aworks :: "new" american classical music

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.

Come Out (1966). Steve Reich /exploitive?/

Celeste Hutchins, in a post about fonts and other topics, asks if Steve Reich's Come Out is exploitive:

But to my ignorant self, it seems like he's using the words of African Americans and then slowly degenerating their meaning until it's unintelligible.

Come Out was premiered at a benefit concert for the Harlem Six, a group of kids being retried for murder (one of the six apparently was guilty but not the one whose voice was  used by Reich). The composer on Music Mavericks:

I was given a stack of about 10 reels of tape with mothers and voices, and I said to the guy--Truman Nelson was his name--who was a civil rights person and scholar of John Brown, I said, “Look, I’ll do this and I’ll do it for nothing, but you’ve got to let me make a piece out of anything I find.”

Steve Reich's Writings about Music does not really answer the question of the work and its meaning.  Keith Potter in Four Musical Minimalists  suggests the work resembles social protest with the repetition increasing its impact; it might have also served as a warning of the sixties' racial unrest to follow.   Reich in the liner notes to Early Works talks about the use of recorded speech:

By not altering its pitch or timbre, one keeps the original emotional power that speech has while intensifying its melody and meaning through repetition and rhythm.

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• Reich work list on NewMusicBox.
• The piece is so minimal, basically a repeat of the phrase "come out to show them" with increasing phasing, such that by the end, it is bizarrely unintelligible albeit still musical. Robert Gable
• Amazon.com Music Sales Rank of Early Works: #59,528

Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-60 (1915). Charles Ives /Danbury/

Today, Danbury, Connecticut celebrates their native son, Charles Ives. The festivities include tours of his birthplace, lectures, and a performance of the Concord Sonata by Timothy Andres. They will also dedicate the beginning of a hiking path named "Ives Trail."

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• Danbury News-Times article about the celebration.
• His technique was modernist, but his sensibility was Romantic. Peter Burkholder
• Are we in the middle of a Charles Ives revival? Christopher Hyde
• NewMusicBox article on teenager Timothy Andres.
• Ives is close to his heart; he grew up in a small town in Connecticut, not unlike Ives’s New England places, and many of his works begin with monumental, dissonant gestures modelled on the “Concord.” Alex Ross
• Page of MP3 excerpts of Andres playing the Concord Sonata.
• Andres bio indicating he was born in Palo Alto.
• The city was reportedly named after the Iron-Age hill fort Danebury in Hampshire, England. Wikipedia

4' 33" (1952). John Cage /one minute/

So Weird Productions has a "1 minute biography" of John Cage.