Listening Report- John Cage’s “Eight-part 1”

 Among all John Cage’s pieces, I decided to focus my attention on “Eight- part 1”, because the name seemed really interesting and thought, something that was part of a project; besides all these reasons why I picked this piece, maybe the most important one relies on my instinct, which is exactly what I will follow to analyze John Cage’s work.

This composition belongs to a collection called Number of pieces, composed between 1987 and 1992, and each piece is named after the number of performers involved. Eight was composed in 1991 for the Tisha Brown Dance Company, which choreographed the piece.

I cannot deny that when I first listened to this composition, I got a little bit emotional, because it recalls a sort of “primordial essence of life”: low sounds realized through the oboe, the horn, the trumpet and the tuba make me think of the sound of a constant heartbeat, which is maybe the first think we hear even before we are born, so it’s like living an experience, that we actually lived but that we cannot remember and that now we can fully understand and appreciate with gratitude. Low sounds never stop and represent a perpetual accompaniment through the entire flow, which is enriched by the use of instruments such as the flute and the clarinet, that give depth and consistency to the piece by adding a glimpse of melancholy and sweetness or at least this is my interpretation. Constant low sounds represent the heartbeat of life that never stops, while high sounds, that are not always constant, represent all the things that change and evolve during our time on earth..

I couldn’t help it and I also listened to Eight- part 2 and my first impressions of it can be summarized with two words: fear and solitude. There was more tension than the first one, but maybe because it represents the other part of life, the scariest one. Low sounds dominate and this gives the impression of “silence” which can be scarier in some ways, but it demonstrates that also the so called “silence” has a sound. John Cage has always said that as long as there’s life there are sounds, so silence probably doesn’t exist or we don’t know what it is because we are alive.

Anyway, I really appreciated John Cage’s work and desire to discover more about the nature of sounds and what they actually are. I have learned so much and for sure I am going to look at things differently right now.