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John Cage - Three Constructions

Track listing:
  1. First Construction (In Metal) (1939) 8:38
  2. A Flower (1950) 2:49
  3. Second Construction (1940) 7:43
  4. Forever and Sunsmell (1942) 5:02
  5. Third Construction (1941) 10:44

Notes


On Three Constructions, the enigmatic twentieth century American composers made these works based around the poems of e.e. cummings. His construction series produced a string of conceptual works for percussion and voice performed by the Donald Knaack Percussion Ensemble with the voice of Jay Clayton reciting. Spare and delicate, these compositions further reveal his interests in oblique methods and chance operations in both composition and performance that in other works are often hard to tackle and arguably appeal more on a conceptual level than an audible one. This work, however, is closer to a song cycle and is explicit of the composer's interests in Balinese music.