Living Room Music
Living Room Music is a musical composition by John Cage, composed in 1940. It is a quartet for unspecified instruments, all of which may be found in a living room of a typical house, hence the title (Pritchett, 1993, 20).
Living Room Music is dedicated to Cage's then-wife Xenia. The work consists of four movements: "To Begin", "Story", "Melody", and "End". Cage instructs the performers to use any household objects or architectural elements as instruments and gives examples: magazines, cardboard, "largish books", floor, the wooden frame of a window, etc. The first and the last movements are percussion music for said instruments. In the second movement, the performers transform into a speech quartet: the music consists entirely of pieces of Gertrude Stein's short poem "The World Is Round" (1938) spoken or sung. The third movement is optional. It includes a melody played by one of the performers on "any suitable instrument."
References
- Score: Edition Peters 6786. (c) 1976 by Henmar Press
- James Pritchett. The Music of John Cage. Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-521-56544-8
- James Pritchett. John Cage: Choral music (a timeline), 1998. Available online.
External links
- Living Room Music two performances: Metropolitan Opera Orchestra Percussionists and Square Peg Round Hole
- v
- t
- e
- Constructions (1939–41)
- Imaginary Landscapes
- No. 1
- No. 2
- No. 3
- No. 4
- No. 5 (1939–52)
- Music for an Aquatic Ballet (1938)
- Living Room Music (1940)
- Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48)
- String Quartet in Four Parts (1950)
- Music of Changes (1951)
- 4′33″ (1952)
- 27' 10.554" (1956)
- Variations (1958–67)
- Cheap Imitation (1969)
- HPSCHD (1969)
- Song Books (1970)
- Etudes Australes (1974–75)
- Apartment House 1776 (1976)
- Etudes Boreales (1978)
- Freeman Etudes (1977–90)
- Roaratorio (1979)
- As Slow as Possible (1985/1987)
- But What About the Noise ... (1986)
- Europeras (1987–91)
- Number Pieces (1987–92)
- Silence (1961)
- A Year from Monday (1968)
- Notations (1969)
- M (1973)
- Empty Words (1979)
- X (1983)
- Crete Cage (mother)
- Xenia Cage (wife)
- Indeterminacy in music
- West Coast School
- Foundation for Contemporary Arts
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