"John S. Labovitz" <RMS.G.HNIJ%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA> (12/21/84)
I like John Cage's music (yes, that's what I call it). I can't sit and listen to it without doing anything else, but then again I can't do that with most music. Cage is interesting because he is not really monotonous or repeating; more like random notes. (Eno, on the other hand, is the opposite, but I like his work just as much as Cage (in fact, I'm listening to "Music for Airports" right now!)). Then again, I think ANYTHING can be music -- my friends & I used to make loud "noies" (feedback guitars, lots of echo, no melody at all), and I still listen to it occassionaly. So I'm not your normal music lover. @hnij@ john labovitz hnij%oz@mit-mc.arpa -------
DBarker%PCO@CISL-SERVICE-MULTICS.ARPA (01/02/85)
Well I like John Cage. Personally and musically. I believe he may well
turn out to be an artist whose influence is greater than his output (cf
Schoenberg) but his music is certainly fun to play and much of the
earlier is good to listen to - particularly "Sonatas and Interludes" and
"Music of Changes".
(BTW that piece is called 4'33''). I think that the answer to those who
disapprove of Cage is to be found in his book "Silence" which has many
informative Zen-influenced stories which try to purvey his aims -
basically to get people to listen to the sounds around them in everyday
life. A couple of examples (from memory):
A number of people were listening to Christian Wolff playing one of his
pieces in his New York apartment. The window was open and at various
times the music was drowned by traffic noise, aeroplanes passing
overhead. At the end one of the "audience" asked him to play it again
with the window shut. "Why?" asked Wolff.
Cage was standing in for another lecturer giving a lecture on oriental
music and played a record of Tibetan religious music. This consisted
entirely of loud spaced-out stokes of a gong. After several minutes a
woman in the audience leapt to her feat screaming "Take it off, I can't
stand any more". When he did so another member of the audience also
arose, very irate, saying "Why did you take it off - I was just getting
interested". ("In Zen they say, if you do something for one minute and
it is boring then do it for two, if it is still boring after two minutes
then do it for four, then eight then sixteen - eventually you will find
that it is not boring at all but very interesting")
It seems to me that JC has provided the impetus and raison d'etre for
such as Riley Reich and Glass and that, had he not existed, we should
have had to invent him.
As Arnold Toynbee once said "We are living in the Age of Cage".jeffw@tekecs.UUCP (Jeff Winslow) (01/03/85)
> A number of people were listening to Christian Wolff playing one of [Cage's] > pieces in his New York apartment. The window was open and at various > times the [played] music was drowned by traffic noise, aeroplanes passing > overhead. At the end one of the "audience" asked him to play it again > with the window shut. "Why?" asked Wolff. Obviously, because they wanted to hear what it was like with the window shut. Or is it Wolff's contention that {played piece + room noise + outside noise through shut window} is intrinsically less interesting than {played piece + room noise + outside noise through open window} ? If so, "Why?" But to back up a bit, if I were that member of the audience, I would have said, "Why not?" (He certainly couldn't say "because I played it once already".) Jeff Winslow