It was Arnold Schoenberg who rather glibly characterised John Cage, his pupil for two years, as “not a composer but an inventor – of genius”. But in the music that Bertrand Chamayou includes in this collection, Cage the inventor seems indivisible from Cage the composer. Cage wrote Bacchanale, his first piece for the instrument that he had devised, the prepared piano, in 1940. Inspired by the experiments of Henry Cowell, Cage had placed a variety of felt, metal and rubber objects under or between the strings of a grand piano, drastically modifying its tone, and so creating a wholly new sound world.
The most substantial and best known work that Cage would compose for his invention would be the Sonatas and Interludes that he completed in 1948. But as Chamayou demonstrates, the stand-alone pieces for prepared piano that he composed before and after that hour-long set do much more than just revel in their sheer sonic novelty.
