john cage's 'in a landscape'

this has been one of my favourite pieces of music for a long time and i've found it to be almost sui generis, nothing else really does what this piece seems to do, not in cage's piano music of this time which is mostly more gnomic, not in anything else from the mid twenty century avant-garde piano repertoire that i have found

so i want to ask that usually doomed and internally bankrupt question 'what else is like this?'

if you abstract it then it becomes 'serene, tempered piano music' which seems to suggest something like harold budd or whatever, which can be great for sure but nothing in that quasi-ambient field works under the aspect of eternity like cage does in this piece

this version by herbert henck is my favourite

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR0zVdjYXcw

Mannheim Steamroller Interludes

serious a: maybe the first side of Terry Riley's New Harp Of Albion

It's pretty remarkable and a favourite of mine as well. I always think of it as the missing link between Satie and the minimalists.

and you've picked one of the slowest renditions of it for a favorite

you've already named the one person who's taken the direction of this particular piece further in this direction over the course of one career, mostly when he eschews all electronics such as on 'Pavillon of Dreams', 'La Bella Vista' or bits of 'Agua'.

the person who plays Cage's idol the closest to this (slowest) is probably Reinbert de Leeuw - http://www.amazon.com/Early-Piano-Works-3-Gymnopedies/dp/B0000069CS

maybe the two long pieces on Peter Garland's 'The Days Run Away', but Riley's "Harp Of New Albion" is a good call

Hm, in my personal opinion, this rendition feels far too slow (about 24 bpm below the notated tempo?) and a little too elastic to me. The pulse is really essential to me: for one thing, it is a dance piece. Also, the form is based so heavily on relative durations. I'm a fan of Drury's recording but, honestly, it's the one I've heard the most.

"Dream" probably comes closest out of Cage's works?

Ha, I found the analysis I did when studying for comps.

weird, I just unexpectedly witnessed a live performance of this on Saturday.

well, a musical performance. there was no dancing :(

Who was performing? Why was it unexpected?

the henck rendition originally seemed too slow to me and lacking the slightly syncopated feel of the faster versions, then the neutral despondency of it got to me

re op q: it's been a long time since i listened to any of it, but maybe some of bartok's mikrokosmos?

yeah this is a favourite of mine also

try dennis johnson - november, though it's over 4 hours long and very minimal

the piano music of eva-maria houben maybe. or jurg frey. stepping into wandelweiser territory

http://m.youtube.com/?#/watch?v=IjRMng_oa4E

perhaps one of scelsi's quieter piano works?

this maybe. impressionistic minimalism

http://m.youtube.com/?#/watch?v=ofTgTDeSbd4

He could well be amongst "the mid twenty century piano repertoire" already found lacking BUT some of Federico Mompou's countless solo piano miniatures may be vaguely in the right ballpark, from memory. Not all of them though, by any means.

the fifth of Bloch's Five Sketches in Sepia; starts at 5:55 in this vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0tUHp6LXh0

http://recordings.irritablehedgehog.com/album/dennis-johnson-november-2

seconding dennis johnson's november..

thanks for the recommendations which im going through rn

i collated the eight uncompressed versions of 'in a landscape' that i could find in a cursory search

in context, henck's tempi seem dilated beyond reason, more than 50% slower than de mare for example

drury's was the first i was aware of, and returning to it is almost like finding another piece altogether, though i like them all

>>

www45.zippyshare.com/v/63941623/file.html

this is interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgNGMt0frcA

You could almost just look at Henck's repertoire and come up with yr list of contenders for this category

Koechlin 'Les Heures Persanes'
Mompou 'Musica Callada'

For sure. Also what about Feldman's solo piano stuff?

"for bunita marcus" would only be similar on account of it being "slow" & solo piano - i love it but it's not really similar at all being a wander between note-worrying listener-antagonism and beatific out of sync pendulum phrased in geological timescale tension release dialogues. reminds me of a keiji haino disc.
there is, however, a jon gibson flute piece called "untitled" you can get on the "two solo pieces" cd, that reminds me of the cage piece, and is truly awesome in its own right. that cd is worth the spons - go get it.

not that fond of for bunita marcus though i should probably return to it
from memory he wrote some early serial or quasi serial piano music

the fifth of Bloch's Five Sketches in Sepia; starts at 5:55 in this vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0tUHp6LXh0

― smhphony orchestra (crüt), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 20:28 (2 days ago)

this is excellent
always get him mixed up with ernst bloch

I'd never heard in a landscape, this is great

maybe something like Julius Eastman's slower pieces would fit w/ this

My favorite Cage work has gone from In a Landscape to Dream to A Room to FourSix to The Unavailable Memory Of. FourSix, including the version by Sonic Youth, is in no way like any of the others.

also you mentioned Budd in the OP but if you haven't heard it yet, Perhaps sounds a lot like this

julius eastman is good, i was going to do a thread about him at some point

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VNJ5PHV52I

i love seeing lots of grand pianos together

(nb this piece does not sound anything like in a landscape)

four walls!

second the les heures persanes recommendation, incredible piece

The third tellus tape (which is on ubuweb I think) is a minimalist piano thing for the most part and has some stuff like this (the Eastman things I'm thinking of are off this tape)

yeah im going to try this now

A pupil of Massenet and Fauré, the prolific French composer and teacher Charles Koechlin expanded traditional harmonies and compositional techniques and was much admired by his contemporaries. Les heures persanes was inspired by Vers Ispahan, Pierre Loti’s diary of a journey through Persia. Oriental atmospheres are recreated through cycles of day and night, and in piano writing completely new for its time. This evocative piece salutes Koechlin’s musical forebears as well as foreshadowing Messiaen through the “passionate and skilled” (The Sunday Times on 8.572570) advocacy of Ralph van Raat.

i remember you recommending some koechlin before

debussy's khamma, orchestrated by koechlin is pretty great of course

Sorry, it's tellus 4

http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/tellus_4/Tellus-4_01_Julius_Eastman-Touch_Him_When.mp3

The Persian Hours is a terribly difficult work to record. It’s a very special, atmospheric work, mostly very slow and dreamy, and except for three or four movements (Travers les Rues; the mini-tone-poem Le Conteur; and the final Dervishes dans la nuit) is often extremely quiet. The orchestration is incredibly delicate and subtle, and it’s entirely typical of Koechlin that although the piece is harmonically extremely audacious for its time (1913–19), the music is so subdued that you might not be aware of its frequent polytonal or atonal basis. In short, this is a very remarkable piece, but not one for casual listening.[2]

lol

Ravel's Le Gibet feels like In A Landscape to me, its a little more sinister, but similar slow, dreamlike pacing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhpX-CyTvfw

In a Landscape is not actually that slow: it is notated at 80 bpm, mostly in eighth notes. The recording at the top is pretty atypical.

Thanks for the zip drive, nakh. Amy Shulman's recording on harp is nice too, if you haven't heard it.

how do you feel about this, is it ever acceptable to ignore the bpm notation? this is more of a 'thing' in late romantic music -- conductors playing the mahler symhony 5 adagietto at feldman-like tempi and so forth

with someone like cage it feels like the license is perhaps more tolerable? henck was personally acquainted with him too

The solo and orchestral versions of Heures Persanes both urgent and key. I don't think Henck's disc of the piano version on wergo is obtainable anymore; the one on chandos (stott) got a bad review from Fanfare's koechlin maven Adrian Corleonis. Van Raat on Naxos maybe? Idk if Korstick has recorded it in his series of koechlin piano yet.

Since getting into this thing I have really wanted to read the namesake literary work in English but it does not seem to have been translated.

so i listened to the koechlin but i need to play that a couple more times

there is a tradition of french orientalism going through debussy's gamelan love, satie, messiaen's vedic fetishim, boulez etc and 90% of this stuff i love

re gaspard -- that is such a sinisterpiece of music that the less unhomely qualities of that movement are overlooked -- i don't share jon's extrensive knowledge of recordings but argerich's version of it is sublime

D'oh, it's that Chandos disc of 'Les Heures Persanes' I happen to have making its way to my mailbox currently. :) Thanks Jon, and others, for past wordage on Koechlin by the way; has been impressive so far.

I haven't heard the chandos disc-- it's just one reviewers opinion and stott is a fine pianist.

Koechlin was a very very interesting dude who venn'd across several eras much like R Strauss did. There is a biography of him by robert orledge which seems to only exist in a few libraries and not at all on ebook. I would love to read it.

there is a tradition of french orientalism going through debussy's gamelan love, satie, messiaen's vedic fetishim, boulez etc and 90% of this stuff i love

Me too, I have such a weakness for that stuff. I know it's somewhat indefensible from a political standpoint. I swear I'm a good person in every other way.

See also szymanowski and a surprisingly large percentage of holsts oeuvre.

how do you feel about this, is it ever acceptable to ignore the bpm notation? this is more of a 'thing' in late romantic music -- conductors playing the mahler symhony 5 adagietto at feldman-like tempi and so forth

with someone like cage it feels like the license is perhaps more tolerable? henck was personally acquainted with him too

I wasn't really saying that it's unacceptable (although I'm not sold on it in this case) as much as that its pacing is actually fairly different from the Ravel piece imo. On the whole, though, I personally tend not to favour these sorts of liberties outside of cases where it is part of an interpretive tradition or where the composer has actually endorsed it, although "acceptable" isn't the word I'd use.

The ultra-slow Liszt trend that started afaict in emulation of Richter's glacial Schubert interpretations drives me crazy. I'm not even sure I liked it when Richter did it.

terry jennings

john tilbury's take on terry jennings' pieces, on Lost Daylight, is sublime. def in this vein, some of the finest piano music out there.

thank you, they are wonderful

jennings' biographical information on the internet is fairly scant, apparently he played cage's sonata and interludes as a 13 yr old, studied at ucla and was an acolyte of lamonte young before seemingly falling on hard times and dying at 41 in 'altercation following a drug deal'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS6TJuZxa3U

this is the most entrancing bit of pseudo eastern chicanery in les heures persanes

and i am still entranced, though the rest of it while fine is not quite the same

the henck recording has gone but usefully someone has uploaded the raat version (the one i have been playing)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1sRuRaLSHs

the last half of it

koechlin's unique harmonic language is what sets his best music apart from mere fin du siecle fetishizing (unlike say ibert) but his work would maybe have benefited from more formal rigor/less peripateticism

although tbh i find koechlin in orientalist mode much more compelling than debussy in similar moments

this implausibly dinks its way into the same eternal field we find 'in a landscape' floating around in imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1Ob7jTzzEI

tick.jpg

looking forward to music for amplified toy pianos.flac now

am i right in recollecting that you have an academic interest in cage?

correct

purely academic tho

although tbh i find koechlin in orientalist mode much more compelling than debussy in similar moments

Koechlin is a superb exoticist and did it more times, at greater length and to greater alien extent but cmon man, "et la lune descend...""la terrasse des audiences..." and "cloches a travers..." are all time pillars of the project!!!

those are certainly unfuckwithable