For his bicentennial celebration, Apartment House 1776, Cage took 44 choral pieces by a group of colonial composers, including William Billings, and subjected their diatonic harmony to a filtering process decided by chance operations. As Cage explained: ''The cadences and everything disappeared, but the flavour remained. You can recognise it as eighteenth-century music; but it's suddenly brilliant in a new way. It is because each sound vibrates from itself, not from a theory.'' This was part of a rich tapestry celebrating the different traditions contributing to the USA – Renga with Apartment House is a large inclusive work not yet recorded.
Roger Zahab asked Cage if some of these workings could be performed on their own on violin and piano and he agreed. The result here is 13 Harmonies for violin with accompaniments on piano (period instrument), harpsichord or organ. Zahab plays without vibrato so the feel is very much that of Cage's String Quartet in Four Parts, but the diatonic materials make a strong contrast with those virtuoso studies in extreme fragmentation, the Freeman Etudes (Musical Observations, 7/92, recorded by Zukovsky, one of Zahab's teachers). The relation between the hymns and Cage is comparable to that between Satie's Socrate and Cage's Cheap Imitation – something has gone wrong with the original in a way that only Cage could have fixed. Unimagined diatonic melodies result automatically.
The 13 Harmonies mix which is on track 17 brings together and superimposes rather tentatively – not like HPSCHD – some of the material already heard. Zahab is mostly self-taught as a composer but has been much involved in new music. His own piece, Verging Lightfall, was premiered at Pittsburgh by these performers in 1992. Two short movements precede a more substantial one, which includes some atmospheric slow writing related to a quotation from Peter Grimes.'