John Cage - Eigth: "Calm and Somewhat Uneasy"

  When I started listening to “Eight,” I didn’t know what to expect exactly. All the information I had was basically that it was one of John Cage’s Number Pieces – this one written for eight instruments – and that it is one of the rather late works by this composer. While listening, I also began thinking if the title “Eight” could have any other significance, but to be honest, I couldn’t get my head around this question.

This turned out to be a good summary for my whole listening experience, unfortunately. At first, I was intrigued by a somewhat “idyllic” beginning with long notes held by the various instruments taking turns, with relatively few dissonances, making me feel calm and almost uneasy at the same time. I almost expected the piece to get louder in the way of Mahler’s symphony in the well-known scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. These expectations, still, quickly turned out to be wholly unfounded. From approximately minute 3:30, the rest of “Eight” turned out to be long held notes, building up and then eventually faltering like a plethora of overlapping sine waves. The rising dynamics and increasing dissonance of these notes conveyed a growing sense of urgency to me at first, like the horns of cars stuck in a traffic jam. However, I quickly got used to that and was left waiting for something else to develop, like a second movement.

The sounds used by Cage had different effects on me, not only the sense of urgency conveyed by the “horns.” At around 36:40, a deep sound like an engine or a machine working in the belly of a ship grew apparent to me, and some sounds like the high-pitched sound at 32:40 even seemed to hurt my ears in a way. The end of the first part also was significant to me; from about minute 41:35, the piece became “heroic,” with (slightly) dissonant horns calling for something, perhaps a hunt? Listening to “Eight” with (over-ear) headphones also opened another experience to me, namely the sound of my own heartbeat in a quieter passage (34:00), reminding me of Cage’s 4’33”. There was nothing quite new to write about in part 2.

“Eight” left me quite baffled, which probably isn’t much of the surprise after how I opened this listening report. One possible interpretation that comes to my mind is that “Eight” represents various sounds of modern life, from one’s own heartbeat to traffic etc. A real audience in a concert hall composed of people who don’t understand more about Cage than I do would probably be pretty much left to their own thoughts and perceptions during this piece in which nothing much apparently happens. This is another way in which “Eight” reminded me of 4’33”. Perhaps “Eight” is not so much about music in any classical sense but about extracting sounds and feelings from unexpected places. In this case, Cage would not be understood as a composer but rather as someone re-organizing and recreating various kinds of sounds, separated from the instruments used to actually play them in the piece.

And perhaps I am wrong in the first place trying to interpret “Eight” and ascribe meaning to it in the way of a classical poem.

Peter Schönefeld