Oeuvre: Hymns and Variations

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.

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.