John Cage (1912-92)

[karlhenning]

. . . (I still have it, and still don't play it) . . . .

I like that

[petrarch]

Separately . . . if the music is what's around us, and just what is happening . . . I wonder what sound quality can matter . . . .

Well, I take great delight in hearing the sound with all those partials and harmonics as richly intact as possible. To hear the heart of the sound, as it were, to paraphrase Scelsi.

[karlhenning]

Yes, to be sure.  Of course, my question was none the most serious : )

[petrarch]

Right.  You have repeated this opinion ad nauseam.   

Fixed it; apologies for being pedantic, but it is one of those things that would be worthy of the grammar grumble thread.

[karlhenning]

Especially we non-Latinists, who are apt to mis-decline nouns : )

[karlhenning]

Thanks.

Now, here's one of those things I imagine drives James up a wall,... and me too btw!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V12XFtFtC3U

I find it infuriating,... but,... dig those crazy old timey dresses, haha,... and look at Cage: Harrison Ford as The Fugitive, haha,... oh, that's funny!

Do it proper, snypsss! ; )

http://www.youtube.com/v/V12XFtFtC3U

[snyprrr]

Do it proper, snypsss! ; )

http://www.youtube.com/v/V12XFtFtC3U

I STILL can't do that. Spock!!

[karlhenning]

You're right, though, the clothes . . . which look so . . . familiar now that I've been watching the first season of Columbo . . . .

[petrarch]

So, having reached the end of the notable Cage works in my collection, here's a final article:

4'33", for any number of performers using any number of instruments (1952)

4'33" (1952) is Cage's "silent piece," in which no sounds are made by the performer at all. This piece is perhaps his most famous creation, and has been written about extensively. Practically no discussion of the composer or his work fails to mention it. The work has most often been presented either as the ultimate chance composition or as the perfect example of indeterminacy of performance--both chance and indeterminacy entering into Cage's music at about the same time 4'33" was composed. What has been rarely noted is that he had the idea for the piece much earlier: In A composer's confessions there appears the following:

"I have, for instance, several new desires (two may seem absurd, but I am serious about them): first, to compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and see it to the Muzak Co. It will be 4 1/2 minutes long--these being the standard lengths of "canned" music, and its title will be Silent prayer. It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make as seductive as the color and shape of the fragrance of a flower. The ending will approach imperceptibility."

Silent prayer, as it was thus described in 1948, is clearly the first glimmer of an idea that, four years later, would become 4'33"; while Silent prayer is not 4'33" itself, it is its ancestor. Thus the silent piece's origins lie not in Cage's works of the 1950s and 60s, but rather in the aesthetic milieu we are considering here: the late 1940s, the String quartet in four parts, and the Lecture on nothing. We are justified, then, in considering the significance of 4'33" in this context and in attempting to understand what it would mean to Cage before the invention of chance composition.

Because 4'33" is known far more by reputation than through direct experience, it is worthwhile here to provide a precise description of the piece as it was composed in 1952. The piece is in three parts of fixed lengths: 30", 2'23" and 1'40" for a total duration (as given by the title) of 4'33". These durations were arrived at by chance means, via the addition of many shorter durations.

Although chance was used in the compositional act in 1952, it surely was not considered in 1948 when he first thought of the work: he almost certainly would have used a consciously-chosen structure instead. What would remain the same about the piece from 1948 to 1952 is the idea of a structured silence. Thus considered, 4'33" represents an instance of a truly empty rhythmic structure. If all sounds occur within the order of rhythmic structure (as Cage had asserted previously), then such a structure could not only encompass all possible sounds, but could function without any composed sounds at all: the ambient sounds of the environment--or even a dead silence--would themselves occur within the structural order. More to the point, a silent piece would serve a personal, spiritual purpose: by making and experiencing a piece of structure entirely without content, Cage could follow Eckhart's injunction to empty himself entirely, and thus hear "the hidden word." As a disinterested action, a mediation on the discipline of rhythmic structure, an actual immersion in the emptiness of rhythmic structure--in these senses the silent piece may be seen as more a means than an end, a mental, spiritual, and compositional exercise. Its literal silence reflects the silence of the will necessary to open up a realm of infinite possibilities.

It is not hard to imagine Cage in 1948, before the String quartet, realizing the need to keep still and quiet, to pursue such a discipline of self-control and denial. The situation here is reminiscent of that found in the "ox-herding pictures" of Zen Buddhism. In these pictures, the path of self-discipline that leads to enlightened knowledge is compared to the gradual taming of an ox. The ox becomes completely docile, and ultimately disappears entirely. In one version of the pictures, the last picture is only a blank circle and its accompanying text can be read as a commentary on 4'33":

"Both the man and the animal have disappeared, no traces are left,
The bright moonlight is empty and shadowless with all the ten thousand objects in it;
If anyone should ask the meaning of this,
Behold the lilies of the field and its fresh sweet-scented verdure."

(taken from The Music of John Cage, by James Pritchett)

More at:
http://www.rosewhitemusic.com/cage/texts/WhatSilenceTaughtCage.html
http://solomonsmusic.net/4min33se.htm

[karlhenning]

I had not known of this association, i.e. to canned music, before reading your post.  But, this adds another layer of meaning to the piece: that Cage was making a statement against the constant onslaught of sound, some music, some noise, that makes it impossible to experience silence.   Too much music turns it into "noise" as people begin to tune it out, and ideally, people would have opportunities to hear music when they consciously turn their attention to it, not being force-fed it when they are on hold on a phone call, or sitting in a doctor's office, or riding an elevator (although this practice seems to have died out) - or booming out of a car behind you in traffic.

There is too much random music from the environment and this piece by Cage was an attempt to encourage a little silence, which I think is a very important statement to make.

But one which, unfortunately, also got lost in the noise.

Nice post, Leon!

[karlhenning]

And, incidentally, one marvels at the Sisyphean repetition of whining about the naked simplicity of 4'33 . . . Get Over It (the fact of the piece) and Get Over It II (your undercurrent envy that you weren't there to think of it, first).

[Grazioso]

A canvas is never empty. --Robert Rauschenberg

[Grazioso]

And, incidentally, one marvels at the Sisyphean repetition of whining about the naked simplicity of 4'33 . . . Get Over It (the fact of the piece) and Get Over It II (your undercurrent envy that you weren't there to think of it, first).

I don't think it warrants marvel: to some, 4'33" seems like Cage thumbing his nose at convention, getting away with a bit of charlatanry dolled up in the fancy duds Classical Music and academic art criticism.

It depends on one's notion of the function of art: if art is ideally didactic, or a physical embodiment of an aesthetic theory, then what Cage is doing is right. If art should make one examine the nature of perception or reevaluate one's aesthetic suppositions, then what he's doing is logical.

But what if art is supposed to be the creation of conventionalized or stylized beauty for pleasure? Then things get shaky. Unless an orchestra plays 4'33" and a Brahms symphony at the same time What of someone who solely wants to hear in music the use of standardized practices ("What can he do with a C Major sonata?") to create entertainment? Or someone who doesn't want to intellectually engage with art as an expression of culture and philosophy?  Someone who wants to view music as artifact instead of action?

[Grazioso]

Art is that and more.  The definitive aspect of a work of art is the intention of the creator.  A toilet is a toilet unless an artist like Duchamp says that his toilet is a work of art.

There are schools of critical thought that reject that notion, holding authorial intention to be irrelevant or unknowable and focusing instead on formal elements. In literature, for example, New Criticism, Reader Response criticism, etc.

Using the Duchamp example, one could alternatively say a toilet becomes a work of art when it is re-contextualized as such: put it an art gallery where viewers are socially conditioned to view objects on display as "art," and it suddenly becomes art. The janitor could accidentally leave his toilet plunger in one of the exhibit halls, and suddenly it's "a brilliant Neo-Dada installation that interrogates the dichotomy of self and other in the Post-Industrial milieu."

[karlhenning]

There are schools of critical thought that reject that notion, holding authorial intention to be irrelevant or unknowable . . . .

Interesting!  Not always completely unknowable, I shouldn't think . . . that tack strikes me as intellectual laziness.  (But then, "schools of critical thought" of itself suggests cozy hermetic tanks ; )

In general, I should certainly agree that one cannot know everything the artist intends (the artist himself probably doesn't understand it all), and that there are questions of how relevant this or that intention may be.

[Grazioso]

Interesting!  Not always completely unknowable, I shouldn't think . . . that tack strikes me as intellectual laziness.  (But then, "schools of critical thought" of itself suggests cozy hermetic tanks ; )

In general, I should certainly agree that one cannot know everything the artist intends (the artist himself probably doesn't understand it all), and that there are questions of how relevant this or that intention may be.

Cozy hermetic tanks, perhaps, but at least the academics are intellectually engaging art on a rigorous, systematic level, whatever the validity of their end results. That trumps the "I listened to and it sucks. Why? Because, it does, dumbass!" school of art criticism 

The artist, not a "school of critical thought," owns his intentions.   

You're making a theoretical critical assertion/assumption right there. How much of those intentions are the artist's and not indirect or surrogate expressions of his cultural matrix? What if the art is the result of subconscious urges unknown to the creator? (Shades of Marxist and Psychoanalytic/Freudian criticism, respectively.)

What of an observer who sees in a piece of art something totally different than what the creator tried to achieve? Is the observer somehow wrong?

How are an artist's intentions inscribed in a work to where they can be decoded by observers with any accuracy? A piece of music is a succession of sound waves. What methods do you use to infer a composer's intentions from those sound waves in the absence of other evidence?

The artist is aware of his own intentions, at least, as fully aware as people can be concious of their motivations and intentions.  It is immaterial what outside observers may write or theorize or what schools of critical thought sprout up around a body of work - the bottomline is that if an artist presents something as art - then it is art. 

If no one else perceives it to be art, is it still art? And is not the creator also an outside observer? The painting is not the man.

It may not be good art, or it may have a small audience - but as you said, when an object has been re-contextualized, it can become art.  But, the person who does the re-contextualizing is an artist - not a janitor.  The artist has made a concious decision to re-contextualize an obejct for artistic purposes whereas the janitor was merely forgetful and left something behind.

But for the janitor, the "creator," it was never art, yet others perceive it to be so. Is it therefore not art?

[karlhenning]

Cozy hermetic tanks, perhaps, but at least the academics are intellectually engaging art on a rigorous, systematic level, whatever the validity of their end results. That trumps the "I listened to and it sucks. Why? Because, it does, dumbass!" school of art criticism 

Well, the latter school is easily trumped, though, isn't it? ; )

[some guy]

I recently bought Kenneth Silverman's biography of Cage, begin again. I'm quite liking it. Not a big fan of biographies generally, but this one's a good one.

In this book, the origins of 4' 33" are a little more detailed than in Pritchett's account, dating the first idea for the piece from 1940, not '48, in line with what I've read elsewhere, too, although the semi-serious joke about Musak did come from a lecture given at Vassar in 1948.

And mentioning the visit in 1951 (or '49) to the anechoic chamber at Harvard. That and the white paintings by Robert Rauschenberg were perhaps the strongest impetuses to go ahead with the piece.

Cage had also been using long silences in several pieces before 4' 33", at least one of them before the Vassar lecture.

For another detailed account of 4' 33", there's Larry Solomon's essay at http://solomonsmusic.net/4min33se.htm.

[bhodges]

Just found out that next year's Focus! Festival at Juilliard will celebrate the centennial of Cage's birth with a week of programs, below:

FOCUS! 2012 FESTIVAL – Centennial of John Cage
Friday, January 27 – Friday, February 3

Friday, January 27, 8 PM, The Peter Jay Sharp Theater
Opening concert
All-Cage program

Monday, January 30, 8 PM, The Peter Jay Sharp Theater
Juilliard Percussion Ensemble
Daniel Druckman, director
Works by Cage, Cowell, and Harrison

Tuesday, January 31, The Peter Jay Sharp Theater
7 PM, Pre-Concert Forum
8 PM Music of John Cage

Wednesday, February 1, 8 PM, Paul Hall
Vocal, chamber and solo works by John Cage

Thursday, February 2, 8 PM, Paul Hall
Vocal, chamber and solo works by John Cage

Friday, February 3, 8 PM, Alice Tully Hall
New Juilliard Ensemble
Joel Sachs, conductor
John Cage – The Seasons (1947)
John Cage – Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950-51)
John Cage – Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58)

--Bruce

[canninator]

I'm hoping someone can help me out here. I am working through the score of the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano paying attention to its micro and macroscopic rhythmic structure.

Sonata I relates to the number 7 and the A section contains 4x7=28 crotchets. Wonderful, no Fields medal to be awarded for me here, but I read that this basic unit of 7 is organised as crotchet beats organised as 4 1 3;4 1 3; 4 2; 4 2 (=28 of course). From the score (and you will need the score if you have it to follow me here) bar 1 is four crotchets and bar 2 is organised, according to conventional analysis as 1 and then 3 crotchets (crotchet rest and 3 crotchets). Why is the rhythmic structure grouped in this fashion? Why not group the whole of section A as 4 4; 4 4; 4 2; 4 2 for example. There seems to be no underlying feature that would warrant grouping of the first two bars as 4 1 3 rather than 4 4. The score has even been annotated by someone who had it before me, in pencil, as 4 1 3.

I also have the score for Music for Marcel Duchamp. The whole piece is a single melodic line organized into 11 groups of 11 bars. Cage's blurb states that the rhythmic structure is 2,1,1,3,1,2,1 (=11 fine, okay I get that). So the piece is all in 5:4 so the first 11 bars are going to be 55 crotchets (5x11, yes thanks John for that) that somehow conform to the rhythmic structure he describes. I can map the structure (2,1,1 etc) he describes onto the first 11 bars 5 times sequentially but it appears to bear no resemblance to what is going on musically. Can anyone please explain the significance of the 2,1,1,3,1,2,1 rhythmic structure to the organization of the first 11 bars.

Crikey, Boulez's Notations is positively transparent compared to the issues I'm having here.