Five2

John Cage’s Five2 is one in the series of John Cage’s number pieces.  It was written in May of 1991 and is dedicated to Mauricio Kagel.  The dedication is due to Kagel’s sixtieth birthday.  The piece is orchestrated for English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet and timpani.  The piece is approximately five minutes.  Cage includes the instructions of “flexible time brackets”.

There is no “score” to the piece, instead it is constructed in five parts.  Each part is exactly that, a part for an instrument.  Each part is divided by various time brackets.  These time brackets indicate the variable times of when to make the indicated sounds.  Each time bracket surrounds what I would call a musical cell.  While these cells act very differently than say musical cells in early minimalist music, I still think it is fair to call them cells.  Each cell contains between one to three different pitches, and potentially breath markings to further indicate time and phrasing.  Each cell in this particular piece has a time notation before and after the indicated pitches.  These time notations each have two time numbers.  These time notations on the left indicate the times in which one can begin to play the notes and the time notations on the right indicate when one may stop playing the cell.

The three clarinet instruments may play throughout the entirety of the piece, while the English horn plays potentially the first two minutes and forty five seconds and the timpani begins playing from two minutes thirty seconds until the end.  While not exactly a call and response, this seems important to the form of the piece to me.  While most likely a result of chance, it is an interesting thing to consider that this process created what I originally perceived as a call and response orchestrated between these two instruments.

(Jeremy Parel)