John Cage

*2022 stock* John Cage's first manifesto, written in 1937, was called The Future of Music: Credo, and the future it described was an "all-sound music" open to every kind of noise. This volume of Wergo's Edition John Cage follows that idea across three decades, from the prepared piano of the 1940s to the vocal and spoken works of the 1970s.

Sonata XIII, from the Sonatas and Interludes, and Music for Marcel Duchamp are pieces for prepared piano, played by Peter Roggenkamp: screws, bolts and rubber placed between the strings turn the instrument into a small, quiet gamelan. With the Song Books the Schola Cantorum Stuttgart under Clytus Gottwald takes on Cage's anthology of solos for voice, a collection of instructions, songs and theatre actions that the performers combine freely.

The disc closes with Empty Words III, read by Cage himself: a text derived by chance operations from the journals of Henry David Thoreau, in which language is reduced to phrases, words, syllables and finally single letters and sounds. Total time 43'00".