John Cage: Best of the Best

Cage (1912-1992) is almost synonymous in 20th-century music with a pair of his guiding concepts: chance composition and the prepared piano. Chance composition, as theorized by Cage, involved works written for indeterminate numbers of musicians (and instruments) and aimed mostly at the process of performance. The prepared piano, on the other hand, left little to chance. Metal objects placed between the piano's strings gave the instrument a percussive feel, and Cage's writing for prepared piano remains some of his best-known and most ingenious. Here are his essential recordings.

	The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage
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Amazon.com essential recording Hard to believe that as early as 1958 there was a 25-year retrospective concert of John Cage's music. But this 3-CD set documents both the concert and its meaning for the history of New Music. Organized by no less than Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Emile de Antonio, the event sparked heated controversy--some of it documented in the crowd's reaction to Cage's early tape- music piece, Williams Mix. The expansive booklet accompanying the CDs includes loads of prescient commentary, much of...Read more
	Cage: Sonatas and Interludes, etc / Aleck Karis
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Amazon.com While John Cage never wrote anything you'd call Classical Top 40, his music up to 1950 is far more accessible than the random and chance-influenced pieces he created later on. These mysterious, wispy pieces sound as though they were written for a small ensemble of ghostly percussion instruments, although they are played by a single performer playing a piano with various gadgets attached to the strings. You need the clear sound of this recent digital recording to appreciate the music, and Karis...Read more
	Cage: Litany for the Whale / Hillier, Riley, et al
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Amazon.com essential recording John Cage's vocal music helped free the voice from strictly narrative-- and strictly tonal--roles. Reaching as far back as 1942, and as far forward as 1990, this anthology of Cage's vocal works brilliantly shows the full range of shapes the composer wanted for musical voice. The title piece is the most recent and relies heavily on two voices shifting pitches in a rich, polyphony-tinged flow. So much here is vital Cage: from his adaptation of phrases from Finnegan's Wake to Riley reading the "36...Read more
	Cage: Works for Cello / Frances-Marie Uitti
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Amazon.com essential recording Solo-instrument works by John Cage can be tricky. His scripted indeterminacy (with customarily Cagean instructions such as "any number of players and any means") can mean any number of things, including an invitation to unbridled virtuosity. And while Frances-Marie Uitti is certainly virtuosic--witness her brilliant Giacinto Scelsi: Music for Cello--she smartly takes another tack here. Her renditions of Cage's cello pieces, from the earliest (c. 1950s) 26' 1.1499" for a String Player and Solo...Read more
	Cage: Works for Piano & Prepared Piano Vol 1 / Pierce
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Amazon.com essential recording Joshua Pierce brings to John Cage's music an almost uninhibited classicism, but that only bolsters the compositions. He opens A Room and emphasizes its shifts with the attention of a concert pianist, rather than someone who follows Cage's directions to play the piece very quietly. Pierce, in fact, takes each of these dozen works, all of them dating to the 1940s and '50s, and draws from them the resonant Cagean oddness--phrases of weird shapes and all. But he adds a ton, too. In a Landscape...Read more