[silence] "Unison of differences"

[Daniel Wolf]

I believe that the notion of a "unison of differences" comes to Cage via  
Henry Cowell and refers to simultaneous variations upon the same basic  
melodic material, an ensemble technique common from the Mediterranean to  
East Asia, as well as in the Anglo-Irish instrumental traditions.  Lou  
Harrison describes this well in his Music Primer.

Another, related, technique is that which Cage refers to as a "Japanese  
canon", another enthusiasm of Cowell's, which Cowell identified in the  
netori (modal "tuning up")  hichiriki and ryuteku passages in which a  
group of the same instruments (typically three) play through the same  
melodic material, entering canonically, but varying the rhythms so that  
one instrument may sometimes be ahead of and sometimes behind the others.

In the adaptation of both these techniques, Cage (and Cowell) could be  
fairly characterized as identifying and isolating a single (and in the  
case of the brief netori, possibly a minor feature) consituent feature of  
a traditional music and radically recontextualizing that feature as a  
central idea in a new work.

Daniel Wolf