LOUIS GOLDSTEIN, piano

Louis Goldstein is a Professor of Music at Wake Forest University, where he has been a member of the Department of Music faculty since 1979. He taught on the faculty of American Foundations, a graduate seminar offered at Reynolda House Museum of American Art, for 15 years. He has performed widely as a piano soloist in the United States, most notably at the Hollywood Bowl, Orchestra Hall in Chicago, and Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City. He has also performed in Canada, Israel, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, and Italy.

Goldstein co-founded and co-directed the California New Music Ensemble, and has been a member of the Los Angeles Group for Contemporary Music and NEWBAND, a New York contemporary music ensemble. In 1982 he won the Grand Prize in the Teacher’s Division of the International Piano Recording Competition. He has recorded for Orion Records, Greensye Music, and Offseason Productions. His CD recordings of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes and Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories have garnered lavish praise from print and internet sources as well as fellow musicians.

His most recent recording, of Morton Feldman's For Bunita Marcus (Nuscope Recordings), ranked in the top 10 modern composition recordings of 2010 by The Wire Magazine.

Piano studies have been with Rudolf Ganz, Joseph Hungate (Bachelor of Music from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music), Leonard Stein, Leonid Hambro (Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of Arts), and David Burge (Doctor of Musical Arts degree and Performer’s Certificate from the Eastman School of Music).

PROGRAM | 11:00 AM

Selections from ASLSP (1985) | JOHN CAGE (1912-1992)

Selections from SONATAS AND INTERLUDES (1946-1948) | JOHN CAGE

PROGRAM | 7:30 PM

4’ 33” (1952) | JOHN CAGE (1912-1992)

I.33”
II.2’ 40”
III.1’ 20”

ASLSP (1985) | JOHN CAGE

SONATAS AND INTERLUDES (1946-1948) | JOHN CAGE

Mutes of various materials are placed between the strings of the piano keys used, thus effecting transformations of

the piano sounds with respect to all of their characteristics.

PROGRAM NOTES

In 1940, John Cage had a regional reputation on the West Coast as a composer of percussion ensembles, and he had begun to develop his reputation as a composer for the dance. So it was no surprise when Syvilla Fort asked Cage to provide music for a choreography that dealt with her African heritage. It was while attempting to make the sound of a piano conducive to an African-themed dance that Cage invented the prepared piano. As succinctly described on the title page of Sonatas and Interludes, in a prepared piano “mutes of various materials are placed between the strings of the piano keys used, thus effecting transformations of the piano sounds with respect

to all of their characteristics.” The prepared piano not only solved the immediate problem involving Syvilla Fort’s dance, it additionally created a sound world so beautiful and so fascinating, that Cage dedicated much of the next eight years to developing a literature for it.

Sonatas and Interludes is the capstone, summarizing work of a period John Cage later identified as "intentionally expressive" composition. This designation might seem strange to people who assume that all music is intentionally self-expressive, but the term makes perfect sense when taking into account the subsequent direction of Cage's career, namely composition determined by chance procedures, which was expressive, but not of the composer’s feelings.

From 1938 to 1948, Cage was intensely concerned with the communicative power of music. Consider, for example, the statement Cage wrote for his first catalogue, concerning Sonatas and Interludes: "The Sonatas and Interludes are an attempt to express in music the 'permanent emotions' of [East] Indian tradition: the heroic, the erotic, the wondrous, the mirthful, sorrow, fear, anger, the odious and their common tendency toward tranquility." He also refers to his article "Forerunners of Modern Music," which begins, "Music is edifying, for from time to time it sets the soul in operation. The soul is the gatherer-together of the disparate elements (Meister Eckhart), and its work fills one with peace and love.” Hardly typical words for a revolutionary of the avant garde.

The 20 individual pieces of Sonatas and Interludes are laid out in a symmetrical format: four sonatas, first interlude, four more sonatas, the second and third interludes, sonatas nine through twelve, the fourth interlude, and the final four sonatas. However, there is no need for the listener to keep track of the successive pieces as they go by. In fact, Cage so ingeniously varies the sonatas’ internal structures that attempts to do so invariably are led off-track.

As the set advances, listeners become less aware of the individual pieces starting and stopping, and gradually more aware of an over-arching continuity binding the pieces together. The experience of listening to Sonatas and Interludes can be likened to the exploration of an utterly strange and beautiful landscape or piece of architecture. Across every threshold, beyond every interlocking branched archway, lies a room or a bower of unexpected size, shape and wonder. Where will the next doorway be? As well, Sonatas and Interludes can be experienced as a series of meditations, or prayers, leading finally to a state of ecstatic stillness.

I believe John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes to be one of the masterpieces of 20th-century piano literature.

There is a common misconception concerning Cage’s compositions after 1950, when he began to employ chance procedures for their production. Many people assume that Cage gave up all interest in expression and the craft of composition. Actually, Cage merely traded the activity of choosing notes for the activity of asking questions. He found an unending variety to the way questions such as these could be asked and refined: How many notes will comprise the next event? Will they be simultaneous or successive? In what order? How many of them will be soft (or loud)? What are their durations? What type of attack will they start with? John Cage loved sound; he found sound, on its own, to be expressive. He invented ways to write music that let sounds be themselves, without influence from his own likes and dislikes, and without the emotional baggage of representing other things, such as the weather, conflict, or love. And yet his control of question asking resulted in many different kinds of musics. ASLSP presages Cage’s last pieces, which grow spare, lonely, and other-worldly beautiful.

ASLSP was commissioned by Thomas Moore for the University of Maryland International Piano Festival and Competition (now known as the William Kapell Competition). The title abbreviation stands for "as slow as possible." Cage also linked the last three letters of the title as a reference to “the first exclamations of the last paragraph of Finnegan’s Wake [James Joyce] … ‘Soft morning light! Lsp!’ ”

ASLSP consists of eight short pieces. In performance, the performer chooses one of the pieces to omit and another section to repeat. The order of the pieces must be maintained, but the repetition may be placed anywhere. "This way, in Cage’s words, “the competition jury wouldn't have to listen to the same piece over and over."

ASLSP is composed by means of chance procedures, but the result is a fixed score that sounds the same on repeated performances. The notation is explicit, that it, all of the specific pitches are indicated, as well as their placement in time. The dynamics and the tempo are left to the performer’s discretion. The rhythmic layer of the composition is notated in a “space equals time” notation. It is like reading a map; the closer together the notes appear on the page, the closer together they are in time. Cage observed that the piece should sound like it looks.