Composed Improvisation

for snare drum alone

Composer: John Cage
Year: 1987
Duration: 8 minutes

John Cage's Composed Improvisation for snare drum alone represents a clear use of aleatory and indeterminacy, processes that Cage experimented with during the 1950s and 1960s. In this piece, the performer is asked to realize a set of instructions provided by Cage, resulting in a sort of sonic mapquest. Formal decisions are made by picking numbers at random, between 1 and 64.

For my music theory thesis, entitled Graphic Notation as Means of Musical Gesture, I completed an in-depth analysis of Composed Improvisation that seeks to uncover a hidden heirarchy of gestures. These gestures, I argue, are only possible through the graphically notated score, this confirming Cage's decision to notate the piece as an event-score. If you are interested in reading this chapter of my thesis, click here.