Outside of musical circles, John Cage is primarily known as an enigmatic revolutionary, a conceptualist whose ideas are more interesting than his sounds. And even to those familiar with his more "conventional" compositions, his early formative works are little known. These works demonstrate the skill with which Cage utilized relatively traditional musical materials, even as he began expanding his creative horizons beyond traditional musical boundaries. Counted among these early works are his Two Pieces for Piano, brief but intriguing works that demonstrates Cage's early interest in the abstract qualities of musical shapes and materials—an interest that would ultimately expand to perceive the wider universe of sound in new ways. The Two Pieces were composed in 1935, only a year after Cage began his studies at UCLA with Arnold Schoenberg. The Second Viennese schoolmaster's influence is apparent in the work, both in its chromaticism as well as its cohesive, almost refractory use of motivic materials.

The first of the Two Pieces, marked "Slowly," unfolds its angular lines in breathy stops and starts, the two hands uneasily independent of each other—in fact, as the work proceeds in ever-changing beat divisions, the bar lines of the left and right hands align only occasionally, as do the melodic arcs themselves. Scalar motions are rare, except for the occasional stepwise turn within a stream of jagged leaps. The steady eighth-note pulse is occasionally rippled by silences, as well as intermittent triplet figures. Toward the end of the piece, the left hand unexpectedly settles into a simple A-E ostinato, offering a moment of relative harmonic lucidity before the ambiguous conclusion.

The second of the Two Pieces assumes many of the same angular, arching contours as the first and uses a similar kind of opaque counterpoint, but takes on an entirely different character. It is to be played "Quite fast" and the composite consistency of its pulse is maintained by one or both hands without interruption of rhythmic variation or rest. Here again, the profusion of wide intervallic leaps and quasi-sequential gesture gives the piece a bony, obtuse quality. And while there is no harmonic holding pattern like that near the end of the first movement, it does convey a certain obsessiveness in the passages, such as that near the close of the piece where the counterpoint devolves into a herky-jerky antiphony of diads in contrary motion.

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