Ferdinand Gasse Ferdinand Gasse Ferdinand Gasse (1780 – ca. 1840) was a French violinist and composer. Born in Naples, Gasse, who was probably related to the architect Louis-Silvestre Gasse, born eight years later in Naples, attended the violin class of Pierre Rode at the Conservatoire de Paris from 1798. He also had lessons with Rodolphe Kreutzer, the dedicatee of Beethoven's famous Kreutzer-Sonata. He also studied harmony with Charles-Simon Catel and musical composition with François-Joseph Gossec. From 1801 Gasse was violinist at the Paris Opera. In 1805 he received the deuxième Grand Prix de Rome for his cantata "Cupidon pleurant Psyché" (after a
Sonata for Clarinet (Cage) California workshop in San Francisco. When Cage arrived, it turned out the clarinetist couldn't play the piece, and Cage had to play it himself, on piano (Nicholls 1990, 176). Cage also tried to get a Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra clarinetist to play the sonata, but the clarinetist refused on aesthetic grounds (Kostelanetz 2003, 103). Later in life, Cage made some revisions and the sonata was finally published by Edition Peters, Cage's principal publisher, in 1963. Although he disliked some of his early works, he considered the Sonata, according to a late interview, "very interesting" (Duckworth 1999, 8). The Sonata is