Imaginary Landscape No.4 or March No. 2

John Cage

General Info

Year: 1951
Duration: c.
Difficulty: Advanced (see Ratings for explanation)
Publisher: Peters
Cost: Score and Parts - $0.00   |   Score Only - $0.00

Instrumentation

Players I - XII (24 musicians): 12 Radios

Program Notes

Written in 1951, Imaginary Landscape No. 4 is scored for twelve radios. Two perform­ers “play” each radio, one dialing the frequency, the other changing the volume and tone. The work is notated conventionally, i.e. with notes expressing duration placed on a five line staff, and was composed using chance operations (in this case coin tosses), as was Cage’s Music of Changes, written at the same time. Though their compositional methods were identical, the two works differ in one fundamental respect: given the nature of the instruments they employ the piano in the former case and the radio in the latter Imaginary Landscape No. 4 is indeterminate whereas Music of Changes is not. The indeterminacy stems from the fact that radios produce sounds that vary according to frequency, time of day, and geographic location. It follows that those sounds cannot be determined in advance, and thus that each performance of Imaginary Landscape No. 4 will be different in ways that cannot be predicted. According to Cage himself, the expe­rience of indeterminacy was the motivation for the piece:

"When I wrote the Imaginary Landscape for twelve radios, it was not for the purpose of shock or as a joke but rather to increase the unpre­dictability already inherent in the situation through the tossing of coins. Chance, to be precise, is a leap, provides a leap out of reach of one’s own grasp of oneself. "

Recent Performances

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Works for Percussion by this Composer

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