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From: DBarker%PCO@CISL-SERVICE-MULTICS.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.music
Subject: Re: discussion
Message-ID: <6903@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 2-Jan-85 11:49:10 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.6903
Posted: Wed Jan  2 11:49:10 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 4-Jan-85 00:13:18 EST
Sender: news@brl-tgr.ARPA
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab
Lines: 34

Well I like John Cage.  Personally and musically.  I believe he may well
turn  out to be an artist whose influence is greater than his output (cf
Schoenberg)  but  his  music  is  certainly  fun to play and much of the
earlier is good to listen to - particularly "Sonatas and Interludes" and
"Music of Changes".

(BTW that piece is called 4'33''). I think that the answer to those who
disapprove of Cage is to be found in his book "Silence" which has many
informative Zen-influenced stories which try to purvey his aims -
basically to get people to listen to the sounds around them in everyday
life. A couple of examples (from memory):

A number of people were listening to Christian Wolff playing one of his
pieces in his New York apartment. The window was open and at various
times the music was drowned by traffic noise, aeroplanes passing
overhead. At the end one of the "audience" asked him to play it again
with the window shut. "Why?" asked Wolff.

Cage  was  standing in for another lecturer giving a lecture on oriental
music  and  played  a record of Tibetan religious music.  This consisted
entirely  of  loud spaced-out stokes of a gong.  After several minutes a
woman  in the audience leapt to her feat screaming "Take it off, I can't
stand  any  more".   When  he did so another member of the audience also
arose,  very irate, saying "Why did you take it off - I was just getting
interested".   ("In Zen they say, if you do something for one minute and
it is boring then do it for two, if it is still boring after two minutes
then  do it for four, then eight then sixteen - eventually you will find
that it is not boring at all but very interesting")

It seems to me that JC has provided the impetus and raison d'etre for
such as Riley Reich and Glass and that, had he not existed, we should
have had to invent him.

As Arnold Toynbee once said "We are living in the Age of Cage".