…i was getting ready for a post similar to yours as i was reading.
John Cage is not talentless…hes opened our ears…not to mention he wrote some of the first pieces for percussion ensemble…and being a percussionist, i apreciate that!
If you let yourself go a little you will apreciate what he does a lot more…
Well I guess this comes under the heading all art is subjective.
But, to many have pointed out this simple concept within real Pieces of musical artwork. Think of the work of Tom Waits and others who use ambient sounds or Brian Eno. In my opinion John Cage was quite tone deaf and couldn’t really create music so he did what he could.
“Waiting Room” by Fugazi. The song starts off with a repeating baseline, and about 20 seconds into it, the bass stops. After a 5 second pause, the bass starts again, now accompanied with drums. It’s a great song, not necessarily because of the pause, but the pause works well in the start of the song. Also helping was the fact that “Waiting Room” was the first track on the first Fugazi E.P., making “Waiting Room”, the bassline, and the pause all part of an interesting opening to an album.
John Cage predates them both by a wide margin. Eno made his influential ambient stuff in the 70’s, John Cage was experimenting with musique concrete in the 30’s. While I can’t stand listening to most of the avant-garde “scene” that Cage was a part of, I can still recognise the influence they’ve had on other genres of music.
First of all, John Cage is dead. He is not the one who sued. Those who own the copyright sued.
But the main point, as far as I remember when the story first broke, is that the second guy who used a “track of silence” actually * credited * John Cale in the liner notes. Even as a joke, it qualifies as recognition that the idea was lifted from elsewhere, and therefore compensation is owed to the owners of “4’33” 's copyright.
Robert Palmer’s song “Looking for Clues” has a false ending with a moment of silence, that’s very effectively done.
I’m normally not a big fan of Madonna (understatement, for which read: I hate most everything she does). However, one song I like by her is “Don’t Tell Me”, which has a few beats of silence that break up the first few lines very well.
The big pause before the unexpectedly quiet and utterly bleak ending of Don Juan by Richard Strauss.
It’s in my mind because I saw the CSO play it last week, and that pause was stretched out…and there was not a single sound from the entire audience during it. It just went on, and on, and on, and the effect was magical.
Absolutely. “Before I sputter out,” indeed!
Here’s a fun one: I have a weakness for the measure of silence in Badfinger’s “No Matter What” that occurs right before one of the last statements of “Ooh girl, ooh girl, with you!”
The best moment of silence for me is in Belle and Sebastian’s “Mayfly”. When they performed this on the Black session, the crowd started clapping politely, only to be knocked out on the upswing. If any of the audience had ever actually * listened * to Belle and Sebastian before, they would have expected the pause.
(This is the point when I stop before I rant bitterly. If * I * had been in the audience, I would have known when to clap.) :mad: