![]() Both artists saw these commissions as opportunities to formalize connections between their compositional approaches to sound and the visual approach to space, kinetic movement, and ground revealed in the time-based poetics of the moving image. In the early 1950s John Cage and Morton Feldman were commissioned to score documentary films on two significant American artists: Cage for the Herbert Matter documentary on sculptor Alexander Calder, and Feldman for the Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg documentary on Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock. As shown in the following analysis, one of the movement’s key features is its symmetrical organisation, but these relationships only make full sense when Pritchett and Bernstein’s gamut of sonorities are redrawn to include the ‘silent sonority’, whose significance for Cage’s work in general, and this quartet in particular, is therefore very important. For example, neither Bernstein nor Pritchett’s gamut of sonorities for the work (Pritchett’s gamut comprises 33 while Bernstein includes an additional 10 sonorities, creating a total of 43) include silence as a ‘sonority’. Previous interpretations of Cage’s String Quartet have not on the whole drawn attention to the function of silence within it. ![]() Our analysis of this movement appears to provide compelling evidence that Cage was already assigning a central function to the use of silence in compositions pre-dating his famous work 4’33” (1952). ![]() The aim of this paper is to present a rereading of the gamut of sonorities used by John Cage in his String Quartet in Four Parts (1950) with reference to the third movement, subtitled ‘Nearly Stationary’.
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