Tag: classical-music

Analysis of ‘Indent’

Indent is a live album by avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, recorded in March of 1973. It was the first solo piano performance he ever released, recorded at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He taught at Antioch from 1971-1973.

I’d first heard of Cecil Taylor’s music through an enigmatic quote from Frank Zappa: “If you want to learn how to play guitar, listen to Wes Montgomery. You also should go out and see if you can get a record by Cecil Taylor if you want to learn how to play the piano.” You will find this quote to be all the more enigmatic once you hear Taylor’s music, wondering how one is actually supposed to learn how to play the piano from emulating Taylor’s relentless, indefatigable virtuosity, especially as it is applied to such an unconventional musical style.

Indeed, to say that Taylor’s music is not easy listening would be the understatement of the year. It is undoubtedly an acquired taste, so be forewarned before hearing any of it. If you stick with it, though, and keep an open mind, you’ll find it rewarding.

I recommend starting with an album like Indent, or Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within) from 1976, for these are solo piano albums, and you can clearly hear what Taylor is doing without what will (at least at first ) seem like the chaos of saxophone wailing and endless drum rolls by players like Jimmy Lyons and Andrew Cyrille respectively, two regular members of Taylor’s “Unit.” This is why I’m analyzing Indent, apart from the fact that there is also poetry, on the back cover of the LP, which I wish to analyze.

Taylor’s music is characterized as being rushes of seemingly endless energy, eschewing conventional melody, harmony, tonality, rhythm, or structure. He was part of the free jazz movement that developed in the early 1960s with players like saxophonist Ornette Coleman, so the music is generally atonal and dissonant. Strongly influenced by 20th century classical composers like Igor Stravinsky and Anton Webern, Taylor started off as a classically trained pianist before going into jazz.

While many jazz musicians of the 1960s were getting inspiration from 20th century classical music, Taylor went beyond the more usual influences of these to create a musical style totally unique to him, with–for example–cascades of tone clusters as being a regular feature of his improvising. He once said that he liked to imitate the leaps of a dancer in his playing, and one can hear that in the way the tone clusters fly along the range of the piano keys.

His piano is a percussion instrument, in effect: “eighty-eight tuned drums,” as Val Wilmer once described Taylor’s playing. This music is demanding on the listener, who must give full attention to it. Lacking conventional rhythm, the music cannot be tapped to or bopped to; I once read somewhere that listeners tend to sway to the music instead, for it is constant, frenetic energy, like fast triplets going on almost forever. At the end of any performance, Taylor had to be exhausted.

Cecil Taylor wasn’t just a piano player: he was also an accomplished poet. As I mentioned above, he had some of his poetry printed on the back cover of Indent; these are called “Scroll No. 1” and “Scroll No. 2.” I will be going into an analysis of these, as well as of the album’s music, below. It will be clear upon reading them of how he was preoccupied with politics in the US.

He was black, with some Native American ancestry. He was also gay, though he didn’t want to be labelled as such, feeling there was so much more to him (of course) than his sexuality. Staying in the closet all the way to the 1980s (when he was outed by Stanley Crouch), because of the homophobia of the jazz world (as well as that of conservative blacks), was necessary for his survival.

These three aspects of his humanity–being black, aboriginal, and gay–left him on the margins of society, and they therefore surely affected his music and poetry, making both highly experimental and expressive of the alienation he must have felt. Being part Cherokee on his mother’s side, and part Kiowa on his father’s, he would have been close to nature, having been taught by his father to appreciate the trees in Manhattan; we can see some of his love of nature in “Scroll No. 1,” as we’ll take a look at soon enough.

The choice of a title for the album seems to represent an aspect of the ‘scrolls” presentation on the back cover. Apart from the left margins, each beginning with “Whistle into night” and “Nation’s lost diplomacy,” there are middle indentations, each starting with “blue’s history” and “crophandler,” then there are far-right indentations, each beginning with “White crucifix” and “asleep.” That the whole album is named Indent rather than the poems seems to indicate that the music on it is supposed to be linked with the poetry.

Certainly, Lynette Westendorf, in her analysis of Cecil Taylor: Indent–“Second Layer” (which by the way gives a much more detailed analysis of the musical structure of that part of the performance than I am capable of doing of any or all of it), sees a link between the ‘scrolls’ and the ‘three layers,’ as the album’s music is divided into. As she understands it, the left margin lines correspond to the First Layer, the middle indented lies correspond to the Second Layer, and the far-right indented lines correspond to the Third Layer (pages 314-319 of her analysis).

Now, apart from dividing both the music and the poems into threes, I can’t hear any other parallels to be made between their structures, as Taylor’s musical style remains quite consistent throughout (unless one were to do as meticulous and scholarly an analysis as Westendorf does). Indeed, with no intention of bad-mouthing Taylor, his pianistic style sounds quite the same more or less throughout his mature period, so it’s hard for me to differentiate.

So, what do the indentations represent? It’s interesting how the…far right…indentation begins with imagery associated with white supremacy: “White crucifix” and “White God” to represent the religion that the Ku Klux Klan, with their “White flame” and “White hood,” use to justify their racism. By way of analogy, could the middle indentations and left margins respectively correspond, in any way, if only ironically so, with the political centre and left in the US?

Not exactly, but I’d say the far-right indentations embody a hate hidden by polite society, the Third Layer. The left margins embody illusions of goodness and justice not so well disguised, and the middle indentations embody various desires, sexual and otherwise, and how those desires are frustrated.

Here is a link to the poetry, and here is a link to the live recording.

In the left margins, we “whistle into night,” and perhaps the tune we whistle is what’s heard on the piano at the beginning of the First Layer: octaves of B, B-flat, C, A-flat, B-flat, G-flat, A-flat, these then played an octave lower, all to a jerky rhythm. We seem to be in a good mood as we whistle this tune, but the feeling is illusory, given how later on down the left margin, “indignation laments.” The political world that Taylor grew up in, a superficially liberal one, was also one he was left out of as a black gay man.

In the America that marginalized him, “difference” was an “excuse” to mistreat him. These liberals, so superficially progressive, weren’t particularly kind to the environment, either. Their “city technique” resulted in a “tar flesh” that “trampled seeds.”

Almost as a kind of call and response, the next piano tune, again in octaves, and one that you could “whistle into night,” is G-flat, B, D-flat, G-flat, A, E, G-flat, then lower with B, D-flat, G-flat, A, E, G-flat again. Then, back to variations on the first tune, with a brief return to the second. With the jerky, irregular rhythms are also contrasts in dynamics that from time to time remind me of those in the second of Olivier Messiaen‘s Quatre études de rythme, louds and softs often divorced from conventional expressivity…that is, except for the anger of Taylor’s percussive pounding on the keys.

Just as the left margins of the poem go from illusory pleasantness to hard underlying reality, so does the music move from relatively consonant (by Taylor’s standards, at least) tunes in octaves to the more dissonant use of minor and major seconds (about a minute into the recording). And as anyone familiar with Taylor’s music knows, it will get much more dissonant very soon.

“Spring cotton answer” may seem like an answer to a problem, but the picking of cotton sounds like the opposite of an answer to black people, whose “indignation laments” their history as slaves.

A confrontation with the “duplicity” and “demagogic democracy” of Scroll No. 2 shows that matters are getting worse. One tries to be so “damned dutiful” in a country of “lost diplomacy,” with so much “white white.” A few black politicians (in recent years, think of Obama or Kamala Harris) do not do much to compensate for continued racism against blacks–hence, the sarcasm of “‘yeah bo’/I’ma Senatah!”

I can imagine the first of Taylor’s trademark cascades of tone clusters up and down the piano in this First Layer as corresponding to the line “You just sing dance unseen,” like so many invisible, marginalized American blacks and gays trying to be heard in a mainstream society that is so deaf and blind to them. Recall his words in this connection: “I try to imitate on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes.”

Later on down the left margin of Scroll No. 2, Taylor continues his sarcastic ‘Uncle Tom’ voice by saying “‘Ah is so happy/Youse mah master” to the moderate white liberal who pretends to care about blacks, but in their…whitewashing…of people like MLK, whose socialism they conveniently gloss over, they are little better than the old white slaveowners–hence, “Youse mah master”…”Kick me agin.” These untrustworthy faux progressives have “ground life out.”

Because of the white moderate, “justice [is] invisibly/impenetrable.” Why can’t the white moderate, or any liberal in general, be trusted? Because capitalism corrupts everything, or as Taylor put it, “Dry cell of money/ has locked the minds/and cauterized hearts.” The love of money is a prison cell we’re all locked in.

Next, we come to the Second Layer, which on the LP is divided into two parts so the whole performance would fit on the record’s two sides almost equally, but which is really just one long, continuous performance, and which combined together would be of exactly equal length to the First Layer (13:40). Since, according to Westendorf’s interpretation (see link above), the Second Layer corresponds to the middle indentations of the two ‘scrolls,’ I’ll be examining these with this particular part of the music. As I said above, I find as a recurring theme in the middle indentations one of desire and the anatomical part-objects of such desire, sexual or otherwise.

As I also said above, Westendorf’s analysis (link above) of the Second Layer is far more thorough and capable than what I can give, so I recommend reading it. Still, I’ll do my best here.

The music starts with a ‘melody’ of succeeding B octaves in the bass register of the piano. Then, we have, in octaves played at the same time, B and F-sharps, Bs and Gs, Bs and Es, and Bs and F-naturals. So, as with the opening ‘whistled’ tune of the First Layer, here there’s no substantial dissonance…yet. There’s desire, but its frustration is soon to come.

As for the poem, “blue’s history” can be the sad history of African-Americans, or a history told through singing he blues. In all of this, there is a desire to rid themselves of the pain, to ‘exorcise’ it. This desire is the “awakened needs” of black people.

There is a desire for “recognition” (as Lacan also observed), to be acknowledged and desired by the object of one’s desire, including such part-objects as the “titty,” “ass’n” “prick.” The “bent whore’s” desire may also be desired, with her “recognition” of us.

The middle indentations have all the naughty words in them (including the aforementioned ones, and “shit”; “Damned,” from the left margins, is mild enough of an oath not to count–in fact, it could simply mean that corrupt politicians are “damned” in the religious sense for being “dutiful” to the ruling class). The desire to have fun saying dirty words is an example of how “puerility romps” and delights in breaking the rules.

Desire’s “tongue tastes,” and it moans “ooh ooh ooh” as the “prick” sprays its “sperm” where the “bent whore’s lost” and “puerility romps/unchided…in night cesspools” (brothels?). Desire isn’t just of a sexual sort, though. There’s also the sweetness that comes from “honeysucklevine” and “molasses” that one’s “tongue tastes.” (Or is the former quote a pun on Honeysuckle Divine, with her “dimples” and “sweat titty”?) There’s the desire of “scampering” children at play, with “pigtails stompin’.”

The point of all of this discussion of desire, centred in the middle, between the illusion of the ‘progressiveness’ of the politics of the liberal white moderate on the one side (the left margins) and the unreserved hate of the white supremacists on the other side (fittingly, the far-right indentations), is that the African-American in his “awakened needs” (a result of the raised consciousness of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s) is caught in the middle, controlled by the whites on either side of him. Thus, his desires and needs are never met in an America where he has no power.

The frustration of that desire is clearly expressed in Taylor’s piano playing, which of course gets very tense and dissonant in short order. Variations on that motif introduced with the low Bs, that chromatic ascension of E, F-natural, F-sharp, and G are heard (see Westendorf’s analysis above for details). The variations are often played in fast arpeggiated forms with added fifths. Soon, the upward arpeggios get much more dissonant.

I’d like to skip ahead to the beginning of “Second Layer, Part Two” beginning Side Two of the LP, because it stands out in my memory. This would be “Paragraph J–Section J-1” of Westendorf’s analysis (page 306, 9:53 minutes into the Second Layer part of the recording). To use her words, here we have “A light pattern of repeating grace-note clusters featuring C♯-B…in the high register”. It is subdued and reflective, to use her words again. For those finding his usual percussive, dissonant playing grating on the ears, this passage will feel refreshing in its softness.

It won’t take too long for the harshness to come back, though, and the Second Layer will end, with more cascading clusters, within less than four minutes of that soft passage I mentioned in the previous paragraph. More desire has been frustrated for the African-American.

The Third Layer, corresponding with the far-right indentations of the ‘scrolls,’ is about four minutes longer than the other two ‘layers.’ It begins in the bass, with a quick ascending line of E-flat, E-flat an octave lower, and B-flat, repeated several times, then with variations using other notes in ascending arpeggios. It’s softer than the beginnings of the other two ‘layers,’ but dissonances are added sooner.

This added tension is fitting as it corresponds with the poem, which is where the fascism resides, hidden under the liberal First Layer (left margins) and hiding under the frustrated desires of the Second Layer (middle indentations). This is made perfectly clear right from the beginning of the far-right indentations, with the opening allusion to the Ku Klux Klan: “White crucifix/White flame/White God/White hood.” The liberal mask is off (or rather, the hood is off), and we can see who is behind it.

The “White white” that follows is repeated in Scroll No. 2 with the opening left margin, though also pushed out to the right of “blue serge,” as if indented, too. Here again we can see the relationship between the white liberal moderate (as represented by the left margins) and the far right of the far-right indentations. “White white” represents not just white skin, but also the White Terror of conservative, reactionary forces against leftists. Recall, in the connection between the liberal moderate and the far-right, Stalin’s words about social democracy and fascism.

Blacks feel the “pains” and “shame” that come from the fascist repressions of types like the Ku Klux Klan. “Whitness” is a pun on “whiteness” and “witness,” from blacks being a witness to whiteness, to which they matter not a whit.

A “surreptitious/Seraph” of “sin sinning/Singing” a “song/Set 4 centuries long” is a white angel that has pretended to be holy while surreptitiously harming the black man over about four centuries of the European slave trade. The whites, in our posturing as racially superior, have pretended the whole time to be angels, while denigrating blacks as the descendants of Ham to justify enslaving them.

Continuing with the far-right indentations in Scroll No. 2, we have only the words “asleep” and “stranger.” The world has been “asleep” to the oppression of blacks only until recently, as of the publication of these “scrolls” (first in 1965, then republished as liner notes to Indent in 1973). The black man has been a “stranger” to the rest of the world because racism has estranged him from us.

As for the dissonance of the piano playing in the Third Layer, and how it can be said to represent the pain felt by blacks because of this estranging racism and how asleep the rest of the world has been to it, one noteworthy section of the music, towards the end of the performance of this layer, should be focused on. Taylor does a particularly thundering moment of tone clusters around the middle-to-lower register of the piano, at about 43:35 on the CD.

We can hear some applause from the audience immediately after that moment. It would seem that, through Taylor’s performance, the pain of the black man has finally received its deserved “Recognition” (line 8 of Scroll No. 2). His piano has sung and danced unseen (line 10 of Scroll No. 2) until only recently; indeed, it took forty years for Taylor to be recognized by the academy, him being named a Jazz Master by the NEA in 1990, and in the following year receiving a MacArthur Fellowship.

In the middle indentation, Taylor refers to giving “recognition” to George Washington “Carver‘s oil” (lines 8-9 of Scroll No. 1). Since Carver promoted alternative crops to cotton and promoted methods to prevent soil depletion, as well as promoted environmentalism, then his “oil” is an ironic metaphor Taylor is using to illustrate Carver’s valuable discoveries for the good of the earth, a major issue of Scroll No. 1.

Still, Carver’s recognition “estranged/outer earth’s garments” (i.e., the tar and concrete covering the ground), for the big money-making interests–typically white Americans–have little to no concern for environmentalism. Their “scorched exclusivity” alienates the earth as well as blacks, gays, and aboriginals. “Tar flesh trampled seeds.”

It’s good to give recognition to Taylor and Carver…but recognition isn’t enough, for the “dry cell of money/has locked the minds/and cauterized hearts.”

Analysis of ‘The Perilous Night’

The Perilous Night is a 1944 composition for prepared piano by the American avant-garde composer John Cage. It is in six untitled movements, and a performance of the whole piece should last about thirteen to fourteen minutes. He said of the piece that it is expressive of “the loneliness and terror that comes to one when love becomes unhappy.”

In 1982, Jasper Johns, a longtime friend of Cage, created a mixed-media diptych also called “Perilous Night,” which includes a silkscreen of the score of Cage’s composition.

Being a piece for prepared piano, The Perilous Night is an example of the radically experimental nature of Cage’s music. I’ll go into what a prepared piano is below, but for now, I want to go into the avant-gardism of his music more generally.

His music teachers were, in the 1930s, Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, both radical innovators in music who would have a strong influence on Cage. (Another major influence was Edgard Varèse, who also influenced Frank Zappa.) Schoenberg, Cage’s teacher in UCLA, famously said that his student wasn’t a composer, but rather an innovator…of genius.

As Schoenberg’s pupil at the time, Cage (writing in a version of musical serialism then) said that he had no feeling for harmony, for which Schoenberg had insisted a composer must have a feeling. Without that feeling, Cage would find himself at a wall he could not pass, as his teacher insisted; so Cage said that he would dedicate his life to beating his head against that wall.

Apart from the prepared piano–which I promise I’ll go into detail about soon enough–he also composed such works for percussion as the Constructions (the first being in Metal) and the Imaginary Landscapes (the first of which was for  records of constant and variable frequency, large Chinese cymbal, and string piano), Williams Mix for magnetic tapes, and by the 1950s, he started to incorporate chance into his music, which as part of the influence of Far Eastern philosophy, used the I Ching. Part of this foray into aleatory music was a recording Cage made with David Tudor in 1959 called Indeterminacy: New Aspects of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music.

Particularly radical ideas of Cage’s included the use of silence, as in 4’33”, for any instrument or combination of instruments, and is just four and a half minutes of silence, or whatever ambient sounds are heard during that time; then there is 0’00”, for any performer. Such ‘compositions,’ influenced by Zen Buddhism, Indian traditions, and Dadaism, are meant to challenge our most basic ideas as to what music is.

As for the prepared piano, its origins lie in the composition of Bacchanale, a dance piece for Syvilla Fort back in the late 1930s. Cage had been writing a lot of pieces for percussion ensembles then, but the place where the dance was to be performed wasn’t large enough to fit in a percussion ensemble (there was only a grand piano in the room); so Cage, influenced by Cowell’s use of extended piano techniques (e.g., playing the strings inside, instead of with the keyboard, as with The Banshee), started to experiment with the interior of the piano.

Cage used mostly weather strippings on the piano strings for Bacchanale, but as for his prepared piano compositions in general, he would also put such objects as bolts, screws, mutes, or other objects between or on the strings, effectively turning the piano into a one-man percussion instrument, changing the lyrical piano tones into metallic, percussive ones. This one-man percussion instrument, or one-man gamelan ensemble, was the solution to his problem with the small room in which Bacchanale was performed.

Here are links to recordings of The Perilous Night, the last of them including the score (with instructions on how to prepare the piano at the end). The first of these shows the pieces of weather stripping and screws put between or on the strings.

Twenty-six notes of the piano are prepared with rubber, weather stripping, screws, bolts, nuts, bamboo, wood, and cloth, and Cage provides very exacting instructions for the preparation, even specifying certain Steinway piano models to create the sound he wanted.

The piece’s title is a reference to the Perilous Bed that Gawain, of Arthurian legend, had to lie on to rid a castle of its enchantments and curses, and thus free it of its captives. For Cage, the ordeal that Gawain went through on the bed is symbolic of a painful moment in Cage’s life, when he was separating from his wife, Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff, to be with Merce Cunningham, who would be Cage’s partner for the rest of his life.

According to the legend, Gawain entered the chamber of the castle where he saw the enchanted bed moving about, hurtling all around the room and smashing against the walls. He jumped on it.

The bed stopped moving, then slingstones and bolts were launched at him; after that, lions or other beasts attacked him (there are several works of art showing him on the bed, with nearby lions). With his bravery and armour, he managed to survive the ordeal and rid the castle of its evil magic.

Since Cage’s relationship with Xenia and Cunningham was a sexual one, a legend about a perilous bed was an effective way to express the emotional turmoil he was going through. Changing the title from “Perilous Bed” to “Perilous Night” sounds to me like a kind of censoring of the homoerotic aspect of this relationship, especially given how the piece was composed and first performed in the mid-1940s, when attitudes toward divorce and homosexuality would have obviously been far more condemnatory than they are today.

The dark, tense nature of the prepared piano music vividly expresses the tension that must have been felt as Cage saw the heartbreak in Xenia’s eyes when she knew she was losing him to Merce. Initially, she’d actually suggested that she and Cage have an open relationship with Merce, a ménage à trois; but the two men drew together more and more, leaving her out and leading to her divorce with Cage.

So it’s easy to see how a legend about a bed that flies around a room, smashing into its walls, then launches bolts and slingstones at the man lying on it, then attacks him with wild beasts, is a perfect metaphor for what was going on in Cage’s bed at the time. Even after it was just him and Merce, Cage kept the intimate aspects of their relationship as private as possible, famously quipping that he did the cooking, while Merce did the dishes.

It’s interesting how the time signatures for all six movements of The Perilous Night are either 4/4 or 2/2, when one considers how complex the rhythms are throughout; one would expect constantly changing, asymmetric time signatures. Cage’s music in the 1940s made use of rhythmic structures called “nested proportions,” in which the total structure of each movement reflects the same proportions for the length of the smaller phrases of the movement.

I would like to imagine a narrative of six chapters, so to speak, that are expressed in the music of these six movements. It’s a narrative of the Cage/Xenia/Cunningham love triangle, with the Gawain narrative paralleling and allegorizing it.

In the first movement, Gawain is approaching the enchanted castle, just as Cage heard Xenia’s suggestion that they have a ménage à trois with Cunningham, since she found him attractive. As for the prepared piano music, it’s mostly variations on, for the left hand, bass notes a major sixth (or a tenth) apart from each other (F and D), and for the right hand, three adjacent notes in the middle of the treble clef (F-sharp, G, and A-flat). One senses in the music a tentative approach to the castle…and to the coming threesome.

In the second movement, I hear Gawain going through the door inside the castle. Cage, Xenia, and Cunningham are having their first sexual encounter together and deciding they like it. As for the music, the left hand does a lot of minor thirds of D-flat and F-flat, back and forth (or they would sound that way, if not for the altering of tones by the piano preparations). The right hand plays a repeatedly ascending and descending arpeggiated chord of E-flat, G-flat, B-flat, and upper E-flat (again, except for the tone alterations). Permutations of these patterns occur largely throughout the rest of the movement.

The energetic nature of this music suggests the passion of the three lovers enjoying their thrilling first time in bed together.

In the third movement, we can imagine Gawain walking through the halls of the castle, looking for and finding the chamber with the Perilous Bed. Cage, Xenia, and Cunningham are experiencing the life of a threesome, but the beginnings of the two men’s desire just to be a couple are being felt. A lot of different musical ideas are going on here, but a few towards the end stand out. Both hands here are at first in the treble register, the right playing mostly A-flats and B-flats, back and forth; then the left hand returns to the bass register, and there’s a back-and-forth of D and F there, with a back-and-forth of D-flat and G/E in the right hand, to end the movement. There’s a sense in this music of an itch in Cage and Cunningham just to be a couple, without her.

In the fourth movement, I imagine Gawain going into the chamber and seeing the Perilous Bed flying around the room, bumping into the walls (each knock against a wall being musically represented, though heard softly, in the left hand of the piano hitting bass Fs, Ds, and Fs two octaves lower). Xenia is having suspicions that Cage and Cunningham are excluding her. This feeling is expressed in the haunting ostinato played on the right hand, with back-and-forth notes of G-flat and E-flat.

In the fifth movement, Gawain has jumped on the bed, and the bolts and slingstones are being launched at him. Xenia has caught Cage and Cunningham in bed together. The tension of such an encounter is musically felt throughout this movement, especially at the end, with six bars of tied, dotted half notes that are accented and played fortississimo with the left hand, and F/D/G with the right hand alternating with low Ds with the left hand.

The sixth and final movement is climactic. Now, beasts and lions attack Gawain on the bed. This violence is symbolic of the hostility that must have grown between rejected Xenia on the one side, and Cage and Cunningham on the other, with fighting that led ultimately to divorce between her and Cage.

The music reflects this tension and fighting with variations on a motif of high eighth notes of mostly D and E, but also some high Bs and other notes played with the right hand, the piano preparation making them sound almost like xylophone notes. The left hand tends to play an extremely low, ascending, arpeggio-like motif of mostly eighth notes rising up to a D and F just below the staff of the bass clef. Though it’s all notated in 4/4 time, the left and right hand motifs are very irregular rhythmically, adding to the sense of an emotionally unstable situation.

Other permutations of these patterns are heard in the middle section, until we get to the end, where things slow down, and the left hand is playing its motif in descending half and whole notes. The right hand will be alternating between eighth and half notes near the end, while the left hand is playing an extremely low F in tied half and whole notes; then the right hand will switch from the alternations I just described to dotted half notes, played on the second beat of each bar, in an extremely high E.

Then, as the music gets softer, and eerier, the low F goes down to an E, and the high E goes down to a B, which soon, instead of being played on the second beat of each bar, is played on the first, with the low E of the left hand. The piece ends thus in pianissimo, expressive of the loneliness and desolation that Xenia must have felt, and for which Cage, in his regret over the relationship’s debacle, must have felt a painful empathy.

In conclusion, I can imagine this piece to be allegorical of the strain felt between the gay and straight communities, the latter’s struggle between tolerance and intolerance of the former, which as we know can be quite perilous for the former.