creation : 1937
music and conception : John Cage
musicians : 6 percussionists
duration : 10 mn
publisher : Peters Editions
In the year of the creation of First Construction in metal, the American composer John CAGE, inventor of the prepared piano, declared: Percussion music is a revolution. Sound and rhythm have for too long been subjected to the restrictions of the music of the XIXth century and, today, we must fight for its emancipation. Tomorrow, with our ears full of electronic music, we will hear freedom … At the present stage of the revolution, a healthy anarchy is justified. Necessarily, the experiment must be continued by banging on anything, by banging, hammering, by producing sounds in every possible way. In short, we must explore the materials of music. What we cannot do ourselves must be done by machines » ….
We are therefore entitled to think that « First Construction in metal », the work of a musician aged twenty-five, written exclusively for metal percussion instruments (gamelans, steel sheets, drums made of car brakes, etc …) represents one of the first stages in this liberation of sound, in this wish to abandon any distinction between musical sound and noise, to consider silence as a musical element and randomness as the very basis of life.