Need opinions: John Cage's 4:33

[relm1]

In the risk of asking a slightly off topic question, my conductor asked what I would think if we played John Cage's 4:33'.  I laughed thinking this was a joke, but he was serious (oops).  My question, of those of you who are professional musicians or experienced concert performers, what do you think of orchestras that program this work?  Is it too gimmicky or is it deeply profound to hear silence?  I would love to hear other opinions before I respond to conductor.  Thanks.

[amw]

4'33" is a bit overplayed (in a manner of speaking)—suggest to the conductor one of Cage's other pieces in the same vein, such as 58, 74 or 108 (depending on the size of your orchestra of course). Assuming he doesn't mind standing around for a while while the musicians stare at stopwatches, of course. (108 may be pushing it a little duration-wise, since it's 45 minutes or so, but it's divided into movements at least.)

There's also probably some Feldman that could be substituted (Orchestra, etc) where he'd actually get to wave a stick around, and of course plenty of vague graphic scores from the 50s and 60s that could equally be interpreted in a very profound way.

If he's set on silence rather than Cage's sound-containers idea, link him to some of the Edition Wandelweiser composers (Beuger, Werder, Frey, Pisaro etc). I'm not as familiar with their stuff but most of it takes 4'33" as a musical starting point rather than a gimmick or a profound philosophical statement, so there's lots of stuff that's silent or nearly so. Jakob Ullmann is another composer in that category. You could do a live performance of Lucier's I Am Sitting In A Room, if that's even possible. Tim Rutherford-Johnson likes David Dunn's Purposeful Listening in Complex States of Time (or whatever the title is), which I've never... er... done... but theoretically you could run off a few hundred photocopies and pass them around to the audience and orchestra alike. They might find it rather pointless if they came to hear Beethoven though.

[Dax]

The piece was composed in 1952 and has now outlived its usefulness as Cage himself pointed out. If anyone is going to perform it, it certainly doesn't need an orchestra to do it: that body of players would be best using their energies in other ways. There have been a number of orchestral performances in recent years:  the perceived reason has often been perceived as being for amusement rather than for serious enquiry which, lets face it, is mor effectively achieved in a chamber setting. If it needs to be achieved at all in this day and age. Do people still need to be informed?

[Octave]

They might find it rather pointless if they came to hear Beethoven though.

I thought AMW's response was reasonably constructive until this possibly dismissive (or merely pragmatic?) last line.  I could imagine Beethoven sounding a lot fuller, deeper, and more profound after a good sitting with 4'33".  Another more drastic possibility---and a number of people who love music have had this experience----is that Beethoven might sound indescribably ugly and barbaric after a productive sitting with 4'33".  It might sound like music that would naturally produce a tradition of ugly, dismissive, "cultured" barbarians whose aesthetics would at times almost seem like barely-sublimated impulses towards ethnic cleansing and imperialism.  I'm not talking about "German Nazis", but that very specific context was on Cage's mind (everybody's mind) when he put the piece together.  Going back to that essay he won an award for as a teenager, where he wrote "by being hushed and silent, we should have the opportunity to hear what other people think".  Even the biographical Wikipedia entry mentions this passage with a remark on its presaging 4'33".

Perhaps a kind of 'Socratic' vengefulness did take hold later on, after years of Cage trying to forge a path in the face of ridicule, condescension, complacency, and dismissiveness.  I've thought that perhaps, possibly, he had a bit of a nasty streak that you can even hear in his radio interviews with Morton Feldman from ~1966; it sometimes glimmers out like a nasty, pedantic tendency, an overconfidence that gives the lie to what seems like the original ethic motivating that California teenager.  I'm still not sure if it especially harmed his music or even his writing: I've partaken of lots of it and just because it's trying to teach something doesn't mean that it's tipped into "the pedantic".  (I have developed an allergy to this teacherly tendency in lots of the avant-garde, so-called.  Still, I find that I'm not turned away from Cage's exercises/experiments.  I like to take Copland's comment about Cage just wanting to amuse himself for a few hours, as a kind of compliment, though I can't imagine it was intended that way.  I wish it had been phrased with more admiration: here's a man who is devoted to working relentlessly to discover things, even things inside boredom.)

If I thought that this piece or Cage's sensibility was a simple matter of pranksterism, vandalism, devotion to "the absurd", then I think I would chuck him right out.  I'm conservative, and I also don't have a temperament for games (a disability of mine); but even when I'm not drawn to listen to his music repeatedly the way I am to other kinds of composers (Beethoven, who I can listen to a lot, too much, and that is part of the problem), I still find even this overcelebrated little gesture to be incredibly valuable, perhaps mainly as a litmus test of sorts.

Of course, none of this amounts to "respect Cage, or you're a Nazi".  Goodness.  I mean really, how much Beethoven have I bragged about acquiring in the past ~year I've been on GMG (oodles), and how much Cage (like four or five discs max)?  But that pragmatic, temporary preference doesn't explain anything.  Cage made Beethoven a richer and more dangerous affair for me, more interesting.  The fact that The Institution Called Beethoven [and this doesn't mean only or even Beethoven's Music] can so easily obviate everything in its path, is probably cause for concern.  In this sense, I think I understand Cage when he puzzled and infuriated people by (allegedly) saying, "Beethoven was wrong!" 

Sorry for the blab.  That's my Cage quota until next summer.

[Octave]

The piece was composed in 1952 and has now outlived its usefulness as Cage himself pointed out.

Where did he point that out?  I've read a pretty large chunk of writings and interviews, but I don't remember that. 
Offhand, I don't know what it accomplished ~1952-1970 that isn't required all the more sorely in an age of WALL-E style screen slaves and pachinko-parlor levels of stimuli at every turn.  I have trouble understanding the world or its inhabitants as having become quieter or stiller since 1952.

...amusement rather than for serious enquiry which, lets face it, is mor effectively achieved in a chamber setting. If it needs to be achieved at all in this day and age. Do people still need to be informed?

When you say "If it needs to be achieved", does the "it" mean "serious enquiry"?  What do people need (or not need) to be informed about?

[Daverz]

This sort of thing really irritates me.  "4'33'', hee, hee.  Wasn't that Cage a silly man.  We can ignore anything else he did now."  It's lazy, smug, and contemptuous of the audience and the composer.

[Octave]

As is often the case, Daverz, I agree with you and envy you your concision, but am trying to rein in my counter-condescension impulses.  RTFM is a response that doesn't bear much fruit in me personally, so I'm trying to make a good faith effort to describe my own pleasure in Cage's little credo.  I agree that it is frustrating that the questions seem so loaded, so already-decided.  My revulsion at that attitude almost makes me want to avoid anything that people like that admire.  But that would be ridiculous.

I guess my whole wheedling screed above was just trying to make the point that 4'33" (just like lots of music that is much close to normal music, notes played from a page) is a fragile exercise.  It requires participation and an almost cultic level of trust.....but only for four and half minutes.  After that, one goes one's own way.  I don't think the point is to "believe in the exercise" [i.e. Cage the ultra-fascist, assuming a copyright on all sound/silence everywhere] as much as it is to believe in attention as a powerful experience.  I've always been flummoxed that composers don't love this piece (4'33") as a way of putting audiences (listeners sitting together) in their shoes, in composers' shoes, replete with not just the stillness but also the anxiety.  "This is how it feels!"  Almost as though 4'33" offers a template for the first rustling of forms before they coalesce and need to be transcribed into the calcified (and wonderful) set of instruments and performance practice.

EDIT: Pace the "people like that" comment above, I actually withdrew a while back from listening to a lot of avant type musics because of the bad luck I was having with people I encountered in that world, i.e. being insufferable.  That's completely anecdotal (and "data is not the plural of anecdote") and I don't stand by the impression.  But maybe people who hate the idea of Cage---discourse on Cage, this or that experience of Cage---have had similar experiences?  Vanguardism in any form can cultivate a kind of "escape mania" that manifests itself as a posturing from some position outside the clueless throng of fish-in-water.  I find myself sympaethic with Subcommandante Marcos' frustrated, punky, vaguely Vonnegut-meets-Sun-Ra "I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet."  I still admire Nietzsche's writing and I still sometimes try to read Heidegger, but woo-boy: dudes have a lot to answer for.  In spite of all this, I'm not going to let these epigone avant hucksters and traditional museum guards rob me of my pleasure.

[Dax]

This sort of thing really irritates me.  "4'33'', hee, hee.  Wasn't that Cage a silly man.  We can ignore anything else he did now."  It's lazy, smug, and contemptuous of the audience and the composer.

Not so. Maybe this will help: http://solomonsmusic.net/4min33se.htm

Quote from: Dax on Today at 07:25:04 PM
The piece was composed in 1952 and has now outlived its usefulness as Cage himself pointed out.

Where did he point that out?  I've read a pretty large chunk of writings and interviews, but I don't remember that. 

. . .  from Michael Nyman - Experimental Music - Cage and Beyond (written in 1974)

It [4'33"] is also - certainly for Cage - a work that has outlived its usefulness, having been overtaken by the revolution it helped bring about. ('I no longer need the silent piece' Cage said in an interview in 1966.)

[The new erato]

It's not important, it's only music after all. 

I think Cage was out to provoke us to reflect upon what music is and how we listen to it, and every time I see a thread like this, it confirms the usefulness of the piece. The more you get your knickers in a twist about it, the more you confirm that the piece had a point. 

[Karl Henning]

4'33" is a bit overplayed (in a manner of speaking)—suggest to the conductor one of Cage's other pieces in the same vein, such as 58, 74 or 108 (depending on the size of your orchestra of course).

Excellent suggestion, avoiding the "I want to program some Ravel — what do you think of the Boléro?" trap.

[Karl Henning]

You need a hobby, James.

[The new erato]

You need a hobby, James.

I think he has one already.

[Karl Henning]

Hah!

[Brahmsian]

Maybe Cage felt about himself that he no longer needed the silent piece, and it is true that the controversy surrounding 4'33" did overshadow it's meaning.  That said, these days we are assaulted 100 times more from media surrounding us than in 1952 and, if anything, I think 4'33" is more relevant today and even more useful than when it was premiered.

I totally agree here!     I think this world needs more opportunities to ponder, reflect, and be used to quiet.

[Karl Henning]

James, you are as ever missing the several points. But your mind is snapped shut viz. Cage, so repeating those points were a waste of energy.

[Karl Henning]

Ah, that open mind and actively inquisitive intellect we have all come to respect so highly.

[Karl Henning]

I should actually enjoy being in the audience for a performance.  Because, whether you're talking about the Beethoven Op.68, or Cage's 4'33, reading about it is one thing, and being in the space while it is happening, something else entirely.

[Fafner]

I had the pleasure to experience 4:33 in a concert  of American music.  (The programme consisted of Barber's Adagio, 4:33, Gershwin's Piano Concerto and Bernstein's Symphony No. 2 -- in this order.)
The piece was performed with the soloist at his piano, with his hands on the keyboard. 

I think it went well, mostly because I felt that the majority of the audience did not know what they were in for.   

[Karl Henning]

I was responding to karl.

Yes, and that is the point.

I've been around for awhile and have read all of the lame & extensive explanations too many times before, it is always the same ol' shit.

The funniest thing about your supposing that you know what I am going to say, and dismissing it in advance, unheard, is how oblivious you are to this being an icon of The Closed Mind.

I don't even make my points . . . and you post multiple times, as if you had answered them.

And we all appreciate the amusement.

[Marc]

After all the hubbub about Cage Against The Machine in Great Britain, Reinbert de Leeuw performed Cage's 4'33 in a popular talkshow on the Dutch telly, december 2010.

[Performance begins at 6:40. Before that De Leeuw talks (in Dutch) about Cage's fascination for silence and detachment (and about his admiration for Satie).]

http://www.youtube.com/v/7KXaylNMJMs