From the mid 1940s onwards, John Cage became fascinated by the music of Erik Satie. As early as 1948 he put on a festival devoted to Satie’s works, and in the 1960s he was responsible for the first performance of Vexations, in which a short piano piece has to be repeated 840 times, over the course of 18 hours. And, as Bertrand Chamayou’s beautifully planned and presented sequence of miniatures by both composers shows, Satie’s music imprinted itself on Cage’s own piano works, especially in some of his pieces for conventional and prepared piano from the late 1940s.
Chamayou opens with a Cage rarity, All Sides of the Small Stone, for Erik Satie, which was rediscovered seven years ago among the papers of the late composer and Cage pupil James Tenney. It’s the most Satie-esque of the pieces here, recreating the melodic purity of the Gymnopédies and the Gnossiennes, but there are other facets of Cage’s musical world here too, such as the chiming gamelan-like sonorities of the prepared-piano Dream and Prelude for Meditation; it’s a gem of a collection.
