Instrumental Interaction and Subversion in John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra

Abstract

This article examines the dynamic nature of instrumental interaction in indeterminate music, using John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58) as a case study. Performing the Concert requires instruments to be dismantled, detuned, and destabilised, and within the parts themselves techniques are often stretched or combined to the point of complete breakdown. Drawing on interviews and observational studies undertaken with the experimental music ensemble Apartment House, I explore how the indeterminacies of the instrumental parts are enacted and negotiated in performance. The article suggests the ways in which indeterminacy is not an abstract compositional device, but is distributed across musicians, their instruments, and their environments. More broadly, it shows how a reading of indeterminacy through performance both underlines and complicates the relationships between individuals, objects, and the kinds of agency that are enacted and animated in creative work.