John Cage

Yes exactly. Henry Cowell, Edgar Varése, and Ruth Crawford all had huge impacts on European music, though it took a while.

Ok....except Varese was French, moved to the States when he was about 30, hence "Ameriques". I think he was one of Busoni's mates and quite influenced by Debussy.

Agree about Copland though when I first got interested in American music I felt more of an American voice/timbre in Don Gillis. Totally engaging and a contrast with my other favourite, Peter Mennin.

John Cage.... What can I say, the man is unique, and his music are different, I can not argue that his music are bad, because it will be the same to say that Duchamp is not an artist, Art is really anything anyone wants it to be, it's doesn't operate on logic, and I can't disprove or prove anyone as an artist or not, but I dont like John Cage, and I don't think he should be a "composer", he should be called a Philosopher.

What I don't understand is nobody else has tried to claim silence to be their own music... If someone were to copyright a piece of silence for say 5 minutes would that plagarism of John Cage?...

I doubt it. I used to visit a coffee shop in London (a long while ago) that had the weirdest records on its juke box - including one that was silent. You could pay 10p or whatever and get 4 mins of silence.

However, when it came on you'd get enlightened about just how unsilent that 4 mins was... babble mostly; and the same with Cage's 4'33" - it isn't about silence as much as what isn't silent during its 'performance', like the audience who formed the 'performers'.

Fontana Mix can be a pleasantly easy one, depending on who's doing it.

I played in a concert of American Experimental music yesterday. It was called Modern Movements, and was designed to parallel the current temporary art exhibit in the college museum, an exhibition of post-1945 art.

The PROGRAM:

Humming, by Annea Lockwood

Projection 1, by Morton Feldman

December 1952, by Earle Brown

Four (version 1) for string quartet, by John Cage

Clapping Music, by Steve Reich

Four (version 2) for string quartet, by John Cage

You Blew It, by Christian Wolfe

In C, by Terry Riley

The idea of much post-1945 art and music is very similar: that you don't need to have knowledge of the process, or the score, or theory, or anything, in order to gain an understanding of said music. You just need to listen. And in the museum yesterday, with about 50 or 60 people (enough to fill the sculpture gallery, where we were performing) all listening with their eyes closed, it really was an amazing experience.

IN C?!!? Great piece. What was the ensemble, and how long did it last?

I did it with our contemporary music ensemble last semester. We had a pretty bad ensemble for it, though. Pretty much a full orchestra, but with 5 sopranos, pipe organ (me), and a marimba keeping the pulse. Most players in the ensemble didn't get (understand) the music, so the performance lacked. But it was fun! It lasted around 50 minutes; my composition teacher hated it...!

IN C?!!? Great piece. What was the ensemble, and how long did it last?

Let's see, we had:

Tenor (me)

Piano (3 people on one keyboard) - the descant person was keeping the pulse along with the electric bass.

3 Accordians

Bowed guitar

String Quartet (2Vln, 1Vla, 1Vlc)

Horn in F

Trumpet

Electric bass

Maybe some other stuff that I'm forgetting.

We were working under time constraints - we just did 10 minutes.

hmm... Cage..... Not really my kind of thing.

I saw a video recently of someone "performing" the 4'33. I got the gist of it, but I felt ultimately that it was sort of pointless

I also heard his In the Name of the Holocaust. What the heck was wrong with the piano? it sounded broken, anyone know?

What the heck was wrong with the piano? it sounded broken, anyone know?

Probably prepared. It's where you stick scraggy in the strings to alter the sound. Prepared piano pieces include detailed preparation charts, indicating what to do with each string.

Umm, I only read through the first 8 pages before posting this, so I may be repeating something obvious..but the point of 4'33 isn't that everything IS music..it's just that anything can be considered music once you place it in the frame. It's just what Duchamp did with his Urinal picture..you wouldn't call a Urinal art, but once you put it in a frame and in an art gallery, what else can you call it? (Bad art, maybe, but it's still art). The same with 4'33..anything that happens during that piece of time becomes music just because it's in a figurative 'frame' in when music should occur.

Essentially, it's only music when you choose to call it so, in which case Cage himself says that 4'33 is not music or is music, depending on how you want to look at it. Of course, the same applies to Bach, and even Rach.

I'll also add that I find Cage's notoriety to be overplayed..I find loads of melody in his work and can find several places I can dance to it.

Right, so I performed Cage's "Lecture on Nothing" for my Seminar class. It's actually a piece, folks... set into sections of 12 lines, with 4 "measures" per each line. The lecturer sets a tempo, and reads according to that tempo. That's where Derek's quote that he says shows Cage's senility comes from. And there's a LOT more to the lecture than that one line.

That speech is hilarious. Take any sarcastic joke out of context and it sounds stupid.

According to: Cage and Silence

"[4] A spatial notion of silence.

Cage's 'Lecture on Nothing', a reading from 1950, signals a shift in his thinking on silence. He realizes that the important role of silence regarding musical structure does not yet establish a full recognition of its positive qualities. Cage wants to avoid approaching silence from a negative point of view, i.e., as absence of sound. At the beginning of 'Lecture on Nothing', he attempts to arrive at a different relationship towards silence. 'What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking ... But now there are silences and the words make help make the silences ... We need not fear the silences, we may love them' (Cage, 1961, p.109-10). Silence is no longer the absence of sounds; silence itself consists of sounds. Silence begets sounds. Chiasm. Reversibility. Through the intertwining of silence and sound, their mutual penetrability now becomes appreciated. Each retains a part of its antipode; each requires the other as its frame. The necessary interdependency between sound and silence relates to two principal aspects: silence is not only the precondition for sound - this means that silence contains sound - every sound in turn harbors silence as well. (According to Martin Zenck, the 'Lecture on Nothing' points out that the words of spoken language by which the silence is demarcated are in fact the precondition for silence.) The latter principle manifests itself especially in compositions that are on the outer limits of audibility, such as Waiting (Play music) (cf. Cage and Noise). In this 'silent piece', silence does not disappear when a tone resounds, rather, it continuously resonates along with the tones. Here, a vertical conception of silence comes into play. Sound and silence develop in a parallel way without mutual exclusion; the one is always already present in the other (cf. Visscher, p.49-50)."

To me this seems like pretentious drivel. Am I missing something here?

According to:

To me this seems like pretentious drivel. Am I missing something here?

Yeah, I think so.

All Cage is trying to do is to allow silence the same importance as sound. Silence in traditional music is used to accent sound. It is "the absence of sound."

The quote you listed is merely trying to explain Cage's process. But it's not an easy thing to just put down in a few words. Yeah, the author used really long and unheard of words. But he's not being pretentious.

All Cage is trying to do is explain that, like life and death, or good and evil, you can't define silence OR sound without the other. Ergo, each is as important as the other.

Yeah, I think so.

All Cage is trying to do is to allow silence the same importance as sound. Silence in traditional music is used to accent sound. It is "the absence of sound."

The quote you listed is merely trying to explain Cage's process. But it's not an easy thing to just put down in a few words. Yeah, the author used really long and unheard of words. But he's not being pretentious.

All Cage is trying to do is explain that, like life and death, or good and evil, you can't define silence OR sound without the other. Ergo, each is as important as the other.

OK. But an ongoing argument is whether or not you can call it "music". I generally don't define music, as I believe the definition of music can vary between people (for instance, many people don't consider rap to be music, etc.) but in this case, it appears to me that Cage isn't really writing a "piece of music". Rather, I believe that calling it an "experiment in sound and silence" would be a more fitting description.

Personally, would you truly consider pieces such as Lecture on Nothing to be music? If you are going to call them music, then what would you say separates music from other sounds? If you've already answered this, I apologize.

My opinions:

Lecture on Nothing: music, and not music.

4'33": not music

Lecture on Nothing can be heard as a piece of music, because if one listens to it for its meter, its rhythm, and the sound of the voice speaking it, it is. If one is listening to solely the words of the piece, it is not.

4'33" is not music, to me, because it lacks the intentionality of sound for its own sake.

Tuning 12 radios to different stations IS music, because it is intentionally done to hear the sound that comes forth.

To me, music has an intentionality that the sound should be heard for itself. 4'33" lacks this intentionality.

Probably prepared. It's where you stick scraggy in the strings to alter the sound. Prepared piano pieces include detailed preparation charts, indicating what to do with each string.

hehe my music class tried this with the grand, it sounds amazing - almost identical to the recording. I can scan the instructions for a prepared piano if anyone wants to see how its done.

We should make a Phillip Glass thread :D