Right…Cage. Sorry. I even like some of Glass’s stuff.
That opens up a whole new discussion…what is good music, what do most people want to hear…these are things no one person can answer…
the what is good music one is particularly dangerous.
See, it’s this “listen to sounds as though they were music” stuff that’s annoying. I doubt that anyone here could actually explain what that means, to be honest. It’s empty artsy buzzwords, just as “re-envisioning a paradigm” is empty corporate buzzwords. The explanation makes less sense than what is being explained.
Ambient sounds can certainly have rhythm; I’ve noticed it, and played with my head position to alter the rhythm, sometimes even creating rhythm where there was none. That doesn’t mean that I think it’s music. Rhythm is not synonymous with music. Ambient sounds may or may not have tonal qualities, depending on the source of the sounds. Many times, all you wind up with are a series of interfering sound wave patterns which result in cacophony, rather than anything even remotely pleasing.
If Cage wanted to say that “ambient sounds should be accepted for what they are, and can even be enjoyed in themselves, regardless of context; here listen to four-and-a-half minutes of “silence” which isn’t really silence to see what I mean” that would be one thing. To try and equate all sound to music, or to say that “all sound should be listened to as music”, whatever the heck that means, is, as far as I’m concerned, an artistically empty and meaningless exercise. One could make the exact same artistic statement by using four and a half minutes of sounds with randomly varying rhythm, duration, waveform, and pitch. Which, to my mind, means there is nothing about 4:33 as written, or what Cage was allegedly trying to say through it, that makes it unique or even all that interesting.
Of course, what you hear when you hear a performance of a Mozart Concerto isn’t due to Mozart either, but due to the performers who are following Mozart’s instructions. Cage’s instructions are: Perform rests.
During a performance of the Mozart, someone may rip a loud fart or a fire engine may go by or someone may rustle a program next to you, or some of the musicians may flub their notes. They aren’t composed into the piece but they are part of that performance, making that performance unique. Your experience and perception of the performance are affected by their addition.
Most composers would prefer that these spontaneous additions and alterations to the piece not be part of the performance. Cage embraced them and made them the entirety of the piece, the auditory equivalent of placing a frame around a hole in the gallery wall, making whatever you saw through the hole inside the frame the picture at that time.
When a guy rips a loud one in the rest room during intermission, we don’t perceive that to be part of our experience of the performance of a piece, because it doesn’t have the “frame” around it.
The essence of Cage (and choreographer partner in crime, Cunningham), is that a performance is simply what happens within a declared space of time. Some of it may be planned, as is our usual experience, much of it is not.
Music isn’t something abstract and innately present in particular arrangements of sounds. Sound become ‘music’ when we chose to listen to it as something other, something more than itself. Repetitive drum beats, electric guitar feedback, textless vocalisation, the interference between droning fans in the AC…all could be listened to as music, all could be perceived as just sounds.
You seem to be leading towards something here, a particular definition of music which relies on tonality. If that’s a requirement for your rejection of 4’33", then please say so.
Can be listened to. He wasn’t preaching.
My bolding - this is a crucial element, that any performance is a unique entity which cannot be repeated, replicated or re-experience. As a listener, one not only hears a unique presentation of music, but also brings to it the state of mind one is in, the emotional baggage one has at that point in time. Even if the sounds could be reproduced entirely and exactly, one could not hear it again in the same way. Hence lissener’s comment earlier:
The point is to concentrate on the sounds the way you concentrate on a live music performance. Sure, we’re always hearing sounds; as has been mentioned repeatedly in this thread, real silence just isn’t possible. But most of the time we’re filtering the “ambient” sounds out to concentrate on what’s the “important” sound. If I’m talking to my wife in our living room, there are lots of background noises: from the air conditioner, from the refrigerator, from traffic outside, from neighborhood dogs barking, from a train passing not far from here, maybe from the TV or radio, maybe from her cat (not “our” cat). And if you sit outside late at night and listen, you can hear a zillion noises: traffic, crickets, birds. And beneath that are lower and lower tones: air conditioners most notably, but also if you listen really intently, you can hear a low hum that the streetlights put off. You can hear your own breathing. Maybe you can hear thumping bassline from a car four blocks away.
But all that is what we consider “noise.” It’s an instinctive and nearly unconcsious process for us to filter it out. We learn to ignore it so that we can concentrate on the “important” stuff: If I’m talking to my wife, I tune all those noises out so that I can more effectively process what she’s saying to me, and if I’m at a concert, I tune all the extraneous noises out to focus my attention on the music that’s being performed.
Most music performances are loud enough that it’s easy to hear above the general racket that the world naturally makes all the time. It’s easy for us to focus on the music, and not be distracted by all the ambient noise.
That focus of attention is the key idea here. You focus your attention on the music, ignoring everything else (or trying to). You listen to the rhythms of the music, the varying loudnesses of the different parts, the way they interact with each other, the way the change and flow; you do all of this at the same time that you’re intentionally ignoring all of the other sounds in the room. It’s a rather amazingly complicated cognitive achievement, but one that we all, of necessity, learn to do at a very young age; otherwise the world would just be a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” in William James’s words.
And Cage wants you to take that focus of attenion – that fine mental ability to listen to different sounds and hear them simultaneously as separate sounds and as part of one big “piece” – and instead of applying it to oboes and violas and tympanis all playing at the same time, apply it to a hundred people breathing and chairs creaking and maybe a thunder-roll outside and whatever other noises are naturally going on during those minutes.
That’s what’s meant by “listening to sounds as though they were music.” It’s not “empty artsy buzzwords.” Just because you don’t understand something, please don’t assume that no one else does.
You know, after I wrote my previous post, I went out back and sat on the swing for a few minutes. Since it was on my mind, I tried listening to all the sounds the way I would at a music performance. It was interesting; the birds were in full stereo, then they flew a few houses down and a bird with a different call started in a different part of the yard. There was a swelling, then receding low bassline from a plane, an octave or two below the hum of the air conditioner, and occasional counterpoints as cars drove by.
Then I heard a car in the street that sounded like it was slowing down, maybe to pull into my driveway, and for a moment I lost the “performance” mindset as I wondered if I should go see if someone was here.
And that’s when I realized there’s yet another cognitive component to “listening the way we would listen to music.” Normally, when we’re in regular-life mode, there’s always at least a minimal sense of readiness; there are lots of background noises, but we always know, just from a few decades of experience on Earth, that at any moment there could be a sound we need to respond to. It could be a car in the driveway, a ringing phone, a knock on the door, someone calling our name, a cry for help, a siren, a computer’s warning sound, an approaching dog, or any of countless others. There could always be a sound that prods us to do something about it.
But during a classical music performance, we’re allowed to let go of that readiness for a brief time and just listen. No matter what the musicians play, we’re not required to do anything ourselves; we can just sit and concentrate on the music, letting our guard down for a few minutes. We don’t become simple passive receptors of the music, but we are allowed to focus on it entirely, with the knowledge that we have no responsibility to it other than to pay attention.
Without realizing it, I had fallen somewhat into that (very pleasant) non-readiness state as I listened to the birds and planes and all. Being snapped out of it by what I thought was a car in my driveway got me thinking about this.
Why are some rhythmic (or a-rhythmic) patterns “music” and some not? Why are some tones “music” and some not? These are the questions Cage is posing, and in trying to answer them many people have learned (experientially) that it’s an incredibly difficult line to draw.
In this regard, Cage lies at the logical conclusion of a long line of composers who pushed beyond the range of rhythms, tones, etc, traditionally considered “acceptable” in classical composition. (Maybe someone can help me out here, but I believe these composers include Arnold Schoenberg and Erik Satie) These composers worked mainly within the framework of “traditional” composition. I hope that someone who knows more about composition than I do can give a coherent example.
(I will give an incoherent example - a certain set of notes tends gives the listener a feeling of mounting tension. Perhaps you can imagine such a series of notes from a film score or something. In classical composition, this tension is traditionally resolved with another certain set of notes. In the compositions of these newer, boundary-pushing composers, the tension can be built and left unresolved. I bet this makes no sense, but I’m sure someone knows what I’m talking about and can bail me out…)
Darwin’s Finch, in response to your challenge (“Can anyone explain what it means to to listen to these sounds as though they were music?”), to which I believe jackelope rose quite respectably, I challenge you to define why some tones and rhythms are musical and some are not.
Cage did that, too.
Further to the idea that’s been mentioned in the last few posts of “putting a frame around” whatever unique set of sounds is happening at the time, and also in re: to Merce Cunningham - Cunningham and Cage often performed dance and music pieces at the same time that they had composed separately without consulting each other. The beauty of such performances was that sometimes the music and dance expressed completely different emotions; sometimes they created an interesting counterpoint to each other; and sometimes they went so well together that Cunningham and Cage couldn’t have come up with anything more beautiful even if they had tried. The fact that they hadn’t, the sheer serendipity, makes the moment even more beautiful.
The point of 4’33" is that even the completely unconstructed soundscape around you can achieve moments that are, indeed, as beautiful and moving as Mozart, if you give them the chance to have that effect on you.
Yes, and also an increased awareness of non-western European musical traditions played a large part - anything from Bartok’s folk influences through to the direct and acknowledged influence of gamelan music on everyone from Debussy through to Cage himself.
It makes perfect sense, and can be taken further, that these sounds can be placed into a different context in which they do not actually have the function of ‘tension’ any more. Jazz harmonies and Philip Glass arpeggios are quite happy to use as ‘resolution’ sounds those which would be (at the very least) some form of tension requiring completion in classical harmony.
I have to thank all the posters in this thread, even though I find the whole “Emperor’s New Clothes” metaphor in relation to art and music incredibly frustrating. The responses that have been generated trying to explain and defend Cage’s work have been pretty damn brilliant, and I feel like I’ve learned a lot (and I’m married to a modern art music composer who adores Cage so … uh… I didn’t start out hostile or anything, just not tremendously informed.) So, I’m really glad that all positions in this thread have been presented, because they enabled some discussion that has been really wonderful to read. Thanks to every poster who took the time to try to explain their position clearly!
Thats pretty refreshing, Im sorry for calling someone a bad name, but hope i came across a little better in other posts.
I’ve been following this thread but been worried about posting.
I consider 4’33 to be a sketch. Cage said “Consider the silence or lack thereof”. That’s it. Any thing else you infer him saying is your own thought- a thought that may not have originated without 4’33, but not Cage’s suggestion either.
It reminds me of the ring of stones in the Philadelphia Musuem Of Art. The ring is some fist-sized, found, unworked rocks in a circle on the floor. Although the ring is large enough to comfortably stand inside, nobody does. The ring asks the question- “Just what is art? And how do we treat it?” A good question. The Van Gogh’s have remarkable textures, but nobody dares touch them.
4’33 asks a simple question about noise, silence and music. It’s a simple work needing only a simple answer.
I didn’t think this was worth starting a new thread, but I thought this was pretty awesome:
From the article:
Nitpick: Cage didn’t specify that the piece should last 639 years. He just wrote on the score “as slow as possible.” Some people understood this very literally. 639 years was chosen because the first organ had been installed in the church 639 before the performance was to be started.
But can you *dance *to it?
Sure, you just have to dance really, really slowly.
I think standing still counts as dancing in this situation.
I tend to agree.
I think what Cage was trying to do was get people involved in the process of listening. 4:33 is designed to be listened to by a live audience in a “concert hall” style acoustic setting. I have seen it performed as an advant gaurd evening and what was riveting was how the hip cogententii, who were there to “make audience noise” realised that they were both contributing and detracting from the intent of Cage. Essenmtially, it has to be experienced. It is a recursive exersice in actually hearing the room and all the humanity in it. 4:33 is for you, here now. It can not be recorded and listened to later, as it becomes static, fixed and unchangable, and even meaningless in doing so. 4:33 makes us aware of not only listening, but being aware of being both a part of and apart from a group of people listening.
FML
Did you go to UW? That is exactly the explaination I was given by a ethnomusicology grad student I was dating in college.