Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site brl-tgr.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!bellcore!decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!godot!harvard!seismo!brl-tgr!tgr!DBarker%PCO@CISL-SERVICE-MULTICS.ARPA 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".