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.
[2]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: The complete set of pieces, including several versions for multiple pianos, was recorded by pianist Steffen Schleiermacher for Musikproduktion Dabringhaus Und Grimm and released in a 2-CD set in 1998.