The California pianist Julie Steinberg is an active proponent of new music whose performances of a diverse repertory that includes music by Olivier Messaien, Frederic Rzewski, Lou Harrison, and John Cage have received critical acclaim. Joined by violinist David Abel and percussionist William Winant, she is a member of the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio, a virtuoso chamber ensemble specializing in 20th-century music from the Americas and the Pacific Rim that has recordings on both CRI and New Albion. Steinberg frequently appears in duo recitals with violinist David Abel, and they have recorded two sonata programs on the Wilson Audio Label. As a soloist, she has appeared with the Oakland Symphony Sound Spectrum, the San Francisco Symphony Mostly Mozart Festival, and the Berkeley Symphony. She has performed in master classes with Jean-Pierre Rampal and Mstislav Rostropovich. Steinberg holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from Stanford University with a specialty in 20th-century music and is presently on the faculty of Mills College in Oakland, California.
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Julie Steinberg has recorded Sonatas and Interludes on the
Music and Arts label (CD-937).
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Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1946-48)
John Cage (1912-1992)
[Liner notes from the CD, by David Bernstein]
Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects, but as musical instruments.1
During a lecture entitled "The Future of Music: Credo" first presented to a Seattle Arts Society in 1937, John Cage explained that in the future the needless distinction between "noise" and so-called "musical sounds" will no longer exist. Cage's manifesto mapped out a project that would occupy him for his entire career. For just as his teacher Arnold Schoenberg had demonstrated that consonance and dissonance differed only in their degree of comprehensibility, Cage was to show that "musical sounds" were only part of a "total sound-space" encompassing all sound.
Cage first turned to percussion music as a means to explore this uncharted territory. In 1937, he organized a percussion ensemble which, along with his own music, specialized in percussion works by other composers including Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Edgard Varése, William Russell, and Amadeo Roldán. Cage's first percussion concert took place in Seattle in 1938 and between 1938 and 1942 he earned a reputation as a specialist in this new and exciting genre.
Having decided to change the sound of the piano in order to make a music suitable for Syvilla Fort's Bacchanale, I went to the kitchen, got a pie plate, brought it into the living room and placed it on the piano strings. I played a few keys. The piano sounds had been changed, but the pie plate bounced around due to the vibrations, and, after a while, some of the sounds that had been changed no longer were. I tried something smaller, nails between the strings. They slipped down between and lengthwise along the strings. It dawned on me that screws or bolts would stay in position. They did. And I was delighted with the sounds they produced.2
In the 1930s, modern dancers often preferred percussion as accompaniment for their dance classes and Cage's experience with percussion music led to positions as dance accompanist first at UCLA and later at the Cornish School and Mills College. In 1940, while Cage was working at the Cornish School, Syvilla Fort asked him to compose music for her new dance work entitled Bacchanale. The Cornish Theater, the space in which the performance was to take place, did not have ample room for Cage's percussion ensemble; the wings were too small and there was no pit. So Cage decided to write for the piano and began to consider composing a piece based on an "African" twelve-tone row, since an African accompaniment seemed appropriate for Fort's dance. But he quickly became dissatisfied with the limited range of sounds available on the piano. Cage was familiar with Henry Cowell's "string piano" pieces which employed new techniques such as reaching into the piano and plucking the strings and running fingers and fingernails along their length. He extended this idea by placing different materials such as bolts, screws, felt, and washers between the strings. The result made the piano sound as if it were a small percussion ensemble. After Bacchanale (1940), Cage wrote many works for the piano prepared in this manner and they are perhaps his most well-known compositions.
Most of Cage's music for the prepared piano was composed during the 1940s and many of these works were dance commissions. Cage used a wide variety of materials in his piano preparations including screws, bolts, washers, pennies, weather stripping, plastic, rubber, and pieces of wood. But the preparations in Cage's dance works are usually very simple. Both Root of an Unfocus (1944) and Totem Ancestor (1943), for example, utilize a very limited "palette" or what Cage called a "gamut" of sounds.
Structure in music is its divisibility into successive parts from phrases to long sections. Form is content, the continuity. Method is the means of controlling the continuity from note to note. The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.3
Between 1943 and 1948, Cage composed several solo concert works for the prepared piano, beginning with Perilous Night (1943-44) and culminating with Sonatas and Interludes (1946-48), perhaps the most masterful of Cage's early works. Unlike many of Cage's compositions for prepared piano written for the dance, Sonatas and Interludes is a large-scale concert work with an extensive preparation. It consists of four groups of four Sonatas; the first and second groups are each followed by an Interlude and the second and third groups are each preceded by an Interlude. Most of the Sonatas are in binary form (AABB) except for Sonatas IX-XI which are in ternary form (AABBCC). The first two Interludes are through-composed, while the third and fourth Interludes are in four parts (AABBCCDD).
For Cage, musical structure is the division of a work into successive parts on both a small (phrases) and a large scale (sections). In order to coordinate both levels of organization, Cage devised what he termed the "square root" system. On the larger level of structure or
"macrostructure," sections consisting of n measures are repeated n times. For example, a work that is a hundred measures long would consist of 10 sections each of which is 10 measures long or 10x10. On the smaller level of structure or "microstructure" each section is divided into phrases according to a fixed proportion. A 10 bar section, for example, may consist of four phrases which are 2, 2, 3, and 3, measures long. This proportion may also apply to the macrostructure, thus dividing the work into four larger sections which are 20, 20, 30, and 30 measures long.
The rhythmic structure in Sonatas and Interludes is derived according to Cage's square root system. The work's phrase structure on the microstructural level is more complex than in any of Cage's earlier works. For example, Sonata I is divided into 7 sections that are 7 measures long and further divided into units of 1 1/4, 3/4, 1 1/4, 3/4, 1 1/2, and 1 1/2 measures long.
Cage's use of asymmetric phrase structures and irregular rhythmic patterns in Sonatas and Interludes is only symptomatic of the work's complexity. In fact, the sophisticated rhythmic techniques used in Sonatas and Interludes are of historical interest since it was written at the same time that composers such as Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez were beginning to explore similarly elaborate structures based on rhythm. It is not surprising that Boulez was a proponent of Cage's early masterpiece and organized its European premiere in 1949.
I learned many essential things about the prepared piano, only in the course of the years. I did not know, at first, for instance, that very exact measurements must be made as to the position of the object between the strings and I did not know that, in order to repeat an obtained result, that a particular screw or bolt, for instance, originally used, must be saved. All I knew at the beginning was the pleasure I experienced in continual discovery.4
The expressive range of the gamut of sounds employed in Sonatas and Interludes is as impressive as its rhythmic complexity. As Boulez explained in a lecture preceding its European premiere,
One's first reaction on hearing John Cage's prepared piano might well be curiosity verging on amused skepticism. Some demented inventor can easily be pictured, a "piano tuner" doing his best to clothe the strings with metallicizing vegetation. More seriously, one thinks of subtle and ingenious soundsmith, drawing new possibilities from the percussive aspects of the piano. The reality has more to do with questioning acoustic ideas received in the course of the evolution of Western music, ideas on which the most radical and challenging works are still based. Instead of giving what might be called pure sounds - fundamentals and natural harmonics - John Cage's prepared piano supplies us with complexes of frequencies. Moreover, we can find a precedent for the use of complex sounds in the central African instruments called sanzas. Immediately, a primordial question arises: does the traditional education which we have received - or submitted to - deprive us of a more refined acoustic sense?5
Cage's preparation involves more than half of the notes available on the piano; it uses a wide variety of materials including bolts and screws of various sizes, plastic, and rubber. The positioning of these materials is extremely precise; the preparations are placed between the strings at points measured from the damper or the bridge. Some of the notes have two or three preparations at different points along their length and the sound of some of the preparations is altered when the performer applies the soft pedal. The variety of sounds resulting from the preparations is extraordinary; the listener encounters, as Cage explained, "an instrument having convincingly its own special characteristics, not even suggesting those of a piano."6 This seems true even when conventional piano sounds are mixed with "Cagean" ones; Sonatas and Interludes maps out a "total sound space" in which pianistic and exotic sounds co-exist. In this recording listeners can appreciate these nuances more than ever before thanks to the artistry of recording engineeer Maggi Payne whose work on the digital recording and editing of this release allows us to hear the minute sounds and long envelopes that would surely have been lost in earlier times.
The prepared piano also makes possible the use of microtones, that is, pitch differences less than our conventional half-tones. This provides an auditory pleasure which has long been known in jazz and folk and oriental music, but which had been largely excluded from our standardized serious music, with the exception of the modern uses of 1/4 tones, 1/8 tones, and even 43 tones to the octave, in the work of Alois Haba, Julian Carrillo, and Harry Partch.7
Cage often told the story that after two years of studies with Arnold Schoenberg it became obvious to both teacher and student that Cage had no feeling for harmony. But listening to Sonatas and Interludes certainly raises questions about the truth of this assertion. There is an extraordinary harmonic sense at work here. Cage's harmonic palette incorporates both microtonal as well as complex "noise" elements and the result is a harmonic language with unprecedented richness. There is often a subtle interplay between degrees of harmonic tension and relaxation and Cage often plays with our sense of tonal "closure." (It is not irrelevant here to point out that the composer once said that the cadences in Sonatas and Interludes would work if the piano was prepared correctly.)
The textures in Sonatas and Interludes are as varied as its harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral characteristics. At times the music features an ascetic sparseness, such as the single-line passages in Sonata IV and the elegant two-voice counterpoint in the pair of linked Sonatas (XIV and XV) named "Gemini" after a work by sculptor Richard Lippold. In contrast, other movements build massive blocks of sound, such as midway through the B section of Sonata XII where descending chords in the piano's extreme lower register combine with an eighth-note ostinato in the right hand.
Music is edifying, for from time to time it sets the soul in operation. The soul is the gatherer-together of the disparate elements (Meister Eckhart), and its work fills one with peace and love. 8
In 1944, Cage went through a period of emotional distress resulting from the end of his marriage, a re-orientation of his sexuality, and a realization that he was unable to communicate his emotional experiences through music. Four Walls, Root of an Unfocus, and The Perilous Night composed during that year are certainly responses to this personal crisis.
Beginning in 1945, Cage became increasingly interested in Eastern philosophy. Under the tutelage of an East Indian musician, Gita Sarabhai, Cage studied Indian philosophy and in particular, the writings of Ananda Coomaraswamy. He learned that music should have a spiritual and ethical effect; its purpose was to "sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influence." Cage explained that his Sonatas and Interludes sought to depict in music the eight permanent emotions, as described in Indian aesthetic theory. These emotional states are the odious, anger, mirth, fear, sorrow, the erotic, the heroic, and wonder. All of these eight emotions have a tendency toward tranquillity. It is reasonable to assert that each movement in Cage's Sonatas and Interludes is based on a single emotion, but the emotion expressed in each piece is ultimately a matter of subjective interpretation. It does seem certain, however, that the whole cycle leads to the tranquillity of the closing movements.
With Sonatas and Interludes Cage began to question the notion that music is a means by which a composer expresses his or her emotions. The creative act no longer entailed a definition of the artist's subjectivity; art now had an ethical and spiritual function. Cage's emphasis had begun to shift from the composer to the listener, a change that would later lead him to chance operations and an almost complete withdrawal of the composer's subjectivity from the creative process.
The most that can be accomplished by the musical ex-pression of feeling is to show how e-motional the composer was who had it. If anyone wants to get a feeling of how emotional a composer proved himself to be, he has to confuse himself to the same extent that the composer did and imagine that sounds are not sounds at all but are Beethoven and that men are not men but are sounds. Any child will tell us that this simply is not the case. A man is a man and a sound is a sound.9
Cage performed his Sonatas and Interludes in the spring of 1948 at Black Mountain College. In January 1949, piano virtuoso Maro Ajemian performed the New York premiere at Carnegie Recital Hall. The audience response was extremely positive and the performance was critically acclaimed in the New York Times. Ajemian's subsequent recording of the work has often been recognized as its definitive performance, especially since she enjoyed a close association with Cage (who helped with the piano's intricate preparation). But the performance on this recording features an artist who is one of a growing number of musicians intimately familiar with Cage's music and aesthetics. The task of preparing the piano (a nine-foot Baldwin concert grand) was approached with a discipline that would surely have pleased Cage. There is also a feeling for the work's large-scale form as well as an attention to rhythmic detail that makes this performance a remarkable modern reading of Cage's mid-century masterpiece.
David W. Bernstein
Mills College, Oakland, CA
- 1 John Cage, "Future of Music: Credo," Silence (Middletown Connecticut, 1961), 3.
- 2 Idem, "Forward to Richard Bunger's Well-Prepared Piano," reprinted in John Cage: Writer,
selected and introduced by Richard Kostelanetz (New York, 1993), 118.
- 3 John Cage, " Forerunners of Modern Music," Silence, 62.
- 4 John Cage, " A Composer's Confessions," reprinted in John Cage: Writer,
selected and introduced by Richard Kostelanetz (New York, 1993), 36-37.
- 5 Pierre Boulez, "Introduction to Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano by John Cage at Suzanne Tézenas's Salon," The Boulez - Cage Correspondence, edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, translated and edited, by Robert Samuels (New York, 1993), 27.
- 6 John Cage, Preface to Amores.
- 7 John Cage, " A Composer's Confessions," 36.
- 8 Idem, "Forerunners of Modern Music," 62.
- 9 John Cage, "Julliard Lecture," A Year from Monday (Middletown, Connecticut, 1967), 97.
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