From the liner notes by Ciro Longobardi:
“A hotel letterhead paper, filled with enigmatic handwritten instructions – first to be deciphered, then interpreted – before a David Tudor performance in Stockholm. That’s how the “score” of Electronic Music for Piano (1964) appears, half a rebus, half a cryptic message. Yet, at a close reading, we soon get to know about the basic piano materials, consisting of the pre-existent series of pieces entitled Music for Piano 4-84 (1953-56). At that time, Cage was searching for a “fast” procedure of composing, which could help him in particular circumstances, without completely replacing I Ching chance operations. In those pieces, all written for Merce Cunningham, the composer exploited the imperfections of paper sheets in order to graphically fix and notate pitch and noise events in the score. It is worth briefly reminding the particular procedure (Cage wrote about it in an article first appeared in 1957, To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music for Piano 21- 52). First, a master-page is made including four musical systems each with two staves (with enough upper and lower room for leger lines) and an additional staff in-between for the notation of noises to be made inside or outside the piano. On another transparent sheet of paper, the imperfections are penciled, in a number determined by I Ching tosses. Then, this transparent sheet is placed upon the master-page and the penciled marks are inked either on the staves, on the leger lines or by the noise middle line. Further chance operations determine the clefs and sound features (whether the note should be natural, sharp or flat, whether it should be performed on the keyboard, muted or plucked”). Each piece is numbered and included in a series of sixteen (except number 20 and numbers 1, 2, 3 and 85, these latter being outside the range 4-84 to be used here). Accordingly, there are 81 pieces available, which can be performed as separate pieces or in a sequence, with or without intermission, by one or more pianists - therefore even overlapped.
