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| Etcetera 2 / 4 Orchestras This work is from 1986 and is fairly similar for the original Etcetera from 1973: soloists from each orchestra move to platforms and perform at particular times. Four conductors beat, but the score calls for some sounds to occur at times off from the beats. There is also a taped component to the music, featuring sounds of traffic and so on recorded in Cage’s New York apartment. This makes the music less focused on nature sounds than the original (which had raindrop-like rustles, sounds of birds, and the like), and in my mind makes yet another case for the equivalence of sounds of the environment we think of as “natural” and those we think of as “artificial.” The music sounds an awful lot like other Cage works for orchestras or large groups of instruments. On the plus side, there’s plenty of variety and it’s recorded very well: I can distinctly tell the difference between each group of instruments, unlike such low quality recordings as 103. I would say it sounds like a lot of quiet creaking, interrupted by occasional simultaneous groans of a large group of instruments. Usually the brass seem to be loudest. I don’t hear very much from the piano besides a few brief tones now and then. Also there’s some percussive sounds that seem more like someone dropping his instrument than anything else! The tape that is supposedly playing is worth a discussion on its won, because I don’t hear it. Or maybe I do—I hear a kind of rushing sound in the background that could either be a tape or it could be air rushing over the microphone. There are also other sounds that resemble the grunting of a truck moving down the street, but these may actually be instruments that happen to not be amplified. I heard no evidence of telephones or any other “apartment” activities, though (unless that ringing sound towards the very end is a telephone and not some percussion instrument). # posted by CageBlogger @ 10:00 PM 0 comments |