John Cage hates bop, tolerates rock, in general seems a bit like Geir Hongro

More fundamental: as I understand it, Cage was against any sort of intnetional effort at expressing anything through music (though he accepted that music would inevitably still be expressive, the way a natural phenomenon might be).

Well, this begs the question...

D, Cage very clearly considered himself a composer, and I don't think he wished to relinquish that title, even though a lot of what he composed led people like Tony Conrad to surmise that the entire purpose/function of the composer had been superceded. That said, he was interested in using aleatoric or chance functions (most famously the I Ching) in order to make music, which does bring up exactly the paradox you point out. Why be a composer if your music has no personality? Well, I can't answer for Cage but I think a lot of that, as stated elsewhere, has to do with reconfiguring the entire function of listening to music (qua listening as, in a sense, "defining"), although nothing to do with reconfiguring the social functions involved in music as a set of activities (listening, composing, performing, etc.). In a sense, Geir is a lot like Cage because he expresses an extreme desire to deal with music "as" music. Unfortunately, where Geir bungles is that in stating this desire, he has a tendency to bring in the social, the "extra-musical," sometimes to offensive effect. Cage may have not been consistent (and I'm sure he'd argue for inconsistency as a good thing), but at least he wasn't a clumsy oaf.

Hstencil -- I don't know that I'd say that Cage's prepared piano pieces transformed the piano from a melodic to a rhythmic instrument. For one, the piano has always been pretty rhythmic. Perhaps Cage made it "primarily rhythmic." But wasn't the main goal simply to get people to hear the piano in a different way, create new sounds from a limited palette, rather than to experiment with rhythm?

Naw, jaymc, there are a lot of rhythmic innovations in Cage's music - and not just his prepared piano stuff. And I think that the goal of "get[ting] people to hear the piano in a different way" dovetails quite nicely with the goal of "experiment[ing] with rhythm." With the prepared piano stuff, he was able to do both!

John Cage made absolutely nothing of value at all.

-- Geir Hongro (geirhon...), April 22nd, 2003.

He's still got you beat, then.

He also once said "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." Which makes me wonder: so why is Cage so adamant that catching a train is NOT interesting? Maybe he should've done it more often or something.

When Cage said "I don't like music that reminds me of the uninteresting things in my life" it reminds me of when people say things like "I don't like movies that make me feel sad" or "Why do the newspapers always have to cover war or famine, it's so depressing!" For a guy so down on the ego-ridden, you'd think he'd have been a little less demanding that CULTURE = MY LIFE.

I like to hear it in performance tho'.

You're listening to it right now, in fact. Something else might be playing at the same time, but the silence is there.

Another interesting Cage factoid: He didn't own a record player or any music.

fair enough but still i want to see the performance space being 'static' for 4'33''

As early as 1948, Cage had conceived of the idea of a “silent” piece:

"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 sell it to the Muzak Co. It will be 3 or 4 [and] 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 or fragrance of a flower. The ending will approach imperceptibility."

The essay from which the above was quoted, “A Composer’s Confessions,” also describes his plans for Imaginary Landscape No. 4, in which twelve radios were the only instruments. In 1952, 4'33' premiered in Woodstock, New York. Immediately, the reputation of the piece in which the performer (for any instrument) was instructed to be silent for “fixed lengths: 30”, 2’23”, and 1’40” for a total duration (as given by the title) of 4’33”” spread, inspiring a multitude of disparate activities...

4'33' has been historically described as “the authority of the composer extinguished.” Tony Conrad describes Cage as opening up an entirely new context, a “context of the vacuum that Cage leaves where you have a great sense of aesthetic ambiguity or even abandonment: relativism,” that “John Cage’s work . . . appeared to bring modernism, and the project of an authoritarian musical form based on the sanctity of the score, to a halt.” However, as Henry Flynt points out,

"The commentators who enthuse over this piece overlook that modern music is still a going concern and that today’s modern music does not in the least consist in an assortment of little silent pieces. Nor did 4'33' typify Cage’s body of work . . Cage’s ‘slight’ pieces were not the substance of his career; they were postures at the boundaries of his oeuvre.

"What 4'33' was, really, was a breach of etiquette relative to the tradition of concert music. It was not infinitely and unsurpassably new and radical; it was not a little bit new and radical; if you had no stake in the tradition, it was something you would not bother to do."

Flynt’s understatement of the radical nature of 4'33' denies that the piece was, in fact, quite a significant breach. His observation is correct in its assessment of Cage’s commitment to such a breach, but denies what is probably the most conspicuous touchstone which set off the activities of those more committed than Cage: namely, the group of artists and composers in and around Fluxus, of which Flynt was associated.

To arrive at that point historically, it might be revealing to catch up with the biographical subject of this project, Tony Conrad. He describes quite vividly his early fascination with music, and how it quickly translated into the quasi-postmodernist breach offered by 4'33':

"And music rendered discoveries. Interesting revelations of an aesthetic nature having to do with the relativism of beauty, for example. Like the way that you can go about liking sounds is so complex and varied. It tells you a lot about other things that are more difficult to analyze socially, like pictures, writing, and so forth. In that sense, music can function more abstractly than writing. You know, it’s hard to just keep writing completely abstract literature because it’s clear that that’s what you’re doing. You can write abstract music and fool everybody. . . I think that the breakdown between so-called high and so-called low cultures, the implementation of an urban cultural model as opposed to a mass cultural model, that this process really changed people’s understanding of where they located themselves. It changed people’s ability to locate themselves culturally within music very early on, which is why I think [that] postmodernity [as typified early by 4'33'] appeared as a concrete factor in music earlier than it did in some of the other cultural forms, really."

4'33' left a multiplicity of entirely new directions in which to travel. 4'33' could be considered one of the early manifestations of musical postmodernism in its emphasis on listening to sound (or silence) as music, about which Conrad writes, came at a turning point where music changed “from a regime of writing . . . to a regime of listening.” Cage himself rarely went in these directions as he was already immersed in his absorption with chance as an aid or method of composition (of which 4'33' was actually part: the lengths of silences were determined by chance operations), particularly those utilizing the I Ching. But there were a variety of people who were using the resources, including the questioning of the role of the composer, that Cage had flirted with. A group of young composers had gathered around Cage: Christian Wolff, Frederic Rzewski, and David Behrman, for example (who were graduate students at Harvard University at the same time that Conrad and Flynt were enrolled as undergraduates). Another group materialized in Berkeley, California: La Monte Young (whom Conrad met during the summer of 1959), Dennis Johnson, and Terry Jennings, for example. Meanwhile, a new generation of Europeans were exploring the new territory as well: “the most advanced young composers were actually going over into this neo-Dada, neo-Futurist territory.” And still, others who would contribute to a widening of this breach were scattered about, soon to be aggregated.

Which is what makes him fascinating and human. He didn't need to set up a strict theory--a la Geir--and attempt to reconcile all of his thoughts into it.

''Which is what makes him fascinating and human.''

oh yeah. sorry what i said should not be interpreted as an attack.

Another interesting Cage factoid: He didn't own a record player or any music.

This is one of those things that isn't strictly true but is true in spirit -- he did actually own a few records.

Anyway, I have a recording of Zappa doing 4'33" -- I think it was the last recording he made before he died.

NERD FITE

i was thinking today that john cage would really like the shit out of battles.