In the summer of 1978, the composer James Tenney was in Toronto preparing the premiere of his latest work, Harmonium #5, dedicated to his mentor, John Cage. The great minimalist composer was of course present for the event, stopping in during rehearsals where he might catch a glimpse of the score. At some point, when Tenney’s head was turned, Cage deposited among his notes a single sheet of paper, which sat undisturbed for 38 years. Discovered by Tenney’s widow Lauren Pratt in December, this page contained a modest, minimalist piece entitled All Sides of the Small Stone, for Erik Satie and (Secretly Given to Jim Tenney as a Koan). The composition finally got its world premiere last week at Redcat in downtown Los Angeles.

“I think [Cage] composed it on the spot, put it in that pencil score of Jim’s and closed it up,” says Pratt of the discovery, which occurred while she and members of the Mexican ensemble Liminar were going through Tenney’s original scores. “I could recognize that hand. It looks like John Cage’s hand. We’d never seen [the score]. If Jim knew about it, he would tell people. But he never told me.”

Violin and viola virtuoso Mark Menzies of CalArts arranged and conducted the piece. A harmonic line on piano, scaling up, back and repeating, bears a deliberate resemblance to the Satie classic Gymnopédie. Menzies had his pick of a number of former Cage associates and specialists on the faculty, including Michael Pisaro, Wolfgang von Schweinitz and Ulrich Krieger, to help arrive at a jazz ensemble of piano, vibes, bass and, in the harmonic line, three trumpets, two double basses and two flutes. The composition lasted about 10 minutes, but appears to be both open-ended and open to interpretation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Cage: inspired by the I Ching. Photograph: Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

“I’m assuming that the small stone is a bit like a sense of a memento. There is something very circular through the harmonic line,” says Menzies, seated at a piano in his cramped office. “What’s also very important is the part of the title that says ‘Given Secretly to Jim Tenney as a Koan’. Koan, in this case, is a riddle or a mystery or contradiction. And the riddle here is what do you do with this harmonic little sequence, basically a scale? Do the other instruments play the scale? Is it atmospheric? Do they make melodies out of it? The very fact the solution is not cast in stone means that every performance is necessarily different.”

Considered one of the most influential composers and music theorists of the 20th century, Cage studied briefly under Arnold Schoenberg in the 1930s before turning away from traditional western musical language to embrace a more open process incorporating chance as well as elements of Eastern philosophies. Experiments with the Chinese divination text the I Ching led to his landmark composition of 1952, 4’33”, in which he sat at the piano and refrained from playing for the duration of the time designated by the title.

“He was able to create 4’33” because the I Ching kept giving him silence,” Menzies explains about the ancient process based on patterns of randomly tossed sticks or dice. “It’s not that he used chance to create his pieces. That’s what most people misunderstand. In those transactions with the I Ching, what matters is the question you ask. The way he had of preparing the composition, setting the framework and setting all the components in motion, the random outcome of the I Ching enabled him to see the opportunities in the materials he had set in motion.”

Even as a teenager in Colorado, Tenney was a fan of Cage’s music, attending a 1947 performance of Sonatas and Interludes, another landmark piece, which uses prepared piano (which sees items inserted among the strings to reimagine part of the instrument as a percussion section). At the time, Tenney couldn’t have foreseen Cage would one day become his mentor and that he would himself record the piece in 2002, 10 years after the maestro’s death and only four years before his own in 2006.

While there is no current plan for a studio recording of the piece, last week’s premiere was recorded for posterity. Of course, Cage provided no explicit instructions, but both Pratt and Menzies feel he wouldn’t have cared if a recording were made or not. While there may be others out there, the new piece is a rare find. “Inevitably, when you get something like this, you want the world to hear about it.”