Composed in 1991, a year before his death, and premiered in New York in the hot summer of 1992, Four4 is the last composition by John Cage for percussions and it was written especially to be recorded to CD, hence its duration of 72 minutes. This is most probably the first composition ever conceived and written for the newly born support that in that period was substituting the old LP.
Written close to John Cage’s eightieth birthday, a composer, philosopher, writer and artist considered as the most eminent figure in the avant-garde music system, and surely the most purely gifted among several other composers that attempt at a various way to approach a new music concept, Four4 is part of a bigger project named “Number Pieces” which occupied Cage’s time between 1987 and 1992 and were developed thanks to a new writing software created by Andrew Culver, his long-time assistant.
This new system enabled Cage to write music very quickly to fulfil the increasing request for new original music from performers all over the world. Each work’s title consists only of a number written out as a word (One, Two, etc.) and indicates the number of performers for which the piece was composed. The titles of the composition Four4 is composed of two parts indeed, the first part related to the performers and the second, a superscript numeral, that explain the number of the series, so we can read the title as Four written for the fourth time. The “first” Four it was for string quartet (1989), the “second” Four4 is for chorus (1990), the “third” Four is for 2 piano and violin (1991) and the fourth “Four” (1991) is the composition presented in this cd. Other two “Four” (for saxophone and another for unspecified instruments) were written before his death.
Comparing this music with some of his recent past, full of virtuosity and ideas, could be for someone who is not familiar with his music a little shock. Barren sounds, almost with elemental reference, merge the late music by John Cage with the idea of an open landscape. We perceive the deep contact with our inner nature and the environment that surround us. The different pitches of every single element around that just resound in our mind. We don’t know when Nature will decide to produce its sounds, as we don’t know when the wind is coming. We found similar atmospheres in Four4 thanks to a thin out use of time brackets.
All this kind of pieces was conceived with the “time-brackets” idea indeed, a system that Cage himself explained in some mesostic, and as in other pieces of the same author, it left the choice of percussive instruments up to the performers. This choice is not a merely way to be disinterested in the results but appear to be in keeping with a kind of Zen-thought that dominates most of his production. The elements of silence, rhythms, and repetition, often used within improvisation, are nowadays reminiscent of Cage’s music. As many scholars claimed, in Four4, Cage created a meager economy of musical means for the players that they must explore thanks to the absence of choice.
The composer wittingly decided to do not to influence directly the resultant sound and left to performers and to occasion the chance to create something new each time. Even the time-brackets system appears to be in line with this choice, without forcing the performers into a rigid system and giving him liberty that would be impossible to express in other pieces.
In Four4 each beginning and each ending of sounds are separated, and each time-bracket features only one sound. The four performers have 22, 16, 10, and 15 time-brackets each; for instance, the player 1 starts his first-time bracket between 0’00 and 1’00, whereas it must end somewhere between 0’40 and 1’40. In this way, Cage can determine the total duration of the piece but not when a single performer would play inside it and it depends on performance to performance and to performer to performer decides in which way face the composition.
As time-brackets follow one-another there are several lengthy walls of silence. The choice of each one became a choice of peace, a vibrating peace among the storm, interrupted by a sound, an inner sound, in an ideal infinite turnover that reminds the breath of spirit.