Joan La Barbara is the singer and composer who has pioneered extended vocal techniques, and has worked in improvisation as well as with the groups led by Glass and by Reich during the 1970s. As their recordings show, her voice has an attractive, flexible, almost boyish quality well suited to delivering Cage, who has asked for a vocal delivery ''without vibrato, as in folk singing''. La Barbara's skill with special effects only comes into its own towards the end of the CD with Cage's Songbooks and Music for Two (by One). (The tracking here is confusing: the layout is as given on the back of the CD booklet but the three excerpts from Songbook listed as 8 are actually 8, 9 and 10, then Music for Two (by One) listed as 9 is actually 11.)
This is a sensitive, nicely shaped anthology with the unaccompanied voice occasionally relieved by percussion, piano (closed) or electronics. By the time we reach Sonnekus it is time for a change of texture and this is provided by the incorporation of the three songs cafe-concert songs of Satie—Je te veux; La Diva de l'Empire and Tendrement sung at a distance in rather drunken fashion by La Barbara, accompanied on the piano by Leonard Stein with perhaps a little too much elaboration at times. Sonnekus, written in 1985, is thus another Cage piece existing parasitically on Satie, even more than Cheap Imitation (for piano in 1969, followed by further versions). The work alternates sacred and secular worlds—unaccompanied texts from Genesis alternate with the songs cafe-concert songs. The idea might have made its point better if the two types had been superimposed with the Satie quite remote—Cage's normal approach.
It is a pleasure to hear The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs accurately performed. Pianists have sometimes been so bemused by playing a closed piano—tapping the body of the instrument—in front of an audience that the precise note-values get forgotten. The Joyce text makes its point beautifully—who could ever say Cage is not a stylist?—and the same melodic formation comes back in Solo for Voice 49. The e. e. cummings setting, Forever and Sunsmell, from 1942 catches Cage at a time when he had been productively involved with percussion in classics such as the pieces called Construction in Metal (the second and third now recorded) and gets another atmospheric performance. Solo for Voice 49 sets a text of Thoreau about birds and the electronics provide a passable imitation of birdsong in discreet suggestions. Thoreau might have preferred the real thing.
The CD booklet runs generously to 30 pages with texts in the original language, mostly English except for Mirakus, which comes from Marcel Duchamp and is in French. It is particularly useful to have the extra dimension of knowing in full how these word-centred pieces operate, although there is no detail about the actual music and the significance of literature and music for Cage. All the same this is an attractive way of exploring unfamiliar Cage, well recorded.'