Oh yeah: Two men walk into a bar. The third man walks into the bar as well and buys them both drinks.
It’s more accurate to put it that way:
- In music, there are composers, performers and listeners
- Composing, performing and listening are arbitrary actions
- Composing, performing and listening are unrelated activities
The first two are self-evident and the third must be taken into the context in which Cage was working: contemporary classical music c. 1950. A composer writes down instructions on a sheet of paper, without any interaction with performers. Performers translate this instructions in to sound without contact with the composer and without paying attention to the audience. If they’re recording, there isn’t even any audience. People listen without influencing the performers. If they’re listening to a record, the performers aren’t even there.
Cage is saying: if a composer can make music without performers and listeners, than listeners can also make music without composers and performers.
Where Buddhism plays in is that this isn’t meant to be an empty philosophical argument. This has to be practiced. In order to practice his musical philosophy it was necessary for him, as a composer, to write music that could neither be performed nor listened to. By using chance operation, it was possible to remove the composer out of the equation while having performers play and people listen. Lastly, if you isolate the listener, you get 4’33".
Ah, but that cartoon put the idea into your head that a construction site could be filled with music. So the next time you walk past a construction site you’ll stop for exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds and listen to the sounds of the world as music instead of the industrial noise pollution that it really is.
And that’s what makes the writers, directors, animators and producers of Termite Terrace (super) geniuses and Cage a hack.
No it didn’t. It was a cartoon. A well-made cartoon, for certain, but it didn’t put any such ideas into my head. If you’re serious about this, and 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’”, then why is the idea of listening to a performance of 4’33" as music proving such an awkward concept for so many people?
Seriously, for the last time - yes, Cage would be a total hack if all he was saying was “guys, you ever listen to the sounds around you? Cause, you know, they’re there and stuff and I like to listen to them just as much as I like listening to other music!”
He’s trying to get you to listen to the world around through all the filters you normally apply - automatically - to classical music. I guess I can see how this would boil down to the same thing for the casual listener. But Cage’s music has introduced me to concepts like unimpededness and interpenetration (which I described in my first post here) that make my listening - to anything - really different than if I had never encountered Cage. This thread actually reminded me of those concepts and I have been re-testing the last few days with quite pleasing results.
My favorite is unimpededness - attempting to hear each sound as though it was totally alone in the universe. In other words, hearing a sequence of sounds and refraining from making them a sequence. The next sound is always a surprise! (A good way to ease into this kind of listening is with Cage’s prepared piano pieces. These are pieces he wrote to played on a piano with all manner of stuff stuck into the strings, significantly changing the timbre of many notes. These pieces are surprisingly listenable - some of them sound kind of tribal to me. But since all the tones have been changed the next note is, often, a surprise).
I found this on YouTube - the beginning is a little too fast to get that effect, but try it after about 2:30 or so. At the very least I hope it will prove that John Cage is also a “real” composer.
ETA: Here’s one where you can see the actual prepared strings of the piano. This is a little more representative of the prepared piano sound - it’s from Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, suggested above.
No. I’m on your side here, but that cartoon wasn’t it. The music was layered over the cartoon and, for the most part, had nothing to do with it. The Budweiser frogs are more of the “music in situ” situation than the Loony Tunes cartoon. In the same way that Lionel Ritchie music videos do not make me hear the music of sculpting classes, the Loony Tunes does not make me hear the music of construction sites.
However there are some cartoons and staged live action videos where the music is entirely made by the natural sounds. Cage’s idea seems to be that this can occur spontaneously, and if you actually listen to the sounds around you there is music there.
Listening to an extended period of “silence”? Of course I have, as I’ve stated several times already. And I was doing it long before I ever heard of Cage. So, I suspect, have most other people. What now?
I also find it highly amusing that here we have a discussion about a guy who calls four and a half minutes of him not doing anything “art”, and the guy who points out that he didn’t do anything is called “contrarian”.
It’s taking longer than we thought, eh?
It really is. Especially when some people can dismiss something as just a cartoon:
No it didn’t. It was a cartoon. A well-made cartoon, for certain, but it didn’t put any such ideas into my head.
And then turn around and declare four minutes and thirty seconds of silence “genius.” It boggles my mind.
‘Just’ a cartoon? Where did that extra word appear from? I dismissed it as being irrelevant to the aesthetic challenges posed by 4’33", and stand by that.
Total crap. It shouldn’t even be identified by a name, as there’s nothing there. The name 4’33" should be applied to Cage himself. By that I mean he was a nothing. I doubt he could even compose his own suicide note, let alone decent music.
Andy Warhal, anyone? :dubious:
I wasn’t asking if you had ever spent 4 minutes and 33 seconds in silence. I asked you to try it once more, with an open mind, taking into account all the philosophical concepts mentioned in this thread (every single one of which, honestly, I do not believe you could have been aware of before reading this thread.) You are clearly unwilling to do so, and you appear to believe that doing so could not possibly be worth the time or effort. I find this disappointing.
Here’s another experiment, which I hope you are willing to honestly try: read through this thread again, and summarize what you believe John Cage is trying to tell us through 4:33.
I think THIS is the fundamental point of disagreement here - you think John Cage is a hack, but you infer a fundamentally different message from his music than those of us who think he has something worthy to say. What do you base your interpretation on? Why, specifically, do you think the other philosophical elements we’ve mentioned here are NOT contained in his music? To be frank it seems as if you’re saying, “I cannot understand anything particularly interesting about this piece, therefore there is nothing particularly interesting about this piece.”
applauds oh yeah!! good for you!! excellent contribution…good job…you’re everybodys hero, bravo!!!
I don’t mean to get cunty, but ether reply with something worthwhile, or avoid the urge to click the button,
and its Warhol you dumb fuck.
Chronos, you’re not actually discussing the ideas this thread has brought up; you’re simply defending willful ignorance.
In any case, your “experiment” misses the point. The main driver of art is almost always not the actual work, but the frame. The context. That’s why photography works, why found art works, why documentaries work. Editing found reality into art, or even taking materials such as paint or clay and refashioning them into a new context.
The power of 4’33" lay in the context in which Cage, for the first time, *placed *silence, not the silence itself, as you so bulldoggishly point out. Over and over.
Here’s the only experiment that will actually work in this situation:
[ul]
[li]Step one, you build yourself a time machine. [/li][li]Step two, you get those neurons that contain your knowledge of 4’33" excised from your brain. [/li][li]Step three, get yourself back to Woodstock, New York, on August 29, 1952, with no foreknowledge or or expectation of what you’re going to hear. [/li][li]Step four, sit in the audience while pianist David Tudor sits at the piano and helps Cage place you in an entirely unexpected moment where you find yourself primed to listen, surprised by the “silence,” and, possibly, eventually, like many people in the audience that night and since, rethinking your traditional views of music, performance, silence, etc. [/ul] [/li]
Or possibly not; thus the experiment.
This is Cafe Society, percussion, not the Pit. Keep the insults there.
As for a few other people: this discussion is about 4:33, and not the other posters. Making comments about them and not the debate adds nothing to the discussion except needless acrimony. Let’s get back to talking about the piece and not each other.
So, has anyone made a joke about using 4’33" as a ringtone yet?
I’ll just be shutting up now. But it won’t be art when I do it.
Yeah, I mean, it’s so hard to find any evidence he ever wrote anything, without, like, clicking the links in this thread.
Well, now we know what the emperor could have said. “My people, I am not naked! I am reconceptualizing the idea of clothing!”
But the thing is, I’m not arguing he failed in his mission. I’m saying he didn’t write good music. He did some pretty wild stuff, and maybe he deserves credit for doing it, and for making people thing, but most people, if they want to listen to music, aren’t going to put Glass on. His stuff isn’t particularly entertaining, I don’t think.
You mean cage in that last line?