Article by Maddie Briggs on 28 January, 2025 for Limelight Magazine

Within the dimly-lit, concrete-and-brick walls of a Carriageworks bay, French pianist Cédric Tiberghien sits down at a grand piano and begins to play.

It’s immediately jarring: rather than the bright, clear voice we’re used to, he pulls out raspy rattles and resonant, off-kilter harmonics from the belly of the beast. The reflection in the piano lid gives some glimpse at the culprits: metal screws, plastic bits and an eraser, wedged in between specific strings at specific points, as notated with precision in the score for the work.

In The Cage Project,Tiberghien performs John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes, the landmark work of the prepared piano, one requiring a variety of objects are placed on or in between the strings of the piano to alter the sonic character of the instrument. The resultant sounds are often compared to the microtonal, resonant gamelan – alien, but never ugly or harsh; sometimes eerie, sometimes sweet and playful.

It’s a solo work, but Tiberghien isn’t alone on stage. A tree of long, horizontal metal poles lays dormant above instrument and performer, each arm lined with wooden planks, metal rods and plates, tiles or crowned with a gong.

This ‘kinetic sculpture‘ is an invention of Melbourne-based percussionist and sound artist Matthias Schack-Arnott, designed to expand Sonatas and Interludes into a three-dimensional sonic world. Each object on the mobile corresponds to one of the 45 piano keys featuring preparation.

After the poppy chromaticism of Sonata V worms its way to an end, the metal monster above the piano slowly starts to wake. Tiberghien plays a sweeping, clunking chord, which is thrown into the air above him as the mobile responds. Though it’s not immediately inextricable from the prepared piano, the piece slowly but surely breaks into the physical space.

As the pieces progress, each pole spins, pushed by a fan attached to the end of its reach; as the pieces grow in intensity, the mobile becomes a swirling tempest of sound – crystalline chimes, metallic clangs, wooden tones.

Even through the fog of preparations, Tiberghien’s sharp pianistic skills cut through. Drawing a colourful dynamic range out of the instrument even the most forward of the prepared notes, he very much performs in duet with the mobile, sometime steering, sometimes pulling back to let it take the lead.

Keith Tucker’s lighting is more than just a complement to the work. It carves out the very size and shape of The Cage Project‘s 3D world.

At the work’s height, the mobile’s spinning tosses a shifting, intricate shadow onto each of the walls around the performance space. It runs in perfect parallel with the ideas of the 20th century New York visual artists that Cage toyed with in his own work: Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, which inspired Cage’s seminal 4’33, argues that the shadows cast onto the canvas are foundational to the experience of the art, as they are here in Carriageworks.

In fact, every element of The Cage Project feels like it directly traces the threads of Cage’s philosophy. While it’s certainly original and inspired, the work honours and expands upon Cage’s vision. It teases out environment from music, space from time, with wonderful regard to flow and arc.

The prepared piano already begs to be witnessed in live performance. Each instrument is different, so every performance is as well.

As the work reaches its end, Tiberghien lays the mobile to gentle rest as the music grows sparser, quieter, immersed in ever-growing darkness, bar for a small, warm light fixed to the music desk.

Most of the audience didn’t leave after the performance. Instead, they flooded onto the performance floor, to peer inside the piano and pose questions to a very gracious Tiberghien. It’s a credit to a work that’s radical and boundary-pushing, and yet, entirely welcoming – the space that Schack-Arnott carves out creates rare room for its audience within the abstruse of the avant-garde.