I have nothing to say and I am saying it,
and that is poetry—John Cage

I was once told by the great composer and teacher Stephen L. Mosko that performing John Cage’s 26’ 1.1499” for a String Player would change my life. At the time I thought he was kidding, but in the years since I first dove head first into this monumental work, I realized that he was absolutely right. Not only did John Cage break up the life and death struggle between 12-tone music and neoclassicism, but also managed take over 2,000 years of human music and stand it on its head.

The pieces on this disk—26’ 1.1499” for a String Player with 45’ for a Speaker and 26’ 1.1499” for a String Player by itself—date from 1953-1954. Cage had in mind a large-scale work called Time, which was never completed and was to have included the works on this disk as well as other timed pieces for two pianos and percussion, all based on the number 10,000. By composing the work through i-Ching chance operations, restricting tempo interpretations through th