John Cage

It is not John Cage that has caused my reaction---it is silly people who actually think he had anything interesting to say, that I am reacting to. It is your silliness that has made him a part of history textbooks, not his profundity. If musical academia weren't a bunch of crazy post-modernists, he would have been laughed at and never taken seriously to begin with.

I don't think Cage's music is necessarily anything profound in itself. I think that what he did opened doors into sound exploration that was influential in the foundation of several (by your definition, actual) musical schools of thought. It is that contribution that has earned him a place in history texts, not the simple fact that he was the first person to think of an audience's ambient noise as music. Brian Ferneyhough, Elliott Carter, Yannis Xenakis, John Adams, and other modern composers were all inspired to some degree by John Cage. If you think these people are silly for taking what they could from his ideas, please think again.

For instance: a mainstay of Cage's philosophy is that a concrete piece of music differs from person to person depending on what each person hears (in this way, he argues that chance music is no different from concrete music - it's just got added chances). So, a guy wrote a piece that uses an ensemble in the audience. Depending on where an audience member sits, they will hear different sonorities, based on the sounds they are closest to. However, the piece itself is written, note for note, and therefore, is musical, and composed. BUT it is still rooted in Cage's chance music philosophy.

And since I'm the child of an academic, and I grew up on a college campus, and the majority of the adults I knew growing up were academics, let me say that it's not just musical academics that are crazy post-modernists.

My father is an academic. He's just about the most clear headed individual on this planet. He's kind of a black sheep...let's just say he doesn't exactly have a lot of friends at the University. Even his fellow mathematicians are liberals. He doesn't talk to them about politics, so he gets along with them just fine.

I like you Derek.

Much of what you said is how I feel. In fact, John Cage's... stuff... is the only work by a so-called composer that I can think of that I would say isn't music. I used to believe that anything could be music depending on how it is perceived... but using that logic, what is music anyway? Why should we even use the term "music" at all if it has no real meaning? If any combination of sounds can be music, even without organization, then why wouldn't we just use the word "sounds?" It's much simpler that way.

In my opinion, music can be as odd and modern as one can imagine, as long as it has tone or rhythm. I, for one, love modern music. I enjoy atonal music, occassionally serialism, and other avant garde techniques. But I refuse to believe that 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence is music. It isn't. Sure, one can attempt to justify it by saying that the noise of the audience is the music - but I think this is ridiculous. I doubt that Cage really thought that. He was putting on an act, and an entertaining one at that. But I can't imagine why ANYONE considers that "serious music."

12 different radios on different stations? Sure, that may be music, but that's not a PIECE of music. It's 12 different radios tuned to different stations. Now, if somebody had composed 12 different parts for a piece and played them on 12 different radio stations at once, they could call it an actual composition. But, merely playing 12 different radios on random stations... that's not a musical composition, that's an experiment in sound. The two are not always synonymous.

I didn't always like atonal music. However, I have been listening to Death Metal for years, which is quite arguably atonal, or at least so tonally ambiguous it might as well be atonal. I decided eventually that my refusing to listen to atonal classical music whilst listening to and enjoying death metal was inconsistent of me, so I began listening with open ears. So far my favorite modern and/or atonal works include: late scriabin, some of Keith Jarrett's improvisations, Stravinsky, some John Corigliani. I can't say I've enjoyed Schoenberg all that much but maybe it will grow on me.

You bring up an interesting point, namely that rhythm has a very large role in musical interest. I think harmony has a lot less to do with it...

HOWEVER...I don't think one could come up with an atonal piece that has a sweepingly Romantic sound, for example.

::addition::

I think rhythm is an as yet largely unexplored area in music. As long as people continue focusing so much on harmony, no wonder people are scared there will be nothing new left to do! It is static, like the colors of the rainbow. Rhythm, however, is for all practical purposes infinite. I actually believe the future of classical music may lie entirely in improvisation since it is much easier to do wild intuitive things with rhythm that would be difficult if not impossible to write out.

I like Corigliano's music too! His score for The Red Violin is gorgeous!

Listen to Ruth Crawford-Seeger's string quartet, third movement - it's pretty sweepingly romantic, or at least it grows into it.

I still say listen to Elliott Carter's Etude #7, from Eight Etudes and a Fantasy. It's a single note - a G, and it's so cool!

I dunno about finding a single note all that interesting. The Corigliano piece I'm thinking of is his etudes for piano, starting with the one for left hand. Its wicked, dark, and awesome. nice piece.

and please...don't anyone tell me "YOU LIKE IT BECAUSE ITS VIRTUOSIC" I get so sick of that mantra lol. THATS NOT WHY I like it because its wicked. not all of it is virtuosic and those are some of my favorite parts.

I wonder if Corigliano composes by improvisation...if so he must be pretty darn good

Actually about that single note thing.

That brings up another interesting debate. How far will we go with enjoying minimalist textures?

Personally, I love minimalist music. Sometimes my favorite pianist Keith Jarrett will do just that--play a single note for a long time. Sometimes he'll articulate it differently with rhythm or surround it with intersting flourishes, though.

Can't say I enjoy it that much when its JUST a single note though...I can only think of one time where he does this for an extended period.

Oddly I think there actually are many people who are revolted by minimalism almost as much as atonality. This really puzzles me, because it seems to me most minimalism is at least pleasant to listen to, if not very complex or intellectually satisfying. Though I'd venture to say well written minimalism strikes a nice balance and can be very satisfying, indeed.

John Adams' "Short Ride in a Fast Machine"

Adams is a successful minimalist/neo-minimalist composer because of the way he interchanges rhythm and pitch content to create interest. He's not afraid to bring in new extensions on old material. This is the problem I have with Philip Glass - as interesting as his works are for their philosophical implications, they evolve at such a slow rate, that it would be impossible to hear the evolution without spending days and weeks listening to his music. Glass' music evolves not within pieces, but within periods. It takes years for evolution of his music. It makes a great statement, but isn't so interesting to listen to (except his 5th Symphony, which is brilliance).

The Carter etude is only a minute long. Interest is created by different sonorities on the note at different rhythms.

I think the problem people have with minimalism is primarily Glass' fault, because they expect something closer to the arc-structure that is culturally expected - and many don't step back far enough to see that the arc structure is so large that it would take years to listen to all the way through.

I don't really listen to John Cage's music since I don't like this kind of style anyway but would love to try to perform his 4'33".

Really, he's both a con-artist and a genius. He actually made people believe just siting there is music, or making random noises and sounds. It takes real guts and creativity to fo that.

I don't really listen to John Cage's music since I don't like this kind of style anyway but would love to try to perform his 4'33".

:P How much experience've you got? You need to be an accomplished musician to be able to perform that piece.

Hmm, I'd say you need to be an accomplished audience member to listen to it.

As Cage said of this and similar works, just listen. As I see it, he made entire audiences the participants in performing this, one of his most aleatoric compositions.

And...he did cause me to wonder when a concert performance actually starts. Is it when "music" starts, is it when you enter the atmosphere of the hall. Is it when you buy the tickets or when the management pick up the phone to hire the hall? A Zen moment - things end up the same (aside from chance) but on the way they get a bit mixed up. (Or words to that effect. Cage. "Indeterminacy")

Which in turn made me wonder about the aesthetic and artistic integrity of listening to conventional music composed for acoustic instruments through loudspeakers or phones. In this regard, Cage prompted me to greater effort toward live music and playing in clubs where traditional 'preferred' audience behavour wasn't strictly applicable. And to electronic music which by its nature has to be transduced to be heard. And the possible blending of both.

Nice! Someone revived this thread - I love it.

In his time Cage was just one of the avant garde. One can include Merce Cunningham, even people like Stan Kenton of "City of Glass" fame, his co-worker/arranger Robert Graettinger and others in the American avant garde, while Darmstadt was riding a crest in Europe.

It's dead easy to say in hindsight, these people "are horrible, they contributed nothing except reaffirm the status quo" but they did cut a few paths and brought new insights. Cage brought much to the American equivalent of Musique Concrète; electronic music generally. But if that reaffirmation does turn out to be all they ultimately offered, at least they closed blind alleys for those closed-minded enough not to spot the difference. No one would be crazy enough (surely) to claim that Merce Cunningham's effort came to nought? I mean, he reshaped classical ballet.

I can't even bracket Cage with Webern - Webern pointed to the sterile inevitability of total serialism so linguistically removed from diatonic music that it fell flat. Cage acted in the opposite direction. Seems many European composers of the day were more wrapped up in fanciful fashion than writing music, where program notes justifying their work were just as convoluted, couched in incomprehensible terms just to sound erudite and clever. (Read a voulme or two of Die Reihe - a specialised periodical of the age available in English.) It was a fashion - like mini-skirts and kaftans, had its influence but gone now.

I don't feel that our craft as Composers is any less free or is any more constrained if we were to totally ignore the man's ideas.

If that textbook HAD included Rachmaninoff, I probably wouldn't be on such a quest. I feel that if the attitude of the academic author is this sort of liberal, all inclusiveness, nicey nicey attitude, I wouldn't mind if he had Rachmaninoff in there AND Cage, but to exclude Rach and include Cage just seems rather hypocritical to me.

I'd actually go out on a limb and say cause the author was a liberal, he hated America so the fact that Rach loved America, became an American citizen, and wrote his own arrangement of the Star Spangled Banner just might be testament to this particular author's political beliefs! hahahaha.

Before you jump to conclusions---I don't think all liberals hate America, quite the contrary. And I realize that some of you are Canadian, I'm speaking from an American perspective here. Finally, I'm a libertarian, not a conservative. lol

All you have to do is listen to almost any pop song and you can here John Cage's influence. One thing I can think of right now, in "serious music" (I guess, is the use of a prepared piano in Aphex Twins "Drukqs". I have performed in ensembles using prepared piano and have to say that it very different than using a un-prepared piano, and is quite a unique sound.

Also I love listening to many of John Cage's compositions, they are quite pleasing to my ears.

lol

Quote from wikipedia: "John Cage returned to California in 1931, his enthusiasm for America being revived, he said, by reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass."

Very nice, if you've played some of the works or instruments!

The only problem with "listening to Cage's compsositions" on record is that, since most involve chance operations, all you get is a snapshot of a particular performance. If that pleases you, fine.

For a while I declined even to record gigs/"concerts" that friends and I gave, based on "planned" improvisation - which might be akin to jazz but without jazz' formal chord base. What would be the point when it was a once-only performance? Publicity possibly...I shrug.

I was finally persuaded by others who found nothing wrong in a pleasing recorded performance - which was, after all, no more nor less than any recorded performance: a snapshot of a given ensemble at a given time and place. Beethoven and the many provided a 'complete' score so that different performances will be recognisably the same work. In that situation each conductor/performer hopes to create a definitive performance (if you're to believe the music mags). With improvisation there is no such thing as a definitive performance - presumably why one chooses not to notate things precisely - so the recording is the extant score of a single performance.

It's possible that different performances might yield recognisably the same work but don't count on it - the details will always be different.

The contribution Cage made to my music was his "Indeterminacy. New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music" - the famous 90 stories. One of those milestones. It forced me to reconsider much, for instance the relevance of "rules" (that just about made me give up music in my early 20s, post-diploma). Thus moving into more remote tonatlities and chromaticism, I could set parameters that made music acceptable while abandoning keys-for-the-sake-of-formality and rhythm as-standard in favour of organised durations and accents. The same thing? Sometime, yes, but the gnosis, if you like, was eye-opening.

M

Right, so I heard a performance of 4'33" today. And, say what you will about it being music and such, it is not a piece to be taken lightly or discredited as quackery.

The experience that we did (this is in my composition seminar class "John Cage and Experimentalism") was to close our eyes, and sit for two minutes. Then the instructor had us open our eyes, stretch, and sit back down. He told us to close our eyes, and said, "I will now perform John Cage's 4'33"." And he did. And it was a COMPLETELY different experience from just sitting.

Also, to Derek specifically, since he seems to think that his quote is the only thing John Cage ever said...

SOME JOHN CAGE QUOTES

"Mathematics allows us to think about, say, water, without jumping in."

"I'm very much involved in theatre because having just an ear is insufficient; you need the eyes too."

And, Derek, for you... ALL of the quote that you keep reciting.

"I have nothing to say... and I am saying it... and that is... poetry... as I need it... Our poetry now... is the realization... that we possess nothing... Anything... therefore... is a delight (since we do not possess it)... and thus... need not fear its loss..."

(The "..." indicate pauses written by Cage in the lecture this quote comes from.)

Well, I used the whole quote, instead of just the assertion unexplained. I think that's a more honest way, don't you?

You made it different.

But that's the point - it's the audience that makes the work, making it truly aleatoric - the "pianist" is just a gimmick in a way.

I recall paired 5 minute "listening" exercises where students had to...yup, listen. Once with their eyes closed (except to make a note), the next with them open, listing every sound they could hear in a (superficially) silent environment. The most aurally acute students noted loads of things to the chagrin of others who realised it was time they learned to listen.

If nothing else it should make students aware of manipulating silence in the structure of their works. Most are concerned to fill time with just sound.

M

But that's the point - it's the audience that makes the work, making it truly aleatoric - the "pianist" is just a gimmick in a way.

I recall paired 5 minute "listening" exercises where students had to...yup, listen. Once with their eyes closed (except to make a note), the next with them open, listing every sound they could hear in a (superficially) silent environment. The most aurally acute students noted loads of things to the chagrin of others who realised it was time they learned to listen.

If nothing else it should make students aware of manipulating silence in the structure of their works. Most are concerned to fill time with just sound.

M

I think that's also the point of the above quote about saying nothing, both in the nature of the words themselves and also the structure.

Sorry, don't understand (and this might just be a Cage event). Your words individually make sense but strung together, how do they relate to what you quoted? I'm unsure whether you're being rude about my posts. Was hoping to let the American avant garde breathe a bit in this forum. I think it had things worth listening to.

If you prefer, I'll delete them.

Or are we on the edge of a Mallarméen moment.....

[There is NO way one can structure silence on this piece of virtual paper, that's certain]

sorry to say this but cage was too much of a dumb bird

he wrote a piece that would last 620 years...

what is he trying to prove?

inmortality through advanced technology?

Nahhh, come on! It isn't as naive as that! If you want to understand why he "wrote" a piece like that you need some familiarity with Cage's philosophy and the environment in which he was working, with whom, etc. You also need to compare it with it's European parallel.

It's no different from learning all the gubbins behind, say, the classical era; learning the procedures used for writing music, etc, to understand why.

Speak to yer average pop fans at school - they'll dismiss Mozart as rubbish and boring. But if you could get them interested in the Mozart scene they might at least appreciate why.

Besides, Cage was predated by some 60 years by Mallarmé who aimed to write the universal book (Le Livre), a work using serial and chance operations that would take a very long time to "operate" completely.

:P

Sorry, don't understand (and this might just be a Cage event). Your words individually make sense but strung together, how do they relate to what you quoted? I'm unsure whether you're being rude about my posts. Was hoping to let the American avant garde breathe a bit in this forum. I think it had things worth listening to.

If you prefer, I'll delete them.

Or are we on the edge of a Mallarm

Hmm, this discussion could take up a lot of space.

I’m not so sure Cage himself has a parallel in Europe nor that his precursors triggered or even influenced the 50s avant garde. Most were working on the back of Webern’s legacy, as I see it. Europe was running parallel - possibly a post-war thing because it engulfed most of Western Europe, one way or another.

American academia in the 40s didn’t seem much different from Europe with a heavy bias toward the neo-classic. Nadia Boulanger was fairly old hat in academic circles here – much respected but people had awakened to her limitations. I mean, she taught Diamond, Piston, Harris…not exactly revolutionary, great composers though they were.

Europe’s ‘avant garde’ seemed as much about sorting out problems faced by their music as the music itself. That’s why Darmstadt was important: it brought people together from disciplines well beyond music (in whatever way anyone cares to define music), like information theory/semiotics, architecture and on.

Cage must have influenced Darmstadt just as it did him.

Stockhausen was there in 1951, Cage (if I remember – correct me if I’m wrong) turned up in 1954 by which time Stockhausen had written his Klavierstucke I-IV. I lack knowledge of whether Stockhausen was using his construction-kit tactics by then. (Certainly did by XI.) I think he did in Kontrapunkte in 1952. These aren’t scores I keep in the top of the piano stool so I can’t be sure!

He was probably experimenting. His big things were electronic/ electro-acoustic music (taking in the Musique Concrete efforts in Paris) and non-Webernian serial music using pretty rigorous methods. It’s possible that Cage helped de-rigorise him but he might have done it himself, teed-off with the fixedness of his earlier stuff.

Whether Stockhausen inspired Cage re electronic music, I don’t know. Until then Cage’s electronic music was fairly primitive. After his 1954(?) visit he started using tape recorders compositionally leading to at least some ‘fixed’ scores (thinking of those for Merce Cunningham). I can’t think Cage came away with nothing from Europe. If he did, he wasted his money!

As I understand it, Cage got increasingly disenchanted with developments in Europe – maybe a language barrier(?) post-war cultural issues – I don’t really know, or he got fed up with the lack of vision in Darmstadt. He’d been composing for 20 years by the time he came up with 4’33” so he might have thought us lot a lost cause. (Well, not England – nothing happened here except isolated instances like Cornelius Cardew and Ferneyhough a little later.)

I’ve tried to trace American influence pre-1940 but find very little. Perhaps there was some in the 20s but even the European serialist efforts have been traced back to Debussy (Jeux) and the poet Mallarme. Weren't the Americans trying to escape the European influence in the lead up to all this?

Gawd, I'm just watching the last night of the proms and wondering if it was all worth it. Oh well, it's a nice booze up afterwards for everyone, that's something. As someone said earlier, all the avant garde did was to reaffirm the old music.

I