Party Pieces (Arrangement for String Quartet)
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SKU: PE.EP66500B
Composed by John Cage. Saxophone. Edition Peters. Book. 60 pages. Edition Peters #98-EP66500B. Published by Edition Peters (PE.EP66500B).ISBN 9790300759500. 232 x 302mm inches. English.
A note from the arranger:
"I had been eager to obtain the manuscripts of these ‘surrealistic’ pieces in order to have the original material on which to base my saxophone quartet and string quartet arrangements. But something seemed to be wrong with this routine procedure, and after a while I realized what it was.
The only published version of these pieces was Robert Hughes’ arrangement for flute, clarinet, bassoon, horn and piano from 1982 (Edition Peters 66500). I felt that my arrangement should be produced in a way similar to that used to create the original, mostly two-staff compositions: For that each composer wrote one bar, folded the paper at the bar line, put two notes into the new bar and handed it to the next composer, and so on: exquisite corpses. Even if the composition process was seemingly finished—no new bars were added to the pieces, and no new pieces were added to the set—it continued by Hughes adding his part to
it: order of the set, instrumentation, tempo markings, most dynamics, and articulations. So I would be the next in the chain, now not starting from the notes the previous composer had given me, but from the arrangement the previous arranger had handed down to me.
Sometimes I stayed close to Hughes’ version, sometimes I went pretty far off. Many changes and additions were made in order to make this an aesthetically consistent version and a working string quartet arrangement—and in the end I also compared it to the original, just to have more information available to me. These pieces may be played in any order, the whole set or just some of them. They may be played ‘en suite’ or scattered over a whole concert or evening, between other pieces of music or any other actions." - Ulrich Krieger, Berlin, August 2003