The album Atlas Eclipticalis on Simple Harmonic Motion Records is available at Bandcamp.  Music by John Cage and Earle Brown, including a chamber performance of Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis/Winter Music.  Must-hear tracks include the two graphic scores by Earle Brown, November 1952 and December 1952.

Atlas Eclipticalis (Simple Harmonic Motion Records) John Bickerton

Avant Garde composition from mid 20th Century New Yorker Earle Brown. Performed by Dustin Donahue

Earle Brown - Four Systems (Clip)

Available on Bandcamp and simpleharmonicmotion.org
Atlas Eclipticalis/Winter Music – Atlas Eclipticalis (for up to 86 instruments), performed here by a chamber ensemble of flute, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, harp, violin, and violoncello, is coupled with Winter Music (for 1 to 20 pianos), performed here by two pianos. Electronics are also engaged using random processes similar to Cage’s Cartridge Music. Page 3 of the four-page Atlas Eclipticalis score was used for all parts, giving a performance length of 20 minutes and 45 seconds. Each page has five systems (lines). Space horizontally equals time. Each system took 4 minutes and 10 seconds to complete in this performance.

Atlas Eclipticalis

Available on Bandcamp and simpleharmonicmotion.org
Variations IV – Cage’s score for Variations IV mainly concerns placing performers (or sound sources) within a given space. It is written for any number of players, any sounds, or combinations of sounds. No further musical direction is given in the score.

The version presented here used a 100-year-old Brooklyn brownstone row house as the performance space. A map of the performance space was drawn, showing the various rooms and floors of the house. Instead of using the transparency sheet with points and circles that Cage used (no transparency was provided with the score ordered from Edition Peters), a different method for determining where a sound would occur was developed using random processes. The results (called a casting) were recorded on a spreadsheet.

Variations IV (John Cage)

Available on Bandcamp and simpleharmonicmotion.org
0’00” (4′ 33″ No. 2) – Cage’s brief instruction for this piece is: In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action. It was meant to be a follow-up to his “silent” work – 4’33”. Like Duchamp’s placing a bicycle wheel inside a museum, we hear an everyday action divorced from its usual location, and our listening is heightened. This recording of Cage’s 0’00” amplifies the sounds of a homeowner working in his backyard. Besides the sounds of tools, the recording captures ambient sounds that are natural to living in a large metropolitan city. They become part of a sustained listening experience.

As Cage explained in an interview in 1965, the piece tries to say that everything we do is music or can become music through the use of microphones.

0′ 00″… is nothing but the continuation of one’s daily work, whatever it is, providing it’s not selfish, but is the fulfillment of an obligation to other people, done with contact microphones, without any notion of concert or theater or the public, but simply continuing one’s daily work, now coming out through loudspeakers.

John Bickerton created this realization for the album Atlas Eclipticalis, released in 2024 on Simple Harmonic Motion Records.

0' 0" (4'33 No. 2) John Cage

Available on Bandcamp and simpleharmonicmotion.org
November 1952 is a graphic score from Earle Brown’s Folio collection. Brown’s notes for the score state: To be performed in any direction from any point in the defined space, lines and spaces may be thought of as tracks moving in either direction. The defined space may be thought of as real or illusory.
This realization of the score is for violin, cello, harp, and electronics. It is performed at a pianissimo dynamic throughout. Key centers were chosen for each instrument. The violin plays notes within an F major tonality, the cello plays within B Major (Lydian), and the harp plays in an Eb Major (Lydian) tonality.
The performance duration was chosen in advance, with a total time of 6 minutes.

A transparency was placed over the score, divided horizontally into six sections. This was used as an overall guide for where sounds could occur in time and gave a sense of how the piece would breathe and use space. However, the parts were not played directly from left to right; rather, they were abstracted from the idea of the score.

John Bickerton created this realization for the album Atlas Eclipticalis, released in 2024 on Simple Harmonic Motion Records.

November 1952 (Earle Brown)

available on Bandcamp and simplehamonicmotion.org
December 1952 – December 1952 became Brown’s most famous graphic score from Folio. It suggests where elements exist in space… space as an infinitude of directions from an infinitude of points in space…to work (compositionally and in performance) to right, left, back, forward, up, down, and all points between. The score is a picture of this space at one instant, which must always be considered as unreal and/or transitory… a performer must set this all in motion, which is to say, realize that it is in motion and step into it.
This recording is a mix of 2 performances. The first was made mainly inside the piano with a plectrum, brushes, timpani mallets, a superball mallet, a rubber ball, and other found objects. The second was played mostly on the piano keys. Sounds are treated electronically with ring modulation, filtering, and delay.

A performance time of 10 minutes was chosen in advance. A transparency overlay determined when sound events would occur in time. For the purpose of this performance, horizontal lines were taken as a sound event’s duration, and line thickness was taken as amplitude. The score was rotated 90 degrees for each take.

John Bickerton created this realization for the album Atlas Eclipticalis, released in 2024 on Simple Harmonic Motion Records.

December 1952 (Earle Brown)

Earle Brown - December 1952 [Kammerensemble AdHoc]

Percussionist Dustin Donahue talks about his love for John Cage, Earle Brown and more. Performance with Donahue and flutist Rachel Beetz at Mengi on January 22nd 2016. 

Atlas Eclipticalis

John Bickerton

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