Music of Changes

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Music of Changes is a piece for solo piano by John Cage. Composed in 1951, it was the first major piece Cage composed using controlled chance[1] and the I Ching, which quickly became one of Cage's standard tools for composition.

History

The title of Music of Changes is derived from the title sometimes given to the I Ching, "Book of Changes". Cage was given a copy of the book in early 1951 by Christian Wolff, a fellow composer whose father published a translation of the book at around the same time. Cage, who already had some experience writing semi-aleatoric music using a Magic Square-kind of chart, immediately recognized the I Ching as a perfect tool and set to work on Music of Changes and a work for twelve radios, Imaginary Landscape No. 4.[2] The dates of composition are as follows: Book I completed on May 16, Book II on August 2, Book III on October 18 and Book IV on December 13.

The piece was dedicated to David Tudor, a pianist and friend with whom Cage had a lifelong association. Music of Changes was premièred in its complete form by Tudor on 1 January 1952, although the pianist had played Book I in public earlier, on 5 July 1951.

Analysis

An excerpt from Book IV of Music of Changes in Cage's calligraphic score. The number 104 indicates tempo from which acceleration begins. The vertical lines are not barlines but simply indicate the middle of the staff length. A cross indicates the moment when sound stops; diamond-shaped notes are depressed but not sounded.

Music of Changes consists of four books. Chance operations are applied to charts of sounds, rhythms, dynamics and even tempos. The rhythmic structure of the piece – 3-5-6 3/4-6 3/4-5-3 1/8 – derives from Cage's earlier work: a number of measures have a square root, so that "the large lengths have the same relation within the whole that the small lengths have within a unit of it"[3]. However, while in the earlier pieces this kind of proportion was expressed using time signatures, barlines, etc., in Music of Changes it is expressed in changing tempi. The tempi are indicated in the score using large numbers. There are no bars and the notation is proportional: two and a half centimeters (almost exactly one inch) equals a quarter note. Each sound begins at a precise position indicated by the stem of the note, not the notehead.[4] Various other alterations to standard notation are used to indicate certain performance techniques. Cage remarks in the foreword to the score that in many places "the notation is irrational; in such instances the performer is to employ his own discretion."[5] The dynamics of the piece ranges from ffff to pppp.

Editions

  • Edition Peters 6256-6259 (books 1-4). (c) 1961 Henmar Press.

See also

References

  • John Cage. Silence: Lectures and Writings, Wesleyan Paperback, 1973 (first edition 1961). ISBN 0-8195-6028-6
  • Richard Kostelanetz. Conversing with John Cage, Routledge, 2003. ISBN 0-415-93792-2
  • James Pritchett, Laura Kuhn. "John Cage", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, grovemusic.com (subscription access).

Notes

  1. ^ Pritchett, Grove
  2. ^ Cage quoted in Kostelanetz, 67.
  3. ^ Cage, 57
  4. ^ Cage's foreword to the Peters edition of "Music of Changes"
  5. ^ Cage's foreword to the Peters edition of "Music of Changes"
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