This is a wonderful album, presenting four late works by John Cage: three of the number pieces and Hymns and Variations. Their quietude seems even more appropriate today than when Cage created them: music whose making reshapes our understanding of the world in as sustainable a way as is possible. Hymns and Variations (1979) is indeed a twofold recycling, Cage using again a version of the reductive compositional technique that he invented in 1969 to turn Satie's Socrate into a monodic piano piece, Cheap Imitation, this time to make new music out of two hymns, ‘Old North’ and ‘Heath’, by the eighteenth-century American composer William Billings (1746–1800), from his 1770 collection The New-England Psalm-Singer.
Cage took these source works and then erased notes, at the same time extending the durations of some of the notes that survived the process of erasure, so that Billings’ quite straightforward tonal harmonies become blurred and new heterophonic melodies emerge from the interplay of the voices. Cage also abstracted vowels from the texts set by Billings so that their religious content disappears. The result is a work in 12 movements, each two minutes long: first we hear transformed versions of the two hymns, then a series of ten variations, each one presenting a different set of erasures and extensions. It's music that is grave, yet full of light, and is sung with perfect dedication by the Latvian Radio Choir, directed by Sigvards Kļava.
In 1993 William Brooks published ‘John Cage and History: Hymns and Variations’, an extraordinary piece of analysis in which he reverse-engineers the process that Cage used to compose Hymns and Variations, working out how the chance operations must have been organised to turn Billings into Cage. Brooks’ scholarship is, as ever, exemplary and his conclusions fascinating: he suggests that Cage enables him to ‘hear through the Hymns and Variations, tracing in their absence the source materials on which the process was performed. Billings is present, but only as if heard at a distance, or through a screen; Cage gives me something like a metaphor for memory, or decay, or simply the passage of time.’Footnote 1 More provocatively, Brooks also argues that Cage's compositional process ‘stands outside time; it operates on its source with no regard for its history’.Footnote 2 Listening to this new recording I am struck instead by how carefully Cage regarded his source, using a process that obscures its harmonic contours in such a way that it sounds new yet retains a sense of its oldness.
There is an earlier recording of Hymns and Variations, released in 1986, in which the vocal quartet Electric Phoenix were multi-tracked three times. The more numerous Latvian Radio Choir are able to assign a different singer to each of the 12 parts and the result is much more satisfactory; they sound like a congregation dispersed, an impression aided by a recording style that takes us close to each of the singers but sets them in a large acoustic. The other works on the album – Five (1988), Four 2 (1990) and Four 6 (1992) – are also given excellent performances and imaginative recordings, Five and Four 2 presented as a more cohesive mass of voices, whereas Four 6 uses the same style as Hymns and Variations.
Only Four 2 was written as a specifically vocal work; it was composed for a school choir in Oregon and the singers vocalise on the letters of the state's name. The scores of Five and Four 6 are more open but work equally well. Five is for ‘five voices or instruments’, and in this recording a number of realisations (it sounds as if either 15 or 20 singers are involved) are performed simultaneously, producing a series of lusciously dense, overlapping harmonic clouds that flood the air; I could quite happily have listened to it for many more than the five minutes that Cage's score allows. In Four 6 each performer must choose 12 different sounds to distribute within Cage's time scheme. The Latvian Radio Choir members assemble an engaging array of sounds, from subharmonics to glissandi and animal impressions, all performed with great discipline. In one of the ‘How to kick, pass, fall, and run’ texts collected in A Year from Monday Cage wrote of his frustration with some performances of his indeterminate scores and wished that he could ‘find a way to let people be free without their becoming foolish. So that their freedom will make them noble.’Footnote 3 In these recordings the Latvian singers reveal themselves as truly noble.
