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).
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From Yet Another Unitarian Universalist Blog:
I know it's heresy, but I could easily live without Beethoven or Mozart. At one church I served, I worked with a music director who felt the same way. Sure, he played the usual Mozart-Beethoven-Brahms stuff, but he's slip in some Gershwin, some jazz, Erik Satie, John Cage -- once he played Cage's "4' 33''" as the prelude to a worship service. It was one of the most memorable performances of music at any church service I've ever been to.
Recent random quotes on John Cage:
We could get away with this because our theme was "Are You Crazy?" -- and we could say Cage was crazy for writing silent music, while Webern was crazy for writing short pieces. Greg Sandow
Thirty or so years ago, the composer John Cage proposed a different sort of battle strategy: Take the heads of warring nations, give each a 25kg sack of horse manure, lock them in a room, and let them fight it out. David L Ulin
"Mine is a much better silent piece," Batt declared. "I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and thirty-three seconds." Henry Kisor
Hawkins set the various scenes to compositions by Arthur Levering, John Cage (his dreamy "Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano''), Ward Hartenstein and Barry Hall. Theodore Bale
Had John Cage's famous silent piece "4'33" " been in her repertoire, she could have played it without the piano. Wilma Salisbury
And how, then, do you categorise such iconic
figures as John Cage or Steve Reich, never mind the more recent
proliferation of mongrel kids? Kenneth Walton
Johnson reportedly slowed his progress through
the backwoods of the Deep South by constantly stopping his convertible
to make agonised telephone calls to the composer John Cage, his current
amour, in Manhattan. Times Online
Trier says besides using his common ordinary hands with the CMU
Percussion Ensemble he also plays marimba, "gong things," timpani, a
generator for a John Cage piece, you name it. Janet Martineau
Cage was one of those whacked out white guys whose white-skin privilege gave him the luxury of being whacked out. (Not unlike a certain 8-Miler we all know and love.) Gentle Jones
Beside the Laurie Anderson exhibition, the celebrated composer Kevin Volans will give a series of lectures on contemporary music, discussing among other things Jasper Johns’ connections with John Cage. ArtDaily.com
Recent Comments