Modern Composition John Cage

simen...honestly....give it up....why do you care....sigh...give it up

I find truth in every post, and I have a question :
Let's say 4'33'' is an anonymous piece. Would it be recognized as art ? I don't think we would be aware of its existence.
And now let's say BWV 542 , or BWV 543 are anonymous pieces. I think they would be recognized as art.

But we say that 4'33'' is art because it is MR.Cage that "wrote" it. We know that MR.Cage is a good composer, so we can say that it is art.

So my question is the following :
Do we have to know the intentions of the composer in order to decide wether it is art or not ?
If Cage farts in a violin, is it art ? it is still sound
Do we have to show everything is music, or should we write less notes and let the listener think about what he heard ?

Simen,

Let's try and talk this over, shall we? After 10 pages!

On a personal level, I wouldn't go to a concert to listen to 4'33" alone! It's not worth it! Thank God it's not 65'49" or something, to take over the whole first part or something! (joke).

On the music side of things, if you want my opinion. Now with the recordings, you get a canned version of a performance. You get a dead Bach, which will never ever change, unless the CD player gets stuck! A live concert is different, since it varries on almost all degrees and it is a social event! Different performers, different instruments, different variations, maybe a few errors in playing, different hall, different... social event in all. If you try to amplify the sociality of the even, as well as making as huge a difference in each performance, you detract the music, input silence: It's performance as different as hell (imagine a Bach fugue played each time with different notation, different key, different instruments, different tempo, etc. And yet, being somehow Bach!) the sociality of the event is amplified to the maximum: each sound means something. Random events become the center of the event.

This is the "music" side of things. I can't really see it as "music" personally. I can't download it to winamp, I can't notate it, etc. So in the traditional sense if you want, no it isn't music.

On account to what Cage said himself: "there is no absolute silence". There is no true silence! There's forever some sound coming from somewhere. Absolute silence does not exist.

In music, what is also very importan is rests, believe it or not! It's very important in a fugue, to have 3 voices to shut up in the exposition and let them develop naturally one by one. You don't start a fugue, BANG!, all the voices at once. And in the episodes, again you don't play 4 voices forever. That would be boring, and Bach never did it, you know it. Silence and rests are most important in music.

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The 4'33" as a social event, or an artistic event is also very important!

First you get Schoemberg who decides that there needs to be communism in music! All notes are equal, blah blah. And he makes this rather ugly system where everything NEEDS to be equal! No matter what! And he tries to evade throughout this system. This system pure as it was evolved to serialism, went to ridiculous things and then died down! Not even Boulez is a serialist anymore! He conducts Beethoven instead! hahaha!

And then you get Cage who goes further: No need for music, no need for arrangement. YOU are important. What happens around YOU is important. YOU are part of the performance, whether you like it or not!

Cage, Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen, all have their place somewhere and actually have also infiltrated pop culture as well in the works of BT, Aphex Twin, Radiohead, dEUS, Soni Youth and I'm sure many more who I don't know.

___________________

You don't want to understand, ok.

We may be talking rubbish! All this semi-philosophical talk to back up something that is bullshit! Maybe that as well!

(It could be both of the above, one of the above, or none of the above, if you want. Any sane man would choose either both or none. )

Thing is that you don't see me reducing any of your works, any of anyones works. You don't see me reduce and belittle anyone, and no event. I declare that I don't care to know about you personally really on the Internet level. I don't care to know your religions and don't have the urge to go about yelling "I'm an judhist/atheist/orthodox YAAAAAAAAAAAAy! (like kermit the frog! ))

Growing up doesn't have to do with an insult. You can ask me to grow up as much as you want, I don't take it as an insult and don't feel the need to refer to you back in the same way! As I said, I'm 30 with kids, family, responsibilities, etc. I don't spend my time trying out my strawmen and don't care if you love Baroque only too much! (this is refering to your fart thread)

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Tolga: You are right! It is because Cage wrote it! Or maybe Cage is who he is because he wrote it?

Everyone who refers to Cage refers to this work mainly! Could it be that this work made Cage who he is?

I personally don't care about the composer and I understand what you mean. Problem is that I "know" about Cage a bit more, I went and researched about him, and in the early 90s (92-93) I went and bought this book.

So while the work alone does not mean anything, the fact that Cage has backed up his arguments, has done many lectures, and teaching and has left behind him many articles to explain pretty much his line of thinking, makes things different.

Yes BWM whatever number would be art on it's own pretty much (let's not waste time deciding what art is). 4'33" can be art as well, exactly because Cage gave it the reasons to be art.

LOL. Why does this piece inspire flatulence?

Originally Posted by Tolga

And now let's say BWV 542 , or BWV 543 are anonymous pieces. I think they would be recognized as art.

Whaat! Prelude & Fugue in A minor~ My absolute most favorite piece ever!...

Why is this here? .... and... BMW is quite a different thing. I like M5.






But that's a car.


Is a car art?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Screw y'all, I'm going to start quoting Dracula now.

What is a music but a miserable pile of secrets! Now have at you! *throws wine glass*

*sigh*

Just as nikolas suggested, a must read for Simen and other people too should be Cage's "Silence", which is basically a collection of some of his writings and lectures on music.

A very small extract from p.9 of that book,

"the position of a particular sound [is] the result of five determinants: frequency of pitch, amplitude or loudness, overtone structure or timbre, duration, and morphology (how the sound begins, goes on, and dies away)"

If you read the rest of the book too, you'll see that Cage showed with his 4'33" that actually, the only thing of those five determinants that is absolutely necessary for music to exist is simply duration.

There are some lovely answers to this thread, but Simen seems to disregard anything that goes against his narrow-minded opinion, going as far as denying everything other people said about him being narrow-minded. Now *that's* being narrow-minded.


Not understanding something, then not *wanting* to understand when other people try and spend some of their time trying to explain it, and then accusing other people of being stupid and senseless because they support what that person doesn't understand, or because they believe in something different than him, that's quite a symptom of narrow-mindedness.

well i guess the fact that we discuss about it so much makes it art. I don't know if it's music but really don't care, it's a matter of the definition of the word music. Art in general is comunication, and 4'33' says something, I have no doubt about it. I think is closer to to theater than music, but as I said, the name we gave it is not big deal.

I personally don't call it music...however I do call it art.
For me art is something that makes you notice something that you may have looked over before, something you didn't care to see.

In a music lecture of mine, the lecturer ''played'' 4'33'' and we just sat there. And we found that after a little while we start to listen to everything else around us. I remember listening to the air-conditioner. So who is to say that John Cage wanted pure silence, maybe he wanted everyone to realise that although there may not be music as we know it constantly playing, there is still the music of nature...or in my case an air-conditioner. Maybe John Cage wanted us to hear that our lives are always filled with sound even if there is ''silence.''

Who are those that define what art is or is not? It all comes down to personal taste. So call it what you want. I don't call it music and it is unlikely that I ever will, but I do call it art. (but then, maybe that's just me)

I think it's a very interesting and revealing composition. As a piece of music it is, quite frankly, boring. But as a work of art, it seems cutting and revealing. It inspires debate as to the nature of art and music, it draws crowds to fill concert halls, and above all it generates reaction.

This to me is enough.

Originally Posted by spherenine

4'33", to me, is thousands of times better than Fall Out Boy. It's not music, but it is a statement. I just think it's fucking retarded, especially because the Cage estate apparently tried to sue somebody for writing a shorter version of the piece (you know, like a 1'44" or something). That pisses me off.

There isn't a shorter version of the piece, because the piece Cage wrote has no defined length. It is a very common mistake that Cage actually wrote a piece called 4'33" and that it lasts 4'33".

Actually the piece just tells the performer to play three movements of TACET. The duration isn't specified and is up to the performer. The piece is called after how long the performer chooses to make it last.

At the world premiere it was played for 4'33'', so from then on it was generally called 4'33'', but actually it could also be called "two hours", "1 ms", or "a day", depending on how long the performer chooses to play.

Originally Posted by walkingwikipedia

I believe Cage wrote this piece after realising that it was impossible to experience true silence. By making an audience sit for 4 and a half minutes without the performers playing anything, rather observing background noise, he was hoping that he could share this realisation and with it, consider what music actually is - where does sound become music? If sound is always present (as he discovered), what is the role of music?

That comes rather close. But from what I've read, he wanted to share his experience that there is no silence. Before writing the piece, he had wanted to experience true silence and was allowed in a totally anechoic chamber. There he realized that your own blood rushing through your ears etc., become so loud that it's simply impossible to experience silence.

Another assumption I don't agree with seems to be that for us to hear sounds as music they must have been musically created. For me, natural sounds aren't music. But they can become music the moment I choose to hear them as such and become my own composer of "musique concrète". The act of listening can be a compositorial act on its own.

Compare it to photography: It is just a (fixed) way of looking at natural objects. But by deciding -what- and -how- to look at these objects, you turn them into art. The same applies to making sound recordings and playing them back. The compositition is the provided framework and focus on natural phenomenons. The only difference in Cage's piece is that he doesn't strictly determine the focus, but leaves it open to the listener (although he does provide a framework, i.e. the concert situation and the performer provides another framework, i.e. that of duration). It's like an "instant personal photography of sound" that is different for every person and vanishes right when it was created.

Last but not least I want to say that from today's perspective it's very "natural" to say this was very easy to do and has no real meaning. And I don't think it was hard to do either. But it is still an enormous action, like Malewich's black square, to actually bring yourself to write something so radical, so absolute and so "primitive". It takes a lot more artistic courage and conviction to do something simple and primitive, than something very elaborate. But I think that's rather difficult to comprehend today, more than 50 years after it was written, when it already -has- been written. Cage knew very well that he would be heavily criticised, even ridiculed for that piece, but he still did it. I find this an achievement by itself.

I don't find it an awesome "piece of music", but I find it music and I find it important that it has been written at some point.