Music of Changes [SEP] instrumentation
Music of Changes
Music of Changes is a piece for solo piano by John Cage. Composed in 1951 for pianist and friend David Tudor, it is a ground-breaking piece of indeterminate music. The process of composition involved applying decisions made using the "I Ching", a Chinese classic text that is commonly used as a divination system. The "I Ching" was applied to large charts of sounds, durations, dynamics, tempo and densities.
History of composition.
"Music of Changes" was the
entertainments of that time and was played as a continuous entity, without intervals or curtain descents between acts. It was the contemporary custom for scene shifts to take place in sight of the audience, these changes being reflected musically by changes in instrumentation, key and style.
Creation Instrumentation.
For the purpose of analysis the music scholar Jane Glover has divided Monteverdi's list of instruments into three main groups: strings, brass and continuo, with a few further items not easily classifiable. The strings grouping is formed from ten members