Cage's 4:33 -- Genius or Garbage?

Cafe Society
101

The fact of this discussion proves you wrong. Irrefutably. You’re making more effort to blindly contradict, arguing for its own sake, than you are to understand.

That’s almost like saying “The piano communicated something, but the pianist didn’t.” It’s even more like saying that a photographer who photographs an existing situation rather than staging it first is communicating nothing. Think of Cage as a documentary composer, in the same way the Weegee was a documentary photographer. Cage put you in a context to experience “found” sound, just as a documentary photographer puts found images into a context that allows you to see them.

Cage set the stage for that communication, and he communicated the suggestion that you could think of such things as music.

The rest is simply contradiction for its own sake, Chronos. Too bad you couldn’t take this opportunity to learn something new.

102

Bro, I think it’s time to just let it go. It’s obvious that for whatever reason, Chronos is 100% sure that he Does Not Like John Cage. Sometimes (and believe me, I’ve learned this through experience) you just can’t force someone to intellectually engage a subject that you, personally, find fascinating.

Chronos, I’m curious - did you try the experiment I suggested? To be honest I’ve always enjoyed your contributions to the SDMB, and am frankly baffled by (what I can’t help reading as) your willful ignorance here.

103

45:33 has a much better beat.

104

I’m not Chronos, but I just tried your experiment, and it left me with 2 observations:

  1. My fan is loud

  2. Four and a half minutes seems longer when you’re just sitting there with your eyes closed listening to ambient noise.

Other than that, I don’t know, man. I’ve read through the thread, and I think I understand what you guys are saying, and what Cage was trying to do. But, honestly, I still don’t like it or think of it as music. The thing is, I don’t know how to explain why I don’t like it in a way that you won’t yell at me or call me ignorant for. :slight_smile: But I’m going to try, anyway.

It seems to me that art is the imposition of order on randomness to tell a narrative. So, the musician, for instance, chooses from all the possible sounds, specific ones, and fits them together in an orderly way to create a composition, a novelist puts letters together into words, words into sentences, etc., a sculptor takes clay or stone and shapes it into a specific form, and so on, for all the arts. Then, when he’s done, his audience, the people listening to the symphony, or reading the book, or looking at the sculpture, are able to say, “Yes,we see and are amused/moved by the story you’ve chosen to tell.”

It doesn’t seem like Cage is doing that with 4’33". In fact, he’s doing exactly the opposite. He’s saying, “I’m not going to provide you with anything at all. I’m going to have you sit and listen to the sounds that are in the room.” He’s deliberately not imposing order. The result might be profound to some people, but it’s not music the same way that Beethoven or the Beatles are music.

105

I tried the experiment today, too. I had an hour to kill waiting for my train, in rush-hour London. So I stood on a busy street and tried to listen to the sounds around me as music. I had to restart several time, and never got to the point where I could filter out enough, or hear little enough, that the full nature of any individual sounds could be heard. Given Cage’s position as an adopted New Yorker, this must have been a familiar situation, and I’m wondering if there’s something in it about why he started to think about silence in the way he did…

Try it again, without the fan, and without timing it. I’m genuinely interested to see whether your response changes.

Again, as with Chronos’s reference to ‘communicative’ music - what ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ does a symphony or a sculpture tell?

I suppose at least music does, in most familiar situations, revolve around an obvious temporal structure.* But so do the sounds within a performance of 4’33".

The Beatles aren’t music in the way that Beethoven is, and vice versa. One cannot meaningfully judge one aesthetic by the criteria of another. There’s far less order imposed in jazz than in classical music - does that make it a lesser art?

Me too.

  • One does not have to go far from everyday experiences to find exceptions to this. The English tradition of church bell-ringing is one I like to use to demonstrate this, and it’s also a precursor to minimalism. In change-ringing, the maximum amount of variation is one change to the pattern every few seconds. But it’s possible to listen to everything else that is happening with the sounds, the timbres of the bell, the rhythmic patterns implicit in the irregular rhythms of the changing patterns, and so on. I’ve done this many times on a warm Sunday morning, because the alternatives are close the window or get out of bed. And the church in question is half a mile away.
106

Of course not. Cage would’ve been the first person to agree with you.

One of Cage’s goals was to get you to think about rethinking your ideas of what music is. It worked. You may not change your definition of music, but you’ve thought about it. Thus he was successful.

107

Far better put than my waffle - thank you! :slight_smile:

108

Thats not such a bad thing ether, Not everyone hears music in the same way, or even would want to hear “music” in that way, just the awareness is the idea really, the fact you tried to listen for it, and even tried to explain your ideas on it is beautiful.

I don’t think anyone here is trying to say this is beautiful music for everyone and you’re totally ignorant if you dont hear it.

109

Perhaps not, but some of us are saying that this idea didn’t originate with John Cage, and that he brought absolutely nothing to the table in this respect. Most people probably have no idea who John Cage is, yet they could probably still articulate something regarding listening to ambient noises and the lack of “true silence” (for that matter, perhaps you recall a certain tune by Simon & Garfunkle, which had a little something to say on the matter). Even Forrest Whittaker is now challenging people to “just listen” before movies nowadays.

What we’re not buying (well, what I’m not buying, anyway) is that Cage had anything new to say with 4:33. He may have been a great composer of actual music for all I know, but with regard to this piece in particular, it’s little more than wankery. He didn’t hit upon some novel realization, nor did he articulate anything new regarding the phenomenon. He certainly hasn’t changed the way I hear ambient sounds. Indeed, I can’t even fall asleep without a fan on because I focus so much on all the ambient sounds around me when the lights go off. And I’ve done this since long before I had any knowledge of Cage.

110

But have you ever listened to the ambient sounds around you before you sleep as music? Cage wasn’t just saying ‘hey, there’s noise around us all the time’. He was saying there’s sounds around us all the time, and that all of them can be listened to as music, if we choose to and if we have the opportunity. I’m not aware of anybody who took this approach before him.

111

If I may go off on a slight tangent here, I thought about this when I was camping the other day. There was a group a few sights away that had music playing during most of their waking hours. They preferred that sound to the ambient sound of the forest, which I find deeply relaxing and satisfying. I can’t pretend to know WHY they preferred it, but one of my pet theories is that the lack of a constant soundtrack makes some people uncomfortable.

I wonder about the phenomenon of portable, personal music,…how so many people walk around with wires hanging out of their ears. It’s a safe bet that NONE of them are listening to 4’33’.

112

Self-imposed piped music is something that’s been around for decades. Many people have a habit of putting a radio on when, e.g., doing the housework. Often, they’re not actually listening to it. And I your observation that this extends to portable players is quite right - and it’s also something that’s been around for some time. Whether using music in this way erodes the ability to concentrate on and appreciate sounds (whether in a traditional ‘music’ context or otherwise) is a matter for debate. It does seem to leave people with a sense of normalcy at this raised volume level, so that natural sound levels seem uncomfortable. What is unquestionable is just how antisocial it is to impose it on others, in the way you encountered.

My example: when I was a student, I had a job one summer in a warehouse. The thing that I hated most (more than the low pay, 5am starts, boring tasks, boring colleagues, vile colleagues, etc.) was the banal pop-music radio station piped throughout the building.

113

I think an argument could be made that a whole generation of people (and multiple generations afterward who will never hear of Cage thanks to TV and DVDs) were exposed to the idea of “hearing the world as music” a decade before 4:33 was ever “composed:”

I give you Rhapsody in Rivets, one of the greatest Looney Tunes shorts ever.

114

Weird: that was the original title of Gershwin’s Second Rhapsody, from a decade earlier. I wonder what the connection is?

115

Any good prank should shake people up and get them talking, maybe even re-thinking their perceptions and assumptions. 4’33" is a great prank in that regard. But I still say it’s got more in common with the work of Joey Skaggs than with Mozart or the Beatles.

116

I’m not saying he wasn’t successful. I’m saying a lot of the stuff he did wasn’t music. It was sort of anti-music. The idea running though a lot of Cage’s work seems to be that “music”, as such, is just an artificial construct, and what he tried to do with a lot of his stuff was break down the seperation between “music” and “sound”, and to celebrate random sound. This might have had something to do with the Buddhism, I don’t know.

But I just find that attitude, as far as I understand it, repellant, and don’t really like Cage’s stuff or what he was trying to do.

117

I must sheepishly admit that I have 4’33" on my iPod. I usually play music in shuffle-mode, and now and then I like to get a few minutes’ break to listen to other sounds, let my ears readjust, etc. It’s a pleasant surprise when it comes on.

By the way, here is a YouTube link to “Rhapsody in Rivets,” mentioned upthread by Justin_Bailey.

118

Cool. But the fact that you made the effort to express that reaction means that he made you think about it seriously. He wasn’t trying to convince you of anything, only to think about it. Mission accomplished.

119

I’d take it further, and say that if he’s managed to engage you to a point at which you can define him (however vaguely) as ‘anti-music’, then you must have boundaries within which ‘music’ exists. What are these boundaries, and if you are not sure, isn’t it something that deserves further thought?

120

I’m sorry but that cartoon isn’t the same idea as 4’33". It’s just a music video set at a construction site. If it had been a musical number that was composed of the sounds present at a construction site it would have been closer. I feel like I’ve seen a cartoon like this, but that one certainly wasn’t it. (Related note: Bud. Er. Bud. Errrrr. Weis. Bud. Et cetera.)

Check out this Visa commercial using the famous Loony Toons “factory music” (Powerhouse by Raymond Scott) Link to YouTube. They made a lot of the percussive sounds with Foley style soundwork. I feel like this is a better implementation of the “classical music video” than Rhapsody in Rivets. It’s thematically more unified. (What the hell was going on with the steam shovel with a boot?)

Anyway, this phenomenon seems to be the exact opposite of what John Cage was trying to do. It’s building the music into the location. Cage is encouraging you to notice that the location already has a music all it’s own.