the john cage industry

I own and enjoy listening to a recording of "First Construction in Metal," and when I DJ I often bring along "Experiences No. 2"/"The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs."

Cage was a listener. We live in a world in which music is ubiquitous, but people have forgotten how to listen. Cage gets you right back to sound. The music of sound. It's salutory.

Cage was extremely charismatic, a kind of guru. Other composers were grouchy, snobby, competitive. But Cage has left us this serence, accepting, friendly, pleasure- loving image. This is an important part of his growing status.

History pulls the mainstream ever leftwards as time goes on, so that, finally, we remember only gestalt-shifting radicals: Duchamp, Buckminster Fuller, Cage...

I can't get enough Cage. Am listening to his early radio plays with percussion orchestra, his prepared piano pieces by Margaret Leng Tan, his spoken word discs like 'Indeterminacy' (brilliant!) and his diaries.

I've always been like this. I hook onto people and decide they are 'it'. Currently, for me, Cage and Holger Hiller are 'it'. I can find the entire universe in their works.

does it make sense to have more cage cds when cage himself hinted that recordings might be facile afterthoughts for essentially chance performance music ?

I don’t really care. Well, actually...I don’t care that much. I mean, I’ll pay attention to what Cage said and all, but if it gets in the way of understanding/interpreting/enjoying to his music, well, tough.

Hey Anthony: what about Beuys? (Did we have a Beuys C/D yet?)

George: Did you post to rec.music.classical.contemporary a couple years ago?

i knew there had been some typically helpful chat from milton and julio abt the MUSIC FOR MERCE box, somewhere on ILM, but for the love of me i can't remember where. so i will revive this gorgeous george thread.

finally got around to reading ian penman's review of MUSIC FOR MERCE in the wire... weird review - he starts by being tough-guy dismissive (w too much emphasis on the New York School's supposed avoidance of 'anything too dark or messy or too stressfully political') but ends up v v pro the whole enterprise. def. made we want to hear the discs - esp of course the maryanne amacher piece. is there anything from the period when Jim O'Rourke and Takehisa Kosugi were part of the troupe?

8 years pass jesus

>is there anything from the period when Jim O'Rourke and Takehisa Kosugi were part of the troupe?

there's four Kosugi solo pieces, more than an hour's worth, and he plays on many of the pieces. Jim O'Rourke joins on laptop for a Cage piece, a Wolff piece & one of the improvs. the main appeal is Tudor, he's on nearly everything & there's almost two hours worth of unreleased solo pieces.

glad to hear Penman finally gives this whole box his blessing. it's kind of a one-stop historical overview of early live electronic music by the main U.S. innovators. it blows my mind to read the liner notes and realize that most of the breakthrough Cage & Tudor pieces for live performance that we've grown used to as recordings were all originally commissioned by Cunningham; basically, it was a genius way of sidestepping the audience's problems with nascent tablecore improv (i.e. the relative disconnect between gesture and sound that still affects most audiences today with laptops) by having all of this music as part of integrated theatre.

the main classics were released back then or since then as standalone recordings, Cartridge Music, Indeterminacy, Rainforest, etc., so most of us got to know them as standalone works, but this box pretty much gives you everything else

it's not entry level, it's a bunch of widefield room recordings -- not lo-fi exactly, but not exactly immersive. and as with all New World box sets, way way way too expensive. so, not for everyone. but if you're even remotely interested in the origins of live electronic music, these are field recordings of ground zero.

I read that a lot of the pieces in this set are excerpts of longer works. I was set to buy the boxset but hearing that has given me pause

these are all 10-25 minute long excerpts and more than enough in most cases. Though there are a few where I would have been down for longer excerpts, the Amacher piece in particular is the kind of thing where so little is going on that it seems wiser to have it on in the background for 45 minutes than in the middle of an action packed CD for 15.

Ward - more on Music for Merce on the David Tudor S & D thread.

I was reviving this because I found out last night that MODE records are recording every composition by this man, also there are more biogs on the way too...so you know "is this a taxation thing ?" aside (probably my favourite part of Gosset's ridiculous rant), the basic thrust of this thread became true.

I was looking at List of Compositions wiki page and from '37 to '59 its basically:

- works for his invented instrument: prepared piano, a transformation of the most prominent device in classical music (piano) into the least prominent (percussion)
- works for perc, but also involving devices that make percussive noises, i.e. scrap metal, even more 'debased' from a classical standpoint, other 'objects' too
- more for noises full stop, i.e. radios, turntables, tape, electronics
- and when a normal piano comes in its mostly solo, really you think its a device to carry on his experiments w/chance and in my head its something he used just to infuriate Boulez back in the 50s (perhaps his only real engagement with classical music).

Nothing for orchestra, one str quartet, the odd work for string instrument, the odd concerto or chamber work and no orchestra. He built his 'operation' from not v much, made friends outside the classical world and only eventually did large scale commissions from that world come about from his notoriety and work with happenings. Really looking at that wiki there's something messed up about the whole enterprise, the later number pieces are really a Merzbow-like joke played upon the world.

Not exactly saying don't record but there is something dumb about this. Have we forgotten how to curate? Does no one have a view on how to approach Cage's compositioal legacy? Why do we have this relativism about it: 'oh just record it all' looks like a poorly thought out solution from someone who was so much about a 'happening'.

My view is, odd piece aside, not to bother after Indeterminacy (the most ego based composition, this from someone who apparently wanted to take out ego) and that a lot of people that like his music should entertain the paradox that he wasn't a classical composer because when he had access to more resources that chipped away at what was great in his music, i.e. self- and re- inventing, from scratch.

Silence was his most notorious composition, and we should think about its implications a bit more.

those mode editions are fucking cool though is the problem

>Does no one have a view on how to approach Cage's compositioal legacy?

The confusing thing -- the main way to approach compositions that sound radically different with every performance is to expose yourself to as many different performances as possible. Cage was anti-recording because they intrinsically fix one performance and we then have a tendency to refer to them as definitive, so... multiplicity is still the only way around it. But there's no way you're ever going to own them all. The mode editions feel odd by presenting themselves as a complete edition, but I've got a few of them.

one of my favorite recent concerts from last year -- I shared a bill with Tom Erbe, who's written a program that produces 'live performances' of Williams Mix; he commissioned a library of all the original individual source materials as mentioned in the score, and every time he presses the space bar it randomly produces a new mix based on the original score. The original version took Cage, Tudor, Brown and the Barrons a year to splice together, and now you can hear the piece in real time.

has anyone seen the 'Journeys in Sound' documentary? I saw it at the ICA last week, quite modest and understated and very nice for it.

never seen it, would like to

Mr Erbe just posted two captures of his 'live' Williams Mix

https://soundcloud.com/tomerbe/sets/williams-mix

Think the hearing as many performances as possible is true for much new music, whether 'open' like Cage, or not. Especially hearing a piece in different programmes really opens up different aspects of a piece.

A better apporach, from what you're saying Milton, could've been to pick a few pieces to draw multiple performances from. I think we could've learnt a lot more that way.

has anyone seen the 'Journeys in Sound' documentary? I saw it at the ICA last week, quite modest and understated and very nice for it.

Susan Stenger was giving a talk there wasn't she? Pissed I couldn't go.

yeah she gave a short introduction about her relationship with Cage and then afterwards there was an unfortunately short Q&A before we got kicked oot for whatever was on next in the ICA cinema. I think she and the film both were aimed at an audience that didn't know Cage especially well, so again it wasn't anything startling but it was nice.

Quite a nice piece on computer music under the AI angle.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/dec/07/he-touched-a-nerve-how-the-first-piece-of-ai-music-was-born-in-1956

The box set of Number Pieces that came out this year is really, really beautiful.

http://anothertimbre.bandcamp.com/album/number-pieces

Cosign on the Number Pieces box. Both Apartment House and Another Timbre make the world a better place for sure.

i don't think it's a conspiracy, i think it's bought by the same people who buy other mysteriously meaningless music, like Radiohead and Jewel.

― maryann, Friday, April 5, 2002 6:00 PM (nineteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol