John Cage's revolutionary four-part cycle of piano pieces, Music of Changes, occupies the third volume of this important series. Influenced by and named for the ancient Chinese divination book I Ging, which Cage encountered for the first time in the 1940s, Music of Changes was Cages first composition to be based entirely on chance operations, the object of which was to remove himself (as composer) from the resulting composition. Four dimensions are guided by chance operations: sound, duration, volume, and tempo.
Understandably, the performance of this work presents even the most formidable pianist with unprecedented musical, theoretical, and score-reading challenges. Steffen Schleiermacher does a masterful job of pulling off this technically unwieldy work, and he informs the listener of his interpretative decisions in the very helpful and thorough liner notes that accompany this disk.