aboutCAGE Vol. 5: Complete Organ Works – Piergiovanni Domenighini

American composer John Cage never tried to avoid provocation, which was sometimes extreme for the time. Instead, he sought and sometimes even pursued it as the ultimate goal of his musical research, in a continuous attempt to push the boundaries of his art beyond what was known in terms of “music”, effectively creating a “musical world” personnel to which even today and for many decades and perhaps centuries in the future we will continue to refer. However, when it comes to Cage’s organ universe, the terms of the discourse change and are cloaked in a seriousness and in some cases a composure that has rarely been seen in the author and that in some respects could recall a less mature Cage, even more tied to “convensional” sound forms, trying to go beyond the mere provocation and mending a gap between music listened to (by the public) and music perceived (by the composer). The organist Piergiovanni Domenighini, through the presentation in this fifth volume of aboutCAGE of the entire organ production, seems to want to demonstrate and suggest precisely this nature that is easily found both in the opening piece “Organ2 / ASLSP” and and above all “Some of” The Harmony of Maine ””, where the composer explicitly refers to an eighteenth-century American hymn book.