Oeuvre: Four^2

Cage hoped that the change from “pinch-penny mental attitudes to courageous wastefulness” would become as prevalent in the arts as it is in nature. Along those lines, his late choral music is spare, seemingly simple: quiet, almost fragile sounds scattered over silences.

Now they know how many cacti it takes to fill the Albert Hall. Last night’s marathon John Cage Prom finished up, over three hours after it had started, with a wonderfully cactus-heavy performance of Branches (1976).

Almost as remarkable as John Cage's actual music is how varied it is. Nothing obvious connects The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, a beautifully simple four-note piece for soprano and piano lid, to Four Solos for voice, a late work in which four singers independently do a series of strange things at the same time.