The cover is almost aggressively uneventful: a pale green field, modest white lettering, no portrait, no historical illustration and no visual clue that the two discs contain more than two hours of music assembled from the remains of early American hymns and Erik Satie. Its restraint prepares the ear correctly. Nothing here announces itself through spectacle. The recording asks what remains when familiar music is relieved of its original function, stripped of explanatory words and allowed to exist as isolated intervals, durations and silences. The result is not destruction exactly. It is music after part of its social memory has been carefully removed.
The two works belong together because both are acts of affectionate interference. Cage does not quote earlier composers in order to display historical learning or produce recognizable collage. He enters existing music and changes the conditions under which it can continue. In 44 Harmonies, hymns and anthems from the period surrounding the American Revolution lose selected notes through chance operations. In Cheap Imitation, the rhythmic structure of Erik Satie’s Socrate survives while its pitches are replaced. One work subtracts from a collective musical past; the other rebuilds a beloved composition after legal restrictions made its direct use impossible. Both ask whether identity lives in notes, rhythm, memory, function or the listener’s desire to recognize a source.
The 44 Harmonies originated inside Apartment House 1776, Cage’s enormous Bicentennial musicircus. The title imagined early American musical traditions existing like residents in separate rooms of one building, audible simultaneously without being synchronized into a single patriotic statement. Protestant hymns, Sephardic songs, Native American music, African American calls and hollers, marches, tunes and instrumental fragments could coexist without being forced to agree. Cage’s apartment house was therefore an alternative to the official national pageant. America was represented not as one triumphant melody but as incompatible sounds sharing time and territory.
That conception was generous, but it was not free from historical difficulty. To divide the country’s inhabitants into several representative traditions risks turning vast, internally diverse peoples into symbolic rooms within a structure still designed by one composer. The year 1776 also cannot mean the same thing to colonial Protestants, enslaved Africans, Indigenous nations and Jewish communities. The Declaration’s language of freedom existed beside slavery, dispossession and restricted citizenship. Cage’s refusal to harmonize those histories into one official anthem is meaningful, yet the categories themselves reveal the limitations of any artistic attempt to summarize a nation.
The 44 Harmonies concentrate upon one particular room in that apartment house: white Protestant congregational music by Supply Belcher, William Billings, Jacob French, Andrew Law and James Lyon. These hymns helped early communities sing themselves into collective identity. Their harmonies carried worship, instruction, mourning, social discipline and a sense of shared belonging. Cage removes the texts and subjects the notes to chance, leaving structures that still resemble sacred music while no longer declaring doctrine.
This subtraction creates a peculiar spiritual condition. The harmonies sound devotional, but the object of devotion has disappeared. Cadences begin forming and then encounter missing steps. Chords retain the upright clarity of hymnody while being detached from the words that once gave them theological purpose. The music seems to remember belief without being able to state what was believed.
Irvine Arditti’s arrangement makes that condition especially vivid. The original harmonies may be played on a keyboard instrument, where multiple notes can emerge from one performer and one mechanism. Dividing them among two violins, viola and cello turns each chord into a small society. Four musicians must sustain, enter, withdraw and breathe together. A vertical harmony becomes the result of several bodies maintaining a temporary agreement.
The Arditti Quartet is famous for navigating some of the most technically demanding and densely notated string music of the modern era. Here its precision serves extreme simplicity. The challenge is not surviving a barrage of extended techniques or rhythmic complexity. It is maintaining purity when every entrance is exposed. A slight imbalance, an unnecessary swell or an expressive vibrato could change the fragile proportions of the entire sonority. Virtuosity becomes the discipline of not adding what the music has not requested.
The quartet’s largely vibrato-free tone creates an almost glasslike surface. The instruments blend without losing their individual grain, producing harmonies that can resemble an organ, a distant choir or one large stringed instrument whose internal parts have been separated across the room. Bowed sound also gives each note a life that a keyboard cannot provide. A chord is not struck and allowed to decay. It is held through continuous physical effort, and its apparent stillness contains four bows making microscopic adjustments.
This physical continuity exposes Cage’s paradoxical relationship with harmony. As a young composer, he accepted Schoenberg’s judgment that his lack of harmonic instinct would leave him facing an impassable wall. Cage spent much of his career finding ways around that wall through rhythm, percussion, chance, silence and the acceptance of environmental sound. Yet 44 Harmonies returns directly to chords, thirds, sixths and tonal remnants. He does not suddenly embrace functional harmony as a system of progression. He frees individual harmonies from the obligation to lead anywhere.
The pieces therefore feel both ancient and strangely suspended outside history. A chord may contain the unmistakable flavor of eighteenth-century hymnody, but without ordinary syntax it becomes difficult to determine whether it is beginning, continuing or concluding. The listener recognizes the architecture while finding many of its corridors missing. These are houses with doors opening onto air.
Duration varies dramatically. Some harmonies pass in little more than thirty seconds; others stretch beyond ten minutes. The short pieces resemble fragments preserved after a larger manuscript was damaged. A few intervals appear, establish a delicate relationship and vanish before the listener can decide what they were meant to accomplish. The longest harmonies transform subtraction into environment. Sparse sonorities and long silences make every return feel architectural, as though another part of an abandoned meetinghouse has briefly become visible.
“Harmony IV: Lift Up Your Heads, O Ye Gates” and “Harmony V: The Lord Descended” together occupy nearly half an hour near the beginning of the cycle. Their titles retain biblical grandeur, yet the music has been emptied of rhetorical certainty. There is no choir proclaiming the text, no congregation affirming it and no harmonic machinery driving toward revelation. What remains is spacious, patient and curiously vulnerable. The gate may lift, the Lord may descend, but the music refuses to stage either event as spectacle.
Elsewhere, names such as “Funeral Anthem,” “Reflection,” “Wisdom,” “Rapture,” “Tempest” and “The Lord Is Ris’n” offer emotional and religious instructions that the sounds only partially obey. “Rapture” appears twice, derived from Supply Belcher, but its remnants do not explode into ecstatic release. Cage’s deletions leave rapture full of openings. The title promises transport while the quartet remains attentive to individual tones and the silence surrounding them.
The place names are equally haunting: Cookfield, Mansfield, Dover, Littleton, Brunswick, Bellingham, Detroit, New York, Greenwich, New Windsor, Litchfield and Bloomfield. Hymn tunes often carried geographical names that allowed melodies to function as portable communities. On this recording those names form an alternative map of America, one made from settlements, congregations and remembered singing rather than borders. Yet the map is incomplete. The voices of the communities have been removed, and the quartet performs their musical remains from another century and another cultural position.
This could feel like an act of sterilization, turning lived religious practice into refined contemporary chamber music. Cage’s method risks converting social history into beautiful abstraction. The performance does not restore the specific congregations, beliefs or conflicts from which the hymns emerged. It cannot. What it offers instead is an opportunity to hear how much historical authority was embedded in apparently ordinary tonal movement. Once selected notes disappear, the remaining sounds stop concealing themselves as natural order. Each interval becomes a decision again.
Chance operations are crucial to that transformation. Cage did not simply edit according to modern taste, removing whatever sounded too conventional. Chance interrupted his preference and prevented the resulting harmonies from becoming a predictable style of elegant fragmentation. Some original relationships survive almost intact; others are reduced until their logic becomes skeletal. The method neither preserves nor destroys consistently. It produces uneven historical erosion.
That erosion resembles the way cultural memory actually works. Certain songs, names and rituals remain vivid while neighboring information disappears. A community may preserve a melody but forget the circumstances that made it necessary. A nation celebrates a founding date while suppressing the experiences that contradict its preferred story. Cage’s missing notes become small acoustic absences inside a larger inherited narrative.
The forty-four pieces are not arranged to form conventional dramatic development. Listening to them continuously can cause individual titles and sources to blur, but that blurring is productive. After enough time, the quartet stops sounding like an ensemble presenting miniatures and begins resembling a device for examining harmony under changing conditions. Density, register, duration and silence become the true subjects.
The experience is calm without being decorative. These performances could remain quietly in a room, but attentive listening reveals persistent dislocation. Cadences do not provide the usual psychological reassurance. Familiar tonal colors appear without explaining why they are present. The music repeatedly resembles home while withholding the route back to it.
After more than one hundred minutes of quartet sound, Cheap Imitation reduces the population to Irvine Arditti alone. The change is profound. The communal hymn fragments give way to a solitary line, and America’s contested historical apartment house is replaced by Cage’s private attachment to Erik Satie.
The work originated from a practical crisis. Cage had arranged Satie’s Socrate to accompany Merce Cunningham’s dance Second Hand, but permission to use the music was denied. Rather than abandon the choreography’s rhythmic structure, Cage created a new melodic line with the same phrase lengths and rhythmic proportions. Copyright obstruction became a compositional method. The prohibited original remained present as invisible scaffolding.
Calling the result Cheap Imitation is both self-mockery and philosophical accuracy. Cage does not pretend to have replaced Satie with an equivalent masterpiece. The title admits dependence openly. Yet imitation becomes strangely intimate because Cage preserves not the recognizable melodies but their movement through time. He follows Satie’s breathing while speaking with different pitches.
This is a deeper form of resemblance than quotation. A quoted melody allows the audience to congratulate itself for recognition. Cheap Imitation keeps the beloved source hidden inside duration. The listener who does not know Socrate can still hear a line shaped by another composition’s body. Love survives as proportion.
The violin version makes that love sound exposed. A solo violin cannot hide behind harmonic mass. Every pitch arrives alone, connected to the next by bow pressure, silence and Arditti’s control of an extremely restrained line. The three movements unfold with pale clarity, neither conventionally expressive nor emotionally empty. Arditti does not inflate the music into a Romantic lament. He allows its modal turns and pauses to retain their peculiar humility.
Cage regarded Cheap Imitation as troubling partly because it revealed personal attachment so openly. Much of his work sought to reduce the composer’s preferences and allow sounds to be themselves, but this piece existed because he loved Satie’s music and refused to let an external prohibition sever the relationship. Chance is still present in the selection of pitches, yet chance serves devotion. The composer’s affection is not expressed through emotional decoration; it is expressed through the labor of rebuilding.
Placed after 44 Harmonies, the solo piece clarifies that Cage’s use of historical material was never simply ironic. He could alter music precisely because he listened to it closely enough to understand which elements might survive transformation. The early American hymns are decomposed into resonant fragments. Satie’s melodic surface disappears while its temporal skeleton remains. In both cases, Cage treats the past as something living enough to withstand change.
The album’s apparent tranquility therefore conceals two confrontations with authority. Apartment House 1776 responds to official national commemoration by replacing unified patriotic narrative with simultaneous, unsynchronized traditions. Cheap Imitation responds to copyright refusal by composing around the forbidden object. Cage does not attack either authority through loud protest. He changes the structure of the situation until another kind of music becomes possible.
The Arditti performances are ideal for this quiet resistance. Their accuracy never turns the works into academic specimens. Precision allows the missing material to remain audible as absence. The quartet gives every surviving interval enough space to vibrate independently, while Arditti’s solo playing lets Satie’s invisible rhythm guide the line without turning imitation into impersonation.
This double CD is ultimately about inheritance without obedience. Cage receives hymn tunes, national history, Satie, copyright restrictions, conventional harmony and the institutions of classical performance. He neither rejects them completely nor accepts their original terms. He removes, rearranges, translates and continues.
What emerges is music of extraordinary gentleness, but its gentleness should not be confused with passivity. To leave a harmony unresolved can be a refusal. To let different histories coexist without synchronization can be political. To preserve the rhythm of forbidden music while changing every pitch can be an act of loyalty performed through disobedience.
The forty-four harmonies and the three parts of Cheap Imitation leave the past recognizable but unreachable. We hear rooms from an apartment house whose residents have changed, hymns whose words are absent, a Satie work whose melodies cannot appear and a composer who discovered that subtraction could be another form of care. The missing notes do not create emptiness. They create the space in which history begins vibrating again.
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