‘Daaaaamn, you know you’re pimp when you got John Cage shoes’
27’10.554 is a great listen for anyone working on the percussion assignment and studying the score has been much of the inspiration for my own piece.
The score itself is organized so that each page equals one minute, with numerical seconds scattered above the stave on certain parts, to indicate where you are within the piece. The stave’s are not strictly organized but it doesn’t make the piece harder to follow and lends towards a more free form approach (considering there’s no meter either), with time being your main guide.
The introductory page is brief, describing certain symbols, note values and ways of interacting with the different instruments (the main ones being metal, wood, skin(?) and interestingly, a stave which, well, can be anything such as a synth sound, whistles or whatever really). The zig-zag horizontal lines that curve up and down on each stave generally indicates dynamics and for a long, sustained drone sound to be made (most commonly with a sheet of metal). The result of these drones lead to some interesting sounds and are quite obscure (similar to the bow being played on the cymbal or the stick with the rubber ball being used on the surface of the bass drum, except more creative), most often when the sounds are called for on the ‘miscellaneous’ stave, so it’s not really clear exactly what you’re hearing.
The general structure of this piece lends towards a contrast between clusters of sound, to long drawn out silences and very low drones. These silences can last up to almost a minute or more, which is a signature of many John Cage pieces, but I feel it almost disrupts the flow of the piece (listening for the first time, I thought my speakers had a faulty connection).
Overall, this is still a very well crafted piece and worth checking out.
Shannon
Monash Composers 
Well, what’s interesting about this piece is that it forces the player to think more about timbre. As Shannon has already mentioned, the notation is very interesting as it is ‘time-based’ and the ‘notes’ themselves are more representative of the sounds that are to be reproduced rather than pitch values.
However, with that being said. It bored the hell out of me. The silences were just way too much. Ok ok, it might be an artistic statement with subtle underlying meanings. But it was just kind of wanky. To use a painting analogy, he didn’t really paint much to see on the canvas. Yeah, sure, you don’t have to draw much to create a beautiful painting, but this was just too much.
There wasn’t any distinct constant rhythmic pattern to it, rather, it was just random splurges of sound. If you didn’t know it was ‘music’, and it was played in the background, you would think it was just a percussionist fiddling around with his instruments, trying to find different sounds. Maybe that’s what the piece was about, I don’t know. I just know that I certainly didn’t enjoy it or think it worked, not to mention having learned anything useful from it.
Scott