aworks :: "new" american classical music

4'33" (1952). John Cage /the millennials meet john cage/

Book cover via Amazon

Hexachordal has a video on YouTube titled "A brief non-stop history of 20th century classical music." Think of it as the millennial generation's version of Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise.

4'33" (1952). John Cage /forthcoming book/

Kyle Gann reports he is working on a book of John Cage's 4'33".

4'33" (1952). John Cage /xmas quiz/

Via Calimac, from this week's Jon Carroll Xmas Quiz:

19. I stole this from Skeptics.com.au, and I think it very fine indeed: Mike Batt and John Cage have each composed a musical piece consisting entirely of silence. Which one is better?

Answer here (scroll down to the next to last entry).

4' 33" (1952). John Cage

CageBlogger comments on his mother's reaction to the music of John Cage:

I also have the Cage movie One11 to review once I manage to go through it all.  I invited my mom to join me, but after a description of its content (changing patterns of light for 90 minutes) she refused and commented, “That sounds even worse than the one where he sits at a piano and doesn’t play anything for three minutes.”  Sigh.

4' 33" (1952). John Cage /ringtone/

Good Morning Silicon Valley's post about Phonezoo, a service for creating ringtones from your audio files, had a great headline:

And I made this ringtone from John Cage's "4'33" " for calls from the office

I'd rather not be near the person with the 20-second Sorcerer's Apprentice ringtone or this AC-DC one. Captain Kangaroo, Radiohead, early Pink Floyd, or Mike Oldfield might be ok, though.

And in hindsight, scrolling through a list of 1400 ringtones may not be the best use of my time. Similarly, using the phrase "ringtone" in the title of this post will surely beckon all those blog spammers...

4' 33" (1952). John Cage /cagespace/

Here's the myspace page for the new record label with an upcoming CDR of five versions of 4' 33". Seeing the banner ad at the top ("Shoot the Pop-Star and Get FREE Ringtones!") while listening is either appropriate or jarring, I'm not sure which.

Francois Hubert reviews the recording:

Nevertheless, there are 5 different versions of “4’33’’” on this CDR, the fourth one consisting “only” of digital silence, i.e. a silent track...Personally, I found the inclusion of this track of digital silence to hold the very key to this particular project, thus reinforcing its overall impact and rendering all the more important Cage’s timeless invitation to listen to the world and to ourselves

4' 33" (1952). John Cage /in a browser/

Via runme.org, Jon Meyer has a browser-based performance of John Cage's 4' 33". I found my attention turned to the motion out the window rather than any ambient sounds.

Peter Gutmann on 4' 33":

One more question: is this stuff really classical music? I think so. The huge variety of music of all eras that we call classical (and here I'm certainly including classic pop, folk, blues and jazz) seems to share two key traits. The first is a respect for tradition. Beyond being a wickedly keen variation on the conventions of the formal concert, 4'33" fills a crucial slot in history. Music began as an imitation of natural sounds and human voices but then became increasingly stylized. Cage brilliantly brings the process full circle, bridging the cultural distance that has developed between conventional performance and the sounds of nature where it all began.

The second hallmark is staying power. I've heard Mozart's dozen mature piano concertos dozens of times each over dozens of years, but right now I can recall only a few of their melodies. I heard the Cage piece just once (and three decades ago), but I remember it so vividly.

Guttman goes on to highlight Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room and Reich's It's Gonna Rain as other successful examples of contemporary music. And yes, I can get tired of a work through too much repetition but unlike say a film or a book, I think music, due its brevity and abstraction, holds up well to thorough replay.

4' 33" (1952). John Cage /video/

terminal degree on experiencing John Cage's 4' 33" for the first time:

What I found the most interesting about this work was the tension that was created (dissonance, if you will) through imposed "silence"--which was anything other than truly silent. Resolution came only after the work was finished.

And Stephen Hicken on 4' 33" performance practice:

The emptiness of Cage’s structure is filled with the unintentional sounds of the audience, the heating/air conditioning machinery, outside noises, etc. These sounds occur during performances of other pieces, too, but we work (with greater or lesser degrees of success) to keep them from our consciousness. Cage asks us do the opposite in 4'33", and a good performance makes that easier to do. If a performer camps up the beginning and ending of the movements, the effect is lessened, much as the effect is lessened in a performance of Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata if the important structural points aren’t articulated, for example.

4' 33" (1952). John Cage /nothing/

Rajeev Nair, a journalist from the United Arab Emirates, reflects on John Cage's 4'33" and how nothing is something:

A realization that from your vantage position at “nature’s intimate theatre,” the Nothing around you is deceptively devoid of emptiness.

4' 33" (1952). John Cage /london/

Londoner Robb Witts thinks of John Cage after the two-minute observance of silence for the victims of the recent London bombing:

Afterwards I couldn't help thinking of John Cage and his rituals of sound and silence. Cage discovered that there is no true silence, that even in the deepest quiet our human ears are filled with the background hum of our own fleshy machinery. By taking our act of remembrance into the streets, we performed a memorial of quiet, in which the presence of our fellow Londoners was audible by the absence of their sound.