New York based ensemble Cop Tears perform John Cage’s 13 Harmonies.

Thirteen Harmonies is a selection from John Cage’s 44 Harmonies From Apartment House 1776, an arrangement of pieces from the colonial and early American choral canon. The piece was written for the American bicentennial. John Cage composed the harmonies by way of erasure of the Protestant chorales and set them in an “apartment house” among other American voices: Native American ritual music, slave spirituals, and Sephardic incantations. What binds the lay experimentalism of William Billings and his contemporaries (all white American men) to the ‘multiplicity of centers’ of the Apartment House of John Cage is the destruction of a privileged musical space, the making-permeable of the division between the music of the piece and the sound of the people coming together to make the music of the piece.