When Playing the Notes Is Enough

One (or two) of my favorite Cage pieces is (are) the little-known Experiences Nos. 1 and 2. The first one, supposedly written in 1946, is for two pianos, the second from 1948 for solo voice. I say “supposedly” because the solo voice version, written on an E.E. Cummings poem, uses the same melody as the piano duo version from two years earlier, and it seems odd that Cummings’ phrases would have fit so snugly the melody that Cage had earlier written for pianos. I discovered both pieces on the old Voices and Instruments vinyl disc of 1976 on Brian Eno’s Obscure label, and subsequently, as a student at Oberlin, played the duo version along with Doug Skinner, who’s since gone on to a musical career of his own. On the Obscure recording, the piano duo is played by Richard Bernas, apparently by overdubbing, and the solo is sung by Robert Wyatt of Soft Machine British psychedelic rock fame. To this day, those are the best, most touching recordings of those pieces out there. I’ve uploaded them for you here:

Experiences No. 1
Experiences No. 2

I’ve been looking for newer recordings, on CD. But every other recording I find is too fast, too textural, too “expressive,” too classical – too Uptown. They’re ultrasimple pieces, all white keys, nothing but pentatonic scale in No. 2. As with much of my own music, I sense that classical musicians find the bare notes too uninteresting, and think they have to “interpret” them to breathe life into them. There seems to be no sense anymore that a pure, stately, slow melody (such as one finds in Renaissance polyphony or Japanese Gagaku) can be beautiful. Post-Ligeti, post-Carter, post-Debussy, everything has to be turned into texture, into an illusionistic surface that transcends the notes. No! No!, a thousand times no! Sometimes the notes, played slowly and with dignity and clarity, are all one needs, as in Socrate, as in Musica Callada, as in In a Landscape, as in Snowdrop, as in Symphony on a Hymn Tune, as in The Art of Fugue.Â

It strikes me, though this would be difficult to document, that the ’70s were a high point for performers understanding that principle, and we’re now in a deep trough, because lately I’ve had a difficult time getting performers to play my simple music slowly enough; they encounter so little technical challenge that they start to rush, trying to buoy what they fear is dull music through some hint of the virtuosity they’re so proud of. But such music turns trivial when played as quickly as it’s easy to play it, as does much of Cage’s music of the 1940s. Bernas and Wyatt and Eno, coming from the pop world, exhibit far and away a more instinctive understanding of the Zen simplicity Cage was aiming at than any of the more recent renditions. I fear I’ll never find another really beautiful recording of Experiences 1 & 2 again.

An odd thing about Experiences No. 2 is that Cage omitted the final two lines of Cummings’s Sonnet, which I think are the best lines:

turning from the tremendous lie of sleep
i watch the roses of the day grow deep.

But it’s still a gorgeous song, and most gorgeous of all when sung the clean, blank way Wyatt sings it.