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John Cage

47K views 277 replies 78 participants last post by  SanAntone 
#1 ·
This is a composer who's ideas were better than his music in my opinion. Schoenberg described him as "the inventor of genius" and I firmly aggree with him. A lot can be learned from Cageian ideas about the nature of music and how we respond to music.

Although quite a bit of his music is lacking in artistic merit (such as his radio music), his works for musicians can be very liberating. I went to hear his piano concerto recently and there were points during the performance where the orchestral players could make any sound they wanted. Also the piano part is a graphic score which I find very exiting as it closes the divide between composer and performer (the performer being free to semi-compose the work themselves).

John Cage I understand is a cotravertial figure and I know how we all like that so let battle commence!
 
#165 ·
The Cage Number pieces present an ingenious solution to the concept of non-measured notation. Since the performers are given "variable time brackets" and, usually, sustained notes, the music exists in chronometric time only, as there is no discernible meter in any form. The later pieces began to make use of melodic fragments rather than single sustained pitches.

Cage's post-1950 music is not really about variation and development. It's not about the connection between sounds, more about their coexistence. The music is not intended to have any meaning. Perhaps that is the hardest part about understanding his music.

I should note here that I was involved with editing (proof-reading) a lot of the number pieces. There were all done in Finale (which I was not using at the time), so I did not do any of the copying myself. I did get to see the originals, often getting them from John's loft and bringing them to our office. My favorites are the last ones: Thirteen (not Thirteen Harmonies, which is not a "Number" piece), as well as Two6, which is for Sho and Piano. Towards the end, he was starting to stretch out on the concept, but they were always these quiet, meditative pieces.
 
#172 · (Edited)
Can't say I really hold with the direction his music ultimately went, but I do think he was making a sincere attempt to push music in a fresh direction , but like many of his generation ended up a blind alley. Still, I do think there was some legitimate talent there (his early works indicate that), but it got lost in translation somehow.

These two works are genuinely attractive :



Also, the Music for Prepared Piano isn't particularly beautiful but it is intriguing:
 
#173 ·
I come from a visual art background, so Cage is relatively easy for me to accept. Art is art.
 
#179 ·
In what way does a visual art background contribute to your understanding of Cage? I have worked in visual art all my life, although I settled upon music as an occupation. As a painter composing form in space I find a greater affinity with the deliberate structures and expressive gestures of the tonal tradition than with anything peculiarly Cagean.
 
#177 ·
Wow, thank you, Peter. No, I had a hard time with music education. I took 3 semesters of music theory, and learned a little piano. I had a very good ear. I played guitar, so in the 1970s it was not recognized, and you have to be a pianist anyway, because the whole system is based on diatonic scales. It turned out that I am really a chromatic thinker, so I had to start from square one and learn on my own, questioning everything. I have a large collection of music theory books, and still continue to study. Next, is neo-Riemann theory. I'm interested in "sacred geometry" and how this applies to guitar, and jazz.
 
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#175 ·
John Cage: Electronic Music for Piano (1964)

"This score was written on a sheet of letterhead paper from a hotel in Stockholm. It is cryptic, and contains only a written instruction for the use of parts from Music for Piano 4-84, reliant upon electronic equipment (microphones, amplifiers, and oscilloscope) and a constellation from an astronomical chart." - www.johncage.org

Ciro Longobardi (piano), Agostino Di Scipio (computer and live electronics)



This is a beautiful realization of the "cryptic" score. The piano is played delicately, and the electronic sounds are subtle and elegant. Another interpretation by Chen, which I heard only a short sample of, sounds more harsh and noisy.
 
#176 ·
The Complete String Quartets Vol. 1 - The Arditti Quartet (mode)


This 1988 live recording includes two 30-minute long works for string quartet using time brackets: Music for Four (1987/8, world premiere) and Thirty Pieces for String Quartet (1983). I think this disc has been OOP, but digital album is now available for download. Both are eventful compared with the later works, and Thirty Pieces is more modernistic. The Arditti Quartet plays masterfully as always.
 
#180 ·
Millions, do you know what a differentiable manifold is? A metric? A Levi-Civita connection? The Riemann curvature tensor? A tensor? A geodesic curve? A fibre bundle? A holonomy? Etc.

If not, then please stop using the word geometry, which is more than the platonic solids and their pseudo-mystical interpretations of 2500 years ago...

If you are that interested in geometry, I could recommend you some actual differential geometry books.

Btw, there seems to be some actual musical theorization using real geometry, done by this Dimitri Tymoczko guy. What I saw seemed correct and rigorous, i.e., doesn't seem a crackpot, although using orbifolds to understand the tonality of a Mozart piece seems a bit like an overkill to me...
 
#188 ·
Yes, the Dmitri Tymoczko book is very good, in that he explains things clearly and in context, and doesn't get bogged-down in definitions. The book is about music, and how different geometric models can help us see it more clearly, as well as compose. The simplest model is the circle of fifths, but he explains the underlying properties of different models (such as number lines) and how these differ from each other, and how each one has a particular use.

There are some very good reviews on the back of the dust cover. I suggest you look into it.
 
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#181 ·
Early Music (Edition Wandelweiser)


Edwin Alexander Buchholz (accordian / bugari bayan anatomic) and Joanna Becker (violin) bring rich timbre and soothing harmony to Cage's probably most melodic and accessible works: Dream (1948), In A Landscape (1948), Six Melodies (1950) and Souvenir (1983). Souvenir is unusual as his music around the period. The American Guild of Organists, who commissioned it, requested a work that is similar to Dream.
 
#183 ·
Freeman Etudes is one of my favorite Cage's works. I have been enjoying the excellent Arditti on Mode for some years, and I am now listening to Fusi's recording (Stradivarius), which I think is played very delicately. There are 3 complete recordings of Freeman Etudes. I have not heard the other one.



I also listened to the first recording of the work by Paul Zukofsky (1979), whom Cage learned the technical aspects of violin with and composed the etudes for. Zukofsky recorded only the first eight etudes.

"The Etudes are both fascinating and frustrating for many reasons. They are the most difficult music I have ever played, yet they are also extremely violinistic. They have endless phrasal possibilities, none of which were intentional in the creation." - Zukofsky
http://www.musicalobservations.com/recordings/cp2_103.html
 
#189 ·
If someone could say something to help me appreciate the freeman etudes I'd be really pleased, whenever I've tried to listen to anyone playing them they sound utterly random to me. By contrast I can enjoy the piano etudes as a duet for two hands.
Cage is exploring the idea of "advanced notation" and what is humanly possible to play using it. There is an element of humor in this idea as well, although it's a kind of abstract humor derived from knowing this. The score is ridiculously complex, and there is an element of humor there. Paul Zukofsky, who it was written for, gave up on it and walked away in frustration (and I find humor in that). Irvine Arditti was finally able to play it, because his chops are so much better than Zukofsky's were ( I find that amusing). Arditti gave Cage some feedback, as he had to finish the work after Zukofsky bailed, and so they settled on "As fast as humanly possible" as the new meta-direction (I find that humorous). I guess if the end result is not pleasing as music, then it's OK to just write it off as "a bunch of noise" ( I find this humorous as well). I think this explanation is humorous.
 
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#185 · (Edited)
The Freeman Etudes I've heard seem more deliberately "fragmented" or "disjointed" than random-one of the tendencies, it seems, for a certain line of modernism. I can understand the breaking up of the long lyrical lines associated with classicism and romanticism, but I do question how satisfying it is. I doubt whether Paganini would have considered these difficult or instructive to play at all because of the noticeable space between the fragments, though still requiring a great deal of focus and concentration to execute well:
 
#186 ·
I like Freeman Etudes because it sounds random and totally unsentimental, not causing any ordinary emotions yet it puts my mind in a certain state. It is calming and exciting, cold and lyrical. It is like nature and artifact at the same time, like irregular sounds of dropping water or extremely elaborated miniature. I enjoy the precise details, pleasant sounds of violin itself. I am not sure what is special about this work compared with other aleatory pieces, it may be something to do with the physicality of the instrument and the particular way randomness is mapped to pitch, duration of notes/silence, dynamics, rhythm.
 
#190 · (Edited)
What is special about the notation? I remember that Sabine Liebner thought that her interpretation of the Etudes Australes - which is unique in that each piece lasts about 7 minutes long - is somehow indicated by some aspect of Cage’s score which all others ignore.

Presumably the score in the Freeman Etudes is as open to interpretation as the Etudes Australes, and that there’s scope for the violin player to romanticise them by finding stories and narratives, like Claudio Crismani does in the piano etudes.

Why did Cage feel the need to write 32 of them?

As far as I know he produced three sets of etudes, Australes, Freeman and Boreales. Has anyone explored the Boreales?
 
#191 · (Edited)
#193 · (Edited)
It would be nice to know how the etudes were written, i can't make sense of what Wikipedia says! I'd like a recipe so I can compose one of my own. Could someone write an Etudes Australes computer programme to generate them? How much of the process was following an algorithm with some random component built in, how much was inspiration?

I looked at some images of the Etudes Australes and they look more or less like regular music except there is no tempo or time signature or dynamic or articulation or any other indication. All it seems to tell us is relative pitch and relative note length using standard notation. And there are these funny little lines with a hook at the end underneath the staves, a bit like pedal.

So can I conclude that the unspecified things - tempo, ornaments, rests etc are left to the performer's discretion, the performer's job is to turn this "framework" into something good to hear?

And what are those little lines about? pedal?

It would be nice to hear from someone who's played one of them.

Rectangle Music Font Parallel Sheet music


There's a view I've heard, that when someone writes some music he has an idea of what it sounds like in his head, and he tries to write that idea down. Did Cage have an idea of how these etudes sound in his head?
 
#194 ·
I looked at some images of the Etudes Australes and they look more or less like regular music except there is no tempo or time signature or dynamic or articulation or any other indication. All it seems to tell us is relative pitch and relative note length using standard notation. And there are these funny little lines with a hook at the end underneath the staves, a bit like pedal.
"An open note is to be held as long as possible beyond the succeeding closed note, the leap to the next note (whether open or closed) being made at the last possible moment. Where more than one closed note follows an open note, a pedal-like notation is given. The open note is then to be sustained as long as the pedal continues." - Cage

There's a view I've heard, that when someone writes some music he has an idea of what it sounds like in his head, and he tries to write that idea down. Did Cage have an idea of how these etudes sound in his head?
Since the etudes were composed using chance operation, it is likely that the composer didn't know how they would sound like.

"Though the notation is determinate [...], the use of chance operations is not as an aid in the making of something I had in mind; rather, a utility to let sounds arise from their own centers freed from my intentions. I just listen. For this reason, also, the use of star maps; to aid in the finding of a music I do not have in mind." - Cage
 
#195 · (Edited)
Thank you Tortkis. Let me rephrase one of my questions, which was really about performers’ discretion. After Cage had written an etude using his notation, did he have a conception of how it should sound? That’s to say, how tightly does the the notation determine the performance?

Cage may have used randomness to remove some of his will, his intention. But in practice is it just replaced by the performer’s will?

I would like someone to make a YouTube video where they write a piano piece in the style of these etudes australes using Cage’s method.
 
#207 ·
Thank you Tortkis. Let me rephrase one of my questions, which was really about performers' discretion. After Cage had written an etude using his notation, did he have a conception of how it should sound? That's to say, how tightly does the the notation determine the performance?

Cage may have used randomness to remove some of his will, his intention. But in practice is it just replaced by the performer's will?

I would like someone to make a YouTube video where they write a piano piece in the style of these etudes australes using Cage's method.
As far as I understand, Cage was lenient to differences from the score if they were due to the limitations of the performers' skills, the instruments, or the circumstance, as long as the performers tried to follow the score as much as possible and didn't use their cliche. I read that Tudor altered certain parts of the score when he played Music of Changes. I don't know what Cage thought about it. When they were working on Freeman Etudes, Cage agreed with Zukofsky (though reluctantly) that "the individual violinist, when it became absolutely necessary, would make such changes [e.g. expanding time, changing stringing, timbre substitutions, etc.] as he or she saw fit, preserving the original and its intent to the greatest possible extent." Ichiyanagi, who played Cage's works with him, said that Cage was very sensitive about playing differently from fixed scores, and when there was openness (unspecified in the scores), he had his preferred way to interpret it.
 
#213 ·
I love "gimmicks" for what they are. BTW, there's plenty of rhythm in the "Five Dances" for prepared piano.
 
#198 · (Edited)
There is music for listeners and music for the people who play it. Different rules apply. The idea that music must have clear rhythm or melody is a listener's bias. I believe entertainment is not essential to music but is DERIVED from music.

When musicians play for themselves, they often break rules that listeners demand. They extemporate, improvise, and experiment. I have a few jazz theory books on the harmonic foundations for this. What cracks me up most of all is how a huge % of music listeners claim to require rhythm in music, yet they have complete phobia for the interesting poly rhythms used in modern jazz, e.g Paul Motian and his followers....

I recall a latin quotation from last week's court hearings that I could apply to conservative tastes in music.
 
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