Cage Music of Changes by Schleiermacher

John Cage: Music of Changes
Steffen Schleiermacher, piano
MDG 613 0785–2

There is a peculiar silence before Schleiermacher strikes the first note — you can almost hear him gathering himself, deciding something. Then the sounds arrive: isolated, sovereign, answerable to nothing but the hexagrams of the I Ching that generated them. Cage’s Music of Changes (1951) is one of those works that either reorganizes your listening or leaves you stranded. There is no middle ground.

Schleiermacher’s decision to pull back Cage’s tempo markings — particularly in Books I and II — is worth pausing over. It makes the piece longer, yes, but length here is a feature, not a liability. Time in Music of Changes doesn’t accumulate so much as it pools. The silences aren’t rests in any conventional sense; they’re load-bearing structural elements, and Schleiermacher understands this with a thoroughness that lesser pianists simply don’t bring to this repertoire.

Book I — barely five and a half minutes — has a kind of impish lightness. Capricious isn’t quite the right word, though it’s close. There’s something almost mischievous in the way Schleiermacher dispatches these fragmentary gestures, his touch calibrated to let each event register without lingering past its welcome.

Then Book II arrives, and everything opens up. Twenty-four minutes and forty-six seconds of what I can only describe as dilated time. The plucked strings — sparse, almost reluctant — land like stones dropped into still water. Schleiermacher spaces them with what feels like genuine dramatic instinct rather than mere execution of a score. The silences breathe.

What this release captures, and what any honest account of Music of Changes must acknowledge, is the sheer physical difficulty of sustaining concentration — both the performer’s and ours. Books III and IV, running eleven to twelve minutes each, test the listener’s accumulated patience and reward it. By the time the final sounds dissipate, something has shifted in the room. The analogy to Feldman is apt and earned: this music, once internalized, generates its own gravitational pull. You finish it and find yourself wanting to begin again.

Schleiermacher has been building something remarkable with his Cage series for MDG — a thorough document that treats this music with the scholarly seriousness it deserves while never letting that seriousness calcify into mere duty. The recorded sound on the Fürstliche Reitbahn Arolsen is clean and spacious, the piano’s full dynamic range intact, from the most feathered pianissimo to the occasional fortissimo eruption that jolts you awake.

Is this the definitive Music of Changes? I’m not sure “definitive” is a concept Cage would have endorsed — or that I’d want to apply to a work built on chance operations. But it’s authoritative, deeply considered, and essential. Get it.