Seventy-Four (1992)

Seventy-four (1992).  During his last years, Cage became almost entirely occupied as a composer by instrumental music, particularly in response to commissions for his eightieth birthday. Most of this instrumental music forms a single series of compositions which are called the “number” pieces – their titles are all simply the number of performers in the particular ensemble, in this case Seventy-four.  All the number pieces have a common compositional technique: that of the time bracket.  The principle here is that there is a period of time during which the music of a given bracket must begin, and a period of time during which it must end. The exact placement of the note is a chosen by the musicians within these limitations

Seventy-four consists of orchestral parts without score, with performers guided in performance by chronometers.  The parts comprise single notes in flexible time brackets, with, as Cage says, “the usual imperfection of tuning perhaps slightly exaggerated so that the music becomes microtonal.”  The work was first performed on November 8, 1992, by the American Composers Orchestra, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, at New York’s Carnegie Hall.