Sonatas and Interludes

John Cage's "Sonatas and Interludes" for prepared piano occupies a strange and beautiful middle territory between percussion ensemble and keyboard music. Cage inserted bolts, screws, rubber, and other objects between the piano strings, transforming the instrument into a gamelan-like percussion orchestra of one. The sound is extraordinary: some notes emerge as buzzing metallic thuds, others as hollow wooden knocks, others retain a ghostly piano-like resonance. Composed between 1946 and 1948 under the influence of Ananda Coomaraswamy's writings on Indian aesthetics, each of the twenty pieces attempts to embody one of the nine permanent emotions in Hindu tradition — the erotic, the heroic, the wondrous, the mirthful, the terrible, the odious, the pathetic, the furious, and tranquility. The result is profoundly intimate, almost private in character. The music unfolds in small gestures, tiny melodic loops, quiet percussive patterns. It is intricate without being ornate, spiritual without being theatrical. Best experienced through good headphones, where the microscopic detail of each transformed string can emerge from silence with full presence.