Music for Piano (Cage)

Music for Piano is a series of 85 indeterminate musical compositions for piano by American avant-garde composer John Cage. All of these works were composed by making paper imperfections into sounds using various kinds of chance operations.

The use of paper imperfections was suggested by fast techniques in painting. Cage recounts that using the I Ching was always a very slow process. In 1952 a dancer (probably Jo Anne Melcher, the dedicatee of Music for Piano 1) made a request for a piece of music which was needed urgently, and Cage had to find a way to speed up the process:

Certainly I intended to continue working [...] by consulting the I Ching as usual. But I also wanted to have a very rapid manner of writing a piece of music. Painters, for example, work slowly with oil and rapidly with water colors [...] I looked at my paper, and I found my "water colors": suddenly I saw that the music, all the music, was already there.

A description of the process of composing these pieces can be found in Cage's book Silence: Lectures and Writings.

The Music for Piano series comprises the following works:

The complete set of pieces, including several versions for multiple pianos, was recorded by pianist Steffen Schleiermacher for Musikproduktion Darbinghaus Und Grimm and released in a 2-CD set in 1998. The set includes "Electronic Music For Piano" in a version for two pianos.

Another complete set of the pieces was issued in 2012 by Brilliant Classics, performed by Giancarlo Simonacci. This set does not include versions for multiple pianos, or the "Electronic Music For Piano".

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