Aside from his Music for Wind Instruments written a decade earlier, John Cage (1912-1992) was known in 1948 for his works for percussion, for piano, and for prepared piano, mostly written for dance companies. The prepared piano gained him wide notoriety as he attached washers, nuts, bolts, strips of paper, and rubber muting objects to the piano strings; each score contains drawings and precise instructions showing where to put these implements.

The purpose of all this fooling around with the innards of the piano was to change the piano, in effect, into a "percussion ensemble in a box" that could be played by a single player. The sounds Cage obtained tended to be unemotional and hard-edged, and he deliberately restricted his available palette to a few notes.

Cage enjoyed the chiming sound of the toy piano and clearly was predisposed to write for a keyboard that produced, again, hard-edged and unemotional sounds from a limited-note palette. Another factor that obviously predisposed him to write this suite was his major occupation of that year: he had gone to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. (While teaching there in 1944 he had organized an event that is generally acknowledged as the first instance of what two decades later came to be called "a happening.") His 1948 project was a 25-concert series featuring the music of French composer Erik Satie.

The simplicity of Satie's music is evident in this suite. The work is in five brief movements, none more than two minutes in length. Cage announces the musical material of the first piece in the form of an incomplete scale. The toy piano is a very limited instrument; it has not much more than an octave of diatonic notes. Cage starts by restricting this instrument even more, using only five notes in the middle of the instrument. The next three notes expand the note palette until all keys on the toy instrument can be used, and then the final movement reverts back to five notes. The music has an intimate and charming, if somewhat deliberately bland quality.

In 1963, Cage's friend Lou Harrison made an orchestral arrangement of the Suite for Toy Piano. This version uses a large orchestra. With the full resources of the orchestra, Harrison adds remarkable amounts of character to the work. He does not harmonize or add additional notes, but he does double the notes at the octave. The sound of the orchestration is at times stately, at times exotic (sometimes even far-Eastern). Harrison's orchestration is far in result from the intentions or sound of Cage's original, but it is beguiling to the ear. And Cage, who loved the idea that his music was unpredictable, did not complain when Harrison created a sound for this music that the composer never dreamt of.

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Suite for Toy Piano (arr.orch., by Lou Harrison)

Lou Harrison's 1963 orchestration of John Cage's 1948 Suite for Toy Piano is an able, orchestral rendition of a splendid, American musical curiosity. While Cage's original work had been a successful comment, and even furthering, of Satie's trail of aesthetic inquiry, Harrison's orchestration brings out a separate comment. While the brief, five movement suite had originally had a definite place in an avant-garde framework—making serious music out of a toy—Harrison takes that same music and turns it into a functional, mainstream piece of orchestral Americana. The result is akin to the music of Copland, and, while not bearing any great impact, the orchestration drives home the critical argument of Cage's even further; music is everywhere. Hearing the solo, toy piano version is interesting because of the ersatz-instrument that the composer chose to write for, and the limited, fragile, and unexpressive qualities of the toy piano give the Satiean-style writing an additional punch that fires the imagination. Harrison uses a conventional orchestra of real instruments, and with all their expressive capabilities to achieve a sound that is grandly tepid, conventional, and only semi-inspired. There is only so far one can go with these sorts of comments upon comments. Cage's finding art within the toy piano's limited range, which is part of what makes the work's impact possible, is genuinely interesting and a pleasant listen. Harrison builds on this point, which develops the argument slightly further and is not ugly while doing so, but by the time one gets this far into the ideas of art by making art, the audience has long since turned towards art concerned with its audience and itself, rather than coded dialogue among peers.

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