jeffw@tekecs.UUCP (Jeff Winslow) (05/20/84)
Several people, John Cage and my mother included (Hi mom!) seem to have the idea that the traditional role of the listener is to figure out what the composer is trying to say. They seem to want to apply some kind of deductive intellectual process to listening. If the composer wanted to say something, he probably would have used his mouth. music is not so simple. music has the power to awaken some kind of appreciation and sympathy in its listeners. They will create their own impressions just as well with a Wagner opera as they will with any number of semi-random Cagian constructions. my own process of music appreciation is a wholly intuitive one furthered by repeated hearings of a work. It has nothing to do with any reasoned attempts to objectively understand the structure of the work, although I am well-versed in music theory and I've done pretty well at that when I wanted to. nor does it have anything to do with any extra-musical "messages" the composer supposedly was trying to put across (or so they say on the record jackets). If I am right about Cage, I am already "listening", and I don't need his kind of stuff to do it. Jeff Winslow