[silence] "Postcard from Heaven" Coming Soon!

[Ben.Harper]

Funnily enough, this relatively obscure work was the first piece by Cage I 
ever heard, and by chance on the weekend I stumbled across the recording I 
made of the radio broadcast of it, 20 years ago.  It was a performance in 
Paris in 1985, and most of the harpists were female.  It sounds like a 
serene, celestial version of HPSCHD.

Cheers, Ben.



At 05:35 PM 30/10/2006, Glenn Freeman wrote:
>No sexual requirements mentioned in the published score. Cage's
>reference to Heaven is subtle. Ragas and Talas are being played by
>the harpist(s) ... so obviously a different kind of "Heaven" than
>some might be thinking. Does Postcard imply Heaven is located here on
>earth? I believe many will soon find Postcard to an important, yet
>largely unknown, Cage work from this period in Cage's career.
>
>Daniel Wolf wrote:
>
> > I'm very pleased to hear about this recording.  Just one small
> > anecdote
> > about the piece: after composing it, Cage described it as a piece for
> > _male_ harpists, with his rationale that "there were no female
> > angels".
> > At dinner at Alvin Lucier's house in '88, aside from being struck
> > by the
> > corniness of the angels-with-harps image, I objected strongly to Cage
> > about this, noting that angels, being immortal, did not reproduce, and
> > thus characterizing angels as one sex or the other was innacurate. The
> > names of bibilical angels were indeed male, but that was a cultural
> > and
> > linguistic convention that was not sustained by angelology.  I don't
> > know if Cage ever formally required male harpists or ever rescinded
> > this
> > requirement, but I think it remains an interesting point.
>
>Glenn Freeman
>OgreOgress productions
>http://cdbaby.com/group/ogreogress
>
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