AMG Review of John Cage: Three Constructions

Martin Walters
All Music Guide

On Three Constructions the enigmatic 20th century American composer John Cage made these works based around the poems of e.e. cummings. His construction series produced a string of conceptual works for percussion and voice performed by the Donald Knaack Percussion Ensemble with the voice of Jay Clayton reciting. Spare and delicate, these compositions further reveal Cage's interests in oblique methods and chance operations in both composition and performance which in other work are often hard to tackle and arguably appeal on more of a conceptual level than an audible one. This work however is closer to a song cycle and is explicit of the composers interests in Balinese music.