Artist to celebrate famous composer with piano piece

Have you ever had the urge to tear apart a grand piano for no good reason?

Don’t worry you’re not alone. John Cage, easily the most famous of American 20th-century composers was there with you too.

But he sublimated all that destructive energy into “modifying” a piano to create a new sound space for a performer to play in. John Tenney, acclaimed pianist, composer and performer of the musical American avant-garde tradition, will be playing one of Cage’s last contributions to the prepared piano genre.

The piece, Cage’s “Sonatas and Interludes” will be performed Tuesday, Feb. 26, at 7 p.m., at the Georgia O’Keefe museum in Santa Fe.

Cage didn’t actually have destructive tendencies. In fact, he was an adamant pacifist due to his predilection toward eastern religious belief systems. What led Cage to the prepared piano genre — taking a piano and cutting strings and placing objects on the strings to make different noises when the keys are struck — was one of convenience. In his early years, Cage was preoccupied with rhythm and created a small percussion ensemble to perform pieces from the new percussion-based music genre. He also accompanied dancers.

One of the problems he encountered was fitting his musical ensemble and the dancers into a relatively small rehearsal space. This lead him to the idea of composing for the prepared piano, an instrument that was compact by nature, yet had the potential for the diverse and resonant universe Cage’s aesthetics required.

His experimentation in this genre came to artistic fruition between 1946 and 1948, when he wrote his “Sonatas and Interludes.” Considered a milestone in his career, “Sonatas and Interludes” was instantly recognized as both the culmination of Cage’s decade of writing for the prepared piano and his first genuine masterpiece.

Unlike many of Cage’s compositions for prepared piano written for the dance, “Sonatas and Interludes” is a large-scale concert work with extremely elaborate preparation. In the score Cage meticulously maps out the placement of every foreign object on every string with precise measurements. In fact, over half of the 88 keys on the piano are given a new texture.

James Tenney, Roy E. Disney Family Chair in Musical Composition at the California Institute or the Arts, has performed Cage’s music since the late 1950s and was cited by Cage as the teacher with whom he would choose to work with if he were a student.

James Tenney was born in 1934 in Silver City, N.M., and grew up in Arizona and Colorado, where he received his early training as a pianist and composer. He was a pioneer in the field of electronic and computer music, working with Max Mathews and others at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the early 1960s to develop programs for computer sound-generation and composition.

He has written works for a variety of media, both instrumental and electronic, many of them using alternative tuning systems. He is the author of several articles on musical acoustics, computer music, and musical form and perception, as well as two books. Tenney will be performing Cage’s “Sonatas and Interludes” Tuesday, Feb. 26, at 7 p.m., at the Georgia O’Keefe Museum at 217 Johnson Street, Santa Fe.