Another Beautiful Passage by John Cage

When a composer feels a responsibility to make, rather than accept, he eliminates from the area of possibility all those events that do not suggest the at that point in time vogue of profundity. For he takes himself seriously, wishes to be considered great, and he thereby diminishes his love and increases his fear and concern about what people will think. There are many serious problems confronting such an individual. He must do it better, more impressively, more beautifully, etc. than anybody else. And what, precisely, does this, this beautiful profound object, this masterpiece, have to do with Life? It has this to do with Life: we are separate from it. Now we see it and now we don't. When we see it we feel better, and when we are away from it, we don't feel so good. Life seems shabby and chaotic, disordered, ugly in contrast.

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The important question is what is it that is not just beautiful but also ugly, not just good, but also evil, not just true, but also an illusion.

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Someone may object that the sounds that happened were not interesting. Let him. Next time he hears the piece, it will be different, perhaps less interesting, perhaps suddenly exciting. Perhaps disastrous. A disaster for whom? For him, not [the composer]. And life the same: always different, sometimes exciting, sometimes boring, sometimes gently pleasing and so on; and what other important questions are there? Than that we live and how to do it in a state of accord with Life.

- John Cage

Here's a counter-intuitive nugget from John Cage :

"If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all but very interesting."

While I don't think it's always correct, there's something to that.

John Cage represents an extremism. He fights to let sound be sound, thus his fight is also against any sort of artist intervention or created symbolism. It's a bit paradoxical isn't it? Even if he were to set a tape recorder in a forest and then play it back to an audience, it would still represent a conscious artistic choice.

His extreme stance when it comes to music making is perhaps why I've heard people say, "Read and love Cage, but listen to his music only out of curiosity".

It makes me wonder how John Cage would see the modern electronic music I listen to - it's a genre not as restrictive as other genres, indeed, it's the most free. From the organic-electronic fusions of early Amon Tobin to the hyper synthetic glitches of Oval, the genre follows Cage's sound first worship. BUT, the genre is also about highly personal expressions, an extension of the ego Cage might say. Sound first, but manipulated to the creator's desires. It might be instructive to look at how Cage views Varese, a composer who manipulated interesting sounds to his own end. Varese is important as a predecessor, Cage goes on, but he remains distinctly a figure of the past because "rather than dealing with sounds as sounds, he deals with them as Varese." Cage might view the same way someone such as Aphex Twin, who's intensely weird abstractions are an extension of his personality, even while pushing sound to the forefront.

Another "Silence" Excerpt

There are people who say, "If music's that easy to write, I could do it." Of course they could, but they don't. I find [Morton] Feldman's own statement more affirmative. We were driving back from some place in New England where a concert had been given. He is a large man and falls asleep easily. Out of a sound sleep, he awoke to say, "Now that things are so simple, there's so much to do." And then he went back to sleep.

One thing that has always pissed me off is when someone says, "Even I could do that." But they don't. And that's the point. Art is not about technical ability - and that goes over the layman's head. The layman calls the artist pretentious, but the true pretension lies in the layman. Should artists restrict themselves to what the layman thinks is art, or should everyone just let art be?

'Silence' by John Cage

"As the unchallenged father figure of American experimental music, Mr. Cage wields an influence that extends far beyond sound alone....Indeed, the entire American avant-garde would be unthinkable without Mr. Cage's music, writings, and genially patriarchical personality."

From what I understand, this nigga did more than anyone else to free sound to be -just- sound. I'm not that far into the book yet, but even already his ideas impress me in their profundity.

It is the sheer pleasure of hearing sound that is at the crux of all his ideas. To Cage, experimental music is merely a method to release sound to be sound. Chance operations, improvisation, and undefined variables all function in the same way - to produce a new and unique listening experience every time. Part of his framework that allows for this is the division of composition, performance, and listening into seperate and distinct activities, so much so that he laughs, "What do they have to do with each other at all?" What happens then is unrestricted freedom in creativity: a composer may make a piece last 639 years, or have a pianist play nothing for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Cage calls it "meaningless play", but the focus is clearly on the act of creation. It's a new product of sound every performance, but most importantly, it's also unique for the composer. He's definitely an artist's artist.

In the activity of listening, Cage contends that there is always something to hear, you just have to open your ears. Using an anecdote relating his experience in a room designed to be completely silent, Cage theorizes that there isn't really silence at all. As he sat in this room that was desigend to be silent, he heard two tones, one low and one high. He was informed that the low was his circulation system and that the high was his nervous system. "Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot." It's a bit philosophical I think - it's really about changing your definition of what constitutes sound, or maybe even more broadly, about being receptive to the world around you.

How I think his Zen buddhism figures into that:
Zen makes use of koans, anecdotes that are paradoxical or seemingly nonsensical, but are stepping stones to enlightment. They shut you up and make you go 'Whuh?'. A moment of perplexion follows, and rational thought ceases. Then, your mind is free. Cage's compositional methods function similar to koans. They slap you upside the head and make you go 'Whuh?'. But then you listen. Then, you are in a state of 'be here now'. You begin to hear sounds unencumbered by your notion of what music is or should be. You just hear. It's really a kind of a beautiful and life-affirming approach: take in the world as it is, rather than what you think it is.

Here's a story that he tells that I like. It may be predictable, but it illustrates his thoughts on sound perfectly:

Several men, three as a matter of fact, were out walking one day, and as they were walking along and talking one of them noticed another man standing on a hill ahead of them. He turned to his friends and said, "Why do you think that man is standing up there on that hill?" One said, "He must be up there because it's cooler there and he's enjoying the breeze." He turned to another and repeeated the question, "Why do you think that man's standing up there on that hill?" The second said, "Since the hill is elevated above the rest of the land, he must be up there in order to see something in the distance." And the third said, "He must have lost his friend and that is why he is standing there alone on that hill." After some time walking along, the men came up on the hill and the one who had been standing there was still there: standing there. They asked him to say which one was right concerning his reason for standing where he was standing.

"What reasons do you have for my standing here?" he asked. "We have three," they answered. "First, you are standing up here because it's cooler here and you are enjoying the breeze. Second, since the hill is elevated above the rest of the land, you are up here in order to see something in the distance. Third, you have lost your friend and that is why you are standing here alone on this hill. We have walked this way; we never meant to climb this hill; now we want an answer: Which one of us is right?"

The man answered."I just stand."