J. Cage / Matthias Kaul - Cage After Cage

Anyone performing John Cage's music cannot avoid silence. In all the works performed in this collection, percussionist Matthias Kaul deals with silence and how it can be realized in the most concrete way. Kaul is not only a percussionist, he is also a composer and therefore equipped for such a task. In Variations I, Cage plays with various forms of silence. The score consists of transparent sheets with dots and lines and the performers generates concrete tones, sounds and "pauses". The playing instructions for Inlets are still more rudimentary; there are three performers, each of whom has four conch shells. The shells are filled with water and turned round and round; then a fire fueled by pine cones begins, and the piece ends when one of the shells blown like a horn. In Child of Tree, the performer must toss coins to determine how many sections to divide the eight minutes into and which instruments to use in which sections. For this major project, Kaul used 90 different instruments and objects altogether.