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Why is 4'33" disparaged, while Western forms of sacred music get their own forum?

181K views 2K replies 159 participants last post by  millionrainbows 
#1 ·
Why is 4'33" disparaged, while Western forms of sacred music get their own forum?

Why do members here frequently disparage and invalidate John Cage's 4'33", which is essentially a sacred statement, while Western/Christian forms of sacred music seem to get much more respect, and have their own forum?

Surely this implies that these Western forms of sacred music deserve a special degree of respect, while 4'33" seems to be "open game" for disparaging posts, threads, and comments.
 
#2 · (Edited)
Why do members here frequently disparage and invalidate John Cage's 4'33", which is essentially a sacred statement, while Western/Christian forms of sacred music seem to get much more respect, and have their own forum?

Surely this implies that these Western forms of sacred music deserve a special degree of respect, while 4'33" seems to be "open game" for disparaging posts, threads, and comments.
Because it's not sacred and not music. It's a clever idea that gives it a pseudo-intellectual status with certain people!

Mind you, I'll say this in its favour. From what I have heard of the unholy din Cage's other 'music' 4'33" appears preferable!
 
#4 ·
Why do members here frequently disparage and invalidate John Cage's 4'33", which is essentially a sacred statement, while Western/Christian forms of sacred music seem to get much more respect, and have their own forum?

Surely this implies that these Western forms of sacred music deserve a special degree of respect, while 4'33" seems to be "open game" for disparaging posts, threads, and comments.
How exactly is this music sacred and why do you oppose it to "Western" music? Was John Cage not a Westerner?

Personally, I make fun of it because it is nothing but a musical joke. Or rather it is the musical equivalent of internet trolling, designed to stir up controversy and thus to make the composer famous.
 
#5 ·
It always amazes me how people cannot see the conceptual importance of 4'33'', or Duchamp's Fountain, for that matter. You may ridicule them all you want, but you're only revealing your own ignorance.
 
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#8 ·
People disparage 4'33" because they can't wrap their minds around it.

Likewise, a few people still disparage religious music because they can't wrap their minds around religious ideas enough to accept its existence (they need not believe it, merely accept it...)
 
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#15 ·
If people think I go around listening to 4'33" in my headphones, they'd be wrong (Here I'm talking about the empty audio tracks on Cage albums). An ideal setting of 4'33" is in a rain forest or something anyway (oh hello, entire genre of field recordings!), but I wouldn't say no to a concert hall setting either. I think this misconception might be what drives a lot of the disparaging comments.

Of course the strength of 4'33" is in its concept. The fact that people can't let it go is, if anything, only a testament to the strength of that concept.
 
#18 ·
I think my post in the other thread got missed.

Yeah, it's an audience piece. That's a great way of putting it! The combination of the ambient noise and the audience's personality... it sweeps your mind like a laser.

It definitely is a piece of music. If musique concrete uses the tools of sine waves, white noise, recorded natural sounds, recordings of recordings... then 4'33" isn't too far different from something like Bird Cage or Roaratorio. Just think of 4'33" as a more intense, visceral, and pithier version of those works.

As for as Zen meditation goes, I've had my personal struggles with Buddhism... but that's a topic for the religious discussion group. I just want to say to Ken that a good piece of music (like 4'33", or Cage's other works, or Xenakis, or Beethoven) can take one to a visceral experience of the present moment. If one just enjoys this for what it is, rather than worrying about 'reaching' the Buddha, then it's a beautiful thing. I think that doing certain things as religious practice, like sitting zazen meditation, or chanting, or listening to music... without worrying about 'reaching' the Buddha is what people meant by 'kill the Buddha'. Buddhists do certain things as spiritual practice with the goal of taking one to the present moment, and from there all of life gradually becomes a more present experience.
 
#24 ·
Not if it was performed outdoors in the city on a weekday day at lunchtime. And you would experience differently there and then, and I think that was his point.
 
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#41 · (Edited)
A most insightful post! Thank you for elucidating on a such a vast topic.

That said, I am not trying to be mean or nasty against 4'33". I even checked out a You Tube of an orchestral version of 4'33" and was delightfully entertained by the production itself. The best part was a cough in the middle of it and the massive applause the conductor received as he left the podium. Seriously, I was entertained, though I only watched enough to get the cough and the applause parts. Perhaps the real problem is that it was never a suitable work for piano. The orchestral version being so much richer. :)
 
#35 ·
TresPicos- It always amazes me how people cannot see the conceptual importance of 4'33'', or Duchamp's Fountain, for that matter. You may ridicule them all you want, but you're only revealing your own ignorance.

That's rather presumptuous on your part... and typical of the assumptions repeatedly made by the self-appointed champions of Modern Art/Music. I certainly know far more about the history of Duchamp's Fountain and the tradition in which it was conceived, the true author, the deception behind the work and its reputation... in America than I suspect you are even aware of. In other words, one can be fully knowledgeable of a work of art... have a great understanding of it... and still not like it... even despise it.
 
#38 ·
arcaneholocaust- ...the strength of 4'33" is in its concept. The fact that people can't let it go is, if anything, only a testament to the strength of that concept.

But then it might just be that some people are interested in listening to music... not entertaining "concepts".
 
#40 ·
Conversely, it could be found that the conceptual significance of 4' 33'', is precisely the same as your prescription of chopping wood and carrying water.

But I disagree that the chop wood and carry water approach leads to one finding things in general less fascinating or significant. I think the end result is the opposite of what you are suggesting.
 
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#43 ·
Funny.

We've gone over this ground before, numerous times, but it's as if no one has ever said anything about 4'33" before this thread, because all the usual canards come rushing in, fresh as daisies, as if no one had ever said anything about what the piece really is.

Of course, I know why.

Anyway, not that it will do any good: 4'33" was something John had been thinking about for around ten years before he finally wrote it. Although you can find quotes where he also refers to it as the "silent" piece, it is not about silence at all but about intention. It is not a piece with no sounds; it is a piece that consists entirely of sounds that the composer did not intend. It is very much a piece about sound. It's just that in 4'33", the sounds are not under the control of the composer. That's called indeterminacy, and there are lots of pieces, by lots of different composers, both before and after 4'33", that are indeterminate.

While the actual sounds that occur in any given performance--I have seen this live several times, and there are definitely good performances and bad ones--are not caused by Mr. Cage in the same way that the sounds in a Beethoven piece are caused by Herr van Beethoven,* the framework is very much a thing that Cage has made. And it is a musical piece. It has three movements, with precise timings. It is a piece for performers. It has musical instructions.

It can be seen as the musical equivalent of the framing one does when taking a picture. Funny that no one seems to mind if people take photos or if some of those photos are displayed on museum walls as art. But so many people get really bent out of shape if Cage frames some environmental sounds and calls the result music.

It also very obviously includes the audience in a way no other piece had done before. This is not a piece where the composer arranges a bunch of notes in a particular order for a musician to perform for you. This is a piece where both composer and performer step aside and invite you to make this into music. You know that one result of this piece has been a thing called the sound walk. They're very popular; you may have heard of them. They all come from the idea that music is about listening. In a traditional concert, the sounds you hear have been organized for you. In a sound walk, or at a performance of 4'33", you do that work.

You may not like it. You may not like what it says or seems to be saying. But claiming that it is not a piece of music is kinda silly. And all this talk about it's being only conceptual is so much special pleading. Name me a piece of music by anyone from any age that is not conceptual.
 
#58 · (Edited)
Funny.

We've gone over this ground before, numerous times, but it's as if no one has ever said anything about 4'33" before this thread, because all the usual canards come rushing in, fresh as daisies, as if no one had ever said anything about what the piece really is.

Of course, I know why.

4'33" was something John had been thinking about for around ten years before he finally wrote it. ... It is not a piece with no sounds; it is a piece that consists entirely of sounds that the composer did not intend... in 4'33", the sounds are not under the control of the composer. That's called indeterminacy, and there are lots of pieces, by lots of different composers, both before and after 4'33", that are indeterminate.

And it is a musical piece. It has three movements, with precise timings. It is a piece for performers. It has musical instructions.

It can be seen as the musical equivalent of the framing one does when taking a picture. Funny that no one seems to mind if people take photos or if some of those photos are displayed on museum walls as art. But so many people get really bent out of shape if Cage frames some environmental sounds and calls the result music.

This is a piece where both composer and performer step aside and invite you to make this into music.

You may not like it. You may not like what it says or seems to be saying. But claiming that it is not a piece of music is kinda silly. And all this talk about it's being only conceptual is so much special pleading. Name me a piece of music by anyone from any age that is not conceptual.
Where to begin? Well, being no fan of indeterminacy, I'll begin at the beginning.

"Funny" is the right word. 4'33" is, to many people, funny. It makes us laugh. It tickles our funny bones. We realize that it was not intended to be amusing. That makes it funnier. People to whom it is a very serious matter are often offended by the fact that we are amused by it. We understand, we even sympathize - and we still find it funny! In saying this, I am not trying to be funny. I mean it sincerely. I find 4'33" irresistibly amusing. I can't even think of it without smiling.

You say that you know why people are still saying the things they're saying about 4'33." But you don't tell us what it is that you know. That's all right. Some of us already know why we think what we think, without your telling us.

When you inform us that Cage had been contemplating the idea of 4'33" for ten years before he "finally wrote it" - excuse me, the word "wrote" is making my face crack a little - I recall that Wagner conceived the idea for Tristan und Isolde around 1854 and completed that most intense and astonishing opera in 1859 - the whole musical revolution embodied in that work took him only five years - while taking a little break from composing his epic Der Ring des Nibelungen. Just a brief hiatus, a little I-think-I'll-alter-the-course-of-Western-civilization-while-taking-a-sitz-bath sort of thing...

Well, I'm sure Cage had other important things on his mind during that decade besides 4'33" of silence.

I understand, of course, that we're not talking about actual silence here. We're talking about sounds, sounds that have not been composed by anyone. But wait a minute...There's something funny about that, isn't there? If Cage didn't compose the sounds, how can he be called the "composer"? Isn't that sort of, well, contradictory? Isn't that like someone who's called an artist inviting you to his gallery and showing you a blank wall? Or someone calling himself an author publishing a book with blank pages? (It didn't take me ten years to come up with those examples - though I admit I had Cage to inspire me, while he was working from scratch.)

Now, you use the example of a framed photograph. But that is not a good example. A photograph may be an image of things in the environment - but those things are chosen by the photographer, and the image is made by him through a controlled process. A photograph really is a composition, and the photographer really is a composer. A better analogy would be a frame with no photograph in it. But a frame with nothing in it is - well, we're back to that blank wall. A frame containing nothing contains... Nothing.

If I may get down to brass tacks here: I do not think that saying that 4'33" is "only conceptual" is "special pleading." I think it is true. I do not think that a list of instructions for a "performer" to behave in a certain way, for a certain period of time divided into "movements," while playing nothing, constitutes a piece of music. I do not think, either, that instructing musicians to choose what it is that they're going to play, so that no one knows what sounds will occur, and giving it a pompous artsy name like "indeterminacy," constitutes musical composition. These things are certainly "conceptual" - and, yes, all music is "conceptual." But what does that mean? It certainly does not mean that a composition of sounds, composed by an actual composer, and played by musicians, is the same thing as a directive issued to someone in a tuxedo to sit at a piano with his hands folded in his lap while hundreds of people watch him and simultaneously listen to distant traffic and cockroaches scurrying beneath their seats. Whether these people find this an interesting or rewarding experience does not alter the fact that it is a distinctly different experience.

Admirers of Cage's experiment in awareness are certainly free, as we all are, to define music in any way they want. But those who decline to go along with them are not " kinda silly" to do so. What I find silly is the stern solemnity and condescension with which some of those admirers, who cannot find humor in Cage's subversion of ordinary meanings, react when confronted with the amusement of those of us who are not tempted to discard our concept of what music is just because a sweetly smiling fellow with a feather and a cactus and a book of Chinese hexagrams plays a little trick on us.

We fans of ponderous Wagnerian epics are a notoriously serious bunch, yet we laugh harder than anyone when Anna Russell points out that Gutrune, "Die Gotterdammerung Gibich," is the first woman Siegfried has ever seen who isn't his aunt. I can only wish an equal measure of self-deprecating humor on the fans of John Cage when they hear about people singing 4'33'' in the shower.

I can do it with variations.
 
#44 ·
4' 33" is not for me a musical joke but the first major time that principles from Zen Buddhism have entered into Western composition.
 
#46 · (Edited)
Is it music? Sure - I've said before that if one person finds particular sounds to be music, I'm not one to disagree.

Is it sacred? Not to me, but hardly anything is sacred to me beyond individuality and family.

Is it boring? Well, it never sounds exactly the same in a "live" setting.

Is it tied in to one or more non-western religions? I don't care.

Is disparaging the piece disrespectful? No, I understand why many folks find it to be nothing.

Is finding value in the piece unreasonable? No.
 
#48 ·
Is disparaging the piece disrespectful? No, I understand why many folks find it to be nothing.
I consider 4'33" to be "nothing." I don't consider that disparaging, but think it's exactly what Cage had in mind. All this talk about "ambient sounds" and so forth is silly. It's nothing. No, not even nothing, because that would be something. And it's not even that.
 
#60 ·
I think the entire discussion on whether or not 4'33" is music is bogus. It is what it is. I consider it theater. Some might considerate invisible architecture.

I still think it is a work of whatever you want to categorize it were the audience is a performer.
 
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