John Cage - The Works for Percussion 2

Third Construction (1941) 10:17
for percussion quartet

Second Construction (1940) 7:50
for percussion quartet

First Construction [in Metal] (1939) 11:25
for percussion sextet, with assistant
Gregory Beyer & Ross Karre, percussion

Trio (1936) 4:30

Quartet (1935) 21:24

Living Room Music (1940) 8:04
for percussion & speech quartet

John Cage’s vision of the future of music was first shaped by an intense creative period from 1935-1942, when he wrote many of the seminal works of percussion chamber music featured here. When he composed these works, the young Cage was basically the same age as the members of Third Coast Percussion.

This release includes all three of the groundbreaking Constructions. First Construction (in Metal) utilizes dozens of metal instruments which are beaten, scraped and shaken, creating an other worldly mixture of resonant sound unlike any heard before it. Second Construction prominently features one of Cage’s greatest inventions, the prepared piano. Finally, Third Construction brings the greatest degree of complexity and the widest range of instrumental timbres yet, creating one of the first landmark pieces in the percussion chamber music literature.

There are very few recordings of the early works Quartet and Trio.

The surprisingly beautiful sounds of everyday objects come forth in Third Coast Percussion’s recording of Living Room Music, recorded onsite at the futuristic Ford House in Aurora, IL, designed by one of America’s most iconoclastic architects, Bruce Goff, in 1947. Third Coast utilize the house itself as an instrument for the first movement.