John Cage (1912-92)

[petrarch]

HPSCHD, for up to 7 harpsichords and up to 51 tapes (1967-69)

[asin]B000NJM6VE[/asin]

HPSCHD, by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller, is arguably the wildest composition of the 20th century. Big, brash, exuberant, raucous, a performance is about four hours of ongoing high-level intensity. The sound is a mixture of seven amplified harpsichords playing computer-generated variations of Mozart and other composers along with 51 computer-generated tapes playing what could be off-tuned trumpets sounding some musical charge. The thousands of swirling images, overlayed and mixed, of abstract shapes and colors and of space imagery from slides and films borrowed from NASA, create a chaotic riot of shifting form and color. The audience walks through the performance space, between the harpsichord players, around the loudspeakers.

--

Computer-composed and computer-generated music programmed by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller during 1967-69 was premiered in a spectacular five-hour intermedia event called HPSCHD (computer abbreviation for Harpsichord) at the University of Illinois in May, 1969. The computer-written music consisted of twenty-minute solos for one to seven amplified harpsichords, based on Mozart's whimsical Dice Game music (K. Anh. C 30.01), one of the earliest examples of the chance operations that inform Cage's work. Computer-generated tapes were played through a system of one to fifty-two loudspeakers, each with its own tape deck and amplifier, in a circle surrounding the audience. Cage stipulated that the compositions were to be used "in whole or in part, in any combination with or without interruptions, to make an indeterminate concert of any agreed-upon length."




The university's 16,000-seat Assembly Hall in which the event was staged is an architectural analogue of the planetary system: concentric circular promenades and long radial aisles stretching from the central arena to the eaves of the domed ceiling. Each of the forty-eight huge windows, which surround the outside of the building, was covered with opaque polyethylene upon which slides and films were projected: thus people blocks away could see the entire structure glowing and pulsating like some mammoth magic lantern.

 Over the central arena hung eleven opaque polyethylene screens, each one hundred feet wide and spaced about two feet apart. Enclosing this was a ring of screens hanging one hundred and twenty five feet down from the catwalk near the zenith of the dome. Film-maker and intermedia artist Ronald Nameth programmed more than eight thousand slides and one hundred films to be projected simultaneously on these surfaces in a theme following the history of man's awareness of the cosmos. "The visual material explored the macrocosm of space," Nameth explained, "while the music delved deep into the microcosmic world of the computer and its minute tonal separations. We began the succession of images with prehistoric cave drawings, man's earliest ideas of the universe, and proceeded through ancient astronomy to the present, including NASA movies of space walks. All the images were concerned with qualities of space, such as Mlis' Trip to the Moon and the computer films of the Whitney family. The people who participated in HPSCHD filled in the space between sound and image."



Seven amplified harpsichords flanked by old-fashioned floor lamps stood on draped platforms on the floor of the central arena beneath the galaxy of polyethylene and light. In addition to playing his own solo, each harpsichordist was free to play any of the others. Each tape composition, played through loudspeakers circling the hall in the last row of seats near the ceiling, used a different division of the octave, producing scales of from five to fifty-six steps. Only twice during the five-hour performance were all channels operating simultaneously; these intervals were stipulated by Cage.

More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPSCHD

[petrarch]

Indeterminacy, ninety stories by John Cage, with music (1959)

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Cage was the most placidly iconoclastic of modern composers. He didn't deliberately put wrecking balls through buildings, so to speak; the buildings were just in his way. He did what he had to, and if that meant ditching music as we knew it in pretty much every form, then fine. He embraced randomness as a methodology and applied it rigorously in music-making, if only to show that randomness was not something in us, but a property of the world that we could disregard if we just listened closely enough. One of his favorite Zen aphorisms contains the distillation of his approach to music: "If in Zen something is boring, do it for two minutes. If it is still boring, do it for four minutes. If it is still boring, do it for eight minutes, sixteen, thirty-two. Eventually you'll find it's not boring at all but very interesting." He bored more than his fair share of people.

And if you followed Cage (off a cliff, one might say), there was much to be found in doing almost nothing, or in doing things which didn't seem to have the slightest relationship to the brick-and-mortal job of music making as we'd come to know it. He composed music by superimposing star maps on blank sheet music, by rolling dice, by doing everything except composing. A good deal of this material was not meant to be recorded or enshrined — there is no such thing as a definitive performance of a Cage composition, by definition — but I suspect it was mostly because he was more interested in seeing what could be done than in actually keeping artifacts of the results. He wanted people to participate in experiences, not just passively receive them prepackaged.

Indeterminacy was one of the glowing exceptions, a work that stands on its own as a recording as well as a concept. Cage's idea was simple: he would sit in one room with a microphone and read ninety anecdotes he had committed to memory, while in the next room, his friend David Tudor would generate noises from tapes, prepared pianos, radios, and a Slinky attached to the tone arm of a turntable (one of Cage's favorite noises). Neither could hear what the other was doing, and the results would be recorded as they happened. If one person's work overlapped the other, that was not something to be avoided; Cage described it as being something like seeing a person on the other side of the street, obscured by traffic. The title was itself a clue to the underlying principle of the work. Cage wasn't trying to force anything; he wanted to see what would happen naturally. If Andy Warhol was trying to make people see by showing us something as forgettable as a Campbell's Soup can, John Cage was trying to make us listen.

Most of the stories in Indeterminacy are about Cage or his friends, and almost all of them have some kind of joke-ish punchline, usually one derived from Cage's own observational insight. Some of them have an almost magical-realistic outlook to them (such as the story about the Eskimo lady); some of them are just plain amusingly odd (the story about going through Dutch customs backwards). More than a few of them are explosively funny. Sometimes I wonder if the deadpan delivery on this record was the predecessor to Steven Wright's flat-affect style of comedy. But the ultimate feeling is not that Cage is just kidding; he uses his little stories as ways of sketching a space. Tudor's counterpoints wind up complementing everything in ways that we can't predict, so that just when we think we know what's coming, we're given a subtle prod in another direction. What is most striking are not the noises, though, but the moments when neither Cage nor Tudor are not doing anything at all. They seem to be holding their breaths together, the way jazzmen do. Maybe such feelings are just artifacts of how things came together, but that seems to be a large part of why Indeterminacy exists: to show such things and to celebrate them.

Booklet available at http://media.smithsonianfolkways.org/liner_notes/smithsonian_folkways/SFW40804.pdf

The stories are available at http://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/

[petrarch]

Music for four, for string quartet (1989)
Thirty pieces for string quartet (1981)

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Music for four, for string quartet (1989)

Music for four is part of a series of works, entitled Music for _, which Cage wrote for various combinations of instruments. This string quartet version of the work was composed especially for the Arditti Quartet, for a concert and congress celebrating John Cage's long association with Wesleyan University.

The score consists of four layers, or parts, to be played completely independently of each other. The work, which can last for 10, 20 or 30 minutes, has each part completely notated, the players having the choice only of how to space out the music within each given time-bracket, how many repetitions to give the single tone surrounded by silence, and how much silence to leave in between each line of music. The short interludes (5, 10 or 15 seconds long) are to be played at fixed times. The time coordinations are done with the aid of four stop watches.

There is a further element to the work, that of spatialization, with the players instructed to adopt unconventional seating positions, perhaps far from each other. This allows the listener to perceive the score as four individual lines projected to him from four different angles in space. The result is a sound balance very different from the normal homogenous mixture we are used to hearing.

--Irvine Arditti

Thirty pieces for string quartet (1981)

Thirty pieces for string quartet takes its title from the work for five orchestras written in 1981. Just as that was a coincidence of chamber orchestras, so this is a coincidence of solos. There is no relationship of the four parts fixed in a score. Each solo is either microtonal, tonal, or chromatic or presents these differences in pairs or presents all of them in succession. Each begins at any time within a forty-five second period that overlaps the first by fifteen seconds. Thus a given piece may be played as fast as possible or it may be drawn out to a maximum length of seventy-five seconds. The work is dedicated to the Kronos Quartet resident in San Francisco. Its flexibility of structure makes it a music that is, so to speak, earthquake-proof.

--John Cage

[petrarch]

String quartet in four parts (1949-50)

[asin]B000000NYI[/asin]

The String quartet in four parts was written in a transitional period in Cage's career, at a time when he was searching for a new aesthetic and a new style. Through his study of the writings of such authors as the Indian art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy and the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, Cage became convinced that music should serve a spiritual purpose: It should "sober and quiet the mind thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences." Towards this goal, Cage tried to create a music that would partake of the ineffable, that would allow his audience to "forget themselves, enraptured, and so gain themselves." Throughout the late 1940s, as his goals became ever more spiritual, his musical style became ever more modest. In 1948, he announced that "it is quite hopeless to think and act impressively in public terms," but that "beauty yet remains in intimate situations." He sought to compose a music that would remain expressive, but in a quiet, spontaneous, low-key fashion. Towards this end, he studied the elegantly understated music of Erik Satie, music that Cage considered a perfect model for the work he wanted to pursue. His search led him to become fascinated with silence; he was inspired by the words of Meister Eckhart, who preached that "it is in the stillness, in the silence, that the word of God is to be heard."

On the verge of writing the String quartet, Cage told his parents that it would be a work in which "without actually using silence I should like to praise it."

The String quartet in four parts reflects these concerns in many ways. The piece is programmatic, its four movements or "parts" representing the four seasons. In particular, Cage drew upon the Hindu imagery of the seasonal cycle, in which spring, summer, fall and winter are identified with the forces of creation, preservation, destruction and quiescence. Cage's quartet opens with summer and proceeds--the music becoming slower and slower--through fall to winter, at which point it is "nearly stationary." The final movement, with its sudden increase in tempo, thus suggests the renewed vigor of springtime creativity.

In keeping with his theme of the eternal, imperturbable cycle of the seasons, Cage adopted a musical style in the quartet that was itself austere, limpid, serene. The music is slow and fairly quiet throughout. The flatness of sound one hears in the string playing is due to Cage's stipulation that the performers not use vibrato. The quartet has no great climaxes or dramatic effects; its muted voice is subject only to very subtle inflections.

But none of this was new to Cage's music in 1949. Instead, it was Cage's treatment of harmony in the String quartet that was new, and here he solved a problem that was crucial to his future work. For of all the elements in music, it was harmony that Cage identified as being the most incompatible with a spiritual approach to the art. He called harmony "the tool of Western commercialism," "a device to make music impressive, loud, and big." What he objected to in particular was the intensely progressive use of harmony in 19th-century music--the sense of strong forces carrying the listener along waves of tension and resolution. Whereas previously he avoided harmony altogether by writing for percussion ensembles, or by creating only single lines without accompaniment, in the string quartet, a medium that begs a harmonic treatment, Cage foiled the intense feeling of progression from one chord to the next by treating each one as unique and separate rather than as a harmony in any functional sense.

When writing the piece, before doing anything else, Cage composed a collection of chords--chords chosen carefully, with a sensitive ear for sonority. However--and this is what was new in the Quartet--he crafted each one separately from all the others, paying no attention to what musical contexts they might appear within. The harmonies in this miscellaneous collection were then used to outline a single melody. The decision to use a particular harmony at a particular point in the piece was based solely on whether it contained the necessary note for the melody. As a result, there is no harmonic logic here, no sense of cause and effect, none of the overbearing expressive force that Cage sought to avoid.

In essence, the juxtaposition of chords is accidental, subservient to that single melodic line. The result is a monophony of harmonies: a "line in rhythmic space," as Cage put it, formed by the chords of his collection, just as dissimilar beads can be strung together to form a necklace.

Thus the importance of the String quartet in four parts lies in its simplicity: Its great achievement is a compositional voice that is quiet and yet sure, muted and yet crystal clear. The lesson Cage learned was that in order to achieve this voice, all he needed to do is let his sounds speak for themselves. In the quartet, each chord is expressive all by itself, and the power of harmony is neutralized by Cage's having refused to connect them, by his having remained silent in the spaces between chords.

Although not including extensive silences (these would appear in his music soon thereafter), the quartet provided Cage with the compositional silence he sought: A freedom from the need to place sounds into compelling relationships.

(Excerpts from the CD booklet)

Additional notes at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_Quartet_in_Four_Parts

[petrarch]

Four, for string quartet (1989)

[asin]B000000NYI[/asin]

The String quartet in four parts was Cage's first work for string quartet; Four, composed especially for the Arditti Quartet, is his most recent. It is one of a series of pieces that are all written by means of the same method of composition, and whose titles are the number of performers involved.

Cage calls these works "parts without scores," by which he means that each performer plays his music independently of the others; there is no master score that coordinates the individual parts. In Four, each player's part consists of short passages made up of sustained tones. Most of these passages contain only a single note; others may be phrases of two to five notes. These simple musical statements are then placed within "flexible time brackets," which is Cage's term for designated spans of time during which a given portion of the music can begin and end (for example, the first passage in each part is marked to begin at any time during the first 22 1/2 seconds, and to end at any time between 15 and 37 1/2 seconds into the performance). The time brackets are of roughly thirty seconds' duration, so that the performers have a fair amount of flexibility in arranging their music in time. Since the brackets overlap one another slightly, it happens at times that two or more phrases follow each other directly, without a break. At other times, a pause of some duration may occur while a performer, having finished a phrase, waits for the next time bracket to begin.

The time brackets, by permitting rhythmic freedom only within certain broad limits, allow the four parts to have a very flexible relationship to one another and yet still remain roughly coordinated. The effect of this kind of composition--isolated long notes placed freely within these floating time brackets--is immediately apparent in listening to the piece. Four presents us with a constantly shifting texture of tones; as notes enter and depart, the four parts together form constantly shifting harmonies. The various lines can be followed like threads in a complex tapestry as they are picked up, combined, dropped and rediscovered.

In Four Cage has decided to deploy his time-bracket method within a severely limited musical domain: He has deliberately removed any possibility of great contrasts among parts. All four players play very slowly, very quietly and without any vibrato. In addition, all four parts are composed within the same relatively narrow range of pitches, so that any member of the quartet can play any of the parts. Cage's instructions for performing Four are designed to demonstrate this interchangeability of parts, as well as the flexibility of the time bracket structure.

First, the four players distribute the parts among themselves in any way. They then play the piece, after which they exchange parts with one another and then play through the piece again from the beginning. The result is that we hear the same music twice, but with subtly different timbres and with varied placement of the music within time. The lack of any distinction in pitch dynamics and timbre create the flat, unmodulated musical surface that we hear. If the interweaving parts resemble a tapestry, then this is a fabric in muted tones, in soft grays and browns.

The austerity of both Four and the String quartet in four parts suggests a connection between the two works. Certainly they have many features in common: Instrumentation, non-vibrato playing, glacial pacing, quietness. It is not only because of these affinities that Cage's latest quartet reminds us of his earliest, however: It is also because in both pieces Cage's manner of going about his work as a composer has been the same. In these quartets, Cage has started by composing individual musical moments--chords in the String quartet in four parts, short phrases of sustained notes in Four. He has then proceeded to throw them into time, into silence. In both works, Cage's exquisite musical moments stand on their own. By attending so closely and sensitively to the profiles of the individual components of his music, he can allow their relations to one another to emerge of themselves, to spring forth from silence.

(Excerpts from the CD booklet)

[snyprrr]

Looking over so many Cage cds has infuriated me.

It's just him. Why do I want to punch him? I do wonder what the after life holds for him.

Nevermind,... I really enjoy what Petrarch's doing here, but I just know if I got any of those cds, I would fall to my knees, arms stretched towards heaven, crying, Why, Why? Nooooo....

[bhodges]

Looking over so many Cage cds has infuriated me.

It's just him. Why do I want to punch him? I do wonder what the after life holds for him.

Nevermind,... I really enjoy what Petrarch's doing here, but I just know if I got any of those cds, I would fall to my knees, arms stretched towards heaven, crying, Why, Why? Nooooo....

Very funny...

--Bruce

[mahler10th]

Looking over so many Cage cds has infuriated me.
It's just him. Why do I want to punch him? I do wonder what the after life holds for him.
Nevermind,... I really enjoy what Petrarch's doing here, but I just know if I got any of those cds, I would fall to my knees, arms stretched towards heaven, crying, Why, Why? Nooooo....

Every time I am invited to hear his work or look at anything by him, I stand (or sit) in complete silence for a good 4 mins and 22 seconds before I do anything...but by then, he has gone...    :-(

[petrarch]

but I just know if I got any of those cds, I would fall to my knees, arms stretched towards heaven, crying, Why, Why? Nooooo....

Afraid you're going to fall head over heels for Cage?

Revisiting my collection of Cage CDs after 5 or 6 years has been wonderful. From the huge pointillistic surfaces of Atlas Eclipticalis to the subdued ebb and flow of the quartets, it's really an occasion to "sober and quiet the mind".

Listening again to these works, I confirmed that I don't care much for HPSCHD and its relentless cacophony, while at the same time the "circus" of Roaratorio is just amazing--and, note, I bought the CD on a whim (it was a gap in my collection) despite not caring much for the work from the limited exposure I had through the Greenaway documentary 4 american composers.

The reason I like Cage so much has quite a bit in common with why I like (e.g.) Feldman, Stockhausen's Klavierstücke and Hymnen and late Nono: It's a sonic delight, an opportunity for contemplation of the sounds themselves, to open the ears and let oneself be moved by the experience.

[snyprrr]

Afraid you're going to fall head over heels for Cage?

Revisiting my collection of Cage CDs after 5 or 6 years has been wonderful. From the huge pointillistic surfaces of Atlas Eclipticalis to the subdued ebb and flow of the quartets, it's really an occasion to "sober and quiet the mind".

Listening again to these works, I confirmed that I don't care much for HPSCHD and its relentless cacophony, while at the same time the "circus" of Roaratorio is just amazing--and, note, I bought the CD on a whim (it was a gap in my collection) despite not caring much for the work from the limited exposure I had through the Greenaway documentary 4 american composers.

The reason I like Cage so much has quite a bit in common with why I like (e.g.) Feldman, Stockhausen's Klavierstücke and Hymnen and late Nono: It's a sonic delight, an opportunity for contemplation of the sounds themselves, to open the ears and let oneself be moved by the experience.

haha, I'm jus' teasin'!!

Basically, I use Late Cage as an antidote for Late Feldman, haha. At least I know that what I'm hearing at the moment won't repeat,... when I need the 'Walden' effect, I'll put on Four or Music for Four.

[not edward]

The funny thing is that some of Cage's 40s output (in particular) is really very accessible to the kind of listener who doesn't even like much 20th century music.

Works like The Seasons or the String Quartet in Four Parts (and perhaps the Sonatas and Interludes) are definitely not a difficult listen, and are pretty damn good too.

[petrarch]

Contemplating or presenting 'sounds themselves' hardly constitutes much tho, and isn't all that moving .. it's nothing. Randomness as a base of composition is mindless and unmusical. None of this stuff is 'ear opening' either (that's a load of bunk).. There has to be more going on than just 'sounds' .. (i.e. music).

Oh it is most assuredly mindless, that's the intent. As for the rest, we all know your opinion.

[karlhenning]

None of this stuff is 'ear opening' either (that's a load of bunk).

Goodness knows your ears aren't open ; )

[petrarch]

... anyone can do that.

But no one does, do they?

[petrarch]

Chorals, for violin solo (1978)

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In 1975, the violinist Paul Zukofsky learned that John Cage had returned to a more conventional notation with his Etudes Australes for piano and hoped that the composer would return to writing for the violin in a similar manner. As Zukofsky put it, the graphic indeterminacy in such works as 50 1/2" and 26'1.1499" (both for string players) doesn't "work perceptually", while a notation with "sufficient specification . . . allows a performer maximum interpretive possibilities." Through the urging of Earle Brown, Zukofsky contacted Cage with this request and the two met early in 1976 to discuss a series of new works for violin.

The main work resulting from this collaboration was Cage's Freeman Etudes. But before Cage could begin on that imposing project, he needed to understand better the violin's capabilities. This he did with two smaller works, an arrangement of Cheap Imitation in 1977 and Chorals (1978). As so often is the case, Cage described his activity in terms of wonder and discovery: "I study under Zukofsky's patient tutelage, not how to play the violin, but how to become even more baffled by its almost unlimited flexibility."

Both Cheap Imitation and Chorals have their origins in Erik Satie's music. In the former work, Cage used chance operations to alter the pitches of Socrate, leaving the rhythms intact. The source for Chorals came from the Douze petits chorals, pieces dating from Satie's years of study at the Schola Cantorum (1905-8), published posthumously in 1968 in an edition by Robert Caby. Cage had first used the chorales in 1970 for his Song Books, but the method by which he altered the music differs from the one he used in Cheap Imitation. As he explained:

Mme Salabert recently sent me posthumous works of Satie that she published. I was crazy about them. Besides, around the time I wrote Cheap Imitation, I was composing other imitations of Satie. These became part of the Song Books. Each time I finished one, I forced myself by means of chance operations to write the next one differently . . . I finally found one, based on his posthumous chorales, that pleased me. The piece I ended up with amazes me as much as if it were by Satie. You're wondering how I did it . . . I just took the chorale and placed directly over the printed score a transparency with staves giving each half-tone the same amount of space. The staff Satie used was obviously conventional and consequently any major third was written as close together as the minor third adjoining it. This obscures the space between the two on the paper. With my new staff, just by tracing Satie's melodic contour onto it--at no matter what angle, even randomly--I was able to obtain a new melody--a microtonal melody. It's not an imitation, it's a rubbing! Yet, it's rigorously something else entirely . . . a discovery.

The first instance of this technique appeared in Song Books as Solo for Voice 85--alterations of all but the fourth, fifth and sixth of Satie's chorales. The notes are stemless black noteheads. If they are accompanied by accidentals, they are to be sung conventionally. If not, they are microtones, with their placement on the staff roughly indicating to the performer which microtone to sing (the spaces of the staff are much larger than the noteheads themselves).

For the violin version, Cage did not indicate time signatures or barlines, but he notated the rhythmic values precisely, making the relationship between the original chorales easier to see. The notation for the microtonality is more precise, too, and allows for a two-fold alteration of conventional sharps and flats. In addition, the music demonstrated Zukofsky's suggestion "to make a continuous music of disparate elements, single tones, unisons, and beatings". Once again, Cage employed chance operations in order to determine which notes would be single tones, which unisons and which beatings.

None of this description adequately prepares listeners for the actual experience of hearing these pieces for the first time. In the first number of the set, the music undulates in a restricted range of a little more than a major second, the changes resembling a kaleidoscope whose patterns are formed from shadows. Our ears become so attuned to these tiny interval differences that anything larger, for instance a slightly flat E followed by a slightly sharp F in the second piece, comes as a shock. Notable, too, are the subtle changes in register between each chorale, which reach their height in the fourth and fifth pieces.

--Rob Haskins

[petrarch]

Gimme a break .. there is loads out there that falls into the unmusical mindless crap category .. throw any ol' shit against the wall and see what sticks etc. That's not high level music making/composition. It's thoughtless unmusical nonsense ... all the words in the world trying to tell you otherwise won't change that.

Break given; just don't listen to Cage. After all no one is forcing you to.

The 'thoughtless unmusical nonsense' bit is amusing. I wonder (rhetorically) what you would say of Klavierstück XI with its random sequence of fragments, of the series of +/- works and of "play a vibration in the rhythm of the universe".

In any case, and to put it bluntly, you don't know what you are talking about (aka 'pffff').

[petrarch]

44 Harmonies from Apartment House 1776 (1976), arrangement for string quartet

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The 44 Harmonies were originally composed as part of the massive Apartment House 1776, a commission by multiple American orchestras in honor of the US bicentennial in 1976. What Cage wanted was a "musicircus" of eighteenth-century American music: A wealth of music performed simultaneously, overlapping, in a rich confusion. So what he needed was a lot of music very quickly. The materials he created for his circus included fourteen tunes derived from dances, four drum solos based on marches by Benjamin Clark, two imitations of Moravian church melodies, and the forty-four harmonies "for the most part both quartets and solos, subtractions of different sorts from anthems and congregational music written by composers who were at least twenty years old at the time of the American Revolution".

The situation Cage faced in the Harmonies, however, was that he had absolutely no connection to the four-part anthems of Billings and the others. If anything, he had something of an aversion to this kind of music. Se he set out to do something that, in his words, "would let it keep its flavor at the same time that it would lose what was so obnoxious to me: Its harmonic tonality."

He tried the systematic transformation of the originals, in this case by removing notes from the different voices of the hymns. He struggled at first, trying to find the correct transformational tool. When it finally came to him--a system involving the extension and silencing of individual tones within each voice--he found himself delighted with the result: "The cadences and everything disappeared; but the flavor remained. You can recognize it as eighteenth century music; but it's suddenly brilliant in a new way. It is because each sound vibrates from itself, not from a theory. . . The cadences which were the function of the theory, to make syntax and all, all of that is gone, so that you get the most marvelous overlapping."

So the Harmonies represent yet another type of opening, this time a transformation from aversion to acceptance, interest, and joy. And again, this led to more transformations. Cage used the same technique with similar music in a series of works that followed the Harmonies: The various versions of Quartets I-VIII (1976), Some of "The Harmony of Maine" (Supply Belcher) for organ (1978), and Hymns and Variations for voices (1979). Once he learned how to love this music, he just couldn't get enough of it.

Like any composer of depth, John Cage shows us various sides to his character in his various works. In these pieces made from transformations, it is not the severe Cage, the disciplinarian of the chance compositions of the 1950s, the renouncer who wrote Lecture on Nothing. Instead, this is the smiling embracer of everything, the yes-sayer, the author of Lecture on Something. As he wrote in that lecture: "And do we need a celebration? We cannot avoid it, since each thing in life is continuously just that." Enjoy.

--James Pritchett

[petrarch]

And you earlier claiming that he's the only one perpetuating the kind-of 'intentional' unmusical mindless crap is no badge of honor either.

Let me rephrase, since I didn't mean it literally... "Anyone" can do it, but most don't really bother.

I keep forgetting your mind only works in absolutes.

[snyprrr]

The temptation to say something smart ass here is un-be-liev-able!!


Haha,... I just 'performed' 4:33, if you know what I mean,... wooo ... yikes!!

[snyprrr]

Well, I don't even think anyone actually does what Cage was doing.  For the most part, his entire oeuvre was an expression of a philosophy.  But, really those composers who might be thought as writing "mindless crap" (Feldman, Scelsi) are actually very different from Cage since they have a desire to do something purposeful and willful even if doing it with minimal gestures and elements.  Cage wished to remove the compositional will and intention from the work, part of his quasi Zen spirituality, and allow the music to simply exist with as little human involvement as possible.

That reminds me of a stagnant pool of water.

ugh, this is just not a topic I want to get into, but it feels like driving by a car wreck on the highway! can't help myself...

I jus' wanna be a Hayta!!