The present disc is the tenth in a series from OgreOgress
featuring previously unreleased works by well-known composers.
This 158-minute 96kHz|24bit DVDAudio contains the world
premiere recording of John Cage’s huge Two3 and
Cage’s complete scores for shō and/or conch shells.
The disc is packaged in a rather flimsy card foldout with
one of those rubbery nipples to hold the disc, so portability
or even storage without damage has to be a concern. The
booklet notes are spread across the inside in a single
grand typographical gesture which makes the text very hard
to read indeed, especially for old folk like me who ruined
their eyes in the age before computers; copying scores
by hand.
Two3 has ten sections, none of which are shorter than 10 minutes each,
some nearly 15. These are described as duets, but in fact
the conch shells, filled with water and moved to produce
odd gurgling noises, only appear very briefly towards the
end of each movement. The great stretches of time are occupied
by a solo shō, an
instrument best described as a Japanese mouth organ with
bamboo pipes. The sound of this instrument is strangely
lonely and remote, and the player’s sparing use of notes
and crescendo/decrescendo gives the music an Aeolian feeling – as
if the instrument were hung in a tree, and allowed to respond
to the wind in its own way. I found the sound rather penetrating – like
a high reed harmonium or indeed a conventional western
mouth organ, but heard through the irresponsibly loud headphone
speakers of someone sitting next to you. It is a
sound to which you can become accustomed, but it won’t
cure your hangover.
This
vast tract of highly abstract music really is the sonic
equivalent of a Japanese ‘karesansui’ garden – the kind
with the raked gravel and isolated stones. The only way
to approach it is with at least a modicum of ‘zen’, since
concentrated listening to such a piece for two whole hours
can only otherwise result in lockjaw or some other negative
physical side effects.
The
conch shells in Two3 take on a more prominent role
in the relatively embryonic earlier work Inlets.
This is a work in which the role of both the composer and
the musician is taken over by the random factors involved
in allowing water to gurgle through conch shells. In this
way, the concept takes on as much importance as the end
result, but as always with Cage, the end result almost
invariably ends up with some kind of bafflingly compelling
element which draws your interest. The bubblings each have
their own tone and pitch, and once your ear and mind relinquish
all gastric or bath-time associations the piece takes on
its own life and strangely fascinating character. The further
random cracklings of what sounds like a fire later on in
the background gives the association of water a different
meaning – a piece of aural theatre which Ivor Cutler would
no doubt have appreciated.
Two4 is for shō and
violin and works with an interesting, organically overlapping
compositional process. The shō part
is in three movements lasting 10:00, 12:00 and 8:30 respectively,
while the violin has four movements, one for each string,
of 10:10, 4:40, 12:40 and 2:20. The music for the shō is
reminiscent to that in Two3, but is given
an extra dimension with the violin part, which lays down
a series of suspended, single notes, out of which the shō’s
often dissonant chords grow and fade.
Rob Haskins’ notes, once you’ve adjusted your eyes to reading them,
provide some useful insights into this strange sound world.
In summing up Cage’s ‘number pieces’, he succinctly places
the remote stillness of the music in a nutshell: “There
is no contrast, no epiphany, no drama, no point.” This
may be true, but the ‘point’ could be part of his further
response, which sees the music “gently enveloping me until
I see and hear minute details of everyday life with a fresh,
uncluttered clarity.” This might or might not have been
Cage’s intention with the longest of these pieces, but
I can only imagine that he would embrace such an effect
as a positive function of the sounds and span of these
works. For me, this music is kind of alternative to a work
like Erik Satie’s Vexations, where the minimalism
is freed of its mesmerising sense of tonal repetition,
but the mind achieves a similar state of meditative saturation – if
you let it. Through the medium of Audio DVD these pieces
at the very least finds the space to exist outside a live
performance. Having them in your collection may alter the
length and value of your day considerably.
Dominy Clements
Tamami
Tono (shō) 
[2:38:00] 
