CD 3 in the Dabringhaus & Grimm Cage Piano Edition sports one of the most famous and also important of John Cage’s many works, Music of Changes, composed with David Tudor in mind back in 1951.

The booklet contains a learned and in depth essay on Cage and Music of Changes by Reinhard Oehlschlägel.

During Cage’s years in Seattle and Chicago he was gradually acquainted with Eastern – Asian – thinking. This happened, for example, when he collaborated with Lou Harrison. Reinhard Oehlschlägel goes on in his essay to John Cage’s early New York years, when he studied Asian musics with Henry Cowell at the New School of Social Research.
Christian Wolff directed Cage right into new worlds of composition by introducing him to the I Ching, the 64-choice Chinese chance manual.

Subsequently, Music of Changes became the first work that Cage composed with the utilization of chance operations through I Ching. Anybody aware of what was to come in Cage’s art and others art understands the significance of that.
It was also the very first composition that Cage wrote for David Tudor; a mighty challenge for the pianist!

From Reinhard Oehlschlägel’s detailed essay on the piece I draw the following information:
There are 1 to 8 layers in Music of Changes. The layers are dispersed across the two systems in five-line notation. Every sound event is characterized by charts of pitches, intervals, sound aggregates, duration and volume, which are determined by the 64 hexagrams of I Ching; the Book of Changes, which indeed naturally supplied the title for this first I Ching work by Cage. The difference from comparable serial compositions is that the details of the composition are not derived from pitch, duration, volume and tempo rows, but instead through working chance operations on pitch, duration, volume and tempo charts.

It wouldn’t be like Steffen Schleiermacher not to write a text himself to be included in the booklet, and there is one in this issue too, which he calls Just Don’t Loose Nerve! – Thoughts on the Realization of Cage’s Music of Changes.
Schleiermacher immediately sets out to correct those who misinterpret the intent of Cage’s utilization of chance operations to mean that anything is permissible. On the contrary, the score for Music of Changes is meticulously indicated down to the smallest fraction. (There have been discussions at the Silence list on these matters from time to time) He further stresses that chance only had its omnipotent power in the act of composing the work. In the act of playing the music there is no room for chance whatsoever; it’s a detailed score to follow, and that’s it.
Like Schleiermacher put it: “Cage employed the I Ching as a little chance computer.”
Cage simply used the I Ching as a tool, not because of Eastern philosophical, religious or magic implications, but simply as the tool this ingenious American young man needed! This is liberating to ponder. He was a craftsman in need of good tool. I Ching was the tool. It could’ve been something else, but it was the I Ching. See it as a tool in Cage’s hand, not as a religious or mystical oracle.

Cage expressed, in connection with the application of chance operations on Music of Changes:

“It is thus possible to make a musical composition the continuity of which is free from individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and traditions of art.”

So much of Cage’s art from that point on was created in this atmosphere of exclusion of intention and ego concerning the compositional process. It’s like a catharsis, a thorough cleansing and rinsing out of all human luggage that weighs down and predispositions. Anything rising from that concept is fresh out of nowhere!

Cage had been studying Indian philosophy with Gita Sarabhai and Zen Buddhism with Daisetz T. Suzuki at Columbia University, New York 1946 – 1947.

Schleiermacher also goes into the situation of the listener, which probably was a tough one as the piece was premiered and many years thereafter. Since the compositional method is chance operations, the result – even though the questions delivered to the I Ching are know – sounds erratic and haphazard, as it of course also is… but chance has its own order, which quantum mechanics scientists will tell you, uncertainty principle attached and all, so this could be said to really be world music; the music of the universe, the music of matter and energy, energy and matter, forming tonal progressions as elementary particles line up or Planck length strings vibrate matter into existence! Cage is reaching far beyond the Self in this composition, setting universal energies in motion, letting them play freely between his hands.

An interesting thing that Schleiermacher points out is that the original calligraphic score is not useable as is, because it contains so much extra information that is useable mainly for an analysis, but not for a performance. The interpreter therefore has extracted a meaningful score out of Cage’s score.

A difficulty is the tempi, which changes all the time. Schleiermacher therefore recommends a conversion of all the tempo indications into minutes and seconds, with a subsequent stopwatch play-through!

Cage didn’t care much if the music was physically playable or not when he let chance decide. He leaves it to the performer to leave out sequences that cannot possibly be performed, and since this can be done in any number of ways, the interpreter has to work on those decisions. Schleiermacher’s own reduction has lead to a more transparent and a little longer interpretation than usual, which he, and I too, find very rewarding.

The music is very much, as I indicated above, a story of matter and energy in the language of matter and energy! It’s as if the core of matter was talking through these shining, diverging and converging audio traces, in tonal collisions and glassy bounces, like memories of mesons and neutrinos etched in the surface of copper plates just raised from acid submersions.

Interesting sites:

http://www.iging.com/

http://home.swipnet.se/~w-118177/iching/indexpr.htm