Subtitled: "Improvisations and Realisations of Works by John Cage and Michael Pisaro", this recording sounds all of a piece, perhaps due to the indeterminate nature of the written works explored, and the long-running (since May 2006) nature of the ensemble.
Michael Pisaro's pieces are part of his "Harmony Series", which are "'translations' of a range of poems into musical scores", which give very basic instructions for their realisation. The number of musicians may be specified, though not their instruments, and similarly, range and duration of notes may be given, though not their specific pitch. The three examples here ("Reader, listen", "La voix qui dit" and "Flux") consist entirely of long held tones separated by silences of varying lengths, and display interesting interactions of overtones during their short lengths. The silences frame these tones and set the listener up for the next episode. John Cage's "Four 6" is one of the last of his number pieces, scored for four players who can use "any way of producing sounds". Twelve sounds are chosen by each player, and these sounds are distributed within a structure of time brackets determined by a computer program, which had become in this period a substitute for throwing the I-Ching, which Cage had previously done by hand. Between the compositions we're served two improvisations "Activation" and "Decentering", which are right in line with the compositions, albeit a bit more interactive.
If you forget all that, or ignore the liner notes altogether, what you get is slightly over an hour of beautifully recorded, carefully rendered electro-acoustic improvisation. If you're not paying attention to the track counter on your CD player, you may not realise when the pieces begin and end. Whether this is due to the open-ended nature of the compositions, or the carefulness of the players' choices and the largeness of their ears is up for discussion. Suffice it to say that it's a well-planned and executed program.
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