What is 'not music' to you?

[Florestan]

Music implies intent. Period.

[North Star]

Music implies intent. Period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatoric_music

[Monsieur Croche]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatoric_music

Someone sat down, wrote a score which, by the composer's intent, has as part or all of the piece, aleatory elements. These scores always do and must have some directives, or a blank sheet handed out to the players would suffice,  lol.

Even if some or all of that score is indeterminate, the choice to make it so was determinate, and made with intent.

[Florestan]

Someone sat down, wrote a score which, by the composer's intent, has as part or all of the piece, aleatory elements. These scores always do and must have some directives, or a blank sheet handed out to the players would suffice,  lol.

Even if some or all of that score is indeterminate, the choice to make it so was determinate, and made with intent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatoric_music

This.

[Monsieur Croche]

This.

This from that:
" The term is most often associated with procedures in which the chance element involves a relatively limited number of possibilities."

It also mentions, "piece... written."

Intent, for the piece to be aleatoric, most usually ^^^"involving a relatively limited number of possibilities," as determined by the person who wrote the piece, then.

Sorry, this debate, I suppose either side of the points made as given, is one of those, "It is turtles all the way down." thingies.


Best regards.

[Madiel]

The flaw in treating 4'33" as music is that those ambient sounds would have happened without Cage saying anything.

His instruction has an effect on the performer, but unlike aleatory music, nothing in Cage's instruction actually has an effect on the sound.

I don't agree that if you have a noisy and upset audience that makes sound in response to what has happened, that somehow counts as part of Cage composing. If that were the case then he is merely quoting Stravinsky in the premiere of Rite of Spring.

[mc ukrneal]

I had a theory as a kid. Anyone who has played in a school orchestra/band/choir/etc knows how noisy rehearsals can be. To combat that, I came up with a chaos theory of my own. Rather than quieting everybody down and then having to start from silence, I thought the group should be allowed to make as much noise as possible. Then, when the conductor signaled, the group would start the piece.

Why do I bring this up now? Good question...just seemed the right place...

[Monsieur Croche]

The flaw in treating 4'33" as music is that those ambient sounds would have happened without Cage saying anything.

His instruction has an effect on the performer, but unlike aleatory music, nothing in Cage's instruction actually has an effect on the sound.

Aw, gee, you might get into the spirit of the thing. Audience, debut, audience expectations, the performer, and the perfomance of  4'33". Add that rather delicious fact that while Cage had contemplated making such a piece for quite some time, it was the very corps of a particularly shallow, sensationalist hipster-poseur alleged-cognoscenti in Manhattan who he had noticed showing up at about any and all avant-garde music events, and without discerning beans about what they heard, applauded everything wildly, who catalyzed his resolve to write and present 4'33".

Hey, that corps group thought they were hep, in the know, exclusive, superior, etc. and they really were not there so much to 'be with the music,' lol.

Put all the elements together ~ that audience, the ethos of that era, confronting that audience with really thinking about the conventions of performance, what was expected there, the nature of music itself, and questioning what sounds were 'o.k.' to use 'as music' ~ and you've got the perfect storm of a One-Hundred and Ten Percent predictable reaction, and ditto 'sound.'

Cage knew his instrument, the performer and venue, and his instrument was that particular audience: Cage played that audience like Paganini could play a violin.

[Madiel]

Well, I've no argument with any of that. But is that Cage writing a composition, or Cage making a statement?

[amw]

It's a sonic event (four and a half minutes of ambient sound) created by someone (the event would not occur without Cage and the musicians present) for an audience, I think it qualifies as a composition...

[Monsieur Croche]

Well, I've no argument with any of that. But is that Cage writing a composition, or Cage making a statement?

What piece of music, artwork, etc. -- no matter whether profound or light hearted and/or capricious -- is not also "a statement?"

[Madiel]

What piece of music, artwork, etc. -- no matter whether profound or light hearted and/or capricious -- is not also "a statement?"

None. But I think it's perfectly possible to make a statement without making music.

Composers do it all the time. They write articles and essays. Cage's trick was to wrap his statement into a piece of non-music.

[Madiel]

It's a sonic event (four and a half minutes of ambient sound) created by someone (the event would not occur without Cage and the musicians present) for an audience, I think it qualifies as a composition...

It's the notion that the event would not occur without Cage that I'm challenging. The ambient sound exists without Cage's instructions, and without musicians present. If no-one appeared on stage for 4.5 minutes, there would be ambient sounds from the audience. If an actor with no musical skills appeared instead of a musician, there would be no effect.

And if I'm sitting listening at home to music, as I often do (and as everyone on this forum often does), there is no difference in the ambient sound between me putting on a recording of 4'33'' and me completely forgetting to press the play button on my CD player.

That's the fundamental flaw in the argument for me. Cage's supposed composition of music is not creating the sonic event. It is simply providing a space in which music is not being performed, whereby people will notice the ambient sounds that they don't normally notice.

And this exact same effect is produced by going on a silent retreat or engaging in meditation, or a whole pile of things that have absolutely nothing to do with someone making use of Cage's "score". This is why I've been making references to copyright and to quoting an earlier composer and so forth. The sound of 4'33'' is simply not distinguishable from a whole lot of things that no-one would claim Cage had composed. The lack of distinctiveness is a serious problem (to my mind, a fatal one) in claiming that Cage composed music.

[amw]

What Cage "created" for his composition was a container of time (exactly 273 seconds) during which a classical music audience listens to ambient sound. In live performance this is usually accomplished by putting musicians on the stage—this tends to ensure that audience members remain silent due to the conventions of the genre. On no other occasion that I can think of is an audience of classical music listeners going to sit and listen to ambient sound in a concert hall, apart from other "silent pieces"; this (a particular length of ambient sound in a particular context) is the "composition".

There is no real point in listening to it on recording. It is worth listening to some of Cage's other time-container pieces (the "number pieces") to see how this works when there are sounds other than ambient ones being presented. It actually doesn't make a huge difference to have "intentional" sounds mixed in. For a solo listener with no other audients or musicians, I guess you're looking more at things like David Dunn's Purposeful Listening in Complex States of Time or whatever.

[Madiel]

What Cage "created" for his composition was a container of time (exactly 273 seconds) during which a classical music audience listens to ambient sound. In live performance this is usually accomplished by putting musicians on the stage—this tends to ensure that audience members remain silent due to the conventions of the genre. On no other occasion that I can think of is an audience of classical music listeners going to sit and listen to ambient sound in a concert hall, apart from other "silent pieces"; this (a particular length of ambient sound in a particular context) is the "composition".

The very fact that you have to describe the "piece of music" by describing the physical setting - stage, concert hall, classical music audience - is my problem. The one thing you're not doing is describing the sound.

You're describing a situation in ways that suggest that the situation is absolutely vital to 4'33'' being 4'33''.  You could play a Beethoven piano sonata on a piano out on the street. Could 4'33'' be played there? Apparently not, from your description. Can you have a "crossover" performance of it? Can you introduce it to a pop audience, a jazz one?

Can you play it a retreat as background music?

Again, the distinctive elements you're describing are not distinctive in terms of sound, and I've yet to witness a definition of music that doesn't involve sound. I think there's a serious problem in just leaping to a word like "composition" and just accepting that because Cage is a "composer", he must have "composed" something, and immediately assuming that therefore he must have composed music. Well, no, that's putting the cart before the horse. The question is: what is music?

Whatever Cage has created is not automatically music just because Cage has created it. That's the same error as people assuming that everything that comes out of a comedian's mouth is intended to be funny.

To me it would be far more accurate (still kind, but more accurate) to say that Cage created a piece of performance theatre.

[some guy]

Music implies intent. Period.

OK. But the intent of the listener has been either ignored or downplayed.

Why is that?

Why is the intent of the listener considered less than the intent of another person, perhaps one we call "composer"?

(And this consideration would be true even if we were talking about the least skilled composer and the most sophisticated listener, so let's not go that route, por favor.)

Also worth noting, in all of Cage's commentary on how and why he made his piece he never mentioned any resolve to show up shallow Manhattan hipsters. Not to my knowledge, anyway. Is there a source for this idea?

Anyway, I have a suggestion. Like all my suggestions, it will be instantly deprecated by those who would benefit from it the most.

I have no idea how to fix that.

But I'll make the suggestion, anyway.

Listen to music. A lot of music. Stop thinking about it. Listen. (That is, think with it.)

Eventually, start listening to everything.

[James]

Music is not just sound. There is way more to it than just that.

[Madiel]

Music is not just sound. There is way more to it than just that.

I don't think anyone ever said it was "just" sound. But the proposition that sound is not necessary is... interesting to say the least.

[some guy]

...the proposition that sound is not necessary is... interesting to say the least.

Who has made this proposition?

It's much better to deal with propositions that have actually been made than to deal with propositions that are supposed to have been made but have not been. For one, dealing with faux propositions means leaving the realm of actual propostions to enter the highly suppositious (and highly suspicious) realm of the supposer, who has done this supposing why? And guessing about motivations, even if one's guesses are accurate, is a zero sum game. All the supposer has to do in that regard is deny.

Cage did make a proposition about sound. It is well known. It has even been referenced in this thread.

It is that sound is ubiquitous. Ubiquitous and inevitable. 4'33" is not a piece that denies sound. 4'33" is a piece that references its ubiquity, that consists entirely of the kinds of sounds that are usually avoided or ignored in a traditional piece of music. The concert trappings, hall, stage, instrument(s), performer(s), are all there to provide a frame for validating sounds that were not intended.

Composers have gone beyond that, now, just by the way, some of them. Some composers set up situations in which sounds will occur without any traditional concert trappings. That is, for some composers, the validation is complete, and we can now get on with using sounds--or not using them but still including them--any sounds regardless of source or of intent. There's a thing called "sound walk" which happens fairly often in many cities. There's an organization in Portland, where I used to live, that does several sound walks a year. New York, of course, is full of them. London, Milford, Paris, Warsaw. I found one in Barcelona, but it seems a bit on the hokey side. That or I am a bit on the snooty side. Either way is perilous....

Anyway, if there's anything in all that to be deprecated or criticized or perhaps even praised, then fine. At least the stuff I just mentioned is actual.

[James]

I don't think anyone ever said it was "just" sound. But the proposition that sound is not necessary is... interesting to say the least.

Some people believe that if we simply sit still in silence within a performance space, ears open and listen to every sound around us that may occur is music, or even worse - serious Art.