This piece and the Cage piece both began in 2000, and both descriptions imply the turn of the millennium are an important marker. So probably not many > 100 year pieces have started since then, but maybe we’ll get a new set in the year 3000. Makes me curious if there are a bunch of unknown 100 year performances conceived around the turns of centuries.
Anyway, I like the Long Player’s description of survival at the end; even if the music seems silly, these are interesting questions - “How does one keep a piece of music playing across generations? How does one prepare for its technological adaptability, knowing how few technologies have remained viable over the last millenium? How does one legislate for its upkeep? And how can one communicate that responsibility to those who might be looking after it some 950 years after its original custodians have perished?”
I had read the portion you quoted and found it interesting as well.
I've always been fascinated by long running processes. I'm sure you might have heard about the Clock of the Long Now [1] (Wikipedia article [2] seems more useful than the official website), which is meant to work for 10000 years. It's under construction, but their strategies to handle adversities over a 10000 year period worth looking into.
Related to that, I've read about an attempt by a software engineer presumably named Brandur who, inspired by the aforementioned clock, has attempted to build a software that would send out tweets for the next 10000 years [3]. While I personally feel it probably wouldn't succeed because there's too many things that can go wrong, it was nice to read the considerations that went into the program. Perhaps more than tweeting for the next 10000 years itself, Brandur was really trying to point out that it's difficult to build long lasting software products.
Writing software that endures for a long time without too much additional maintenance is something I'd like to do.
Another long running — though in comparison to the above much smaller — group of equipments are the space probes Voyager 1 (launched in 1977), Voyager 2 (1977) and New Horizons (2006). Unless I'm mistaken they all continue to function in limited ways and continue to send back data to the earth. Isn't it mind-blowing that something that left Earth about 45 years ago still works?! (Or maybe it's not mind blowing because I guess space doesn't have as much distrubances as the Earth).
I also like long running processes in nature. Comets are one of them. Isn't it just so cool that some of them actually (very likely) come from Oort cloud and their orbits can take hundreds or even thousands of years?
Halley's Comet — which has an orbital period of 76 years, and whose appearances have been recorded by various people in various places over the past couple of thousand years — will show up again in 2061, nearly 40 years from now. I sincerely hope I can see it then. Infact I have a calendar reminder set up for it in 2061 July. Just in case I forget. (The calendar program I currently use might die first. Or I could be dead).
Does anyone love this as music, rather than as an idea? Of composers, there are two schools: those who try to express something interesting musically, and those who produce interesting concepts. Some of Cage's work, especially, takes the second approach to extremes, where it cannot even be experienced as music. I don't think any of that sort of music will survive long, because the concept is no longer clever after it loses its novelty.
Its an excellent point. You really cant get a sense of the whole thing since its mostly one tone stretched out most of the time. Hopefully it survives the stated 639 years
It's pretty silly IMO. Extreme Concept™ isn't difficult to do, and it's even less difficult to imagine.
It's trivial to make extremely long time-based pieces on the web. You load the page, it works out the time/date, and it plays whatever the algorithm says is right for the time date. With the right algo you can make pieces that last for millions of years.
And so on.
There is a sense in which it's an interesting idea, but it's also a cultural dead end. You can only make it bigger and more extreme, and that's more about spectacle than music.
The work doesn't necessarily argue against you. It may have been the intention, or it may be the effect of the work that ideas like yours come into existence. One idea of conceptual art is that the work plays out in your mind, and the physical creation is secondary, utilitarian even.
The authenticity of the piece and it's validity is reinforced by our conversation and replay.
On this measure the timeline is arbitrary, and trumping it is a second work all together, creating a new conversation.
Most people think it is uninteresting and a total waste of time.
I can also understand the aggression a lot of Cage's work got in the past. It's very destructive for people to listen a long time to a man who is only speaking letters. Almost like torture.
IMO the point is to question the limits of what can be considered music. There's precedent (way too much in fact) in visual arts. Is a signed toilet art? Mona Lisa with a mustache? Banana taped to a wall?
None of these things are meant to be enjoyed in the traditional sense. But they might make you think, or make you angry.
So what good do these things bring the world? I don't know, probably none.
It's not the job of the work to bring good to the world, nor to interest people in the slightest, as can be said for yourself, or myself. Though you're right that the success of the work is probably intrinsically tied to it's interest.
Art, and media in general are productions of culture which celebrate our humanity. That is, they rejoice in all of our abilities to perceive, conceive and enact upon the world. Wasting people's time in this light makes people aware of their time, and allows for further interrogations of our humanities to arise. Just as we're doing now.
It's good to remember that art only gains it's status through a production being named art by an exhibitor. IMO there's no special purpose to the term. Consuming art is just another form of recreation, and people are right to hate it for any reason, just that tyranny of what is useful is usually not in the human spirits best interest.
I think the best response to your claim that "most people" find Cage uninteresting is this book intro that e. e. cummings wrote. He had a few things to say about "mostpeople":
No, it's not trivial to make extremely long time-based pieces on the web.
Because you have to keep the computer running continuously. That turns out to be extremely difficult.
So there is no spectacle, here.
Part of the magic of Cage's piece, in this incarnation, is that someone actually built the special organ, in a suitable space that might plausibly remain undisturbed for several centuries. It requires some maintenance and some care and feeding, of course, but not much. So one doesn't have to suspend disbelief too much, here—this performance may actually occur as planned. It's been going for over 20 years so far, after all.
Agreed, extreme concepts are not hard. But I think the fascinating part is the salesmanship involved. Something I've noticed, really high concept artists are fantastic salesmen... and really shitty artists (80% of the time). They can convince people that a duct taped banana on the wall or just splatter paint can emotionally transcend you. Dont get me wrong, I like some abstract art when there is an aesthetic quality to it. But the worship status given to something like this, one incredibly slow note every however months... come on. You could do the same with Vanilla Ice's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 song from the 90s. Doesnt mean anything... other than that song still slaps :)
I'll take listening to an amateur messing with guitar chords while drunk in a shitty bar over something like this. Because I can actually experience the shitty bar music. You literally cannot experience this "art project".
The artist as messenger - through inspiration or otherwise to bring us a new way of looking at things; the artist as theoretician - to build on work that has gone on before and progressively expand our horizons; the artist as performer - acting out a role in society.
I'd suggest all three are present in artists across the ages, but in recent times the last seems to have become more prominent.
This is a bad take, but unsurprising when most Western culture still lauds virtuosity playing and "skill" over most other things. If it's a cultural dead end it's because of the culture not the idea.
That aside, John Cage was having these ideas when they weren't as obvious as they are today and we have the benefit of hindsight. Dismissing that is also a pretty ignorant mistake.
> We must be in different Western cultures because I definitely don't see a lot of skill and virtuosity in most popular music.
I think it depends on the lens you use. If you're looking through a "Tom Scholz" lens, that kind of skill and instrumental virtuosity may not exist today (although artists like St. Vincent are an argument that they do). But tech has completely changed music making, production, and distribution since that time, so today's Toms are people like Finneas O'Connell, and making music today is more akin to software design and engineering.
If you think music and art are entirely about skill that's fine, but I personally am not interested in hearing anything further about your opinions in that case.
> but I personally am not interested in hearing anything further about your opinions in that case.
Fuck me, you say? No, fuck YOU.
Feel free to mute me (edit: assuming HN has that feature) if you're unwilling to engage in an exchange of opinions and perspectives like a reasonable adult.
Would you mind elaborating on what you mean? Why is that a bad take? What is culturally relevant about this? I’m not saying it isn’t, but I don’t know what it is, and tearing down others doesn’t help me.
John Cage didn’t intend this piece to last 639 years, right? What ideas of his are you referring to? This long running organ piece was conceived by someone in Germany and is intended to highlight the history of Halberstadt, right?
The question @TheOtherHobbes is raising seems relevant: how does this performance contribute to musical culture, or even to Cage’s work? It can’t be enjoyed as music, it’s more of a logistical piece intended to create a mythology. In that sense, this performance is, in a way, very much lauding a sort of skill over most other things about the music - the skill of pure perseverance. Like other conceptual art, it’s the story of this work that is interesting, but not really the work itself. You seem to suggest otherwise, would you mind coloring that in for me, so I can appreciate it more?
The best guide is probably Cage's book, "Silence". Contains a lot of Cage's interaction with Zen, random change procedures, silence, form and time in music, and all the ideas that are contained within his various experiments.
It would be hard to explain in an easy sentence or two on here. If I thought I could do it, I'd try. It might end up looking like a Zen koan. :)
That ignores the fact that this Halberstadt project wasn’t designed by Cage, and the timing is for reasons specific to Halberstadt. Do you feel like Cage’s ideas call for a piece to last hundreds of years? It seems like all the ideas you just mentioned are thrown out the window when a single note lasts for years at a time, and zero people are present to witness the full performance, or even the full playing of a single note. This isn’t being done for music reasons, it’s being done explicitly for spectacle reasons, as described by the project page.
Oh that’s totally fair. A spectacle absolutely can be art. This is a bit of a different goal post than above though, isn’t it? And while we can speculate that Cage might say this, it’s (speculating) also possible that he wouldn’t approve of his music being used as a town attraction, or that he wouldn’t approve of music that can’t physically be experienced by humans, right? Either way, isn’t it equally fair to question whether a spectacle is musically and culturally relevant, like @TheOtherHobbes did?
You’re wrong, I’m genuinely curious, and like many here fascinated by experimental and generative arts. You may be lashing out at the very people most likely to agree with your point of view. Sorry to hear that you’re unable to engage.
This is all concept, of course. But walking around the dishevelled old church, listening to the constant humm in the background is an experience that grows from knowing that this tone will last for years until it will change as prescribed. A tone change is a small event that draws some attention from wider circles. There are people who have cared for the project for more than 20 years and it's not only folks who initiated it. It will be fascinating to see how long there will be interest and resources to keep it up.
Maybe that's part of his art? To show where music and experiencing something as music "ends" and where art "begins". Exploring the boundaries of what constitutes music or art is interesting to me.
> I don't think any of that sort of music will survive long, because the concept is no longer clever after it loses its novelty.
At some point it stops being a novelty and becomes a historical event, where a piece of music has already been playing for 400 years. Wouldn't it be interesting to visit a place where you know that people hundreds of years ago have listened not only to the same piece of music but to the same performance as you are experiencing right now. That listenership spans centuries?
I believe we're agreeing, except in our value judgments. You say:
> Exploring the boundaries of what constitutes music or art is interesting to me.
Interesting, yes, as a concept, and perhaps even as a cultural event, but we certainly agree that it's a different kind of experience than a musical performance.
> Wouldn't it be interesting to visit a place where you know that people hundreds of years ago have listened not only to the same piece of music but to the same performance as you are experiencing right now. That listenership spans centuries?
I honestly have no interest in visiting such a place to hear a note, or even the change from one note to another. And recognize that what interests you in such a visit is not musical interest, but conceptual interest.
Is it wrong to explore the boundaries of the art form for reasons other than enjoyment? Formal experimentation is powerful and gives ideas to later composers. By constraining oneself to the goal of enjoyable performance, one can't be as free to experiment formally.
Wrong? I don't see it as a moral issue. I see it as an abandonment of music, but not a moral wrong.
I think there's a value distinction to be drawn between boundary explorations that expand the art form and those that simply depart from any definition of it separate from the other arts. That leaves a broad scope for innovation: the composers of the ars subtilior, Carlo Gesualdo, Hector Berlioz, Debussy and Satie, Harry Partch, Antheil and Edgard Varese, and the progression of serialism from Schoenberg through Webern to Boulez — all of them explored and expanded the boundaries of music, but you can still experience their works as music, even if some have argued that it's bad music. It all can be, and has been, accepted as music.
But some of Cage's works (of those which he presented as musical) depart from musical material and musical experience to play with the nonmusical culture that surrounds music and musicians, or, abandoning that, the idea of performance itself. Obviously 4'33", with its formalities of opening and closing a piano, is an example of the former, but his lesser-known 0'00" runs simply, "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." In that case, the performer is as justified in a disciplined soiling of their pants as any musical act. I refuse to countenance such wanking. (Cage was by no means alone in this, but he's probably the most famous.)
I'm glad to see that even academic composers seem to have retreated from this dissolution.
I enjoy reading Cage a lot more than listening to his music (for that matter, he was fine with not being called a musician if people deemed his work not worthy of that, I can’t recall exactly but I believe sound architect is the alternative job description he proposed).
I don’t relate to most of his music but I do think he was on an honest quest for something. In fact, I think it could even be fair to say he was a philosopher using sound as his medium, instead of a musician.
4’33” isn’t about about non musical culture although some have mistakenly construed it as such. Cage made it absolutely clear what it was about in his comments about the piece.
I could have worded that better: to make its point about sounds and, if you please, music, it depends on nonmusical cultural expectations that surround musical performance. Its adherence to the outward trappings of musical performance in the 20th century prompt the audience to perceive what occurs during it as part of a "performance". Apart from that, there's nothing more musical about it than sitting alone in a meadow — which I think was essentially Cage's point.
That I find myself using the word "point" so often here emphasizes, to me, that Cage was engaging in philosophy rather than musical composition.
Your last sentence is very interesting and probably captures our different perspectives. I see Cage’s work as pointing towards an experience that I might enjoy and be enriched by in practice (not always but then I don’t always enjoy performances of my favourite works) and the concept is part but only a part of that.
Messiaen found sitting in a meadow quite a musical experience!
That's why I chose the sitting in a meadow comparison: it's an experience you could also choose to interpret as musical even though it is not organized sound. An aside: I think an awareness of and exposure to the sounds of nature is beneficial to a composer, even if I don't think it's intrinsically musical.
I think that there are several issues with this perspective.
Firstly, it presupposes that the music and the ‘concept’ are distinct. I love say Mahler 2 and the Rite of Spring but I love those pieces as a collection of notes and a concept together and trying to separate the ‘concept’ from the notes is impossible - when I listen to them the concept is an essential part of the experience.
In this case I can imagine listening to the notes in the knowledge of the wider context and being profoundly moved by the experience. I don’t see this as any different to music that is highly repetitive (and so not ‘interesting’ musically), for example, but still elicits an emotional response from many listeners.
Finally, if the classification is of composers into two camps, with Cage being in the wrong camp, then I’m afraid that the idea that Cage’s music won’t survive long isn’t backed up by the evidence as most of it is still doing really well many years after it was composed.
I remember a few years ago when the drop was supposed to fall. It was so exciting watching the drop almost fall, but after a few weeks of no visible movement it got dull.
Interesting. Besides the fact that they would sing to themselves but yes, when you live on a different time-scale you probably would have entirely different musical art. Though I personally do not think this is interesting and I suspect a thousander wouldn't either, they seemed rather more complex creatures.
Not prog rock but I used Moroder's 15+ minutes long "Love to love you baby" and "I feel love" when doing 4+hrs vinyl sets in disco bars, plenty of time to go to the bathroom. If I had Göttsching E2-E4 I'd have spun that one too.
I'm pretty sure it would be considered fair use, even if it was quite heavily influenced (and in some parts, taken) from a work. It isn't like anyone is going to listen to the two pieces and get them confused nor is any copyright holder going to lose money because someone plays their song so slowly that most folks just hear a single tone, even if they stay for days.
My cool hipster roommate told me about this 10 years ago when I first moved out for school, and I’m now the age she was back then (and the piece is 10 years older)
Nearly anything sounds beautiful when it’s spectrally smoothed and lengthened 50x by Paulstretch, including the most irritating pop song you can name off the top of your head.
I haven't played with Paulstretch, but it looks similar to what Tom Erbe's "Soundhack" program did (windowed FFT with overlap add resynthesis). Soundhack was originally written in the late 90's and was used by the sound designers of The Matrix.. anyhow. Soundhack is now defunct, but Tom released the source and I ported the time stretching bit of the software to Go if anyone's interested: https://github.com/corporealfunk/gopvoc
Interesting to me at least, but the start reminded me strongly of parts of This Mortal Coil's, Song to the Siren. A lovely song. https://youtu.be/HFWKJ2FUiAQ
It probably looks new mostly because the pipes are so shiny. This is because, in order to change any note, a new pipe is actually installed in one of the slots.
Incredible that Cage managed to provoke riots in his audiences in 1974 and 1976.
Impressionists and modernists famously did so in earlier generations but the mid-70s is astonishingly late for an art riot. Among Buddhists in Boulder, no less!
I think death sentence for blasphemy is antichristian too, but, when your funny idea to perform in church involved the risk of burning alive, people were indeed far more considerate.
Sorry, but anyone who thinks this will see completion is delusional. It'll be amazing if our distant posterity will recognize a map of today's Europe, much less be interested in this song's performance.
We live closer to Christopher Columbus than the end of this song. Think about how much the world has changed in that time.
The Americas are just as old, it is just that people in their arrogance have chosen to overlook the works and achievements of Mesoamerican civilization.
History did not begin with the arrival of the Europeans, that is just when colonization began. The long history of these continents is treated as some sort of lost and mysterious thing of times past, yet the people from those civilizations are still here today.
Cage and Glass both understood this and named a number of their works aptly.
Medieval Christianity revived and resumed ancient Greek culture and philosophy. That's a larger gap than we're talking about here. There's precedent if you look hard enough.
modern art = i could do that + yeah but you didn't + you didn't have the artist's cachet + you didn't have the connections to exhibit your work + you don't have the body of experience that lead you to this particular output + nobody is going to care about your low-effort piece but somehow this artist got them too
I think this still completely misses what's interesting about this: the number of interesting performance attempts, not the piece itself which is neither first/last of the concept or the focus of the post.
138 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadlonger duration, faster tempo
It began on 1 January 2000.
Anyway, I like the Long Player’s description of survival at the end; even if the music seems silly, these are interesting questions - “How does one keep a piece of music playing across generations? How does one prepare for its technological adaptability, knowing how few technologies have remained viable over the last millenium? How does one legislate for its upkeep? And how can one communicate that responsibility to those who might be looking after it some 950 years after its original custodians have perished?”
I've always been fascinated by long running processes. I'm sure you might have heard about the Clock of the Long Now [1] (Wikipedia article [2] seems more useful than the official website), which is meant to work for 10000 years. It's under construction, but their strategies to handle adversities over a 10000 year period worth looking into.
Related to that, I've read about an attempt by a software engineer presumably named Brandur who, inspired by the aforementioned clock, has attempted to build a software that would send out tweets for the next 10000 years [3]. While I personally feel it probably wouldn't succeed because there's too many things that can go wrong, it was nice to read the considerations that went into the program. Perhaps more than tweeting for the next 10000 years itself, Brandur was really trying to point out that it's difficult to build long lasting software products.
Writing software that endures for a long time without too much additional maintenance is something I'd like to do.
Another long running — though in comparison to the above much smaller — group of equipments are the space probes Voyager 1 (launched in 1977), Voyager 2 (1977) and New Horizons (2006). Unless I'm mistaken they all continue to function in limited ways and continue to send back data to the earth. Isn't it mind-blowing that something that left Earth about 45 years ago still works?! (Or maybe it's not mind blowing because I guess space doesn't have as much distrubances as the Earth).
I also like long running processes in nature. Comets are one of them. Isn't it just so cool that some of them actually (very likely) come from Oort cloud and their orbits can take hundreds or even thousands of years?
Halley's Comet — which has an orbital period of 76 years, and whose appearances have been recorded by various people in various places over the past couple of thousand years — will show up again in 2061, nearly 40 years from now. I sincerely hope I can see it then. Infact I have a calendar reminder set up for it in 2061 July. Just in case I forget. (The calendar program I currently use might die first. Or I could be dead).
[1] https://longnow.org/clock/
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now
[3] https://brandur.org/10000-years
Then you could go listen to a snippet of it, in this extremely slow version, and get a sense of that.
Then combine the two.
It's trivial to make extremely long time-based pieces on the web. You load the page, it works out the time/date, and it plays whatever the algorithm says is right for the time date. With the right algo you can make pieces that last for millions of years.
And so on.
There is a sense in which it's an interesting idea, but it's also a cultural dead end. You can only make it bigger and more extreme, and that's more about spectacle than music.
The authenticity of the piece and it's validity is reinforced by our conversation and replay.
On this measure the timeline is arbitrary, and trumping it is a second work all together, creating a new conversation.
Most people think it is uninteresting and a total waste of time.
I can also understand the aggression a lot of Cage's work got in the past. It's very destructive for people to listen a long time to a man who is only speaking letters. Almost like torture.
Is a waste of time art?
None of these things are meant to be enjoyed in the traditional sense. But they might make you think, or make you angry.
So what good do these things bring the world? I don't know, probably none.
Art, and media in general are productions of culture which celebrate our humanity. That is, they rejoice in all of our abilities to perceive, conceive and enact upon the world. Wasting people's time in this light makes people aware of their time, and allows for further interrogations of our humanities to arise. Just as we're doing now.
It's good to remember that art only gains it's status through a production being named art by an exhibitor. IMO there's no special purpose to the term. Consuming art is just another form of recreation, and people are right to hate it for any reason, just that tyranny of what is useful is usually not in the human spirits best interest.
https://www.americanpoems.com/poets/eecummings/introduction-...
Because you have to keep the computer running continuously. That turns out to be extremely difficult.
So there is no spectacle, here.
Part of the magic of Cage's piece, in this incarnation, is that someone actually built the special organ, in a suitable space that might plausibly remain undisturbed for several centuries. It requires some maintenance and some care and feeding, of course, but not much. So one doesn't have to suspend disbelief too much, here—this performance may actually occur as planned. It's been going for over 20 years so far, after all.
I'll take listening to an amateur messing with guitar chords while drunk in a shitty bar over something like this. Because I can actually experience the shitty bar music. You literally cannot experience this "art project".
I'd suggest all three are present in artists across the ages, but in recent times the last seems to have become more prominent.
That aside, John Cage was having these ideas when they weren't as obvious as they are today and we have the benefit of hindsight. Dismissing that is also a pretty ignorant mistake.
We must be in different Western cultures because I definitely don't see a lot of skill and virtuosity in most popular music.
I think it depends on the lens you use. If you're looking through a "Tom Scholz" lens, that kind of skill and instrumental virtuosity may not exist today (although artists like St. Vincent are an argument that they do). But tech has completely changed music making, production, and distribution since that time, so today's Toms are people like Finneas O'Connell, and making music today is more akin to software design and engineering.
It was my understanding that everyone had heard.
Why is that a bad thing?
Fuck me, you say? No, fuck YOU.
Feel free to mute me (edit: assuming HN has that feature) if you're unwilling to engage in an exchange of opinions and perspectives like a reasonable adult.
John Cage didn’t intend this piece to last 639 years, right? What ideas of his are you referring to? This long running organ piece was conceived by someone in Germany and is intended to highlight the history of Halberstadt, right?
The question @TheOtherHobbes is raising seems relevant: how does this performance contribute to musical culture, or even to Cage’s work? It can’t be enjoyed as music, it’s more of a logistical piece intended to create a mythology. In that sense, this performance is, in a way, very much lauding a sort of skill over most other things about the music - the skill of pure perseverance. Like other conceptual art, it’s the story of this work that is interesting, but not really the work itself. You seem to suggest otherwise, would you mind coloring that in for me, so I can appreciate it more?
It would be hard to explain in an easy sentence or two on here. If I thought I could do it, I'd try. It might end up looking like a Zen koan. :)
> I don't think any of that sort of music will survive long, because the concept is no longer clever after it loses its novelty.
At some point it stops being a novelty and becomes a historical event, where a piece of music has already been playing for 400 years. Wouldn't it be interesting to visit a place where you know that people hundreds of years ago have listened not only to the same piece of music but to the same performance as you are experiencing right now. That listenership spans centuries?
> Exploring the boundaries of what constitutes music or art is interesting to me.
Interesting, yes, as a concept, and perhaps even as a cultural event, but we certainly agree that it's a different kind of experience than a musical performance.
> Wouldn't it be interesting to visit a place where you know that people hundreds of years ago have listened not only to the same piece of music but to the same performance as you are experiencing right now. That listenership spans centuries?
I honestly have no interest in visiting such a place to hear a note, or even the change from one note to another. And recognize that what interests you in such a visit is not musical interest, but conceptual interest.
I think there's a value distinction to be drawn between boundary explorations that expand the art form and those that simply depart from any definition of it separate from the other arts. That leaves a broad scope for innovation: the composers of the ars subtilior, Carlo Gesualdo, Hector Berlioz, Debussy and Satie, Harry Partch, Antheil and Edgard Varese, and the progression of serialism from Schoenberg through Webern to Boulez — all of them explored and expanded the boundaries of music, but you can still experience their works as music, even if some have argued that it's bad music. It all can be, and has been, accepted as music.
But some of Cage's works (of those which he presented as musical) depart from musical material and musical experience to play with the nonmusical culture that surrounds music and musicians, or, abandoning that, the idea of performance itself. Obviously 4'33", with its formalities of opening and closing a piano, is an example of the former, but his lesser-known 0'00" runs simply, "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." In that case, the performer is as justified in a disciplined soiling of their pants as any musical act. I refuse to countenance such wanking. (Cage was by no means alone in this, but he's probably the most famous.)
I'm glad to see that even academic composers seem to have retreated from this dissolution.
I don’t relate to most of his music but I do think he was on an honest quest for something. In fact, I think it could even be fair to say he was a philosopher using sound as his medium, instead of a musician.
That I find myself using the word "point" so often here emphasizes, to me, that Cage was engaging in philosophy rather than musical composition.
Messiaen found sitting in a meadow quite a musical experience!
It's a matter of taste, of course.
Go to a gallery full of abstract expressionism. Hear people asking, "what does it mean?"
Firstly, it presupposes that the music and the ‘concept’ are distinct. I love say Mahler 2 and the Rite of Spring but I love those pieces as a collection of notes and a concept together and trying to separate the ‘concept’ from the notes is impossible - when I listen to them the concept is an essential part of the experience.
In this case I can imagine listening to the notes in the knowledge of the wider context and being profoundly moved by the experience. I don’t see this as any different to music that is highly repetitive (and so not ‘interesting’ musically), for example, but still elicits an emotional response from many listeners.
Finally, if the classification is of composers into two camps, with Cage being in the wrong camp, then I’m afraid that the idea that Cage’s music won’t survive long isn’t backed up by the evidence as most of it is still doing really well many years after it was composed.
I remember a few years ago when the drop was supposed to fall. It was so exciting watching the drop almost fall, but after a few weeks of no visible movement it got dull.
Interesting, will need to check it out.
Also there is https://longplayer.org/
which is on the same idea as this piece
Or will the lawsuit take 639 years too?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiKWfcy-Z70
But then again, the source is an incredibly beautiful song which has an interesting time signature and chord progression:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdZSOoOF5Ms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKMAV8pvlOA
http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/
https://web.archive.org/web/20120217161857/http://www.micros...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX40crWTTYs
Impressionists and modernists famously did so in earlier generations but the mid-70s is astonishingly late for an art riot. Among Buddhists in Boulder, no less!
We live closer to Christopher Columbus than the end of this song. Think about how much the world has changed in that time.
sometimes it's hard to understand how mind boggingly old europe is, being from the younger continent.
History did not begin with the arrival of the Europeans, that is just when colonization began. The long history of these continents is treated as some sort of lost and mysterious thing of times past, yet the people from those civilizations are still here today.
Cage and Glass both understood this and named a number of their works aptly.
modern art = i could do that + yeah but you didn't