Living Room Music

"Living Room Music" is a musical composition by John Cage, composed in 1940. It is a quartet for unspecified instruments, all of which may be found in a living room of a typical house, hence the title (Pritchett, 1993, 20).

"Living Room Music" is dedicated to Cage's then-wife Xenia. The work consists of four movements: "To Begin", "Story", "Melody", and "End". Cage instructs the performers to use any household objects or architectural elements as instruments, and gives examples: magazines, cardboard, "largish books", floor, wooden frame of window, etc. The first and the last movements are percussion music for said instruments. In the second movement the performers transform into a speech quartet: the music consists entirely of pieces of Gertrude Stein's short poem "The World Is Round" (Pritchett, 1998) spoken or sung, accompanied at times with vocal percussion akin to beatboxing. The third movement is optional. It includes a melody played by one of the performers on "any suitable instrument."

References

* Score: Edition Peters 6786. (c) 1976 by Henmar Press
* James Pritchett. "The Music of John Cage". Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0521565448
* James Pritchett. "John Cage: Choral music (a timeline)", 1998. [http://www.rosewhitemusic.com/cage/texts/choral.html Available online.]

External links

* [http://www.arnoldmarinissen.com/Pages/Cage.html "Living Room Music" information and recording by Arnold Marinissen]
* [http://library.davesabine.com/listings.asp?species=Living+Room+Music "Living Room Music" at Dave Sabine's Percussion Library]