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Artist:	CAGE, JOHN
Title:	Cheap Imitation
Label:	AMPERSAND
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	AMPERE 003CD

Classic solo piano work, performed by Cage, 3/7/1976 at Mills College. "'...to take an interest in Satie,' Cage wrote, 'one must be, first of all, disinterested, letting a sound be a sound and a man a man, abandoning illusions about ideas of order, expression of feeling, and all the other aesthetic sales-talk we have inherited.' Humbly engaged but never over-determined, Cheap Imitation remains John Cage's most devotional and enduring homange to a lifelong contract between the Maestro of Stony Point and the Frenchman. Originally composed when he was refused permission to use the arrangement for two pianofortes for Satie's 'Socrates' as the 'accompaniment' to Merce Cunningham's choreography, the tempered, harmonically rich and wryly simple melodic lines that comprise this piano work in three movements presents what French Cage scholar Denis Charles refers to as 'a deforming transposition of Socrates' musical skeleton.' Recorded and engineered by David Behrman and 'Blue' Gene Tyranny during a brief stopover at the Mills College Concert Hall in the midst of a Bay Area downpour and subsequently released on the Italian Cramps label. This newly remastered edition marks the first US release of this historic recording and is filled with archival photographs and essays by Gene Tyranny, Charles, and two pieces by Cage himself (one of which is a cleverly assembled fantasy communication between himself and Satie originally written and published in Art News Annual in 1958)." Limited stock.

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