinyl lies in mint- condition, looks and plays perfectly except from a tiny spot at the beggining of side b: that affects reproduction a little bit, while cover lies in very good++ condition, still in shrink but with splits on top and bottom (see picture).

Tracklist

Credits

• Cello – Peter Schenkman
• Conductor – Paul Zukofsky
• Flute – Robert Aitken
• Percussion – Robert Becker, John Wyre, Robin Engelman, Russell Hartenberger
• Piano – Marc Widner
• Producer – David Jaeger
• Trumpet – James Spragg
• Violin – Otto Armin

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