John Cage, Pianist

ANN WARDE

Independent scholar

From Grieg recordings and early radio broadcasts to women’s music clubs and the enduring influence of his aunt and teacher Phoebe Harvey James, this chapter maps the sounds and musical communities that surrounded the young John Cage, illuminating formative influences on his later performances and compositions.

A slice of early twentieth-century musical Los Angeles

In the early 1920s, Los Angeles pianist and soprano soloist Phoebe Harvey James (figure 1), ² then in her late twenties, was to be found singing—at a meeting of the Glassel Park Community Center Association, at a Christmas party for newspaper boys from Philadelphia, and, among multiple other performances, as a dramatic actor in an opera by California composer and Italian Band leader Manfredi Chiaffarelli. ³

Figure 1. Phoebe Harvey James, image from “De Luxe Concert Tonight Featuring Soloists,” Los Angeles Times, 25 June 1923, 6. Source: Newspapers.com.

She was also performing and presenting programmes at the Monday Afternoon Club, the Wednesday Morning Club, the Lincoln Study Club (whose president was her older sister, Mrs. Lucretia Cage), and the Optimist Club. ⁴ In 1923, together with her violinist cousin, she arranged a music programme for LA radio station KHJ. She also performed on the programme as a pianist in two works for violin, cello, and piano trio, and, accompanied by another pianist, sang “For All Eternity” ⁵ by Angelo Mascheroni, “Juanita” by Caroline Sheridan Norton, “Marcheta (A Love Song of Old Mexico)” by Victor Schertzinger (all in audio example 1a), and “Life” by Pearl Gildersleeve Curran (audio example 1b). ⁶

Audio example 1a. See player for recording details. ⁷

Audio example 1b. “Life” by Pearl Gildersleeve Curran, performed by Beniamino Gigli (tenor) and Dino Fedri (piano), recorded 1955. Playback help

Broadcast on 25 July 1923, this music programme followed her piano performance of a wedding march on the previous Saturday evening’s broadcast by station KHJ of “a public wedding in a new sense, the guests being scattered over a vast radius. The ceremony was lovely.” ⁸ Earlier that Saturday afternoon, KHJ had broadcast “a convention of youthful pianists” that included a performance by her ten-year-old nephew, John Cage (figure 2). ⁹ Several years earlier, amid her flurry of musical activities, Phoebe James had begun to teach him to play the piano (figure 3). ¹⁰

Figure 2. Newspaper report of a radio programme including “a convention of youthful pianists,” mentioning “John Cage, Jr., 10 years of age, pupil of Mrs. Phoebe James,” from Ben A. Markson, “Wedding Bells Are Broadcast,” Los Angeles Times, 17 June 1923, 22. Source: Newspapers.com.

Figure 3. John Cage as a child (1921). © John Cage Trust, used with permission.

Many years later, Cage mentioned, “I was introduced to ‘neighborhood music,’ that branch of the art that all the world loves to play, and I did too.” ¹¹

What was this music?

During the 1910s and ’20s, Phoebe Harvey James and her colleagues performed many works by well-known nineteenth-century European composers: Georges Bizet’s “Agnus Dei,” Léo Delibes’s “Bell Song” (from Lakmé), Edward Elgar’s Salut d’amour, Jules Massenet’s “Pleurez” (from Le Cid), Amilcare Ponchielli’s “Voce di donna” (from La Gioconda), Giacomo Puccini’s duet “Tutti i fior” (from Madame Butterfly), Camille Saint-Saëns’s “The Swan” (from The Carnival of the Animals), Franz Schubert’s Musical Moment (arranged for violin, piano, and cello trio) ¹², Jean Sibelius’s “Black Roses,” Richard Strauss’s “Ständchen,” Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Adieu, forêts” (from The Maid of Orléans), Richard Wagner’s “To the Evening Star” (from Tannhäuser) (all of which you can hear in audio example 2a), ¹³ and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s “Prayer” (from The Jewels of the Madonna) (which can be heard in audio example 2b). ¹⁴

Audio example 2a. See player for recording details. ¹⁵

Audio example 2b. “Benedicimi tu” from Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s opera The Jewels of the Madonna. Playback help

Music by the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg was also frequently performed. As a child and teenager Cage was likely familiar with Grieg’s two Peer Gynt suites (audio example 3), which were popular with Los Angeles audiences. At least one of these two compositions was frequently played by the Los Angeles People’s Orchestra in 1912–13, ¹⁶ and in 1923 the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News’s 28 June “Music and Art” column (p. 3) mentions an upcoming performance of Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite at the Hollywood Bowl, conducted by Emil Oberhoffer, to be heard on Friday 13 July.

Audio example 3. Peer Gynt Suites Nos. 1 and 2. See player for recording details. ¹⁷

Below is a somewhat wide-ranging (though relatively random) listing of Los Angeles–area newspaper notices announcing and reviewing performances of Grieg’s music in the years 1920 to 1929—the period of Cage’s life beginning when he was seven years old and continuing until he was seventeen—as a means of clarifying the popularity and availability of Grieg’s music at that time.

Alongside the Hollywood Bowl July 1923 performance just mentioned (which does not specify which suite was to be performed), many other notices for Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 can be found. ¹⁸

In early 1926, the Pasadena Star News featured an in-depth examination of Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 with notated melodies for each of its four sections: “Morning,” “Death of Ase,” “Anitra’s Dance,” and “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” ¹⁹

Beyond the Peer Gynt suites, notices of performances of an expansive range of Grieg’s compositions appeared in many local Los Angeles newspapers. On the evening of 7 February 1923, Grieg’s Land Sighting (Landkjenning), was performed by a full chorus (audio example 4; pieces written in bold font in the following eight paragraphs can be listened to from this player). ²⁰

Audio example 4. See player for recording details. Playback help

The first movement of Grieg’s Piano Concerto, in an apparent arrangement for solo piano, is mentioned as having been performed by Emily Wellington Archibald on 2 July 1923. ²¹ The concerto was later scheduled to be performed by composer-pianist Frances Mae Martin, accompanied by another pianist, on the evening of 21 February 1925. ²²

On 29 May 1925, a notice alerted listeners to five compositions by Grieg scheduled to be performed by a string ensemble on the coming Sunday: “Albumleaf” (“Albumblad”; Lyric Pieces op. 12, no. 7); “Grandmother’s Minuet” (“Bedstemors menuet”; Lyric Pieces op. 68, no. 2); “Peasant’s Song” (“Bondens sang”; Lyric Pieces op. 65, no. 2); “Shepherd Boy” (“Gjætergut”; Lyric Pieces op. 54, no. 1); and “Homeward” (“Hjemad”; Lyric Pieces op. 62, no. 6). ²³

A notice about the Tuesday Musicale’s 3 May 1927 programme mentioned that Grieg “may on account of his original ideas … be placed in the first rank of composers. … Had he been less national … he would now be less universal.” After a presentation about the composer’s life and works, three songs were performed: “Ich Liebe Dich” (“Jeg elsker dig”; Hjertets melodier, op. 5, no. 3), “Ein Schwan” (“En svane”; Sex digte, op. 25, no. 2), and “the intensely Norwegian” “Solvejg’s Song” (“Solveigs sang”; from Peer Gynt). Three piano compositions followed, beginning with “To Spring” (“Til våren”; Lyric Pieces op. 43, no. 6), a composition we shall revisit in an analysis later in this chapter. The other two piano compositions were “Nocturne” (“Notturno”; Lyric Pieces op. 54, no. 4) and “March of the Dwarfs” (“Troldtog”; Lyric Pieces op. 54, no. 3), and these were followed by choral arrangements of Peer Gynt Suite compositions. The programme ended with From Holberg’s Time (Fra Holberg’s tid), op. 40, billed as Suite in Olden Style, performed by a string ensemble of young players. ²⁴

Grieg’s “Norwegian Bridal Procession” (“Brudefølget drager forbi”; Folkelivsbilleder, op. 19, no. 2), was noted as having been performed at the 22 January 1920 meeting of the Ebell Club, ²⁵ and the song “In a Boat” (“Der gynger en Båd på Bølge”; 5 Songs op. 69, no. 1), among several other pieces by Grieg and other European composers, was noted as having been performed on 21 February 1929 at the Thursday Morning Music Club’s meeting. ²⁶ In addition, other compositions by Grieg performed by the Long Beach Municipal Band—in the above mentioned 1929 afternoon and evening concerts ²⁷—included “Huldigung’s March” (“Hyldningsmarsj”) from Sigurd Jorsalfar, four Norwegian Dances from “the suite called ‘Northern Dances and Folk Songs’” (25 Norske folkeviser og danser, op. 17, which was written for piano, so apparently band arrangements were made), the third and fourth sections of Peer Gynt Suite No. 2—“A Stormy Evening on the Coast” (“Peer Gynts hjemfart” [“Peer Gynt’s Homecoming”]) and “Solvejg’s Song” (“Solveigs sang”)—and “Last Spring” (“Våren”; To elegiske melodier, op. 34, no. 2).

Importantly, recordings of Grieg’s music were available for the Knabe Ampico Reproducing Piano, and on 78 rpm discs available from Columbia Records. Listen to audio example 5, containing the Australian pianist and composer Percy Grainger’s 1921 recording of Grieg’s “Wedding Day at Troldhaugen” (“Bryllupsdag på Troldhaugen”; Lyric Pieces op. 65, no. 6).

Audio example 5. Grieg’s “Wedding Day at Troldhaugen,” performed by Percy Grainger (1921). ²⁸

The much older Grieg, apparently a strong supporter of Grainger, and a good friend, ²⁹ also seems—as a personality—to have been of particular interest to Los Angeles newspaper readers, perhaps suggesting he was accompanied by a wisp of exoticism and curious “otherness.” In March 1928, the well-established Grieg Group of the Woman’s Music Club presented, as a fundraising event, a dazzlingly elaborate “Oriental program.” Members wore historical Japanese costumes and a Chinese chef was engaged. The wide-ranging set of compositions heard included one song by Grieg, “The First Primrose” (“Med en primula veris”; 5 Songs op. 26, no. 4). ³⁰

A month earlier, the Burbank Daily Evening Review determined that a gift of sealed packages of Grieg’s correspondence to a library in Bergen would be of interest to its readers. ³¹

Several years earlier, in December 1925, an evocative article describing Grieg’s development as a composer portrayed Norway as “a wildly beautiful country with bleak mountains rising straight from the sea. In the Winter the deep fjords stretch out like icy fingers to grasp their prey. This season is long and the peasants gather around the fire and tell stories of elves and mermaids.” ³² The article ends with a poetically imaginative description of Grieg’s piano composition “To Spring”:

Percy Grainger had recorded Grieg’s “To Spring” in 1919. ³⁴ And, in 1923, a performance by Metta Merrill Purinton of a violin arrangement of “To Spring” was featured in a concert that included several songs performed by her cousin Phoebe Harvey James (audio example 6). ³⁵

Audio example 6. See player for recording details. ³⁶

Alongside an interest in Edvard Grieg and other well-known European composers, Los Angeles newspapers recorded that Phoebe and her colleagues played music by about twice as many not-so-well-known composers, both men and women, many of whom lived in Los Angeles. ³⁷ Newspaper accounts mention Phoebe Harvey (not yet James) singing “A Bowl of Roses” by Robert Coningsby Clarke and “Haymaking” by Alicia Adélaide Needham, and her sister Margaret Harvey singing “Dein” by Carl Bohm. ³⁸

Reported performances by other musicians included “Leggero, invisible” by Luigi Arditi, “Lo, here the gentle lark” by Henry Rowley Bishop, “Just a-wearyin’ for you” by Carrie Jacobs-Bond, “Angus MacDonald” by Joseph Leopold Röckel, and “Yesterday and Today” by C. G. Spross (audio example 7).

Audio example 7. See player for recording details. ³⁹

Also noted were “A des oiseaux” by Georges Adolphe Hüe, “The Cuckoo” by Liza Lehmann, the Fifth Nocturne of Ignace Xavier Joseph Leybach, and “Down in the Forest” by Landon Ronald (audio example 8).

Audio example 8. See player for recording details. Playback help

A final group of performance notices is of particular interest, because the composers and/or the specific compositions featured are not now widely known. For this reason, these people and their music may draw us more closely into corners of musical life peculiar to Los Angeles in the early twentieth century, raising many questions, and perhaps emitting glimmers of enlightenment. They include “In Solitude” (“In der Einsamkeit”; 12 Genrestücke, op. 17, no. 4) by Ede Poldini, several instrumental compositions by Florence Jones, ⁴⁰ “Delight” by Isidore Luckstone, “Beyond the Meadow Gate” by Wilfred Ernest Sanderson, “My Soul Shall Sing” by Roy Lamont Smith, “June” by Charles Ferry, “O Golden Sun” by Grace Freebey, “The Mother Heart” by Samuel Richards Gaines, and “By the Weeping Waters” by Thurlow Lieurance (video example 1). ⁴¹

Video example 1. Thurlow Lieurance, “By the Weeping Waters,” performed by Thurlow Lieurance (piano) and Hubert Small (flute), recorded 1917.

Catherine Parsons Smith’s Making Music in Los Angeles contains lists of still more European and American composers, whose music was performed a decade earlier by the notable, though short-lived, People’s Orchestra (1912–13). ⁴² This orchestra was launched by members of the Southern California Music Teachers’ Association (SCMTA), organised in 1910. Many women served as both leaders and members of this activist organisation (which excluded businessmen), and by the 1920s the group had grown to 650 members. ⁴³

The mission of the SCMTA was to “promote Public Concerts at popular prices for the general public and School Children in particular—to be given by Orchestras, Bands, Vocalists and instrumentalists, performing the best class of music: resulting in a general and wholesome Musical uplift and influence on citizenship.” ⁴⁴ Although the People’s Orchestra hoped to attract listeners who were not necessarily regular orchestra-music audience members, the orchestra was nevertheless viewed as a competitor by the Los Angeles Symphony. The SCMTA attempted to resolve this situation through a printed clarification of its intentions:

To “play the people’s music to the people,” the People’s Orchestra performed music in the same vein as the compositions Phoebe Harvey James and her colleagues would later present in women’s music clubs and in local Los Angeles venues. As we have seen, this music included relatively familiar European works alongside music by Los Angeles composers, and it included a significant number of works by women composers. Local musicians were engaged as performers. ⁴⁶

Smith explains:

Within the thirty concerts performed by the People’s Orchestra, the most frequently heard composers were Richard Wagner—mostly Tannhäuser and Lohengrin excerpts—whose music was performed at every concert, and Giuseppe Verdi, whose music was heard in twenty-four concerts. The most popular composers with fewer than twenty-four performances were Camille Saint-Saëns, Jules Massenet, Felix Mendelssohn, Victor Herbert, Edvard Grieg, and Gioachino Rossini.

The popularity of specific compositions is shown by how frequently they were performed (table 1).

Table 1. Popularity of specific compositions at People’s Orchestra concerts. Data from Smith, Making Music, 109. ⁴⁸

Catherine Smith’s insights bring to light ways in which people understood specific pieces of music, clarifying the orchestra’s motivation for its repertoire choices: “Brahms’s Tragic overture was criticized as too heavy … Beethoven and Mozart were represented by overtures; Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, chosen by a soloist, was seen as exotic and referred to in the Express as ‘an early German writing.’” ⁴⁹

Taking these attitudes to heart, “people’s music” welcomed a wide latitude of instrumentation and timbral colour, while at the same time sidestepping contrapuntal and multi-layered structures, choosing instead lyrical melodies with integrated, supportive accompaniments.

In parallel with the People’s Orchestra’s 1912–13 concerts, Phoebe James (then Phoebe Harvey) was just beginning to perform as a pianist, accompanying her older sister—the up-and-coming singer Margaret Harvey—at private parties (in a report about one of which the very young John Cage is mentioned) and at least one wedding. ⁵⁰ And, as she gradually became a regular participant in the Lincoln Study Club’s programmes, Phoebe Harvey also began performing at other women’s music clubs and around town at social and civic functions. ⁵¹ The music called “intermediate classics” ⁵² by the People’s Orchestra’s supporters—the music Phoebe Harvey James was introduced to at the beginning of her performing career—seems to have become the music through which she came to express herself, successfully, as a well-known, accomplished musician. And, reasoning from this set of circumstances, it seems likely that it was also the music she drew from in her work as a piano teacher.

Within the years leading up to World War I (1914), the social and cultural landscape that fostered the “people’s music” of Los Angeles, and of multiple other American cities, was complicated by several simultaneously emerging movements. For listeners, a fast-developing “new commercial entertainment industry” introduced multiple alternatives to the standard German and Austrian symphonic music (and its steep, upper-class-focused ticket prices). At the same time, immigrants from many parts of the world entered the city, drawn by jobs unleashed during the so-called Second Industrial Revolution. Movements aimed toward progressive economic and political reform grew up to address dismal working conditions and to assist transplanted people in finding their way into a life in America. Increasing numbers of actively involved women amplified these movements, and the presence of all these different people diversified both the interests and the financial status of music and music theatre audiences.

One result of these dramatic changes was the emergence of a split between musical performances intended for elite audiences and those aimed at the rest of the population—a split that grew increasingly deeper as commercial entertainment and progressive, diversifying ventures expanded their reach. ⁵³

The Los Angeles People’s Orchestra (and similar orchestras in other American cities) was only one instance of multiple attempts to span this intensifying chasm within the United States. Questions began to be asked about how European symphonic music might be reshaped to interest a wider public, and, well … what about fashioning an “American” music? ⁵⁴

Through her musical choices, it seems that Phoebe Harvey James would have been a strong supporter and maker of music bound up with an early twentieth-century American progressive devotion to democracy and inclusion (in the clearly limited ways that these ideas were understood at that time). ⁵⁵ This music required a turning away from elitist musical activity (again, as it was understood at that time); and, according to John Cage’s own characterisation of his early piano study with his “Aunt Phoebe,” it resulted in at least a partial estrangement from “the masters” of nineteenth-century music. ⁵⁶

A surrounding musical environment

The assortment of specific musical activities in early twentieth-century Los Angeles was dynamic and extensive. The 1915 production of Fairyland is one of a subset of events through which we might sketch aspects of the constantly changing musical and social environment surrounding Phoebe Harvey James, and, later, her nephew John Cage as he began to become familiar with the city’s local musical communities.

Fairyland was written by the well-known composer Horatio Parker, a Yale professor and, notably, composer Charles Ives’s teacher. Its cast included the Creek and Cherokee soprano Tsianina Redfeather Blackstone, ⁵⁸ a friend of the similarly well-known composer Charles Wakefield Cadman—both Blackstone and Cadman were very active in the musical life of Los Angeles at that time. ⁵⁹

Many California-composed operatic works followed Fairyland. Phoebe Harvey James’s performances as a singer in these productions included travel to the San Francisco area for an encore solo performance in The Soul of the Sequoia, staged in the summer of 1919 at what is now Big Basin Redwoods State Park. ⁶⁰

The following year in Los Angeles brought a concert, on 28 May 1920, sponsored by the Woman’s Lyric Club, ⁶¹ another of the large and thriving community of women’s clubs in Los Angeles in which we earlier found performances by Phoebe Harvey James. These ubiquitous clubs regularly staged semi-professional musical and theatrical performances by and for their members. They also invited professional performers to take part in their programmes, and, in this way, they provided opportunities for up-and-coming musicians to develop their performance skills and to forge connections within the larger Los Angeles musical community. ⁶² Local newspapers regularly covered the activities of women’s clubs on their “society pages,” listing forthcoming performances and reviewing the details of recent events. ⁶³

Held in a large auditorium, the Lyric Club’s concert featured the astounding Los Angeles virtuoso pianist Olga Steeb (1890–1941). Just a few years older than Phoebe Harvey James, she had left California in 1909 to study in Berlin, and eventually to perform throughout Europe with extraordinary success. Olga Steeb returned to Los Angeles in 1915 and was asked to lead the piano department at the University of Redlands, and, later, at the University of Southern California. While living in Los Angeles, she continued to give concerts, performing with the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as well as in New York City and other locations throughout the United States. ⁶⁴

According to a Los Angeles Times review, ⁶⁵ as part of the Woman’s Lyric Club concert, Olga Steeb performed several compositions by Frédéric Chopin, and “On Wings of Song” by Felix Mendelssohn in Liszt’s arrangement for solo piano. ⁶⁶ The programme included further compositions that fit easily into the genre pursued by Phoebe Harvey James’s circle and members of the Southern California Music Teachers’ Association. “When the Land was White with Moonlight” by the American composer Ethelbert Nevin was performed, ⁶⁷ and a choral composition called The Leprechaun, by Welsh composer Bryceson Treharne, was sung by a chorus of Woman’s Lyric Club members. ⁶⁸

In 1923 (the year of ten-year-old John Cage’s KHJ radio performance), Olga Steeb opened her own school, which was, according to Catherine Smith, “the largest and most consistently successful of the many private conservatories that operated in Los Angeles during the 1920s and 1930s.” ⁶⁹ Olga Steeb’s support of a production of the American opera Narcissa, by West Coast composer Mary Carr Moore, is one illustration of her interest in the development of new music at this time. ⁷⁰

These musical happenings were accompanied in 1922 by the opening of the Hollywood Bowl with its inaugural concert series “Symphonies Under the Stars.” Founded on the idea of “democratising music,” its enormous capacity, low ticket prices, and audacious placement outdoors—so near to some Los Angeles neighbourhoods that people could conveniently walk over to listen to concerts—altogether displayed its mission. ⁷¹

Olin Downes, music critic for the New York Times, visited the Hollywood Bowl several years later and remarked that the concerts

In the fall of 1922, the experimental composer Henry Cowell gave several “modern interpretive recitals,” ⁷³ apparently at the Theosophist group Krotona’s Hollywood Hills location; ⁷⁴ and, in 1925, his New Music Society gave its first programme, with compositions by Darius Milhaud, Carl Ruggles, Feodor Kolin, Leo Ornstein, Arnold Schoenberg, and Dane Rudhyar. ⁷⁵ In 1928 Aaron Copland’s Concerto for Piano was performed at the Hollywood Bowl. And, after Arnold Schoenberg arrived in Los Angeles in 1934 and began to teach at USC, Olga Steeb performed musical examples for his first lectures in 1935. ⁷⁶

Olga Steeb’s career itself illustrates a potential for the forging of distinct, individual pathways within the intricacies of early twentieth-century musical Los Angeles. As a virtuoso pianist, the performance of any kind of music was open to her, and Steeb’s orchestral and solo performances of Ludwig van Beethoven and other “serious” European composers found her situated within the “elite” layer of Los Angeles’s musical society. However, as a teacher and owner of her own music school, she was also affiliated with the very large group of music teachers whose livelihoods overlapped Phoebe Harvey James’s progressive and inclusively oriented musical world (again, “inclusive” with clear limitations). At the same time, Olga Steeb supported composer Mary Carr Moore and investigated Arnold Schoenberg’s “new” music.

Her career also demonstrates how the multiple musical layers of Los Angeles society might have intersected and interacted, and how an individual might have occupied and moved among several layers simultaneously.

This multifarious Los Angeles musical world, which surrounded the young John Cage, embraced virtuosos, “people’s music” adherents, and venturers into the “new”—and these layers, of course, flourished alongside numerous wonderfully and stylistically diverse others. Phoebe Harvey James’s performances and her teaching of music that “all the world loves to play” were almost certainly rooted in nineteenth-century European-American Romanticism’s musical “expressivity.” 

This well-known performance practice, based on tempo rubato (translated from its Italian to English as “stolen time”), is characterised by a focus on carefully and improvisationally shaping and articulating musical phrases in time. Balance is key. And so is intention: “if [the performer] desires his interpretations to be logical, appropriate, artistic, he must submit the music he desires to interpret to a detailed and careful analysis. He must analyze its rhythm, its motival construction, its phrasing, its structural form as a whole, its emotional characteristics; for upon such a correct analysis the right application of rubato depends.” ⁷⁷ This raises the question of how much functional analysis a performer might actually delve into: “Although analytical understanding of a work can inform performers with regards to their approach to musical structure, it offers little insight in terms of nuances of style that are largely absent from the score.” ⁷⁸

J. Alfred Johnstone, in his 1920 book Rubato, identifies the “underlying principle of rubato in music” to be “the idea of progressive movement to and from a climax.” ⁷⁹ And, “the feeling of a progressive movement in the rhythm and the phrasing from weak to strong, from an unimportant to an important point, is the fundamental basis of the idea of an appropriate rubato.” ⁸⁰ Johnstone emphasises the importance of unique interpretations, within limits, which means that no real “standard” performance practice exists, other than one bounded by a strictly metrical performance (not enough time is “stolen”) and a performance in which, by exaggeratedly slowing down, so much time is stolen that it can be made up only by exaggeratedly speeding up, if it can be entirely made up at all.

Simultaneously, however, alongside this deep affinity for musical Romanticism, the recent departure of the nineteenth century itself suggested a “new” and “American” music. “American” operas, and the Hollywood Bowl’s progressive, “democratised” listening space, pointed away from the counterpoint and multi-layered musical structures of Johann Sebastian Bach, Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, intentionally embarking on a path toward the goals of building music around prominent, tonally-based melodies, whose virtually unlimited possibilities focused on the adoption of structures familiar to a broader population of listeners. From a different perspective, but in parallel with these other musical sensibilities, Cowell, Copland, and Schoenberg were each forging disparately “new” conceptions of what and how music itself is or could be. ⁸¹

And, following on from these new ventures, in the 9 May 1932 edition of the Los Angeles Evening Post-Record we find a notice that John Cage was to perform the next day, as a pianist, at the Lincoln Study Club (whose president was his mother, Lucretia Cage), accompanying Phoebe Harvey James’s singing of a group of French songs by modern composers (figure 4). ⁸²

Figure 4. Newspaper announcement of John Cage’s performance the following day. From “Talented Youth Lincoln Guest,” Los Angeles Evening Post-Record,9 May 1932, 8. Source: Newspapers.com.

A question now is, how might these multiple layers perhaps illuminate, and maybe even articulate, specific artistic and musical sensibilities and possibilities—spurred by the energetic activities of his Aunt Phoebe—that were later on investigated by John Cage, pianist … and composer.

A time-wise analysis of Edvard Grieg’s performance of “To Spring” (“Til våren”)

Cage often mentioned his early interest in the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg’s music. ⁸⁴ Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite was one of the most frequently performed compositions by the Los Angeles People’s Orchestra, and, because he was an early adopter of sound recording technologies, Grieg’s recordings, in multiple formats, were available throughout the world in the early decades of the twentieth century. His piano composition “To Spring,” which he performed and recorded, appears to have been distributed by the Victor Company and would have been available in the United States. As a young student, did Phoebe Harvey James listen to these recordings? And, later on, did she play them for John Cage?

Grieg recorded his piano solo “To Spring” (“Til våren,” the sixth of his 1886 Lyric Pieces, op. 43), along with several of his other compositions, between 2 and 3 May 1903 in Paris as a ten-inch single-sided 78 rpm disk for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company (see table 2). He also recorded “To Spring” at his home, Troldhaugen, in Bergen, Norway (in September 1904), for the Aeolian Company’s sixty-five-note Metrostyle System. This machine was attached directly to a piano and recorded its performances on a player-piano roll.

Table 2. Grieg’s disk and piano roll recordings made from 1903 to 1906. ⁸⁵

Although piano roll playback recordings of several of Grieg’s compositions are available, I have unfortunately not yet found a playback recording of “To Spring.” However, a digitally remastered recording of the Gramophone & Typewriter Company’s single-sided disk is available.

Grieg’s rendering of his composition retains the typical nineteenth-century tempo rubato performance practice, demonstrating a restrained yet inventive and flexible approach toward the interpretation of tempo. He employs changes in tempo specifically as a technique for shaping phrases, and he takes liberties with his notated tempo markings in ways that have become emblematic features of nineteenth-century performance practice. ⁸⁶

Audio example 9 contains the first thirty-second segment of this short and very lively, spirited composition. Its performance on a shellac disk, with the characteristic accompanying noisiness produced by the contact of the needle with the grooves of the disk, invites us to eavesdrop on the experiences of listening enjoyed by those living in the early years of the twentieth century.

Audio example 9. The first thirty seconds of Edvard Grieg playing “To Spring,” from Grieg’s 1903 recording. Reissued on Chasing the Butterfly (Simax Classics, 2010). ⁸⁷ Used by kind permission.

Figure 5 illustrates, to some extent, the changes in loudness, pitch, and timbre of a 3.5-second segment of Grieg’s recording. Its upper image is a “waveform” plot of the relative loudness of Grieg’s performance recording over time. Its lower image is a spectrogram plot, which provides a way to observe the specific times at which notes begin. It also illustrates the relative pitch and overtone structure of the composition’s piano sounds.

The lowest, dark, horizontal lines shown in the spectrogram plot the fundamental frequencies (the perceived pitches) of the piano notes of the composition’s melody.

Figure 5. Waveform and spectrogram plots of a segment of Grieg’s performance of “To Spring” for solo piano. The left edge of each blue box measures the start time of each note.

The parallel, somewhat wavy, horizontal lines above these fundamental frequencies plot the right-hand repeated chords that accompany the melody. In this recording, we measure the time at which the fundamental frequency of each note begins by the left edge of each of the blue boxes marked on the spectrogram. Information about spectrographic analysis and details about musical analysis procedures can be found in the appendix.

Video example 2 shows spectrogram and waveform plots of the first thirty seconds of Grieg’s performance as it moves through time.

Video example 2. Video of waveform and spectrogram plots of the first thirty seconds of Edvard Grieg’s performance of “To Spring” for solo piano. The left edge of each blue box measures the start time of each note.

I have used timing information from the measurements I’ve made on the spectrogram to compare Grieg’s printed rhythmic notation of “To Spring” to his performed rhythmic use of time and to his construction of phrases during his performance.

Figures 6 to 9 illustrate Grieg’s rhythmical shaping of note values in his performance of the first phrase of “To Spring.” In video example 2, this information is accompanied by a recording of Grieg’s performance.

The upper image in each of these figures is a printed, notated line of Grieg’s score. Beneath the printed notation is an analysis figure comparing:

a) the timing of Grieg’s performance of the left hand’s melody (blue circles); 
b) the timing indicated in Grieg’s printed notation (orange circles); and,
c) a steady dotted-half-note beat (the grey circles on the lowest line).

I’ve lined up the orange circles representing the notation’s timing of the left hand’s melody with the printed notation of the melody above it.

The locations of the blue circles are based on timings of Grieg’s performance of the composition’s melody. These locations are based on my spectrogram measurements.

Because Grieg does not follow the tempo marking notated in his printed score, this analysis is not based on Grieg’s tempo marking itself. Instead, the analysis uses a dotted-half-note value derived from my measurements of Grieg’s performed tempo. ⁸⁸

Figure 6. Analysis of Grieg’s rhythmic shaping of note values for the first phrase of “To Spring.”

Figure 7 illustrates that Grieg is just ahead of the printed notated rhythmic timing as he plays the second phrase of “To Spring.”

Figure 7. Analysis of Grieg’s rhythmic shaping of note values in the second phrase of “To Spring.”

By exaggerating the shorter rhythmic values in his printed notation—of the third phrase and of the first part of the fourth phrase (shown in figure 8 below)—Grieg injects rhythmic clarity into the music’s overall phrase structure.

Figure 8. Analysis of Grieg’s rhythmic shaping of note values for the third phrase and the start of the fourth phrase of “To Spring.”

The analysis shown in figure 9 suggests that, as a general feature of Grieg’s performance practice, some kind of amplification scaling process may be at work. That is, Grieg appears to employ a tendency towards shortening his printed notation’s relatively short note values, and towards lengthening his printed notation’s relatively long values.

Grieg’s performed rhythmic alterations function as a way to clarify the overall phrase structure of the composition. His use of rhythm in performance builds temporal contrast between phrases, emphasising the unique pitch and dynamic characteristics of each individual phrase.

Figure 9. Analysis of Grieg’s rhythmic shaping of note values for the final measures of the first section of “To Spring.”

Because he chooses—in performance—to rhythmically alter his own notated music, Grieg seems interested in including his own impressions of experiences beyond those represented by his printed music notation.

Indeed, Grieg seems to be working to remember, and to articulate, directly—and within the here-and-now moments of his performance—the physical sensations and emotional responses evoking his own perceptual experience of spring. My sense is that Grieg’s memory of these experiences informs his specific approach to the use of rubato in shaping the temporal trajectory of each phrase.

Recent scholarship, including that by Arnulf Christian Mattes, professor and head of the Grieg Research Centre at the University of Bergen, interestingly provides substantial support for this interpretation.

Mattes describes Grieg’s recordings of his own works as reflections of an aspect of the nineteenth-century European “aesthetic conception of music as musical poetry.” ⁸⁹ He suggests that Grieg’s performances mirror an approach developed and articulated by Grieg’s (apparently) very close colleague, the Nobel Prize–winning Norwegian writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.

Bjørnson’s work focused on illustrating Norwegian cultural life from a perspective encompassing “literary, ethnographic, and … sociological investigations into the full range of societal relationships.” ⁹⁰ From Mattes’s perspective, Grieg’s shaping of his own music in time embodies this kind of qualitative—almost scientific—perceptual observation of the activities it depicts, acknowledging them as embedded in a “broader cultural-intellectual context.” ⁹¹

Mattes explains Grieg’s employment of rhythmical flexibility in his recorded performance of “Norwegian Bridal Procession” (Brudefølget drar forbi), op. 19, no. 2, as an intentional depiction of the characteristically imprecise movements of people, while they are parading together as participants in a marriage celebration: “this specific use of rhythmic irregularities might possibly refer to the poetic idea of the ‘Norwegian Bridal Procession,’ captured as a musical analogy to a defining moment of Norwegian folk life, the wedding, and the motion of the people falling behind during the procession, trying to recover lost time, or rushing too much, slowing down and trying to fall into the regular march rhythm again.” ⁹²

A time-wise analysis of John Cage’s performance of the fourth movement of Amores

Cage continued his piano study into the 1930s as a student of composer and pianist Fannie Charles Dillon (figure 10) while he was likely at Los Angeles High School, or perhaps at Pomona College. ⁹⁴ Also, for a short time, and mostly focused on composition, Cage apparently studied with the well-known Los Angeles concert pianist Richard Buhlig (figure 11). ⁹⁵ Buhlig was a specialist in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, he had been a teacher of Henry Cowell, and he was instrumental in bringing Cage’s future pianist colleague, the virtuoso Grete Sultan, from Berlin to Los Angeles. ⁹⁶

Figure 10. Pianist and composer Fannie Charles Dillon. Reproduced from Jane Catherwood, “Los Angeles Reviews Its Late Musical Activities,” Musical Courier 71, no. 4 (28 July 1915), 10.

Figure 11. Richard Buhlig, American concert pianist, 1930. Johan Hagemeyer photograph collection, © The Regents of the University of California, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. This work is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.

Beginning in 1933 ⁹⁷ and for the next forty years, as a pianist, Cage accompanied innumerable dance rehearsals and performances and employed the sight-reading skills he often mentioned that he had developed during his studies with Phoebe Harvey James. ⁹⁸ He also played his own compositions, as well as pieces by other composers, as accompaniments for dance and in numerous concerts, often performing as a duet or two-piano partner.

Cage played pieces for both conventional and prepared pianos, and he was involved in a broad range of experiences and experiments with, and extensions of, conventional piano techniques. At the end of the 1940s, dancer Jean Erdman introduced Cage to the pianist David Tudor, and from then on the two often performed together. ⁹⁹ Cage also performed with other expert pianists, including Maro Ajemian, William Masselos, ¹⁰⁰ and the previously mentioned Grete Sultan.

Cage composed his first prepared piano piece, Bacchanale, for a dance by Syvilla Fort that was premiered in Seattle in February 1940. Subsequently, Cage’s technical ability as a pianist allowed him to navigate the challenges of his compositions The Perilous Night, written in 1944, and the Sonatas and Interludes, written between 1946 and 1948. ¹⁰¹

Cage worked closely with the composer and electronic music pioneer Gordon Mumma during their long-term mutual association with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (1966 to 1974). Mumma has written an intimate and lively portrait of Cage as a performer—he describes Cage’s performance of Erik Satie’s Three Nocturnes as “lyrical, gently liquid rather than markedly articulated, and with a subtle lilt like a barely perceptible perfume.” ¹⁰²

We are fortunate to have a recording of John Cage performing his 1943 composition Amores, whose first and last movements are written for prepared piano. Cage stipulates very specifically in his instructions that the notation of Amores does not agree necessarily with its intended rhythmic timing, but, instead, that “the notation given facilitates phrase-reading”:

These instructions mirror the disconnect between Grieg’s printed notated rhythm and his rhythmic shaping of individual phrases in performance. Perhaps we might understand Cage’s “phrase-reading” as reflecting Arnulf Mattes’s idea (about Grieg’s piano playing) that the use of a flexible tempo can function as a means of elucidating sonic and structural characteristics built into individual musical statements.

Audio example 10, below, is a recording of the short first movement of Amores for prepared piano solo performed by John Cage.

Near the beginning, multiple instances of the same prepared pitches, at varying dynamic levels, sound significantly different. These distinctions among the sounds of prepared piano pitches at different dynamic levels suggest that Cage was perhaps interested in developing musical ways to elucidate the details of each sound’s sonic trajectory.

At the end of the recording, listen for Cage’s use of a slight rubato, suggesting a connection between his performance of this 1943 composition and characteristics of nineteenth-century European and American “Romantic” piano performance practice. ¹⁰⁴

Audio example 10. The first movement of Amores (1943), performed by John Cage, released in 1961. ¹⁰⁵ Playback help

Figure 12 illustrates Cage’s alteration of specific piano pitches, using rubber mutes, bolts, and screws with or without loose nuts attached, in the final twenty measures of the fourth movement of Amores. The music directly echoes and elaborates the final two measures of movement 1 (audio example 10), using multiple layers of repeated material, at several different—but rhythmically-related—time scales: three repeated measures are followed by a different set of three repeated measures, which are followed by a third set of four repeated measures. This total of 3 + 3 + 4 = 10 measures is then simply repeated in its entirety. Importantly, in connection with the idea that Cage may be specifically interested in capturing and presenting the trajectories of individual sounds, the dynamic markings in the first part of each of the two ten-measure segments are not the same.

Figure 12. The final twenty measures of Amores, movement 4, with preparations identified by coloured noteheads: yellow—rubber mute; orange—bolt; red—screw; blue—screw and loose nut.

Audio example 11 contains John Cage’s recording of the fourth movement of Amores; please listen in particular to the final twenty measures.

Audio example 11. The fourth movement of Amores (1943), performed by John Cage, released in 1961; the final twenty measures begin at 3:08. ¹⁰⁶ Playback help

Figure 13 shows results from an analysis undertaken using the same approach as the rhythmic analysis of Edvard Grieg’s performance of his composition “To Spring.” The upper image is Cage’s printed score. Colours indicate the type of piano preparation applied to specific notes. Beneath the printed score is a comparison of:

a) the timing of Cage’s performance (blue circles);
b) the timing indicated in Cage’s notation (orange circles); and,
c) a steady quarter-note beat (the grey circles on the lowest line).

I’ve lined up the orange circles representing the printed notation’s timing with the printed notation of the composition above it. The blue circles follow the timings of John Cage’s performance, based on my spectrogram measurements.

Figure 13. Amores, movement 4, for prepared piano. Rhythmic analysis: blue dots—Cage’s rhythmic performance; orange dots—Amores rhythmic notation; lavender and yellow dots—steady four beats per measure. Preparation materials are identified by colored noteheads: yellow—rubber mute; orange—bolt; red—screw; blue—screw and loose nut.

I’d like to suggest that Cage, like Grieg, alters the rhythmic value of specific notes in performance because he wants to articulate and emphasise phrase groupings. In Amores, the resonances of individual prepared piano notes last for different lengths of time. Sounds with longer resonances need time for all their trajectories to be heard.

If the resonant trajectories of individual sounds were understood to be the focus of the musical phrases in Amores, the performer would need to carefully place sounds so that the end of the resonance of one sound would not be interrupted by the start of another sound. An intentional placement by the performer of sounds, independently in time, would seem to be a requirement for the articulation of each musical phrase as it unfolds and is determined during its performance.

Cage’s performed tempo is about half the speed of the printed notation’s metronome marking—or even slower. The notation’s metronome marking is quarter note = 120. So, a quarter note should last about half a second. In Cage’s performance, the average quarter-note time value is almost 0.8 seconds, closer to a quarter note at metronome marking = 60.

During his performance, Cage’s interpretation of the time value of two eighth notes varies significantly from his interpretation of the time value of a single quarter note: his performance of a single quarter note is often twice as long as his performance of two eighth notes. However, interestingly, Cage does steadily adhere to a consistent length of time overall for each four-quarter-note measure.

Low-frequency sounds prepared with bolts inserted between the strings decay more slowly than higher frequency sounds prepared with rubber or screws. Because of this, these low-frequency prepared sounds require more time for the complete duration of the sound’s resonance to be heard. In his performance, Cage clearly departs from his printed notation to lengthen, albeit relatively slightly, the phrases containing low-frequency sounds prepared using bolts.

However, by speeding up his performance of sounds with shorter decay times, Cage ends up (rather stunningly), by the last measure of the composition, in synchrony with the printed notation of Amores. He has, as we have suggested, achieved a clear balance in his use of rubato.

Again, Cage consistently observes the notated time lengths of measures, each of which contains a single phrase. Echoing Grieg, Cage’s rather radical departure from his notated timing occurs within phrases. Interestingly, in Cage’s case, by identifying and clarifying his notion of “phrase-reading” in the printed notation of Amores, Cage articulates that this departure is clearly intended as a feature of the composition:

Conclusions and interconnections

Figure 14. Spectrograms: Top, Amores, by John Cage; bottom, “To Spring,” by Edvard Grieg.

Figure 14 illustrates the sounds of about ten seconds of Edvard Grieg’s “To Spring,” as he performed it on an unprepared piano. Above it is an image of the first ten seconds of John Cage’s performance of Amores, movement 1, for prepared piano.

Both composers are concerned with phrases. Grieg’s phrases are built from relatively uniform sounds, whose salient phrase-making characteristics are pitch and dynamics (that is, frequency and amplitude). Cage’s phrases are built from collections of highly variable sounds, whose salient phrase-making characteristic is precisely that variability—each sound embarks on its own unique trajectory through time.

I have suggested links between Grieg’s focus on his own personal, unique, time-varying, subjective shaping of sounds into phrases and Cage’s attention to the unique, time-varying, acoustic characteristics of independent sounds.

John Cage declared, while exploring nineteenth-century music as a young pianist, that he especially loved Edvard Grieg’s late-Romantic, “expressive” compositions. Arnulf Mattes has pointed to Grieg’s distinct perceptual perspective towards an expressive interpretation of his music. Grieg’s motivation for his tempo alterations in “To Spring” may be understood as a response (through rhythm and dynamics) to a sensual memory of perceptions experienced in springtime: its angles of sunlight, images, sounds, smells, and the body’s sensations as it experiences the atmosphere of its surroundings. All these are observed and perceived through the body’s physical senses. What are the details of the movement one notices (and feels), walking along within a wedding procession, or standing and quietly observing a butterfly?

It seems Grieg’s music intersects the musical interests of both Phoebe Harvey James and John Cage. As we have seen, the performance of Grieg’s compositions, particularly in the years from 1920 to 1929 in Los Angeles, formed a piece of the project surrounding James, in which she was lodged (socially, at least). This project attempted to expand access to orchestral music as part of a general interest at the time in “the democratisation of music.” Accomplishment of this seems to have required a turning away from music perceived in early twentieth-century Los Angeles to be “elitist”—music that included compositions by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart. ¹⁰⁸

At the same time, Grieg’s “expressive” performance—his alteration of tempo markings through improvisation—appears, as we’ve seen, to be intended to embody some of the details of movement and motivation he observed within the lived events he endeavoured to depict in his music. During his performance, Grieg seems to have drawn on these observations as sources of an externally applied shaping of sound in time.

While playing Edvard Grieg’s music and participating in Phoebe Harvey James’s mostly nineteenth-century-inspired musical world, it seems likely that John Cage would have experienced the interpretive practice of external phrase-shaping. From this perspective, he might be understood to have worked to keep hold of Grieg’s sense of musical expression, while at the same time turning the external-shaping practice inside out. Using prepared piano sounds, his music constructs ways to facilitate a performer’s observation of each sound’s own internal musical expression, as it shapes itself in time and in response to its production by a performer.

In closely related ways, Edvard Grieg and John Cage observe the “real world” and, simultaneously, use specific details of musical time to evoke that world. They are both also concerned with subjective expression—with music as a sensual experience.

Cage seems to imply that if a composition lacks “sensual appeal” and “expressive power” (pointing to his own discarded early pieces), it is not useful; expression is essential to music. ¹⁰⁹ Might he be responding to his early love of Grieg’s music, by making compositions in which sounds themselves—independent, individual sounds—are presented in ways that show each to be expressive of itself?

The prepared piano can be understood to embody a collection of individual, complicated sounds, each with its own trajectory, and each dependent for the details of its characteristics on how its sound is produced by the person playing the piano. That is, the preparations amplify the response of the piano to the technique and approach of the pianist, as that person produces sounds that are soft or loud or short or long. However, the same placements of the same piano-preparation materials on different pianos result in different collections of sounds. This is a problem, and it was a problem for Cage, particularly as time went on and his music for prepared piano began to be performed by other pianists. ¹¹⁰

Cage’s 1943 solution to this problem was to extend—to the performer—the responsibility for determining the sounds of the music of Amores, indicating that the prepared piano is to be, distinctively, an instrument “invented” by the person who prepares it and who plays it. That is, since one’s performance of a prepared-piano composition cannot be about the specific sounds Cage had in mind, it must instead be about a perception of the sounds that actually do happen, in response to the actions of the pianist, during the action of performing the music.

In this way, Cage departs from contemporary turn-of-the-century composers, including Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, for instance, who had also been working to integrate timbre more existentially into their music (as did Grieg himself). Perhaps beyond, or in addition to, focusing on melody and accompaniment structures, Cage, in pursuit himself of a “democratising music,” foregrounded the unique acoustics of individual sound trajectories—so much so that the performer is instructed to use an apprehension of those trajectories as a performance instruction—as a way to explore the universal and fundamental perception of sound itself.

And, perhaps, at the same time, as John Cage also seems to have turned away from working with patterned collections of sounds intended to be “interpreted” (in a nineteenth-century musical sense), he nonetheless kept hold of a delight and a fascination with the spirited properties and intentions of Edvard Grieg’s nineteenth-century musicality. ¹¹¹

Cage’s early piano-playing experiences were followed, in Seattle, at the Cornish School, by his composition of music for dance. His piano preparation experiments, which led later to his composition of Amores, began there in earnest, with Cage’s own piano playing serving the economic and practical purpose of supplying a needed performer for his own music. At the same time, Cage regularly arranged to have other, more formally accomplished pianists perform his compositions, importantly including Maro Ajemian for performances of his Sonatas and Interludes and David Tudor as an interpreter and close collaborator for his works exploring chance operations (on Cage and Tudor, see also You Nakai’s chapter in this volume).

Phoebe James, on the other hand, extended her initial experiences as a performer by embarking on a lifelong career teaching Rhythmic Expressions (an approach combining movement and music), first at the UCLA University Elementary School, and later as her own business, for which she composed songs she performed herself as pianist and soprano. In addition to teaching and leading workshops, her Phoebe James Creative Rhythm Records made and sold 78-rpm recordings throughout the United States and internationally. As a performer-composer, her composition of songs served the same economic and practical purpose, within her primary career as a performer, as did Cage’s performances of his own nonstandard works. ¹¹²

Clearly, we consider Cage as a composer-performer. However, in reversing this categorisation and pointing to his piano playing—to the degree that his interest in Grieg’s music provided a source of ideas for his own music—I have intended to demonstrate the substantial contribution of Cage’s secondary activities as a performer to the distinctive ways in which he accomplished his primary work as a composer.

*    *    *

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Spectrograms are mathematical models of sound based on fast Fourier transform mathematics and the specific choices about imaging made by software developers. They can provide information—though by no means thoroughly complete information—about vibrational activity in time (rhythmical activity) and in frequency (musical pitch).

Because a spectrogram computes and can display acoustic activity throughout a recording’s captured frequency range, it is in some cases possible to identify activity associated with distinct layers of sound tied to specific sound sources. A rapidly moving textural layer in Edvard Grieg’s “To Spring” accompanies and supports its lyrical melody. In his performance, Grieg keeps the repetitive rhythmic patterns of the accompaniment steady while expanding and contracting the melodic line’s tempo.

By adjusting the balance between the spectrogram’s degree of precision in representing acoustic activity in time and its precision in representing distinct acoustic frequency components, distinctions between Grieg’s performance of melody and accompaniment can be determined. This works because the spectrogram takes apart the sound and plots the frequency values (in Hertz) of overtones within the sound. We perceive distinctions within the sets of overtones that make up a sound by identifying differences in the timbre or colour of the sound (percussive, flute-like, similar to a human voice, or whatever we might find). In Grieg’s “To Spring,” the pitches of the melody are written below the pitches of the accompaniment (usually these are notated the other way around). Because the spectrogram deconstructs the sound into a set of frequency values, we can distinguish higher and lower pitches. In my analysis of “To Spring,” I have marked the beginning of each sound, which I can distinguish because the duration and the “highness or lowness” of each frequency value is plotted. In general, these components cannot be separated easily by analysing the sound’s waveform representation. Listening to Cage’s performance of Amores reveals how he also makes use of a flexible tempo at specific locations within the composition.

In addition, a spectrogram’s ability to represent the distribution of acoustic energy throughout the frequency range invites exploration of the overtone structures of standard piano sounds and the changes in these structures instigated by Cage’s piano preparations (screws, bolts, pieces of rubber inserted between the piano strings).

The spectrogram values are displayed as a grid, with each column representing average acoustic activity over its length in time, while each row represents average acoustic energy over the frequency range it covers. Informed setting of the widths of the spectrogram’s columns (in our case lengths of time) and rows (in our case ranges of frequency) ¹¹³ facilitates measurements that accurately represent the analysed sound’s specific characteristics.

Edvard Grieg’s “To Spring,” for solo piano, is in 6/4 time, with a metronome marking of a dotted half note equal to 84 (i.e., 84 beats per minute). I have analysed only the opening section, which contains two introductory measures containing sequences of repeated quarter-note F♯-major triads played by the right hand in an upper register. These are followed by a repeated segment of twenty measures, during which quarter-note sequences of a variety of triads continue and are accompanied by a lyrical melody played by the left hand. The melody contains fifty-one notes in total, with seven pairs of quarter-note values forming duplets within measures generally divided evenly into dotted-half-note patterns. This combination of triple and duple metrical patterns, resulting in the stretching and compressing of note values, might cause us to suspect an inclination on the part of the composition towards a flexible rhythmic interpretation.

And, indeed, this is the point of view taken by Grieg in his performance. Annotations on the spectrogram marked the start time of each of the fifty-one melody notes. The time differences in seconds between adjacent melody-note start-time measurements were plotted sequentially (blue dots on the uppermost line).

In order to align Grieg’s recorded rhythmic values with the rhythmic values in the “To Spring” score, a value for the length of a dotted half note, as performed by Grieg, was computed as the average of the measured length of the thirteen single dotted half notes occurring within the fifty-one notes of the melody. This value (0.54 seconds) ¹¹⁴ was used to construct values for plotting the written rhythmic notation (see figure 6—the orange dots on the middle line), and also to construct, for reference, a sequence of dotted-half-note values to indicate a steady rhythmic pulse (the grey dots on the lowest line).

The analysis of John Cage’s performance of Amores (1943), movement 4, follows a similar procedure. The composition, for solo piano, is in 4/4 time, with a metronome marking of an eighth note equal to 118 (i.e., 118 beats per minute).

In this case, again, to align Cage’s recorded rhythmic values with the rhythmic values in the score of Amores, movement 4, an averaged value was computed. However, because the analysis segment contains only eighth- and quarter-note values, and because upon listening to Cage’s performance, these values appear to depart from the notated values in non-uniform ways, an average eighth note (the notation’s basic rhythmic value) computed by averaging over all eighth notes was not computed. Instead, it was found most useful to determine the individual lengths of each of the final twenty measures that make up the analysis segment. This was done by adding together the measured time differences between adjacent notes across each measure. The total length of each measure was then divided by four to compute each measure’s average quarter-note value. An averaged quarter note value over all twenty measures in the analysis segment was found to be 0.86 seconds. ¹¹⁵

Two subdivisions of a steady beat (instead of one) are plotted to illustrate more clearly the comparison between Cage’s written notation and his performance. These values are: (1) the averaged quarter note value (0.86 seconds) (grey dots, third line from the top); and (2) a 4/4 measure length computed to be 0.86 × 4 = 3.45 seconds (orange dots, lowest line). ¹¹⁶ Values for Cage’s performance appear as blue dots on the uppermost line. Values for the notation of Amores, movement 4, appear as orange dots on the second line from the top.

Related texts

In this publication:

You Nakai, Like an Instrument That Only I Know How to Play
—John Cage and performer identity

Clare Lesser, “Voice and Shocking Things”: John Cage’s Performances of Water Walk and Four⁶
—Cage, performance, and listening

In other SONUS publications:

Jennifer Walshe, Other Presents
—musical communities and mediation