Pauline Oliveros, Christian Wolff, Keith Rowe, Michael Pisaro

Cage: Beyond Silence is a major festival celebrating the music of John Cage, taking place at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and venues across the city.

Scored for a quartet with “any way of producing sounds,” Four6 is perhaps the most open of Cage’s Number Pieces. Offering no other directives than a series of time brackets, Four6 invites its players to individually choose and number 12 sounds that they are willing to make, and to begin and end them sometime during a set of fixed durations. As each performer has no knowledge of the others’ sounds beforehand, the result is unexpected and magical.

Composed in 1992, and dedicated to Pauline Oliveros on the occasion of her 60th birthday, this performance brings together four preeminent post-Cagean composer-performers.