John CAGE: Winter Music / Variations I (KPFA, 1968)

From a live broadcast on KPFA, recorded on May 20, 1968, Robert Moran and Howard Hersh perform two works by John Cage, “Winter Music” and “Variations I”. Both are aleatoric works, here featuring a single stark piano mixed with occasional taped sounds, but mostly filled with long periods of silence. The prerecorded bits seem to include a lot of wind and water sounds and taken together certainly seem to evoke the pristine barrenness of a winter’s day, although there is nothing in Cage’s or the performers comments that would indicate that this was it’s purpose. Yet freed from the need for meaning this performance will stand in its own right, as a thing of simply being.