Party Pieces: Sonorous and Exquisite Corpses

This composition, written in 1945, was a collaborative effort of John Cage, Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, and Virgil Thomson. The way it was composed is this: one person would compose a measure of music plus two more notes (starting the next measure); he would fold the paper at the barline (thus concealing the full measure he had written), then pass it to the next composer, who would continue the piece from the two notes he could see, completing that measure plus two notes across the barline, fold and pass it to the next person, and so forth. The composition is divided into twenty short pieces, each being about half a minute long on average. Not all of the four composers were involved in each particular piece. Two of the pieces (the first and the seventh) were composed by Cage and Harrison alone; the rest of the pieces involved three composers each. Of the four composers, only Cage and Harrison had their hands in all twenty pieces. Thomson joined Harrison and Cage for six of the pieces, and Cowell participated in twelve. The work was originally scored for 'any melody or keyboard instruments'. The instrumentation at the public premiere, in August 1982, was for flute, clarinet, horn, bassoon, and piano. The entire composition lasts approximately ten minutes. On a whole, I think the work is well-paced, with the twenty pieces contrasting well with each other, while yet maintaining a certain cohesion as a unified composition. Furthermore, the pieces work well when examined individually. They do not sound like slapdash links joined together; rather, they sound remarkably woven together, as though by a single composer instead of multiple (and very different!) composers. Antecedent phrases are answered by convincing consequent phrases, although often the particular answer is a little bit unexpected. This unpredictability, however, is understandable, since each composer knew only a couple of the notes the previous composer had written. In my opinion, this is part of the charm of the piece, for all throughout, we get pleasant little surprises. A literary equivalent would be for one author to write a sentence plus a couple of words starting the next sentence, cover the full sentence so it can't be seen, then have another author finish the partial sentence and write a few words starting the next sentence, pass it on, etc. This sort of collaboration is very much using a type of chance procedure: in this case, it could be called 'the human factor', not knowing what another person is going to do. Stylistically, Party Pieces: Sonorous and Exquisite Corpses sounds rather traditional for its time and contains virtually nothing which is experimental. While the composition is fairly good and interesting in its own right, I believe, however, that it is one of the least interesting works of the four composers who wrote it. Party Pieces does occasionally get played, but I feel that Cage, Harrison, Thomson, and Cowell probably intended it (as in the case of Mozart and his scatological canons, which are not among his best works) more for their own private amusement than for public performance.