Re: RE: Score Size (7 Haiku, Music of Changes)
"Daniel Wolf" <[email protected]> Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:12:45 +0200
| Newsgroups | gmane.music.john-cage |
|---|---|
| Organization | Material Press |
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
As the horizontal length of the staves does not correspond to Cage's description of their length, it's fairly clear that the Peters/Henmar edition is reduced in size. Since Music of Changes has not been a print-on-demand score, I suspect that they printed a large stock of the piece at this size and are more immediately committed to selling this stock than in producing a more playable score. I recall talking with James Tenney about this. During his NY years in the 1960s, Tenney had wanted to play Music of Changes but had found the score produced by Peters far too small to read. He said that he had contacted Peters about seeing the manuscript but was told that they only had a reduced copy. IIRC, Tenney even used the word "lost" to describe the presumably larger original. Tenney figured that the only way to play the piece accurately would be to reconstruct it from the original charts which were then not available to him. If Peters does not, in fact, have a larger version in its files, it strikes me that another possibility would be to consult copies produced before Cage signed with Peters/Henmar, for example in the David Tudor collection. The finding aid at the Getty's collection does not give the precise size of the Music of Changes but tellingly indicates "see also oversized". Daniel Wolf