C-A-G-E was composed at the request of the FZML for the CAGE100 Party Pieces project.
The music material comes from the tetrachord C-A-G-E, corresponding to John Cage's last name. This tetrachord is the basis of the sonority sustained in the first measure in strings. In the second measure the tetrachord is transposed by half-step down to G#-B-D#-F# and woodwinds join the strings with the transposed quote from Schoenberg's 6 Kleine Klavierstücke op. 19, IV (in Oboe part). The third measure features another half-step transposition of the tetrachord down to G-Bb-D-F in brass, percussion and piano, thus complementing the aggregate of all twelve pitches.
The condition of the project was to limit a composer to a 5-measure fragment only, and I organized these 5 measures as a metric palindrome with the time signatures 4/1, 3/2, 4/4, 3/2 and 4/1, supported by the palindormic use of tetrachords (C-A-G-E in mm. 1&5; G#-B-D#-F# in mm. 2&4 and 5 and G-Bb-D-F in m.3 and 5). The last measure uses all twelve tones, bringing this short fragment to a logical, yet open-ended conclusion.

C-A-G-E was composed at the request of the FZML for the CAGE100 Party Pieces project.
The music material comes from the tetrachord C-A-G-E, corresponding to John Cage's last name. This tetrachord