Please stop referencing 4'33" by John Cage

shit, i forgot the notes.

I'm just guessing nick's intention.

That's not just a guy, that's The Music Man!

http://www.greatstreets.org/MusicMan/MusicManImages/MakingTheMovie/04RobertPreston.JPG

(let me rhyme C on your T)

Ha, I work with a guy who's 4'33". He wouldn't know who John Cage was even if the composer put his teeth on his buttocks and pretended to bite.

cf also "the sounds of your body are part of this record"

Ambient.

(xpost)

You make it sound really good.

i think there was a distant thunderstorm during the first ever perf (david tudor on piano as per nath's pic)

(several xposts)

the piece has three movements though, so in pop-sensibility terms it shd be compared w.three singles not one!

Why worst? They could be the best. Or, in fact, would be no better or worse than any other circumstances.

We're all listening to 4'33 all the time, if we just bother to listen. :)

There's stuff about it in Cage's book Silence. And also in Michael Nyman's book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond

anyway rauschenberg white canvases were part of the "happenings" (anachronistic word alert) that cage staged at black mountain college, and the the overall "whatever happens is part of the piece" open ambience aesthetic def applied there

(tho cage did not like the audience staging their own disruptions, interestingly enough) (not that this started hapnin till the late 60s)

good thing he didn't make it several lifetimes long.

its title is the totality of the playing instructions

xpost

Hahahaha!

Ah, you're no doubt right about that, yes. I've only seen them in the NY Guggenheim, under harsh fluourescent lighting, and this just never occured to me, but yep, of course, makes lots of sense.

jim ru sure the LENGTH-determined-by-chance is in nyman and silence?

Um...those were the places where I thought I'd read it, and seem the most likely sources. You're making me doubt myself slightly now, but I'd definitely seen this explanation before, and it wasn't at wikipedia. I'll check when I get home tonight.

There is no such thing as absolute silence. If you have your record player off, your room and the world are still filled with noise. However, 4'33" is not a composition, it's a field recording. The only element of composition is the choice to do nothing, but even Cage himself admits that the sound of the audience is the focus of the piece. I am happy to accept 4'33" as a field recording, but so long as people insist that it is a composition, I will continue to make jokes about it. Thx, bye.

(i think it is closer to the erased drawings, with its non nihillist implications of negation)

If that was Cage's intention with the piece, then I'd have to say he failed, because despite my familiarity with his piece, I still don't think of any random 4 minutes of ambient noise as being music. I mean you could paraphrase Cage's composition as basically the statement: "Everything is music!" To which the natural response would be: "No, it isn't." Which is not to say it isn't a clever gesture - probably even more clever than Duchamp's famous urinal, when you think about it.

interesting that with computer technology you can make a DDD version of 4'33" leaving you with a version tainted only by the playback mechanism and not the recording mechanism. 'tainted'. would compress down to an mp3 pretty well too 8)

Just as well, as I've got some of his that are right stinkers

Mike Batt to thread!

yeah, in '52 at a small chapel in the woods near woodstock, ny.

I think a big part of the idea behind the piece is to force the audience to think of the ambient noise as music, as no different from other "compositions."

er, not exactly. you could say maybe his imaginary landscape radio pieces achieved that specific goal more closely, but 4'33" is more about performance than sound, obv.

thank you douglas for bringing up 0'00", which is another variation on the theme.

anyway, 4'33" (and many other cage pieces) really exploded the entire musical world open to consider things that had only been the realm of obscure wackos (like, say, the futurists). mark s is gonna hate me for this simplification, but it led directly to fluxus which led directly to the dream syndicate which led directly to the velvet underground (among many many other musical things), etc., etc., you know the drill.

It's tonight! The theme is "bear suits"! I would go, but I'm too poor to afford the admission fee of $5.
-- n/a (nu...), February 15th, 2005 11:48 AM. (Nick A.) (link)

Nick's right. I'm probably gonna talk about The College Dropout and Marcel Dzama and my awesome idea for a New Yorker cartoon. However: I'm worried that the show itself has been getting into a rut, though, lately. Too many of the same performers, not enough outside interest being built up. If anyone knows of any artists or performers in Chicago that might want to read poetry/play music/show a film/tell jokes/etc. for 15 minutes on stage at a rock club, send 'em my way!

jaymc, you should talk about these photos by Carlee Fernandez: http://www.ahgallery.com/image%20pages/fernandez.bear-studies.html

er, not exactly. you could say maybe his imaginary landscape radio pieces achieved that specific goal more closely, but 4'33" is more about performance than sound, obv.

Oh, I'm not sure about that. I can't think of Cage ever talking about that piece as anything other than sound, a chance for listening. Yes, there's some element of performance in it, just like there is all his music, but like all his music it's mostly an invitation to listen.

The only time I've seen it performed live, the performance-y angle was really played up. The original version, with three movements, was played, and there was a feeling of "hey, we're playing 4'33"!", which didn't feel right at all.

I'm not sure it's possible to give a good performance of it anymore.

But that said, 4'33" needs less analysis, more listening to.

Can we all talk about Fifty-Eight instead?

whoa that sounds awful.

I'm not sure it's possible to give a good performance of it anymore.

you're probably right. but that doesn't mean it can't still be talked about or analyzed. it (along with a lot of other things cage did) did change things.

If we were going to be objective about it, and interpret Cage's piece according to the conventions of the form he was working in, ie. classical performance, then we'd have to admit that the weight of tradition does not side with the interpretation that a rest (ie., silence) is to be interpreted as ambient noise. If that is the meaning of a rest, then any composer who had ever used a rest in the centuries before Cage's work had already gotten there first anyway. Simply to create a work that only consists of rests does not change the fundamental nature of what a rest is. There was ambient noise in the room before Cage, and composers used rests before Cage, so I don't necessarily accept that Cage's piece really changed any of that equation.

It's only because of his extra-musical commentary that we assign a different conceptual weight to Cage's rests vs. the rests of other composers. One might say that Cage's accomplishment was not as a composer, but as a musicologist - ie., he tried to redefine the meaning of the rest. Whether or not he succeeded, or whether his re-interpretation of the rest is useful, is not as clear.

xposts: Talk of Cage's theories makes it difficult to appreciate that he wrote some of the most beatufiul music ever. And if you open up the keyboard and bang on the actual keys, that's actually a La Monte Young piece. It generally goes on for much longer than four and a half minutes, though.

http://www.delafont.com/music_acts/Music_Images/ll-cool.jpg

And isn't this all a bit ludicrous considering 96% of the population probably doesn't know who John Cage is/was?

Casuistry OTM. It's interesting to know Cage's intentions behind 4'33", but it also works powerfully if you don't know them at all. When I performed the piece, I doubt any more than a handful of people in the audience knew what it was: I didn't tell them the story behind it until after the fact.

that's x for henry flynt by our man la monte.

And if you open up the keyboard and bang on the actual keys, that's actually a La Monte Young piece. It generally goes on for much longer than four and a half minutes, though.

not exactly.

paik reformed it as his own piece zen for head, btw.

Why is it inevitable that one listens to the room? One could just as easily listen to the performance. Even when notes are being played, one has the choice whether to listen to the notes or to other sounds in the room - ie., cars going by, someone coughing, etc.

it isn't. as stated upthread, it's been noted at the first performance in '52 at a chapel in the woods near woodstock, ny there was a thunderstorm nearby. the audience was listening outside the room.

Unless the person coughing is some consumptive sitting right in front of me, as it invariably is. On the other hand, this has given me the opportunity to know my inner berzerk homicidal maniac.

In this case, what's the difference, though?

the two 'number' pieces that i've heard are lovely, yes.

Cage gets a 'mauling' by lots of people dada: Howard goddall for one, there was a bit on mark steel's TV lecture on beethoven (but that made sense, it was germaine greer talking about 4'33'' performance at that cage/uncaged fest and it looked exactly like wot casuistry was describing); it all of which leads to a very defensive reaction by many who like him.

His music was always iffy on record - I think that one of his works (concert for piano and orchestra?) required one of the players to make tea at a certain point but I didn't like from the one listen I gave it and that's from '57 (and no I won't be getting the dvd). I d/l lots more last year and most I didn't care for but I think 'cartridge music' does a better job as music to listen to while yr neighbours are having sex.

My very fave from him is 'roaratorio'; not only was he one of the great singers but its lots of cage music in a super dupa conceptual cage mashing up. The EMF reish of 'HPSCHD' is wacky enough. its a bit like metal machine music for harpischord and prob more effective since we all like feedback now. 'empty words' is a gd one for the riot, if nothing else.

wrong. hear "cartridge music," "fontana mix," others. some of this stuff really shreds.

"the past doesn't influence me, i influence the past"

I love fontana mix, cartridge is great too. Most of things that involved electronics/electrics were gd.

Even when there are other noises going on during a performance (and there always were - even before Cage), it doesn't mean one has to listen to them! One can still listen to a performance of silence. The actual performance of silence is no further from the ideal of silence than any actual performance of any piece is from the ideal of the notes on the page. So Cage's piece did nothing to change the equation of what the music consists of and what consists of the extra-musical ambient noise!

Have you even heard the piece in question?

While Cage obviously had a desired effect with this piece, I don't think he was as dogmatic about it as you make him out to be. Some people will listen to the silent performance, some people will have their attentions drawn elsewhere: I think he'd be okay with that. It's as much an experiment as anything else.

...music has inhabited a peculiarly postmodern corner of ‘culture’ ever since the late [19]50s, when the critical paradoxes of [John] Cage opened the ear of ‘serious’ music onto the world, when the machinery of international capitalism coalesced with the machinery of popular music, when both ethnomusicology and music history became participatory enterprises for the active listener. It was only in the 50s that it became possible to listen to records of weird jazz, avant-garde music, and music from other times and cultures.

This was the turning point from a regime of writing music to a regime of listening. Many things at the time pushed this change, even though there has been very little comment on, or understanding of, the core paradigm shift that this represented for music.

I think referncing it at all makes you somewhat more than ill-informed.

your post was so good until that sentence, dude.

Like you'd swear disco was the bee gees and ten other bands, and free jazz was 20 records, and rock, well that's bigger, maybe 2000 bands or so.

conversely they seem to see themselves as large and important, and music as the baby mobile hanging above them which they can move about and fuck with, when the reality is they're a speck on a speck on a speck and their knowledge is even moreso.

OK, now you are making fun of me!

xpost - yes jaymc! hahahaha!

I know! This is what I mean! I mean, I can grasp why a lot of 20th-century art movements weren't taken up earlier, inasmuch as some of them still seem "difficult" or at odds with the dominant notion for so long that art = beauty. But maj-7ths are so PRETTY!!!

If you play something that's just intoned rather than well-tempered then some chords might sound a little weirder than they do today. Maybe.

I'm happy for people to keep talking about 4'33" because it's an incredibly important piece and makes you think dunnit? If I have a pet peeve it's with people using the word "iconic". Every time I watch Kirsty bloody Wark on Newsnight Review she's saying this or that is iconic, and it's just lazy. It's like she's saying "X is important enough to put on this show, and has been around a long time, and is famous, and we're adding to that fame now by covering X even more, and calling X iconic..."

I mean who doesn't remember with relish the few times in their life, in college or whatever, they've had a chance to really passionately defend 4'33" to a bunch of cynics or just fools?

(manipulative = he made "art")
(haha chancer = by throwing dice)

okay ignore me.

momus i am glad you like cage. honestly if we ever met up we'd probably get along and talk about fun stuff.

I'm not sure I get at what nate is posting on this thread - the point is that he used silence (or noise) as a functional component in much of his music and, from 4'33'' onward, other people did that too.

As far as performing the piece its success does seem to depend on whether a portion of the audience might know of what it does - it ties in with his provocative side, that it has to validated by some disturbance from the crowd as well as ambient noise. But again I haven't sat through a performance.

There were lots of weirder intervals than you find in a major seventh being used in various folk musics and other musical traditions long before 1900. It was only in the rather narrow world of European classical music that they were verboten. But vocal traditions in Eastern European countries like Bulgaria made use of very dissonant intervals including major and minor seconds, sevenths, ninths, and microtones. I recommend listening to Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares for a taste of how far out those harmonies can get.

Surely silence (ie., the rest) had been used as a functional element long before Cage. The only difference is that previous composers had used it to separate notes, whereas Cage used it as the only content of a piece. In a way, you might say that Cage was the first to use silence in a non-functional way, since the function of silence was to separate notes.

Just to go back to jaymc/stencil exchange I would actually like to hear what other fans of the 'out there' think of dizzee or whatever - one thing in which avant-garde doesn't deal with is a straight beat but uk garage (or this strain of it) does sidestep it.

Mea culpa.

riygar3 (5 days ago) +1 Reply
Could you imagine if all musicians did this , and just sat around listening to just sounds, whether its acoustic or whatever. Nothing would ever get done! It would be like watching a black screen when you went to the movie theater and just heard some sounds and talking every now and then, I mean it might be good for shits and giggles, but come on man, the whole idea of making music is using some form of action on the persons behalf to create a certain energy, vibration,etc with the body.

OK that's funny. The pic in the 4th post down is a piece on of my classmates from grad school did.

Have you heard the one about the Quaker choir?

Their repertoire is pretty small, all they ever seem to play is 4'33"!

it might be confusing to listen to an aerosmith song at the same time as 4'33''.

-- peter smith (plsmith), Tuesday, February 15, 2005 12:13 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Link

this made me lol

I was watching the youtube vid that comment comes from whilst listening to music

Been reading 'silence' for about ten years now and I don't think I'll ever get bored of it. Every now and then something just really hits me. Always find myself smiling when im reading it. Gonna pop to the Hayward this Friday, they're showing some if his stuff there.

Man, thread title otm for real tho

not a day goes by...

those illipses were referencing 4'33

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQa4DL17Aug

stop referencing the overton window

references of schrodinger's cat seem to have slowed down, that was a big one for a while

basically i'm trying to turn this thread into the ZOMBIES/BACON thread but for people who are trying to sound smart instead of trying to sound rAnDoM

imo, Cage was just playing second fiddle to Duchamp and unimaginatively at that.

i went to see a student of Cage's give a talk and at the end of it a performance of this song which was yeah just as exciting as an art gallery full of people trying not to cough could possibly be.

the whole time i was wondering wouldn't it be cool to just start singing "Dust in the Wind" or "Freebird" or whatever and keep it going for the duration. the whole conceit of 4'33" being that IT'S WHATVER SOUNDS U HEAR MAN would probably be hard to square w a loudmouth belting out an AOR classic.

https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=Schrodinger%20Philip&src=typed_query

What was on the b-side?

Overrated pap

aimless wrong about everything as always

Oof

Been getting really into the prepared piano pieces, and the album of Gamelan interpretations that's out there. Like anything in the classical world (apparently), there so many recordings and versions out there. Can anyone recommend some definitive recordings for Cage's prepared piano pieces (and anything in a similar realm for him)?

When kids stop blasting it every fucking night when I'm trying to sleep, I'll stop referencing it.

I'm saying nothing

wow I was annoying

Sorry for the revive, but it's unfortunate that "John Cage" became so synonymous with 4'33, because I never actually checked out his work that involved notes until the past year

Jeffrey Pierce is pretty good.

xpost Have you ever read any of his books? I highly recommend Silence.

.

that was the post equivalent of 4' 33"

funnier in 2005 imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-3iLnXV90s

who needs an MPC?

I'm a sucker for Indeterminacy, Jordan; try that.
also dig the toy/prepared piano stuff.

We have this thread about his music fwiw: John Cage: Classic or Dud? Search and Destroy

wow I was annoying

― na (NA), Thursday, July 2, 2020 5:38 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i always assumed your username meant Not Applicable

wow I was annoying

― na (NA), Thursday, July 2, 2020 2:38 PM (eight hours ago)

new board description?

no one has actually watched "salo" but everyone keeps it in their back pocket for easy edgy responses to tweets like "what movie do you wish they would make into a theme park ride?"

na otm, I was struck this summer by how many Twitter "personalities" were suddenly left with no choice but to demonstratively tweet about being "forced" to watch Salo on exterior projection screens.

I mean, maybe it wasn't a bunch of people, but I distinctly remember at least three incidents where people were tweeting about how embarrassing it was that their "film clubs" just happened to have already picked Salo for a screening but, "oops pandemic" and they just had to screen it outdoors, "haha how transgressive!".

we watched a bootleg VHS dub of salo in film school back in the day, the prof was very proud & titillated to have sourced an uncut copy, and afterwards was absolutely absolutely with me when i wouldnt concede my view that we probably could have just read about it instead of actually being made to sit through it

"abosultely furious" with me, that is. (getting flustered recalling all the transgressive depravity.)

A friend of mine watched Salo in film class. Reaching for his lunch, he was dismayed to find it contained chocolate pudding.

I put a performance of 4’33” on my “is this music?” playlist for discussion in class and one of my students brought it up today. She was like “what’s the deal with the one where the people just sit there??” And we talked about it. No regrets for bringing it up bc it illustrated a useful concept for me: “humor” in music that’s not verbal humor. Good discussion!!

Also now if anyone ever references it, they’ll understand.