John Cage (1912-92)

[milk]

I downloaded this from iTunes. Noël Akchoté is a prolific French guitarist. He's done electric guitar versions of Feldman too.
It's odd.
https://www.youtube.com/v/kWXHkBNJQ_E

[San Antone]

In the wake of the controversy surrounding his work, especially works such as 4'33" and his chance operations, Cage published his first book, Silence, in 1961.  The essays come from a long period in Cage's life, ranging from the late 1930s to 1961. As such, it collapses and obscures the long trajectory of Cage's work from his first enthusiasm with sounds of all sorts, to his methods of structuring them, and ultimately to his discovery of sources for his later work, above all Indian aesthetics and Zen Buddhism.

[asin]B0066BK44Y[/asin]

Silence occasioned considerable critical debate. Jill Johnston, dance critic for the Village Voice, commented favorably on the agreeable variety of material. While her description of Cage's compositional methods was too cursory to give a full impression of them, her understanding of Cage's critique of conventional aesthetics was extremely perceptive. She stressed the importance of experience over judgment in audition; she acknowledged the advantage of multiple responses to the music; and she suggested that Cage's conception of art returned humanity to a position within nature rather than one that dominated it. In particular, she astutely recognized that the ambient sound immanent within what was conventionally understood as silence should be understood as a cosmic complement to whatever sounds Cage added.

Perspectives of New Music published its own review of Silence in due course, by the poet John Hollander; his review indicated what worried the mainstream professional musical establishment about Cage's work.  Hollander felt that Cage's abdication of his own authority as composer released the listener from any obligation to take his music seriously and listen carefully. Worse, it implied that Cage's chosen methods could never allow for the process of critical reflection and hard work that characterizes real art and real artists. 

In spite of the differing conclusions made by both reviewers, each suffered from a common problem, the omission of one crucial phenomenon from their commentary: the actual sounds of Cage's music.

[San Antone]

4'33" App for iPhone

Cage's work, which teaches us that there's no such thing as 'silence' (and that there's joy to be found in paying close attention to the sounds around), is available in this official release from the John Cage Trust and Cage's long-time publisher, C.F. Peters.

Users are able to capture a three-movement 'performance' of the ambient sounds in their environment, and then upload and share that performance with the world.

[ahinton]

In my worst moments, I cannot help but suspect that John Cage: Silence is somehow analogous to Mohandas Gandhi on Western Civilisation...
Time to get me coat, no doubt...

[San Antone]

One³ (1989), called for a performer to raise the level of amplification in a space to the maximum level before distortion occurs; he then joined the audience to listen to the electronically enhanced ambience for an indeterminate length of time. Cage performed this work in November 1989 in conjunction with his receiving the Kyoto Prize, an international award endowed by the Japanese Inamori Foundation recognizing significant contributions to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind.

I would like to hear this work performed, something of a variation to 4'33" but with the ambient sounds being amplified. 

Over the course of his life Cage received many honors and acknowledgements of his contribution to music and world culture.  This Japanese prize merely one.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

One³ (1989), called for a performer to raise the level of amplification in a space to the maximum level before distortion occurs; he then joined the audience to listen to the electronically enhanced ambience for an indeterminate length of time. Cage performed this work in November 1989 in conjunction with his receiving the Kyoto Prize, an international award endowed by the Japanese Inamori Foundation recognizing significant contributions to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind.

I would like to hear this work performed, something of a variation to 4'33" but with the ambient sounds being amplified. 

Over the course of his life Cage received many honors and acknowledgements of his contribution to music and world culture.  This Japanese prize merely one.

This would be fascinating! Cage performances are very rare in Australia. I suppose if i go the USA it would be a little more common to hear his music live? For such a famous and influential composer it strikes me as odd that he isn't performed much. One³ is one of many works that is so well suited to live performance and does seem to lose its purpose in a recorded format a little....

[San Antone]

This would be fascinating! Cage performances are very rare in Australia. I suppose if i go the USA it would be a little more common to hear his music live? For such a famous and influential composer it strikes me as odd that he isn't performed much. One³ is one of many works that is so well suited to live performance and does seem to lose its purpose in a recorded format a little....

As far as I can tell there is no recording of One³.  But you're right, it would be very interesting to hear a live performance.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

As far as I can tell there is no recording of One³.  But you're right, it would be very interesting to hear a live performance.

A hypothetical recording, taking into consideration that one can purchase and download a recording of 4'33".
It just goes to show that Cage was someone who certainly didn't just write music to be performed and recorded. From what I can tell from his compositions, he was very interested in that people really just listen.

[San Antone]

A hypothetical recording, taking into consideration that one can purchase and download a recording of 4'33".
It just goes to show that Cage was someone who certainly didn't just write music to be performed and recorded. From what I can tell from his compositions, he was very interested in that people really just listen.

There are many commercially produced recordings of 4'33"; e.g. Frank Zappa released one as part of a John Cage tribute album.  However, the question is does a listener raise the volume in order to hear the ambient sounds at the time the recording was made, or should the listener turn the volume down and listen to the ambient sounds in his room while he is playing the recording?

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

There are many commercially produced recordings of 4'33"; e.g. Frank Zappa released one as part of a John Cage tribute album.  However, the question is does a listener raise the volume in order to hear the ambient sounds at the time the recording was made, or should the listener turn the volume down and listen to the ambient sounds in his room while he is playing the recording?

An impossible question

[San Antone]

Etudes Australes is a set of etudes for piano solo by John Cage, composed in 1974–75 for Grete Sultan. It comprises 32 indeterminate pieces written using star charts as source material. The etudes, conceived as duets for two independent hands, are extremely difficult to play. They were followed by two more collections of similarly difficult works: Freeman Etudes for violin (1977–90) and Etudes Boreales (1978) for cello and/or piano.

https://www.youtube.com/v/o7Gzy1hGDg0

The pieces are built on two basic ideas. The first is writing duets for independent hands, inspired by the way Sultan played. Cage made a catalogue of what triads, quatrads (four-note aggregates) and quintads (five-note aggregates) could be played by a single hand without the other assisting it; overall some 550 four- and five-note chords were available for each hand. The second idea was to use star charts as source material, as Cage had already done with the orchestral Atlas Eclipticalis in 1961 and with Song Books in 1970. This time Cage used the maps in Atlas Australis, an atlas of the southern sky by Antonín Bečvář, which he acquired in Prague in 1964.

[Karl Henning]

Is Feldman saying easel painter like it's a bad thing?  Just wondering.

Glad someone asked. 

I think he is saying that no matter how innovative a composer's work has been, e.g. Wagner, or Schoenberg, they are still working in the traditional genre defining methods: a difference of degree.  Cage however, did something entirely different outside the tradition: a difference in kind.

Now, I wonder which you mean.  Consider:

Cage often said that he no longer listened to music; just to the sounds around him.  During the 50s Cage and Boulez were close and corresponded quite a bit.  They both wanted to remove subjectivity from the process of composition, but each through drastically different methods.  Boulez ended up splitting from Cage over his complete reliance upon chance operations, and around the same time Boulez also lost interest in complete serialism after Structures.

But if you listen to the Boulez's 2nd Piano Sonata and Cage's Music of Changes you will hear amazing similarities; but achieved through opposite methods.

I think I've mentioned on GMG before that Yvar Mikhashoff demonstrated much the same point at SUNY Buffalo with a Babbitt piece (do I even remember which?) and Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano:  both pieces audibly cut from the same sonic cloth (so to speak), but which result from entirely different methods.

I wonder if the two aren't contradictory.  I mean, our observation that to the listener, it's really just the musical result, not the method — that the composer's method is, in a word, musically irrelevant;  or, does Cage matter more, because his was a difference of kind.

(I still don't accept the apparent implication that painting at an easel is become anything artistically 'inferior'    )

[San Antone]

Glad someone asked. 

I think he is saying that no matter how innovative a composer's work has been, e.g. Wagner, or Schoenberg, they are still working in the traditional genre defining methods: a difference of degree.  Cage however, did something entirely different outside the tradition: a difference in kind.

Now, I wonder which you mean.  Consider:

I think I've mentioned on GMG before that Yvar Mikhashoff demonstrated much the same point at SUNY Buffalo with a Babbitt piece (do I even remember which?) and Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano:  both pieces audibly cut from the same sonic cloth (so to speak), but which result from entirely different methods.

I wonder if the two aren't contradictory.  I mean, our observation that to the listener, it's really just the musical result, not the method — that the composer's method is, in a word, musically irrelevant;  or, does Cage matter more, because his was a difference of kind.

(I still don't accept the apparent implication that painting at an easel is become anything artistically 'inferior'    )

First, I didn't read Feldman's comment as saying that being an easel painter was artistically inferior. 

If I can sum up John Cage's career, I think it is bound up in the idea of Cage's desire to remove himself from the process.  This is a very different idea from Boulez or Babbitt who never thought to remove themselves even though serialism might seem to tie a composer's hands, so to speak.  Feldman was also prone to say things like "let the sounds be themselves" (Stockhausen asked him, "you mean you don't want to push them around even a little bit?"), but his process was actually 180 degress opposite from Cage's in that Feldman was an entirely intuitive composer, following the direction of his own internal muse.  Whereas Cage would create processes in which his choice about how the music would develop was turned over to chance operations.  Sometimes he might not initially like where the music was going, but he was quoted as saying that in those instances "he changed himself", i.e. changed his attitude about the "beauty" of music, not the music (this idea of accepting the music was related to Cage's embrace of Zen).

I think this idea of having the music seemingly just appear, without the ego of the composer being expressed (at least not overtly), is the kind of innovation by Cage which is of a different kind, not just of degree which is how one might describe the innovations of Schoenberg, or Wagner. So, in Feldman's analogy, Schoenberg was the easel painter and Cage was something else (Feldman doesn't say what the other kind of painter would be).

As far as I know Cage might be the only composer desiring this removal of himself, even though there are other composers using chance operations.

[Karl Henning]

If I can sum up John Cage's career, I think it is bound up in the idea of Cage's desire to remove himself from the process.  This is a very different idea from Boulez or Babbitt who never thought to remove themselves even though serialism might seem to tie a composer's hands, so to speak.  Feldman was also prone to say things like "let the sounds be themselves" (Stockhausen asked him, "you mean you don't want to push them around even a little bit?"), but his process was actually 180 degress opposite from Cage's in that Feldman was an entirely intuitive composer, following the direction of his own internal muse.  Whereas Cage would create processes in which his choice about how the music would develop was turned over to chance operations.  Sometimes he might not initially like where the music was going, but he was quoted as saying that in those instances "he changed himself", i.e. changed his attitude about the "beauty" of music, not the music (this idea of accepting the music was related to Cage's embrace of Zen).

Good, thanks.

[PotashPie]

There are many commercially produced recordings of 4'33"; e.g. Frank Zappa released one as part of a John Cage tribute album.  However, the question is does a listener raise the volume in order to hear the ambient sounds at the time the recording was made, or should the listener turn the volume down and listen to the ambient sounds in his room while he is playing the recording?

The piece is a performance. It specifies a duration of time, as a performance, not as a recording. The piece must be performed in the present moment, as experience of a duration of time.

Time is subjective, as an experience of being. Recording it "objectifies" it, and also "fixes" the duration and the sound events which occur in that duration, and makes it an "object" to relate to. It thus becomes what all recordings are: simply a record of an event which has passed. It is important that the piece remain as an experience of being, in the now.

I think many of the questions about this piece could be answered if there were a real understanding of Eastern subjectivity. I notice all the time how people try to objectify everything.

[San Antone]

The piece is a performance. It specifies a duration of time, as a performance, not as a recording. The piece must be performed in the present moment, as experience of a duration of time.

Time is subjective, as an experience of being. Recording it "objectifies" it, and also "fixes" the duration and the sound events which occur in that duration, and makes it an "object" to relate to. It thus becomes what all recordings are: simply a record of an event which has passed. It is important that the piece remain as an experience of being, in the now.

I think many of the questions about this piece could be answered if there were a real understanding of Eastern subjectivity. I notice all the time how people try to objectify everything.

I take your point.  However, there have been recordings despite the obvious correctness of your point.  But you overlooked this part of my post, which addresses your compaint:  "the listener turn the volume down and listen to the ambient sounds in his room while he is playing the recording"

4'33" is really just the culmination of Cage's involvement with chance operations (including whatever sounds occur during the time period) and as you say a Zen worldview.

[PotashPie]

"Zen worldview"applied to a Western context, questions the idea of authorship, and of performer/listener, and reverses it.

We become "the composer" as we listen; it is up to us to provide the "content" of the work in our experience of the sounds around us.

[Contemporaryclassical]

John Cage is misunderstood, he took many ideas from Webern, Varese, Cowell and Zen Buddhism and created something unparalleled.
I don't listen to a lot of Cage but he's a very valid composer

[milk]

I've a hard time relating to the latter part of Cage's career - perhaps the part where chance becomes more important. Maybe I'll get there some day. Meanwhile I love his prepared piano stuff. Recently I've been listening to the Arditti release: Cage: 44 Harmonies from Apartment House - 1776 & Cheap Imitation and enjoying it very much. I've a dozen or so Cage releases that I really love. But I don't get the Etudes and other "random" sounding stuff.

[milk]

Yes! Apartment House 1776 (in particular) is amazing, I need to give it a spin tomorrow 

This is unique music (leaving aside it's familiar origins). It's strange. To people who don't know it or Cage, they'd probably have a hard time trying to figure out what it is, in terms of context. "Is it new; is it old?" The Andritti is very imaginative.