John Cage - Two3/Inlets/Two4

OgreOgress

There’s difficult and then there’s difficult.

OgreOgress, in recent years, has devoted a large percentage of its releases to first recordings of the John Cage works often referred to as the “Number Pieces”, compositions from late in his life. They’ve taken to issuing audio DVDs allowing the listener to hear extended works without pause. The disc in hand presents three works, two of them Number Pieces. “Two3” (the “3” should be superscripted), for sho and conch shells, consists of ten “movements” and lasts for 121 minutes while “Two4”, for sho and violin, is made up of four intriguingly overlapping sections covering a half hour. In between those two is the delightful “Inlets” (1977) for conch shells alone.

I mentioned difficult. “Two3”’s ten sections last between about 10 and 15 minutes each. While they’re technically duets, in fact the conch shells, filled with water and jiggled, producing uncontrollable gurgling noises, only appear momentarily toward the end of each portion. The vast majority of time is occupied by solo sho, performed here by Tamami Tono. The sho, incidentally, is a mouth organ with bamboo pipes traditionally associated with Japanese Gagaku. I was somewhat familiar with the Laotian variant of this instrument but only marginally with the sho, which has a sparer, more isolated sound. Cage had heard Miyumi Miyata perform contemporary pieces at Darmstadt in 1990, became fascinated by its sound and transcribed many possible chordal possibilities, traditional and otherwise, then used his chance procedures to determine which of these sequences would occur when in a given composition. To a listener not familiar with the sho, a sonic approximation might be Harry Partch’s Chromelodeon, though with a much less wooly, far sharper sound. The music unspools slowly, even languidly, single notes melting into chords, ample pauses for breath (there’s almost a bellows-like quality to much of in-and-out nature of the playing) or simply to appreciate the silence and a generally meditative air is achieved. The initial impression is one of sameness and it takes a certain amount of perseverance—possibly a great amount--to get through that wall and begin to hear all the variations in the pieces. The work’s sheer length and quasi self-similarity makes keeping everything you’ve heard in your memory exceedingly difficult, however. For myself, and I don’t mean this as a backhanded compliment, the piece works better the less strongly I’m concentrating on it. Not as ambient music, but as something gong on “over there” that edges its way into my brain at intervals. The contributions from the conch shells (manipulated by Glenn Freeman) occur only near the very end of each section and, in that context, are a little bit startling, emerging from an entirely different kind of sound-world. “Blurp!” But there’s something “right” about their placement also, a kind of punctuation/commentary on what’s preceded as if coming from someone who’s been listening, unnoticed, on the sidelines all along.

The relatively brief (seven minutes) “Inlets”, admittedly, arrives as a refreshing change of pace, a clear drink of water as it were. One of a number of pieces developed for “uncontrollable objects”, Freeman jostles twelve water-filled shells, the unpredictable burbles echoing through their small chambers with an odd accompaniment of clicks, the source of which I can’t quite determine. As mentioned in Rob Haskins’ liners, the rhythm ends up belonging to the instrument, not the performer. A lovely piece.

“Two4”, for sho and violin (the always excellent Christina Fong) has an interesting, overlapping structure. The sho part is in three movements of the durations (as performed here) 10:00, 12:00 and 8:30 while the violin has four movements, one for each string, of 10:10, 4:40, 12:40 and 2:20. The sho’s lines aren’t very dissimilar to those heard in “Two3” but the violin sets it off quite beautifully, the graininess of Fong’s approach serving as a spicy tonic to the sho’s organ-like fluidity. The violin also provides a kind of balance, lending the work a more contemplative character, tempering the slightly strident (to Western ears, anyway) sound of the sho, resulting in a very beautiful half-hour.

Haskins observes, “The music simply continues with almost annoying steadfastness until its end. That steadfastness…allows the music to avoid the trap of merely sounding beautiful.” I agree with that in regard to “Two3”, a very tough nut to crack without seriously readjusting one’s ears and general expectations; I expect to return to it in the future and wouldn’t be at all surprised if my reaction shifts more than once. The other two works, however, strike me as “beautiful” on their face and make this disc, yet another fine effort from OgreOgress, necessary hearing for those interested in Cage’s ideas.

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