This environmentalism continues to have many adherents. Theodor Adorno once referred to the attitude of Richard Strauss in his tone poems as that of 'the grand industrialist who knows that his resources are endless.' The 1960s, though, gave birth to a musical environmentalism that rejected the industrialist attitude in favor of a more cautious husbanding of resources. Jonathan Kramer, a reformed 12-tone composer who would later teach at Columbia, wrote a series of works limited in pitch, using only five pitches in his Moving Music for 13 clarinets, six pitches in Music for Piano Number 5, and an uninflected E-minor scale for his orchestra piece Moments in and Out of Time. In 1975, still in college, I, like Cage, wrote a piece using only the 'white' notes, no sharps or flats. Three years later, Philip Glass produced Music in Fifths using only seven pitches, five in each hand with three overlaps. Those may have been isolated experiments, but in 1960 La Monte Young wrote a piece using two pitches: B and F#, 'to be held for a long time.' In 1966 Steve Reich wrote Piano Phase using five pitches. European works on one pitch were written by Witold Lutoslawski and Giacinto Scelsi. Soon afterward, however, the idea of pitch limitation was in the air: In 1950, Elliott Carter employed extreme pitch limitations in his Eight Etudes and a Fantasy, using only a D Major triad in the Third Etude and only the pitch G in the Seventh. Clearly, not many at that moment shared Cage's dubious view of the big things of society. The same year in which the Suite for Toy Piano was written saw the composition of one of the largest symphonies ever, Olivier Messiaen's Turangalila, written in ten movements for orchestra expanded by a large percussion section, solo piano and Ondes martenot. In a survey of the symphony I once prepared, I found more symphonies written by well-known composers in 1946, the year after the war ended, than any other year since the 18th century, most of them big, noisy works using the orchestra's full potential for brass and percussion. At that time he was writing mostly quiet works, because, as he later explained, 'I didn't think there was any good in anything big in society.'Ĭage's willingness to limit himself to white keys was strikingly dissident in a noisy, patriotic decade which produced perhaps more symphonies than any other decade before or since. His instrument was only two octaves wide and contained only white keys. In 1948 John Cage wrote a Suite for Toy Piano. Keynote Address for The Extensible Toy Pianoĭelivered at Clark University in Worcester, Massachussetts, November 5.

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