From the beginning of his career John Cage (1912 - 1992) was a pioneer. He was among the first classical composers to write music that was mostly (or all) for percussion. Then he originated the "prepared piano," altering an ordinary piano with various doodads on the strings inside to make plunking, rattling, and banging sounds (in effect, making it a percussion ensemble in a box). Then he devised a method of using durational cells as the basic formal principle of his music, and, beginning in the 1950s, invented and applied the principle of indeterminacy in service of an aesthetic of "non-intention."

As is the case with many of his earlier compositions, The Seasons was written for a dance performance, having been commissioned by Lincoln Kirsten and the Ballet Society of New York. It was Cage's first score for the full resources of a traditional Western concert orchestra. It was also his first extended piece for conventional, pitched Western instruments since his Music for Wind Instruments of 1938.

By now Cage was using durational cells, and was on his way to the principle of indeterminacy. He had gotten through some personal problems by turning to Eastern philosophies, which he studied with Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Cage accepted an Indian aesthetic idea of "permanent emotions," and likely also heard from his teacher the Indian interpretation of the fundamental qualitites of the four seasons of the year: Quiescence (winter), Creation (spring), Preservation (summer) and Destruction (fall). Cage said in his own notes on the piece that it is an attempt to express this view of the year's cycle.

The ballet's four seasonal scenes are musically divided into nine sections; each season is preceded by a prelude, and the material of the first prelude is repeated to end the work. Cage had replaced harmony as the energizing force in music with time itself, with the number of beats or a measured duration of a section being the basic definition of a unit. Cage felt free to fill each durational unit with a collection of related sound-ideas that acted as a group, rather than as a progression from one note to the other. Thus some cells in the work are tonal and some not; some use "pretty" sounds, while others are harsher.

The nine sections' proportional durations are 2, 2, 1, 3, 2, 4, 1, 3, 1 (with the repeat of the opening prelude taking half the time as in its original exposure. The effect of the music is surprisingly attractive to the ear, which quickly adapts to the notion that the replacement of one note by the next is not meant to carry particular meaning.

The Seasons was premiered at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York on May 18, 1947, by the Ballet Society, with choreography by Cage's partner Merce Cunningham.

© All Music Guide

Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.