0.10 Appendix 1: musician biographies  (Page 10/37)

Cage also experimented with giving performers greater freedom in their interpretation of his music. The instructions for one work read “for any number of players, any sounds or combinations of sounds produced by any means, with or without other activities” (which could include dance and theater). These experiments were not always successful. At the premiere of Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra he found that some of the musicians “introduced into their performance sounds of a nature not found in [his] notation characterized for the most part by their intention, which had become foolish and unprofessional.”

The scores Cage composed as the music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company were conceived independently of the choreography, so in performance, music and dance simply coexist rather than being consciously shaped as a unified work. In addition to his long association with Cunningham, Cage was a close friend of the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, both of whom depicted common objects in their paintings, for example, Johns’ series of the American flag, or numbers and letters of the alphabet. In explaining this interest in everyday experience, Cage described his intention as “to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of the way and lets it act of its own accord.”

Chopin, frederic (1810–1849)

Frederic Chopin was born near Warsaw, Poland, of a French father and a Polish mother. He was a precocious child but largely self-taught in music, receiving most of his formal training during his high school years at the Warsaw Conservatory. In 1829 he toured Germany and Italy as a pianist. On a second tour, which took him to France in 1831, he found Parisian life and society so congenial that he settled there for most of the remainder of his life. His extraordinary playing and personal charm won him many admirers among the aristocracy and in artistic circles. Among his artist friends was the novelist George Sand, the pen name of the novelist Aurore Dudevant, with whom he began a liaison in 1838. After their separation in 1847, tuberculosis, from which he had been suffering for many years, weakened his already frail constitution. He died in Paris.

Chopin’s compositions are almost exclusively for the piano. Of the three major keyboard instruments (piano, harpsichord, organ), the piano is the most familiar and widely used today, and also the most recent. Its complete name is pianoforte, Italian for soft-loud, reflecting the fact that varying the pressure with which the keys are depressed directly influences the force of the hammers that strike the strings and thereby gives the player control over the volume of sound. The piano was invented in Italy in the early 18th century but did not attract serious attention from composers and performers until the time of Haydn and Mozart. At this early period it was a comparatively small, light-framed instrument of delicate tone. By the time of Chopin, at the height of the romantic period, its pitch and dynamic ranges had been expanded to essentially those of the modern piano.