Re: Cage Nocturnes

Perhaps an analogy for tightening or relaxing the string, i.e., moving the tuning peg.  So relaxing would be detuning, and tightening would be putting it back to concert pitch (and which could be simulated, I imagine)?  Pure speculation inspired by the terms “relax” and “tighten” and their specified order in the piece.  I’ve heard these terms used by guitarists as they tune their instruments.  I don’t play violin, and I don’t know the Cage piece in question.
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Caleb Deupree
[email protected]


> On Apr 18, 2018, at 5:43 AM, Philip Thomas <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> It’s a really strange instruction and I have no idea. But worth noting that earlier in the piece the B a semitone lower, held for a bar or so, has the instruction to ‘relax the pitch’. The C at the end, a semitone higher, is part of a dyad, a 9th above the lower B, with the instruction to ‘tighten the pitch’. My guess is it’s something to do with the tuning too, but which way, and in what relation to ‘relaxing the pitch’, is anyone’s guess!
>  
> Philip Thomas
> Professor of Performance
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>  
> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Rob Haskins
> Sent: 12 April 2018 19:46
> To: silence <[email protected]>
> Subject: [silence] Cage Nocturnes
>  
> A friend is performing the Cage Nocturnes for Violin and Piano and called me today to ask a question about an instruction in the violin part: something about how the violinist, playing a B and C, is instructed to "tighten" the C. I thought it might refer to make the C sharper, narrowing the distance between the two notes. The violinist thinks it is to emphasize the C, making it rougher as played on the string. Does anyone know? I'm sorry that I don't have the score and have no more info than this.
>  
> -- 
> Rob Haskins, D.M.A., Ph.D.
> Professor of Music
> College of Liberal Arts
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