In the darkened auditorium, the pianist sits at his instrument in a circle of muted light. Suspended 6.5 meters above the stage is a massive, black, sound sculpture weighing 250 kg, with a central spine and eight radiating beams, eight metres in diameter. It slumbers like a sleeping beast, its panels and dishes reflecting the shades of midnight, shifting silently in the air currents.

It is a performance of The Cage Project at the 2024 Adelaide Festival. French classical pianist Cédric Tiberghien plays a grand piano prepared to instructions by John Cage for this, his magnum opus, the Sonatas and Interludes of 1948. But The Cage Project is not just his 70-minute suite of 20 short pieces for piano.

The project’s co-creators Paul Kildea, Artistic Director of Musica Viva Australia and Australian percussionist, composer and sound artist Matthias Schack-Arnott, have taken Cage’s pieces and exploded them beyond the confines of the piano casing to generate programmed sounds in sympathy from the giant mobile above, producing a deeply mesmerising, multi-dimensional sonic landscape. Harmony alternating with dissonance, jangling with Gamelan-like bells, pin-drop silence with clamour, the piece reflects Cage’s sensitivity to Eastern philosophy.

The Cage Project...