Work by John Cage Times Have Changed Music Review
Composer, conceptual artist and professional provocateur John Muzzle, in a 1966 portrait. Victor Drees/Getty Images hibernate caption
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Victor Drees/Getty Images
Composer, conceptual artist and professional person provocateur John Cage, in a 1966 portrait.
Victor Drees/Getty Images
Today, exactly 100 years after his birth, composer, writer and conceptual artist John Cage is still, for many, Public Enemy No. i. On a calibration far beyond the reach of any other 20th-century art composer, this main provocateur is nonetheless the one who inflames and infuriates. (I like to imagine that Cage, a natural-built-in trickster, would have loved the chip of April Fool's mischief that iTunes pulled a few years ago when they offered his "silent" 4'33" as their gratis download of the 24-hour interval.)
But Cage was no pull a fast one on artist; iv'33" wasn't silent and it wasn't a joke at all. When a pianist does zippo more than elevator and close the instrument's lid, the ambient sounds surrounding the listener, and even the listener'south own breath, go the vehicle for a kind of sonic zazen. Information technology is a stunningly potent invitation to reframe music and the world. In a 1988 interview with composer William Duckworth, Cage said that 4'33" was a piece he used "constantly in my life feel. No twenty-four hour period goes by without my making use of that slice in my life and in my work ... More than anything else, it's the source of my enjoyment of life."
His habit of putting a frame around take a chance encounters and stamping those catholic accidents with his ain signature may well anger you, but at the very least he forces y'all to reconsider your expectations and assumptions. Not just inside classical music circles — and whether or non yous personally savour his output or his aesthetics — Cage fundamentally reshaped ideas of what music was and what it could exist. (Be sure to check out 33 artists from Wilco's Glenn Kotche to Amanda Palmer to Cage specialist Margaret Leng Tan reacting to the question: "John Cage, what does he communicate?")
While it is true that he could accept disseminated his ideas via the ministry building (a path he considered early on, before he was introduced to Buddhism), visual art (ditto), or more primarily equally a writer or equally a philosopher, music and live performance were his main modes of expression. Similar meditation itself, Cage's work is best experienced rather than explained, and so in honor of the Cage centennial, here are five videos and functioning clips of his work, each a path into understanding what he was all about.
Sonatas And Interludes
- from Cage: Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano
- by Boris Berman
One of earliest of John Cage's many musical innovations was the prepared pianoforte. How he came to invent it is now the stuff of fable: One story describes a metal rod accidentally falling into Muzzle's piano as he accompanied a dance class in 1939 in Seattle. In whatever case, Cage began intricately rigging the bowels of his pianoforte with any number of bolts, screws, $.25 of safety and weatherstripping. The result was a completely unique sound – a complete, customized battery of percussion within a box. It took Cage more than than three hours to prepare a piano to perform his Sonatas and Interludes, equanimous between 1946 and 1948. Sonatas 14 and 15 go as a pair, and feature a central note around which Muzzle weaves an exotic garland of melody. — Tom Huizenga
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Stephen Drury Prepares A Muzzle-ian Piano
- from Cage:The Piano Works I
- past Stephen Drury
So what goes into preparing a piano according to Cage'south specs, anyway? Pianist Stephen Drury, a Cage specialist, explains how he gets the instrument gear up (a bread clip, strips of rubber from a canning jar, screws, bolts), how long it takes (at least 3 hours) and how to do it (very carefully).
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'Indeterminacy'
- from Indeterminacy: New Attribute of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music
- past David Tudor
For his 1959 Indeterminacy recording, John Cage read xc of his own tales — "autobiographical fragments," he chosen them; some funny, some melancholic — out loud in random guild. Each story lasted exactly lx seconds, with some stretched out very slowly and some crammed in every bit fast as possible in order to make the one-minute marker. Meanwhile, beyond his own range of hearing, his friend and collaborator, the pianist David Tudor, performed bits of Cage's Concert for Pianoforte and Orchestra with his Fontana Mix. (In his performance notes for Indeterminacy, Muzzle indicated that i could perform the stories with any music the performers liked, or no music at all.)
The results are both curious and sublime. As Kay Larson explains in her excellent, lucid and newly published book Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, the guiding forcefulness behind this work was his Buddhism teacher, D.T. Suzuki: "Cage had encountered teachings on indeterminacy in Suzuki's course. Suzuki'due south vision of the universe was glace and full of transformative potential. Indeterminacy means, literally: not stock-still, non settled, uncertain, indefinite. It means that y'all don't know where y'all are. How can it be otherwise, say the Buddhist teachings, since you have no fixed or inherent identity and are [yourself] ceaselessly in procedure?"
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"I've Got A Secret"
- from Indeterminacy: New Attribute of Class in Instrumental and Electronic Music
- by John Muzzle
In January 1960, John Cage showed up on the immensely popular television game evidence I've Got A Clandestine to perform his "Water Walk." (The 2012 equivalent: Björk on Dancing With The Stars?)
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'Variations V'
- from Music for Merce Cunningham: Five Rock Air current
- past John Cage WIth David Tudor & Takehisa Kosugi
John Cage'due south work didn't exist in a vacuum. Have for instance 1965's Variations Five, a collaboration between choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham — whom Muzzle start met in 1938, and who soon became Cage's companion until the composer's death in 1992. The co-creators of Variations V also included David Tudor, Robert Moog, video artist Nam June Paik and electronic artist Baton Klüver, among others. The score was created by coin flips that determined each sonic element; accordingly, the music would change at each performance.
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Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2012/09/05/160339846/silence-and-sound-five-ways-of-understanding-john-cage
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