Late summer, 1958. For the first time, the American composer John Cage attended the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. As so often in those years, he was accompanied by the pianist David Tudor, and together they gave the European premieres of his Music for Two Pianos, Winter Music and Variations I.

John Cage’s first appearance in Darmstadt in 1958 was a red-letter event in the history of music (his second and last appearance there would not take place until 1990, two years before his death). With his three lectures, in particular, he cracked open the little world of contemporary music, sowing the seeds for a rich, burgeoning, heterogeneous landscape of sound with many different concepts of what music is and can be.

The Communication lecture of 1958 is the only one of Cage’s three Darmstadt lectures that exists in the archive of the Darmstadt International Institute of Music in the form of an audio document, minus the opening minutes. There is no way of knowing today why the other two lectures, 'Changes' and 'Indeterminacy', were not tape-recorded, or whether the recordings later disappeared.

Contents:
Third part of the Darmstadt Lecture “Composition as Process” (1958)
John Cage (voice)
World premiere recording
[01] Communication 1

[02] Communication 2

[03] Christian Wolff: For Piano with Preparations (1957)
David Tudor, piano

[04] Communication 3

[05] Bo Nilsson: Quantitäten (1958)
David Tudor, piano
World premiere

[06] Communication 4

[07] Bo Nilsson: Quantitäten (1958)
David Tudor (piano)
World premiere

[08] Communication 5

[09] Communication 6

[10] John Cage: Variations I (1958)
John Cage and David Tudor, two pianos and radio sets
European premiere