New World Records' John Cage: Music for Keyboard and Morton Feldman: The Early Years combines two long unavailable CBS recordings that collectors and even the most casual followers of these seminal American composers have sought for two generations or more. The originals of these two CBS albums have an extended history that is in itself interesting: the
Feldman was first issued in 1959 in CBS' Modern American Music Series and swiftly sank without a trace; it fared much better when reissued in Columbia's later Odyssey series, wherefore it earned the title The Early Years, by which it has become familiar. The
Cage was issued as a two-record set in 1970, and for a time after it went out of print, one could still order it as a Columbia Special Products release but that too disappeared in the 1980s. John Cage: Music for Keyboard 1935-1948 was the first comprehensive survey of
Cage's prepared piano music and contained many first recordings of pieces that are now well more than familiar. Morton Feldman: The Early Years is aptly titled -- the
Feldman of Rothko Chapel, the String Quartet No. 2, and Coptic Light was, in 1959, a baby. Flashes of his later brilliance are liberally apparent in these -- by later standards -- miniatures of five to seven minutes' duration.
The striking thing is that when these recordings were made in 1959 stereo,
Feldman was a "nobody." His works were seldom heard in concert, he did not have a publishing contract just yet, and his crudely fashioned graphic scores were certain to underwhelm most critics who regarded
Stockhausen and
Boulez as the kingpins of contemporary music. CBS' Goddard Lieberson, however, was interested in capturing important currents in contemporary music in whatever streams they were flowing -- in 1959 CBS also recorded
Stockhausen and
Boulez -- and someone convinced him that
Feldman was the real deal. CBS also used musicians of the same caliber that they would for
Boulez, or for that matter Mozart -- on these
Feldman recordings we have not only
David Tudor and
Feldman himself as interpreters but also the entire New Music String Quartet and up and coming pianist
Russell Sherman. From an interpretive standpoint, these 1959 recordings of
Feldman are every bit as good as anything the top performers of the present could do in these same pieces. New World's careful transfers of the session tapes are a big improvement over the LPs in that for the first time one gets a sense of the stereo spread in works like Piece for Four Pianos, only narrowly perceptible on vinyl.
Cage's meeting with pianist Jeanne Kirstein was crucial to his development and John Cage: Music for Keyboard 1935-1948 did wonders for his reputation as a composer. Kirstein was a professor of piano at the University of Cincinnati and
Cage, in 1967-1968, was its composer in residence -- in 1967 he was still fielding questions like "Mr.
Cage, are you a charlatan?" Kirstein, the wife of
LaSalle String Quartet cellist Jack Kirstein, took an early interest in
Cage's prepared piano music, and although Henmar Press was getting a lot of this music into print at the time, nobody was playing it --
Cage himself had mostly forgotten it. Revisiting these early scores with Kirstein, and experiencing her first-rate interpretations of them, helped reconnect
Cage with his muse at a time when, as he later admitted, he was feeling adrift in a sea of too many options. The composition of Cheap Imitation, the work that opened
Cage up to the last phase of his development, which has proven so potent in establishing his place in posterity, followed hard enough on his work with Kirstein that the piece was even mentioned in the original CBS album's liner notes.
Again, New World's transfers are a huge boon to listeners -- no one who has endured the crackling static during Prelude to Meditation on the carelessly made Columbia LP pressings could fail to appreciate the noiselessly silent reproduction it enjoys here. Kirstein's performances are trendsetting and in many ways, ideal -- her playing of
Cage is cool, controlled, easygoing, and eloquent. The notes are the only drawback to this effort -- although the short headnote by producer
David Behrman puts these recordings in the right corporate context, the rest of the notes, while making some interesting points, are mostly just a rehash of secondary sources. He hardly said a word about Jeanne Kirstein; we do not learn, for example, that she died young, in 1980. Nevertheless, these aren't just "historical recordings"; they are integral parts of the history itself, and neither
Cage nor
Feldman would be what they are if these albums had never been made. For dedicated devotees of either of these major American composers, obtaining this New World set is not an option, and even casual fans will find them highly illuminating.