Suckers and Music?

[Keemun]

But everything Cage did was musical.   

I don't see how 4'33" can be considered musical.   

[bwv 1080]

I don't see how 4'33" can be considered musical.   

But it is
http://solomonsmusic.net/4min33se.htm

'

[longears]

I don't see how 4'33" can be considered musical.   

A fantastically intricate polyrhythmic piece which draws on nearly the entire range of musical history--but written entirely in rests.

[Keemun]

But it is
http://solomonsmusic.net/4min33se.htm

'

I should have worded my statement more carefully, because obviously some do consider it to be music.  But that still doesn't make it music.

A fantastically intricate polyrhythmic piece which draws on nearly the entire range of musical history--but written entirely in rests.

(See above.)

EDIT:  On second thought, I think it's best that we agree to disagree.  Obviously I believe that I am right, but that is a subjective opinion and I don't expect those who disagree with me to change their opinions. 

[longears]

But it is
http://solomonsmusic.net/4min33se.htm

I should have worded my statement more carefully, because obviously some do consider it to be music.  But that still doesn't make it music.

A fantastically intricate polyrhythmic piece which draws on nearly the entire range of musical history--but written entirely in rests.

(See above.)

EDIT:  On second thought, I think it's best that we agree to disagree.  Obviously I believe that I am right, but that is a subjective opinion and I don't expect those who disagree with me to change their opinions. 

When I've lost something, retracing my steps from the time I last had it often helps me to find it again.  Where were you when you last had your sense of humor?

[Keemun]

I should have worded my statement more carefully, because obviously some do consider it to be music.  But that still doesn't make it music.
(See above.)

EDIT:  On second thought, I think it's best that we agree to disagree.  Obviously I believe that I am right, but that is a subjective opinion and I don't expect those who disagree with me to change their opinions. 


When I've lost something, retracing my steps from the time I last had it often helps me to find it again.  Where were you when you last had your sense of humor?

  It appears I may have mistaken your posts as serious.  Rest assured, my sense of humor is intact.  It just likes to play hide-and-seek sometimes.   

[jochanaan]

...Chinese society is a different kind of thing and to import it in this ridiculous way is embarrassing.

What does Chinese society have to do with music that isn't music?

[not edward]

What does Chinese society have to do with music that isn't music?

In the original quote, Carter was basically accusing Cage of a kind of Orientalism (in the Saidian sense).

Hopefully that makes it clearer.

[Catison]

If you try to denounce what one man calls art, then you must open yourself up to the same criticism.

[orbital]

A fantastically intricate polyrhythmic piece which draws on nearly the entire range of musical history--but written entirely in rests.

If music can be constructed entirely by rests, than a painting can equally be created by a blank canvas.

I think they both have artistic value, so much so that a reproduction will have no value at all.

[jochanaan]

In the original quote, Carter was basically accusing Cage of a kind of Orientalism (in the Saidian sense).

Hopefully that makes it clearer.

A little.  But that begs the question, Does Carter (or Cage) know any more about Oriental society than, say, I do?  (Don't get me wrong; I love Carter's music!  But we all know of composers whose musical genius is not matched by precision and circumspection in language. )

[Grazioso]

I don't think the rejection of ideals and norms necessarily means that what is being said is not honest nor heartfelt. Turning things into a big joke might for instance be a serious comment on the artist's view of archaic and stultifying norms. 

Maybe it is more an attempt to find a new kind of beauty and value beyond these norms .

Certainly mockery and satire play their roles in questioning established norms, but the great satirists are usually moralists, too, trying to put forward a better alternative to what they see around them, as opposed to merely subverting honest values out of boredom, capriciousness, or childishness.

[The Mad Hatter]

Oh boy...jumping in the deep end here...

If music can be constructed entirely by rests, than a painting can equally be created by a blank canvas.

I think they both have artistic value, so much so that a reproduction will have no value at all.

But Cage's idea was that 4'33" was not made from rests, but from the sounds made by things other than the instruments! Accidental sounds were always part of Cage's repertoire - 4'33" was just a piece for them only.

On the other hand, a blank sheet of canvas is just a blank sheet of canvas.

The only definition I've found for music that I think actually works is 'an arrangement of sound and silence', and that's the one I stick with.

[Catison]

On the other hand, a blank sheet of canvas is just a blank sheet of canvas.

By the same argument, a blank sheet of canvas is the detail of the texture present on the raw canvas.  The imperfections themselves and their randomness is the art.

[The Mad Hatter]

By the same argument, a blank sheet of canvas is the detail of the texture present on the raw canvas.  The imperfections themselves and their randomness is the art.

I suppose you're right. But then, I've never been any good at art.

[knight66]

By the same argument, a blank sheet of canvas is the detail of the texture present on the raw canvas.  The imperfections themselves and their randomness is the art.

I think this is an argument that is open to abuse and indeed has been abused by a number of artists. Art has become a trading commodity and that means market forces, so if someone can con someone else into parting with money for a blank canvas, it is simply supply and demand. The 'art' element seems incidental.

Mike

[longears]

But Cage's idea was that 4'33" was not made from rests, but from the sounds made by things other than the instruments! Accidental sounds were always part of Cage's repertoire - 4'33" was just a piece for them only.

Oy vey--let me quote my earlier response, still appropo:

When I've lost something, retracing my steps from the time I last had it often helps me to find it again.  Where were you when you last had your sense of humor?

Perhaps your sense of humor doesn't jive with mine and you weren't amused.  No biggie.  But to take my statement about artful arrangement of rests, etc, at face value suggests a missing funny bone.

Whatever happened to Nigel, anyway?

[Scriptavolant]

I'm not talking about music that you think sucks. I'm talking about where someone - possibly intentionally - did something non-musical and tried to pass it off as music. The "Hole in the Ground" thing certainly qualifies. Yes, I do consider a lot of what John Cage has done to also qualify (ie. 4'33").

What do you mean by something musical? It necessarily implies a physical instrument emitting sound waves? If yes, I would still listen to 4'33'' rather than many conventional musical products. Or do you mean tonality? Would you explain?

[pjme]

First of all, I would recommend everybody who is interested in Art (in a very general sense) to read about it...Since roughly 1908-1913, Art went through spectacular changes . This is not the place to start a course in art history, but I want to point out that already in the early 20th century the idea "Art" or the "concept" "Art"  changed dramatically .

See& read about Marcel Duchamp : Art can be about ideas, not only about "wordly" things. http://www.understandingduchamp.com/

As for Cage's 4'33, many GMG'rs have tried to explain it before! Basically, it belongs to the world of "happenings" / Fluxus

In 4.33, Cage simply returned the audience's acoustic perception back onto themselves to force them to actively listen to (their own) 'silence'. In fact, whilst the pianist held off from playing anything for the duration of the work, the audience produced a soundtrack of their own: nervous coughs, awkward rustling and other ambient sounds.

And from Wiki :

In 1948, Cage joined the faculty of Black Mountain College, where he regularly worked on collaborations with Merce Cunningham. Around this time, he visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. (An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor will absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than bouncing them back as echoes. They are also generally soundproofed.) Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but as he wrote later, he "heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation." Cage had gone to a place where he expected there to be no sound, yet sound was nevertheless discernible. He stated "until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music." The realization as he saw it of the impossibility of silence led to the "composition" of his most notorious piece, 4′33″.

Cage repeatedly claimed that he composed 4′33″ in small units of silent rhythmic durations which, when summed, equalled the duration of the title. Cage suggested that he might have made a mistake in addition. Some have speculated that the title of the work refers to absolute zero, as 4'33″expressed in seconds is 273 seconds, and minus 273 degrees is absolute zero in the Celsius scale; there is, however, no evidence that this relationship is anything more than a coincidence.

Another cited influence for this piece came from the field of the visual arts. Cage's friend and Black Mountain colleague, the artist Robert Rauschenberg, had, while working at the college, produced a series of white paintings. These were blank canvases, the idea being that they changed according to varying light conditions of the rooms in which they were hung, as well as the shadows of people in the room. These paintings inspired Cage to use a similar idea, using the 'silence' of the piece as an 'aural blank canvas' to reflect the dynamic flux of ambient sounds surrounding each performance.

Cage was not the first composer to write a piece consisting solely of silence. One precedent is "In futurum", a movement from the Fünf Pittoresken for piano by Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff. Written in 1919, Schulhoff's meticulously notated composition is made up entirely of rests.[1] Cage was, however, almost certainly unaware of Schulhoff's work. Another prior example is Alphonse Allais's Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man, written in 1897, and consisting of nine blank measures. Allais's composition is arguably closer in spirit to Cage's work; Allais was an associate of Erik Satie, and given Cage's profound admiration for Satie, the possibility that Cage was inspired by the Funeral March is tempting. However, according to Cage himself, he was unaware of Allais's composition at the time (though he had heard of a 19th-century book that was completely blank).[5]

The premiere of the three-movement 4′33″ was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952 as part of a recital of contemporary piano music. The audience saw him sit at the piano and, to mark the beginning of the piece, close the keyboard lid. Some time later he opened it briefly, to mark the end of the first movement. This process was repeated for the second and third movements[6]. The piece had passed without a note being played—in fact without Tudor (or anyone else) having made any deliberate sound as part of the piece. Only then could the audience recognize what Cage insisted upon, that "There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound."

Richard Kostelanetz suggests that the very fact that Tudor, a man known for championing experimental music, was the performer, and that Cage, a man known for introducing unexpected non-musical noise into his work, was the composer, would have led the audience to expect unexpected sounds. Anybody listening intently would have heard them: while nobody produces sound deliberately, there will nonetheless be sounds in the concert hall (just as there were sounds in the anechoic chamber at Harvard). It is these sounds, unpredictable and unintentional, that are to be regarded as constituting the music in this piece. The piece remains controversial among those who continue to take it seriously, and is seen as challenging the very definition of music.

While it may challenge the definition of music, it does not challenge any definition of composition — the earliest score was written on conventional manuscript paper using graphic notation similar to that used in Music of Changes, with the three movements precisely scored to reflect their individual lengths. The most famous version of the score is the so-called Tacet edition, which features three movements all on one page, each labelled tacet — the traditional musical term for when a musician does not play for a movement. The score provides no time limits for any of the parts. Neither the whole piece nor the duration of the first performance were decided using chance operations. The piece can have any duration and thus any title, but is stuck with the famous first performance duration and title (i.e. movement I: 30'';- movement II: 2'23'';- movement III: 1'40'';). Cage himself refers to it as his "silent piece" and writes; "I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece... for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have published. At one performance... the second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and a doe leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium." (in John Cage: Silence: Lectures and Writings).

And further on excrement :

Piero Manzoni : (also Wiki)

Piero Manzoni (July 13, 1933 - February 6, 1963) was an Italian artist best known for his ironic conceptual art in direct response to the work of Yves Klein.

Manzoni was born in Soncino, province of Cremona.

In his paintings Manzoni experimented with various pigments and materials. In one case he used phosphorescent paint and cobalt chloride so the colours would change over time. However, he had some less ordinary ideas as well. They included sculptures made of white cotton wool, fiberglass, rabbit skin and fake bread rolls.

In 1958 he had "pneumatic sculptures", 45 blow-up-membranes. The buyer could also have Manzoni's own breath inside the membrane. He also tried to create a mechanical animal as a moving sculpture, using solar energy as a power source. In 1960 he created a sphere that was held aloft on a jet of air.

In 1960 Manzoni marked a number of hard-boiled eggs as works of art by imprinting them with his thumbprint. He let the spectators eat the whole exhibition in 70 minutes. He also began to sell prints of his thumbprints. He also designated number of people, including Umberto Eco, as walking works of art.

In May 1961 Manzoni defecated into 90 small cans and had them sealed with the text Artist's Shit. In the following years they have spread to various art collections all over the world and netted large prizes. (As far as I know, the cans were actualy filled with plaster...see article hereunder)The same year he signed naked people for exhibitions and even gave certificates of authenticity. He also designated a "magic base"; as long as someone was standing on the base they were a work of art.

Piero Manzoni died by myocardial infarction in his studio in Milan in 1963.



And from "The guardian:

Merde d'artiste: not exactly what it says on the tin


Jonathan Glancey
Wednesday June 13, 2007
The Guardian


Piero Manzoni's Merda d"Artista does not deliver on its promise



In 1877, the eminent critic John Ruskin cast a gimlet eye on Nocturne in Black and Gold, an impressionistic painting by James McNeill Whistler on sale at London's newly opened Grosvenor Gallery. "I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now," he wrote, "but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."
In 1961, the Italian artist Piero Manzoni did more than fling a pot of paint. He offered art-buyers 90 tins of his own excrement, at a price equal to their weight in gold. Although some critics were outraged, art lovers paid through the nose for what had passed through Manzoni's behind.

Or had it? One of Manzoni's collaborators, Agostino Bonalumi, has now revealed that the tins are not full of faeces, but plaster. This has inevitably stirred up a storm in a toilet bowl (or should one say lavatory basin?) in the art world. Does Bonalumi's revelation mean that a 30g can of "freshly preserved, produced and tinned Artist's Shit" is worth far less than the pots of gold paid for them? The Tate shelled out £22,300 for one in 2000, and recently another went for £84,000 at auction in Milan.
Does it really matter, though, what went into Manzoni's tins? Not really. The joke, the artistry and their collectability turn on the artist's attempt to shock, and on the fact that he signed the tins. Manzoni said that the gullible art world would buy anything signed by an artist, even a tin of faeces. He was right. Manzoni has had the last laugh. Even the excrement po-faced collectors bought from him was fake.

Today, the idea of canning "Artist's Shit" is no more shocking to us than Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold. When Sarah Lucas installed a working lavatory in the ICA as part of a show in 1997, visitors allegedly spent pennies in it rather than paying thousands for it. Artists have talked rude for long enough - even if Manzoni has proved that excrement, or plaster, can indeed be turned into gold.


Wim Delvoye : Cloaca ( Wiki)

Wim Delvoye (Wervik, 1965) is a Belgian conceptual artist known for a number of unconventional projects:


1 Cloaca
2 Euterpe
3 Tattooed pigs
4 External links
5 Biography

Cloaca is an installation that produces feces.

The first Cloaca machine was exhibited at the MuHKA (Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp) in 2000.

The machine was "fed" an exquisite meal twice a day, the feces coming out at the other end of the processing unit as a result of the "digestion" of the food.

There are several Cloaca set-ups: the original setup is that of a series of containers in glass on a long table, while the more modern ones are comparatively shorter, digesting food through what looks like a series of washing machines.

The logo and other promotional art work of the Cloaca project are a parody of the logos of Coca-Cola, Ford, Mr. Clean, and other brands. The feces produced by the Cloaca machines are sold vacuum-packed in translucent boxes.

Cloaca has its own website, www.cloaca.be

[Scriptavolant]

With any luck, "avant-garde" things like Cage's 4'33" will be relegated to a tiny footnote in artistic history--or merely used as a predictable joke in GMG threads

I doubt that. Cage is already acknowledged as one of the most influential contemporary composers in modern history. Usually are trite jokes that happen to be relegated to a tiny footnote etc etc.