Laurel Karlik Sheehan gave the Canadian premiere of Two2 with Jack Behrens in 1990. Rob Haskins is a respected Cage expert and scholar.Together they bring an authority and expertise to this performance of Two2. Cage based Two2 on renga, a Japanese poetic design of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables expressed at least thirty-six times. Each line of music is divided into five measures, just like the five lines of the poetry.The first measure contains five separate musical events - chords or single tones, usually shared
between the two pianists - which correspond to the five syllables of the first line; the second measure has seven events, and so on.There are a total of thirty-six such fivemeasure sections in the piece.While the pianists can take any amount of time to perform each measure, each pianist must wait until both have finished the same measure before proceeding to the next.
Given this flexibility, Haskins and Karlik Sheehan's performance is the longest of the recordings to date, emphasising the sense of spaciousness and interest in harmony that marks many of Cage's late pieces.
