1O1

1O1, orchestral work by John Cage that premiered in Boston on April 6, 1989, one of the rare large-scale works he composed in order to explore his fascination with aleatory, or chance, music.

For much of his career, Cage investigated in various ways the contradiction between standard compositional practices—which provided notes to be played for a certain length of time and at a certain volume (and so on)—and his interest in chance operations and the Yijing (an ancient Chinese text once used in divination and involving the casting of lots to build hexagrams). By using methods that would provide unpredictable or random results, Cage reasoned, he could remove authorial intention. Perhaps his best-known experiment in this vein was the composition 4′33″, for which he wrote no notes, merely the injunction to the musician(s) to be silent and to allow the ambient sounds that occur during the course of 4 minutes and 33 seconds to constitute the “performance.” Less well-known but equally dramatic was 1O1, commissioned and premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Seiji Ozawa.

The piece 1O1—to be written, as the composer wished, with a capital O rather than a zero as the middle figure—is a late work and one of Cage’s so-called Number Pieces, a series of 48 completed compositions whose number of players is indicated by the title. Like some of the other pieces in this group of compositions, 1O1 has a stated duration. For the piece, three orchestral groups produce three types of sounds—sustained tones, percussion, and loud brassy blasts—each group following a separate score (there are no master score and no conductor) that has flexible measures (what Cage called time brackets). Each musician’s part has whole notes of varying pitch with parameters indicating generally when each note should be played (not before this point in the score but not later than that point). That is, the indicated notes are to be played during a particular range of time—beginning, for example, between 0′00″ and 1′00″ and ending between 0′40″ and 1′40″. The end result is a sort of controlled anarchy that allows musicians flexibility within the ensemble.