Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Dionisis Boukouvalas <>]

So far, this is my (alphabetical) list of the composers who have made use of time brackets:

Boukouvalas, Dionysis
Chan, Marc
Frey, Jurg
Haskins, Rob
Kotlowy, David
Malfatti, Radu
Schlothauer, Burkhard
Tenney, James
Thorman, Marc
Wolff, Christian

It would be interesting to know if and how their use of time brackets deviates from Cage's. It is true that Cage had a relatively uniform way of using time brackets, i.e. specific types (depending on overall time and overlap time) and a taste for overlap, both in the interior and the exterior of a bracket set.

As Marc Thorman wrote to me, in his piece the one bracket starts where the previous ends (this not to be confused with fixed time brackets).
In my piece with Rob Haskins there is no overlap between start and end brackets, only occasionally between bracket sets. The piano has only start brackets, since the pedal is always depressed, so the sound only starts but does not "end". Finally, brackets have a random length of time, not predetermined "types" as in Cage.

Any other additions and comments (on various uses) would be interesting.


> From:
> Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2010 00:15:23 -0400
> To:
> Subject: [silence] Re: Time Bracket pieces
>
> Yes, in addition to Marc Chan and your own piece, two other composers we're recording for our next project, named "Postcage," often use time brackets ... David Kotlowy and Jurg Frey.
>
> Dionisis Boukouvalas wrote:
>
> > I was chatting with fellow silencer and composer Rob Haskins, on the event of
> > the completion of our collaboration composition "Winter Concords", about
> > non-Cage pieces utilizing Time Brackets (ours is an example). We came up with
> > the names of Christian Wolff, Marc Chan, James Tenney and Burkhard Schlothauer.
> > Could anyone add more names to the list (their compositions or not)?
> > Eventually, it would most interesting to compare the different uses of this
> > technique by the different composers.
>
> Glenn Freeman
> OgreOgress productions
> http://ogreogress.com