Music for Piano is a series of 85 indeterminate musical compositions for piano by American avant-garde composer John Cage. All of these works were composed by making paper imperfections into sounds using various kinds of chance operations. General information The use of paper imperfections was suggested by fast techniques in painting. Cage recounts that using the I Ching was always a very slow process. In 1952 a dancer (probably Jo Anne Melcher, the dedicatee of Music for Piano 1) made a request for a piece of music which was needed urgently, and Cage had to find a way to speed up the process: Certainly I intended to continue working [...] by consulting the I Ching as usual. But I also wanted to have a very rapid manner of writing a piece of music. Painters, for example, work slowly with oil and rapidly with water colors [...] I looked at my paper, and I found my "water colors": suddenly I saw that the music, all the music, was already there. A description of the process of composing these pieces can be found in Cage's book Silence: Lectures and Writings. Cage composed the work by creating a "master page" in which two staves (one "system") have enough space above and below to allow each staff to be either treble or bass clef, so that all the notes on the piano can be included. He then used transparent paper and marked the imperfections in the paper according to various chance operations, then inscribing the staves of the master sheet on the page, making the imperfections into whole notes, adding ledger lines (where needed), accidentals, clefs, and other indications (such as M for "muted" and P for "pizzicato") selected using the I Ching. The Music for Piano series comprises the following works: Music for Piano 1 (1952) Dedicated to dancer Jo Anne Melcher, who commissioned the work for her choreography "Paths and Events". The score (six pages) only specifies pitches (using whole notes), leaving the durations to the performer. Cage composed the piece one staff at a time. First, he set up a time interval within which to work. Then he would mark as many paper imperfections as he could find during that time. The piece is played at a prescribed tempo (each system = 7 seconds). In all subsequent pieces the tempo is freely determined by the performer. Music for Piano 2 (1953)