aworks :: "new" american classical music

4' 33" (1952). John Cage /cage against the hype/

Cage and friends via Wikipedia

Globe and Mail:

This week, 40 musicians representing the old guard (Billy Bragg, Orbital) and the new (the Kooks, Guillemots) entered a London studio and did not play their instruments in a performance of John Cage’s famous silent composition, 4’33’’.

I've known about this for awhile and haven't felt compelled to mention it. I'm not sure why I don't particularly care, given this is the great publicity for what is of course Cage's greatest work. On an Overgrown Path suggests it is time to give John Cage a rest. 

I did join the Cage Against the Machine Facebook group awhile back. Maybe I'm just burned out on Facebook hype. I do know I am enjoying twitter more than ever, including the feature where you can easily play tweets that reference Rdio.

As far as actual John Cage music, I've listened to more of it this year than ever so maybe I'm just more interested in content rather than promotion at this point.

Related articles

• Will John Cage silence the X Factor? (telegraph.co.uk)
• John Cage For Christmas (theawl.com)
• UK supergroup records 4'33", hopes to top Xmas charts (boingboing.net)
• Facebook's silent Christmas no 1? 'Cage Against The Machine' by John Cage (dailymail.co.uk)

4'33" (1952). John Cage /squeezing this cool idea again/

Image via Wikipedia

Andrew Druckenbrod complains about an orchestral performance of 4'33":

Why must we keep squeezing this cool idea again and again until it becomes a mockery of that it once was? And really, it never was all that great -- better in theory than reality...

I'm fortunate that, at least in recorded versions, the piece still works for me. 

johncage.info:

1. Silence does not exist. One simply should listen and open one's ears. 2. Silence is a means to seperate tones and chords, in order to avoid melodic interpretations to chronology of sounds.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Album: John Cage, Fontana Mix (él) (independent.co.uk)
• The visual art of John Cage (guardian.co.uk)
• John Cage: Once more without feeling (independent.co.uk)

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.