LAUSR

formances or further analysis, for example. The Concert Player app differs in that it enables the user to combine sound recordings of orchestral solos by Apartment House to generate various audible versions of the piece. The app cannot replace the experience of multiple possibilities through performance and collaboration; however, it allows the user to readily explore 16,383 possible combinations with varied durations and sequences of score pages. After choosing a duration, the app enables the user to create an automatic or manual arrangement. The manual arrangement allows the user to select instruments and distribute their pages of notation and silences over time. The automatic arrangement has a more limited number of interactive features, for example, the number of instruments and pages can be specific or random. Additionally, the automatic arrangement can be edited in the same way as the manual one. Each arrangement can be played almost instantly with recordings for a personalised performance. As well as orchestral solos, there is a conductor’s part for Concert for Piano and Orchestra, and the Concert Player app does not include this because it ‘is a performative input, changing the performer’s psychology whilst playing’, thus bringing a ‘further element of randomness to it, which is already instilled in the app through the random generation feature’. It is regrettably not possible to see the notation of the orchestral solos, however some can be viewed on the Cage Concert website and the score is published by Edition Peters. As a composer, listener and sometimes performer, I am especially interested in quiet, sparse, and durational indeterminate music. Therefore, the interpretations that I explored within the Concert Player app were mostly of durations of 20 minutes or more, few instruments and pages, and many silences. In fact, whilst working on my PhD thesis, I listened to a version for three hours, comprising three instruments (cello, viola and clarinet) and with only three pages each, separated by silences. I often listen to durational music, such as Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean (2011–) and Eva Maria Houben’s Breath for Organ (2018), whilst I work as a repeated listening practice, and I replicated this using the app. In contrast, I played with shorter durations of under 10 minutes with as many possible instruments and pages that would fit into that duration. Using the apps is less like work than like playing a problem-solving game. I played with several notations and their numerous possibilities, as well as automatic and manual arrangements of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra. It is amazing how quick and easy it is to hear such contrasting interpretations of the piece. What’s remarkable about these apps is the ability to create versions of the piano’s notation for performance in a much shorter time than it would usually take, and this should encourage more performances of the complex work with combinations of notations and instruments that have never been heard before. For example, just hours after Thomas’s online workshop, James Joslin, composer and publisher, shared on Twitter his playing of the piano part’s first page in 100 seconds. Furthermore, the apps are not only useful for performers, composers and researchers, but they could be used as a fun educational tool to show and explore the complexity but also the accessibility of Cage’s music and other indeterminate works. The apps widen the understanding of this piece, which is an important milestone in extending the methods of analysis for the most complex indeterminate compositions.