Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

["Daniel Wolf" <>]

As the horizontal length of the staves does not correspond to Cage's
description of their length, it's fairly clear that the Peters/Henmar
edition is reduced in size.  Since Music of Changes has not been a
print-on-demand score, I suspect that they printed a large stock of the
piece at this size and are more immediately committed to selling this
stock than in producing a more playable score.

I recall talking with James Tenney about this. During his NY years in the
1960s, Tenney had wanted to play Music of Changes but had found the score
produced by Peters far too small to read.  He said that he had contacted
Peters about seeing the manuscript but was told that they only had a
reduced copy.  IIRC, Tenney even used the word "lost" to describe the
presumably larger original. Tenney figured that the only way to play the
piece accurately would be to reconstruct it from the original charts which
were then not available to him.

If Peters does not, in fact, have a larger version in its files, it
strikes me that another possibility would be to consult copies produced
before Cage signed with Peters/Henmar, for example in the David Tudor
collection. The finding aid at the Getty's collection does not give the
precise size of the Music of Changes but tellingly indicates "see also
oversized".

Daniel Wolf