FOUR x FOUR
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Four
by John Cage
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2022
MICHEL LORAND – QUATUOR MP4
HD color film, 16:9, Stereo sound and 5.1, 70’
Four x Four is a film built around John Cage’s Four (1983) for string quartet. This piece is part of a circular conception of music, “to find, to search for, to turn, to go around,” as Maurice Blanchot tells us in The Infinite Conversation: “To find, to search for, to turn, to go around: yes, these are words indicating movement, but always circular. It is as though the sense of searching or research lay in its necessary inflection in turning. ‘To find’ is inscribed upon the great celestial ‘vault’ that gave us the first models of the unmoved mover. To find is to seek in relation to the center that is, properly speaking, what cannot be found.” 1
The quartet’s musicians faced each other, and a camera circling them filmed their performance in a single shot. In one long performance, the musicians play the four variations of the piece Four: five minutes, then ten, then twenty, and finally thirty minutes.
Four (1989) belongs to the Number Pieces series, begun in 1987 and unfinished at the time of Cage’s death; its title reveals the number of musicians required for its performance. The time brackets are indicated, but the sound material is very much simplified. The musicians have access to all parts, without consideration of virtuosity, but instead creating a set of shifting tonal densities.
“In Four, each player’s part consists of short passages made up of sustained tones. Most of these passages contain only a single note; others may be phrases of two to five notes. These simple musical statements are then placed within ‘flexible time brackets,’ which is Cage’s term for designated spans of time during which a given portion of the music can begin and end (for example, the first passage in each part is marked to begin at any time during the first 22 1/2 seconds, and to end at any time between 15 and 37 1/2 seconds into the performance). The time brackets are of roughly thirty seconds’ duration, so that the performers have a fair amount of flexibility in arranging their music in time. Since the brackets overlap one another slightly, it happens at times that two or more phrases follow each other directly, without a break. At other times, a pause of some duration may occur while a performer, having finished a phrase, waits for the next time bracket to begin.
The time brackets, by permitting rhythmic freedom only within certain broad limits, allow the four parts to have a very flexible relationship to one another and yet still remain roughly coordinated. The effect of this kind of composition—isolated long notes placed freely within these floating time brackets—is immediately apparent in listening to the piece. Four presents us with a constantly shifting texture of tones; as notes enter and depart, the four parts together form constantly shifting harmonies. The various lines can be followed like threads in a complex tapestry as they are picked up, combined, dropped and rediscovered.”2
The four musicians play very softly, very slowly, and with no vibrato. In addition, the four parts of the quartet are composed of the same relatively limited range of keys, so that any of the four musicians can play any of the four parts; Cage’s performance instructions are designed to show that the parts are actually interchangeable and so the structure of the time brackets offers great flexibility. First, the four musicians divide the parts between themselves as they like. They play the piece and then they exchange scores and play it again from the beginning. This results in us hearing the same music twice, but with slightly different timbres, with the notes slightly displaced within the brackets. The absence of any differentiation of key, dynamics or timbre, contributes to the creation of a flat, unmodulated musical surface. Although the interwoven parts of Four resemble a tapestry, they are actually a fabric of muted shades of grays and browns. “There are three five-minute sections, A–C, each having flexible time brackets and one which is fixed; these are notated from 0’00” to 5’00”. There are four parts (1–4), each of which can be played by any of the players. If the performance is to last ten minutes, all players play section B (parts 1–4). The two violinists then exchange their parts with the other two players either as 1 with 3 and 2 with 4 or 1 with 4 and 2 with 3. After resetting their chronometers, they play section B again. If the performance is to last twenty minutes, all players play sections A and C without pause between. Players 1 and 2 then exchange their parts with players 3 and 4 in either way and play A and C again.” John Cage
1 The Infinite Conversation, Maurice Blanchot, translation and foreword Susan Hanson (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 25-26.
2 Fragments from comments by Malcolm Goldstein:
https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php?topic=9355.80
