John Cage

Apartment House presents seven works from John Cage's early period, before he began his systematic exploration of chance procedures. This repertoire captures a transitional moment when Cage had moved beyond traditional methods but before he devised new formal systems—a period when, as pianist Kerry Yong notes, he was "forced to be guided by their instincts and intuition" producing "extraordinary music."

The program balances what Yong calls "simply gorgeous / gorgeously simple pieces like 'Dream' and 'In a Landscape'" with "the often spikier pieces for prepared piano, which revel in a kind of trickster-like innovation." Both approaches share an investment in "the beauty, or maybe the sensationalness of sound, whether that is what is considered traditionally beautiful, or other darker or weirder notions of beauty."

The prepared piano works—Amores and Music for Marcel Duchamp—showcase Cage's radical reinvention of the instrument. Yong describes the preparation process: "There is something quite ephemeral and special about the prepared piano... His instructions seem quite prescriptive: although, unless you know actually piano model he was using and the objects he was talking about, you're always making adjustments." He finds "a tactile and experimental pleasure in preparing a piano, as well as playing it. The sounds always seem magical, fresh and new and as a pianist, you feel a little bit like a fantasising and imposter percussionist."

The String Quartet in Four Parts and Six Melodies (performed with Mira Benjamin, violin) were written consecutively using the same compositional method—a gambit-based approach Cage abandoned as he moved toward chance operations. As Yong observes: "In Cage's early music there's also some in between – a willingness to play with patterns and then change when you feel you want to: a sort of responsiveness to the present, or other interruptions and other factors, e.g. dance. There always seem to be a good sense of play and freedom, grounded in a mixture of pragmatism and theory."

Yong's background with Cage is extensive, including his Cover Me Cage project—reimagining Cage's prepared piano pieces on a Casio keyboard with effects pedals. As he discovered: "His rhythms and patterns were robust and ingenious, but also versatile and malleable - like a new sort of musical language or potential-music."