Another Cage album from New Albion allows me to correct something I wrote in September when enthusiastically reviewing their earlier release consisting of some of Cage's vocal works most attractively sung by Joan La Barbara. I had presumed that these days anything can be done in the studio and in commenting on the recording of Solo for Voice 49, based on Thoreau, referred to a ''passable imitation of birdsong''. I could not have been more wrong—Foster Reed kindly informs me that these were real live birds singing on cue at 5am in Marin County, Lucas Valley, Skywalker Ranch!
I am pleased to have had this chance of correcting myself whilst writing about another Cage album. How well early, full notated, Cage is standing the test of time, especially the works for prepared piano and for percussion. The Perilous Night is a 12-minute prepared piano piece completed two years before Cage started his classic Sonatas and Interludes. The Perilous Night, which uses fairly elaborate preparations, is nothing like so well known, although included on Jeanne Kirstein's important 1970 CBS double LP. The connection between Cage and Jasper Johns was re-emphasized when the painter started a series of Perilous Night works containing a page of Cage's score in 1982. One is reproduced in colour on the front of the booklet. Before that Cage got the idea for the title from an Irish myth about a bed placed on a floor of polished jasper!
If that link seems to have been prompted by the punning linguistic logic of James Joyce, a growing influence on Cage since setting The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs in 1942, then Four walls, derives from an even earlier enthusiasm—Erik Satie, especially his Rosicrucian works of the 1890s, and Socrate. But, like Cage's String Quartet of 1950, Four walls, a ballet score for solo piano using the white notes only, is very much his own kind of piece, with his typically disengaged continuity. The subject of Merce Cunningham's ballet is an exploration of the disturbed mind—this was the period of Cage's divorce and his move towards Zen Buddhism as an alternative to psycho-analysis. The pacing of the near hour-long suite of dances is often more Eastern than Western. Listeners must be prepared for long silences: Joan La Barbara's chaste tones provide a welcome contrast, if too rare. But thanks to the successful assaults of minimalism the time-scale of such Cage works is now seeming much less daunting, although there is a sense of going round in circles with the dance element missing. All the same, Cage's repetitive routines have gained a new richness in retrospect. He was right after all! The performances by Margaret Leng Tan, described by The Village Voice of New York as ''the world's premiere string piano virtuoso'', seem admirable and so is the recording.'