If there is one thing that John Cage is famous for, it’s the prepared piano. Even those who have never heard of chance operations or mesostics, for example, or who never have come across any of Cage’s writings, know something about the prepared piano. That concept has sunk into the common musical mind of most people who are remotely interested in music, it seems.
It might be of some interest to dwell somewhat on the actual occurrence of the concept. It was way back in 1940, and Cage was supposed to write music for a ballet by Syvilla Fort. He had envisioned it as a piece for percussion, but it turned out that the performance space was very limited, making it impractical to place a percussion ensemble there. That is when Cage – as he saw the need for it – in his ingenuity invented the truly percussive piano, by experimenting with inserted screws, pieces of rubber and other paraphernalia between the piano strings. The piano – which really is a percussive instrument but which hardly was considered one before Cage’s insights – is a derivation of the gypsy cimbalom and the Persian and Indian santoor, which you play by hitting the strings directly with handheld hammers, whereas the piano, as we know, is hit by hammers indirectly, through a seemingly simple but pretty genial contraption of hammers, dampers and so forth.
When Cage experimented with his innovation – inspired by Henry Cowell’s earlier unorthodox ways of playing the piano – he found that he could have the piano become a whole percussion ensemble right there in one package, in the guise of a regular grand piano. The innovation was up and working, and the methods have been employed ever since, inspiring people to adapt other instruments too.
Necessity had, like so many times before, provided the tool for the solution.
It was also more practical and easy to travel around with dance groups, like the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which Cage did in the 1940s, just carrying a bag of small items to stick into the piano, instead of traveling with a group of percussionists. Most of John Cage’s music for prepared piano has indeed been written for dance performances.

The first piece in this 3-CD release is Cage’s first try at a composition for the new instrument, showing a rather simple, basic preparation; “Bacchanale” (1940). It’s about 8 minutes long, and starts with a heavily percussive rush, hardly reminiscent of a piano at all, in a joyous roll of the fingers over the keyboard, coming to hesitant near-halts, halts and scouting motions, like a cat stopping dead in motion, front paw stretched out in front of it, listening with the utmost attention – and then the piano percussion rolls on again, sometimes becoming tranquil and silently hushed; then again appearing in boisterous attacks, head high, hitting the opponents in the head with clutched fists.
The tempo is sometimes winding down to a calm current, in dampened feelings of brownish or even grayish percussive tones, but the percussion, though retaining the imagined colors of tone, can get really loud too. This first prepared piano piece is very un-pianistic, and very percussive, and it must have been such a joy for Cage to find out that he could get this mighty percussive web out of a grand piano, with colors of tone bordering on bamboo gamelan.

Of course, the basis for a performance of these pieces is a very careful preparation, and since the preparation changes its details from piece to piece it must have been a lot of work for Steffen Schleiermacher, who plays these pieces in a wonderfully artistic concentration and flowing gallant ease, to get all the screws and bolts and erasers inserted at the right place, having them sit tight and not fall out during the sometimes violent attacks! When you consider the tight schedule for recording all the works of this box – just three days in December 1966 – you might appreciate the concentration and discipline at work at the Fürtsliche Reitbahn Arolsen.

“Totem Ancestor” (1942), the second piece, is a short incident that I’ve also heard with the pianist Joshua Pierce on Wergo Schallplatten. The sound in these recordings with Steffen Schleiermacher heavily outweighs any competitors I’ve heard so far, though, but I haven’t heard what Mode Records will achieve with the prepared piano in their series of Cage music as yet, as I’ve only heard their release of “Sonatas & Interludes” (Philipp Vandré) when it comes to altered piano. “Totem Ancestor” is written for the dance by Merce Cunningham. It bangs away pretty good, impressing me mighty much with its bang-on-a-can percussion, i.e. the tin can feel of it, straight out of the pantry!

“And the Earth Shall Bear Again “ (1942) is dedicated to Valerie Bettis & Merce Cunningham. Again I’m familiar with the piece from Joshua Pierce. The timbre is much richer here than in the premier prepared pieces, since Cage decided to insert unprepared tones in the texture of prepared ones, making for fantastic transformations and strange timbral adventures indeed, here wonderfully expressed by Steffen Schleiermacher’s pure mastery of the instrument and the idiom. Glaring golden fountains of unprepared but strange timbres rise out of the prepared percussive rhythms, spraying you in metallic precipitation, making for a kind of counterpoint of timbres and rhythms, which sounds as strange and wonderful as the description of it! It is also very loud at times, but pure and clear all the same. I’m very impressed by Schleiermacher’s playing here. He employs a frantic intensity with a pure and controlled outpour of channeled energy, thus sort of etching the music in clear outlines, in contours of tonal excellence, without ever blurring the vision. It’s a rhythmic and timbral feast!

“Primitive” (1942) is, for some reason, a quite well known work. I first experienced it in a recording by Richard Bunker as a filler on a bootleg vinyl of the radio play “The City Wears a Slouch Hat” with Kenneth Patchen and John Cage (recorded in 1942 and since officially released by Cortical Foundation), but have after that also recently heard it with Boris Berman on mass label Naxos! That says something about the widespread knowledge about at least one venue of Cage’s artistic output; the prepared piano!
“Primitive” is scarred, jarring hardware store compulsion, coming at you in a jerky, popping, jolting tour de force of hammering metal and chopped wood; beware! It’s a music you cannot be indifferent to, believe me – and it’s oh so easy to forget that the sounds all originate, without electroacoustic manipulations, in a grand piano!

“In the Name of the Holocaust” (1942; note the year; the Holocaust we’re automatically thinking of wasn’t very known then, and certainly not defined by that name) is referring to James Joyce and the derivation of ‘the Holy Ghost’ employed by him. It is a meditative piece, sparse, transparent, moving with caution across un-chartered territory, discovering for itself where to thread, in a diligent balancing act, traversing the misty moors of Cage’s score, but sometimes apparently forced to hammer down the nails of the footbridges and even blowing away some rocks with dynamite, as downright explosive patterns occur towards the end of the work.

“Our Spring Will Come” (1943) occupies track 7 of the first CD in the box. It falls in line with other early works employing the method of a mixture of prepared and non-prepared tones, thudding away across the topographies, sporting a “funny-walk” worthy of a John Cleese!

“A Room” (1943) also appears on many other prepared piano compilations. Its almost elusive character is quite different from former loud bangings, and resembles a flowing, cautiously performed gamelan music of an introverted, downsized kind.

“Tossed as it is Untroubled” (1943) is a peculiar title indeed. It scrambles up – and then down – a staircase between two stories, hesitant, up, down, up, down – with tiny, fast steps of someone in great bewilderment. The preparation has made this piece very dampened, very soft in its appearance, trickling on in these waves, until, when one minute of the 2:36 duration is left, a higher pitch shines through, in pearly, glassy percussive progressions. Very beautiful!

“The Perilous Night” (1943 – 1944) has six movements, making it the first prepared piano piece by Cage divided up in several parts. It is based on an Irish tale. The duration of this work is almost 14 minutes. It has a very different beginning too, from what I’ve heard so far on this album, with its deep, ringing, timbrally layered sound web, feeling its way down from the darkest holes of identity, managing a blind search for rescue from who knows what feelings…
I’ve made similar remarks before in this review, but I feel I have to mention it again: I have never in the case of Cage’s music for prepared piano heard any better sounding recordings. I’m baffled at the sheer beauty, depth and spaciousness of these recordings, and their clarity down into the smallest detail of sound. Amazing – and thrilling, as you discover nuances of the works hitherto shrouded by the common blurring of sound because of rumbling ventilation or other musically unrelated environmental sounds, or just carelessly placed microphones etcetera. In these Schleiermacher recordings on Dabringhaus & Grimm there are no disturbances, nothing unrelated; just the pure, un-altered sound of the music, in brilliant hi fi!
The short movements of “The Perilous Night” makes for a comfortable awareness of subtle variations of timbre of the bells, the gamelan (bamboo gamelan too!), the golden rays of sound; the prepared piano!

With “Roots of an Unfocus” (1944) we have reached the end of CD1 of the three CDs. This sounds, at first, more of an experimental piece of chamber music than dedicatedly a piece for prepared piano. There is no piano-feel what so ever at the outset, which presents an erratic, slow rhythm of some kind of indefinable percussive instrument (though we, of course, know it’s a piano), with sudden, screeching, eerie sounds, as if the piano is dragged across the floor, and I cannot understand how these particular sounds were hurled out of the frame of the piano…
Merce Cunningham (I quote from the booklet) said, on “Roots of an Unfocus”: “The title is mine. ‘Unfocus’ here refers to a disturbance in the mind, an imbalance, it’s a photographic term which signifies a blur, an unclarity. It’s one of the first solos I made. I was still concerned with expression. It was about fear. The dance was in three parts. The first part gave the impression of someone realizing there’s something unknown. The second part shows the dancer struggling with this, but it’s futile because there’s nothing there. In the third part he is defeated by it. The ending was a series of falls and crawling off the stage. In a sense I was still making a conventional modern dance, with great differences of tempo between the three parts.”
The wonder of this recording is that Steffen Schleiermacher achieves a sound as from Tibetan trumpets or some other wind instrument by way of his preparation of the strings, which is no less than a musical wonder to me. Sometimes it’s like hearing the horns being played around Jericho before the walls fell – and it’s a piano! It’s really brutal at times! And then it just ends!

CD2 begins with a piece hitherto unknown to me, called “The Unavailable Memory Of” (1944). It’s a short piece of just over 2 minutes. It has a beautiful mix of deep murmurs and lighter bell-sounding trickles, sometimes enhanced by wooden-like determinations, but the piece progresses in a kind of hypnotic flow, intensely forward, in a magnificent vibrancy of tone colors. It’s a wake dream of the old-timer out in the woodshed, suddenly overcome by existential visionary revelations.

“Spontaneous Earth” (1944) is just a little longer with its 3 minutes. It sounds just like the piano is fed through a ring modulator (as in Stockhausen’s “Mantra”), but it isn’t! The preparations and Schleiermacher’s fingerings result in this blurred double vision; double hearing! It’s a hallucinatory flux of our perception that is triggered by this mix of slightly “off” timbres! The structure, apart from the timbral specialties, is a slow, determined, swaggering walk up ahead, accepting no interference, for sure!

“Triple Paced” (1944) is yet another Cage work that I’m unfamiliar with, and it must be stated that it’s a great pleasure to become accustomed to these lesser-known works by the ingenious Maestro. “Triple Paced” hits like a joke, with a simple line running up and down in jolly gestures, interspersed with punctuated slabs. The piano sounds like some kind of marimba or bamboo percussion; it’s amazing – and I would never have guessed that Cage was the composer here, never! I love being surprised, but in this case I would – if I hadn’t known better – assumed that somebody else’s score had accidentally been filed with Cage’s music… Jolly amusing, this short piece!

“A Valentine Out of Season” (1944) is probably another of those works that not many are acquainted with, including the average aficionado (if the pairing of those words isn’t a contradiction…) It holds three movements, and seems to be a meditative, Zen-natured piece of prepared piano, the way Schleiermacher paints sparse calligraphy on our tympanic membranes. This is just plain sitting at a stony beach, hearing the ocean, the wind, the sea birds, and picking up random pebbles coming to us out of the eons of time…

“Prelude for Meditation” (1944) again is a more familiar piece, but very short; just over 1 minute! This is the brittleness of Japanese temple bells on a frosty winter morning, rising out of careful piano preparations and a diligent, spidery touch. Sunlight through spider webs hung with dew; sudden reflections out of the micro worlds…

“Mysterious Adventure” (1945) could well be a fitting title for this magnificent CD box from Dabringhaus & Grimm, but it is of course a piece by Cage. This one is a little more extended than the last ones mentioned above, with almost 9 minutes. Here we return to the rock n’ rolling side of Cage’s character, sporting a fast, throbbing percussive pianism with sudden jolts up and down the register, punctuated by bells and bangs out of the keyboard. “Mysterious Adventure” reminds me a lot of “Three Dances for Two Prepared Pianos” (1944 – 1945) which doesn’t appear on this release, but which I’ve heard on a Wergo CD. Even though this is only one piano, the basic rhythmic flare, as well as the recurring refuges taken in more silent sections - interspersed in the rougher progressions – are the same as in “Three Dances for Two Prepared Pianos” and also “A Book of Music for Two Prepared Pianos” (1944), also not found here but on a Wergo release.

“Daughters of the Lonesome Isle” (1945) is a popular piece, widely recorded in the Cage community. It is straight Balinese gamelan from the beginning, and I mean that it really could fool me. I’d guess gamelan over piano any time here! That spell is broken after a minute, when you might realize that it isn’t gamelan after all, but certain – many! – characteristics of the timbres and the rhythms are clearly very reminiscent of gamelan. The way almost atonal – just percussive, metallic – hits are combined with the golden luster of the “gamelan” makes this piece one of the most beautiful pieces of prepared piano that I’ve ever heard; it’s pure musical beauty, and it’s a downright, almost indecent pleasure to listen… as it reminds you of how sweet life can be – and it’s a bit scary even…

“Music for Marcel Duchamp” (1947) differs from the rest of the set. It sounds to me like some pieces of Cage that I’ve heard him play himself, on CDs from Cramps Records in Italy, like “Cheap Imitation”. On one of those CDs from Cramps Cage in fact also performs “Music for Marcel Duchamp”. The music is very hushed, i.e. the strings are very dampened, giving off a peculiar “under-the-blanket-muffled” sound, and the melodies are repetitious lines of simplicity that come and go and come again, like an Italian landscape with rolling hills and vineyards; very inwardly, very still right in its movement…

“Two Patorales” (1952) is clearly a product of a new thinking on the part of Cage, since it is much more reminiscent of pieces like “Music of Changes” (1951), which was aided by the usage of I Ching. I have no information whether these pieces - “Two Patorales” – were in some way taking advantage of any chance operations, but even if at times that seems to be the case, too much of human logic is apparent in the music to really suggest that. However, some characteristics, like long pauses and sometimes very independent tones (not seemingly related to one another). The feeling is more complicated here than before, more unforeseeable, hard to forecast, as tone follows tone in a sometimes haphazard kind of way. “Two Patorales” is, from my knowledge, the only place on these CDs that other instruments than the prepared piano occurs, as some kind of pipes or whistles are utilized here and there.

CD3 contains only one work, but one of immense significance for modern music, and very much so also for the reputation of John Cage in a wider perspective in the world of music. This brilliant, thought-through and diligently elaborated set of 20 (on most issues just 19) movements which together constitute John Cage’s “Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano” (1946 – 1948) made the name John Cage a household word, and opened up many possible venues for him, enabling him to also spread som of the ideas that were dear to him, as he gradually became a philosophical as well as a musical guru, spreading his words to thirsty ears from his loft full of plants in New York City.

There are a few works of musical art that I have several recordings of, like Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” (Wanda Landowska, Walter Gieseking, Jeno Jandó, Tatiana Nikolayeva, Glenn Gould, Friedrich Gulda, Edwin Fischer, Samuel Feinberg, Rosalyn Tureck), “Sonatas & Partitas for Solo Violin” (Jascha Heifetz, Ida Haendel, Nathan Milstein, Arthur Grumiaux, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Rachel Podger) and “Suites for Violoncello” (Pablo Casals, Pierre Fournier, André Navarra, Maurice Gendron, Anner Bylsma, Heinrich Schiff, Mstislav Rostropovich, Pieter Wispelwey, Yo-Yo Ma, Paolo Beschi, Edgar Meyer), plus Terry Riley’s “In C” (Members of The Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in the State University of New York at Buffalo, Shanghai Film Orchestra, a 25th Anniversary Concert with an array of musicians in San Francisco, Piano Circus, L’infonie, Ensemble de la SMCQ) – and John Cage’s “Sonatas & Interludes for Prepared Piano” (Maro Ajemian, Philipp Vandré, Julie Steinberg, Yuji Takahashi, Louis Goldstein, Joshua Pierce, Gerard Fremy, Boris Berman – and now; Steffen Schleiermacher!).

There is no need to dwell too much on “Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano”, since it is so well known, but let me just underline my observation of the care and skill that Steffen Schleiermacher has put into the work, as he has into each and every one of the many works in this box of music by Cage for prepared piano. It is with great joy and sometimes almost awe that I’ve listened straight through the box, as I’ve been stunned by the sheer beauty of the recorded sound, which of course means that the recording company knows exactly how to treat and take care of sound!

This Dabringhaus & Grimm venture with the Steffen Schleiermacher recordings of much of John Cage’s music for prepared piano has had nothing short of revelatory proportions for me.