On Cage
On Cage
I am reading Cage’s lectures, and its hard to figure out when the performance stops and the analysis starts, which I think is absolutely the point.
It troubles me that so much great work is remembered in terms of one silent piano piece, I used to chant that the point of 4’33’’ is that everything we do is music, all possible sound can be defined as musical, but I realise now that I missed the point as well. In the light of his lectures I have discovered that Nothing is music, must be music - all other conditions are a failure. Perhaps more controversially Cage says that nothing is a far more virtuous condition then something. Mr Cage is dead now and has thus passed into the absolute realm of nothing.
When Cage says something like ‘nothing is more virtuous then something’ he is attaching to the very Zen idea that when you have nothing (poverty of the soul) then everything is acceptable, equal, Buddha. More imminently, what Cage was also saying is that everything, every sound, is musical, because when you forswear ‘nothing’ in favour of trending toward ‘everything’ you begin immediately to impose subsets, limitations and symbols. Thus you quickly exhaust ‘everything’ into processes and methods - this was the situation Cage found in his musical age, and like a great many great men before him, his progress was not a change in the rules (serialism) but a change in the scope of the definition.
I realise I was supposed to be talking about John Cage’s writing, and I got side-tracked like many better musicians before me, by his music.
Cage’s work with chance operations shows that he wants to remove everything possibly attributable to music from music, by using chance he wants the piece to be empty of everything, and thus free to become nothing. Perhaps he trumps Schoenberg at the acousmatic practice, Schoenberg wanted to hide the instruments, Cage wants to hide the performer, the composer, everything. He labours the point in his writings that a recording of music is a totally pointless operation. Adorno can argue this from the right, but Cage’s proofs are not so divisive and far more evident - how can you record chance music? And regardless of its creation, once it is bound to an object, how can it be nothing?
I realise was supposed to be talking about John Cage’s writing, and now im writing about his ideas. Feck sake.
I like the idea of Cage, and I make myself like his music, you must learn to like post-modern music, because when you like pre-modern music what you like is the memory, the nostalgia and the recognition of symbols. I think cage would argue that this listening is not music at all, an intruder; He describes it more as a virus, gradually stealing away the music and replacing it with personal meaning.
I had trouble with semiotics, Cage doesn’t, but I did. I wanted the ownership of meaning of music to reside with the composer, but this is not possible. Boulez said that music can impart no emotion, at normal volumes it has no effect on us - we bring the effect.
When I was writing music I included references to Cage here or there, samples of lectures and titles of works. Back then I did it to add authenticity, to like Cage in public, to demonstrate my idea of his idea, flawed as it was, no one else was doing it, no one else was doing meta-text at all back then, unless it was rape or violence. Politics and Philosophy were limited to the subset ‘everything’ of populist left / centrist, taken for granted omitted and/or ignored. Here then I can personally see the truth in the virtue of Nothing. Sadhu.
I need to clarify - not Absence, Nothing is NOT absence, absence is the exclusion of a thing from a subset, it is polishing everything. When Cage was writing, this absence, and exclusion had reached its ridiculous conclusion, analysis of analysis three tiers deep, music that was incapable of transmitting symbols other than intellectual arrogance, yet still clinging onto the last, terminally inbreed shards of Beethoven. Perhaps i am too cruel, The restorative school wanted to ‘compose as before’, the neo-classicists ‘wanted’ to write film-soundtracks for the rest of time. Rarely does a golden age follow a golden age. And at least it wasn’t fucking Combichrist. Feck sake.
When I was writing music I included references to Cage here or there. And now when I read his lectures I am reminded of the samples, this is a majestic dissonance. Cage himself samples his own lectures within other lectures
Beginning of the
Third unit
Of the fourth
Large Part
The result is beauty, real beauty, Cage hates structure (sometimes) and process (sometimes) but in his interlinked writings and in my interlinked interactions with his work we build a network out of nothing, its messy and ad-hoc but it is. A structure of structurelessness. Does this subvert his idea?
Can I find out?
Could Rachel Haywire?
Do you know what I mean when I reference Acidexia?
Does She?
Would we dance to the passing truck in front of the deaf musicians?
Do I need to clear this for copyright?
Did Cage copyright nothing?
Is that opensource?
Would this section have been better if I had used chance operations?
Is this Zen?
I realise was supposed to be talking about John Cage’s writing, I don’t think you should read cage, I think you should listen to it performed. He frequently used the same mechanisms in drafting his lectures that he used in his composition, perhaps the whole thing, elegant sampling and all, was just a labour saving device - Cage was a clever man who did, after all, make a comfortable and influential living talking about nothing.
Mr Cage is dead now and has thus passed into the absolute realm of nothing. I wonder would he be happy or sad that I have dressed him up like Socrates for Plato? Would he be angry about the sampling? or the meta-structure? would he be proud that he crafted a mechanism whereby i cannot embrace his ideas without violating them? Would he be prod of me for just setting that mechanism aside? Would he be touched or saddened that I have borrowed his style and adopted his ideas, surely that’s what he fought against?; analysis and subdivision. If the piece is created by chance operations, do you criticize the composer, the performer or the coins? Cage has eliminated criticism by making authorship meaningless, while simultaneously discovering that art can (perhaps only) exist when meaning is suspended and nothing embraced.
John Cage. Fucking. Legend.
I am reading Cage’s lectures, and its hard to figure out when the performance stops and the analysis starts, which I think is absolutely the point.
It troubles me that so much great work is remembered in terms of one silent piano piece, I used to chant that the point of 4’33’’ is that everything we do is music, all possible sound can be defined as musical, but I realise now that I missed the point as well. In the light of his lectures I have discovered that Nothing is music, must be music - all other conditions are a failure. Perhaps more controversially Cage says that nothing is a far more virtuous condition then something. Mr Cage is dead now and has thus passed into the absolute realm of nothing.
When Cage says something like ‘nothing is more virtuous then something’ he is attaching to the very Zen idea that when you have nothing (poverty of the soul) then everything is acceptable, equal, Buddha. More imminently, what Cage was also saying is that everything, every sound, is musical, because when you forswear ‘nothing’ in favour of trending toward ‘everything’ you begin immediately to impose subsets, limitations and symbols. Thus you quickly exhaust ‘everything’ into processes and methods - this was the situation Cage found in his musical age, and like a great many great men before him, his progress was not a change in the rules (serialism) but a change in the scope of the definition.
I realise I was supposed to be talking about John Cage’s writing, and I got side-tracked like many better musicians before me, by his music.
Cage’s work with chance operations shows that he wants to remove everything possibly attributable to music from music, by using chance he wants the piece to be empty of everything, and thus free to become nothing. Perhaps he trumps Schoenberg at the acousmatic practice, Schoenberg wanted to hide the instruments, Cage wants to hide the performer, the composer, everything. He labours the point in his writings that a recording of music is a totally pointless operation. Adorno can argue this from the right, but Cage’s proofs are not so divisive and far more evident - how can you record chance music? And regardless of its creation, once it is bound to an object, how can it be nothing?
I realise was supposed to be talking about John Cage’s writing, and now im writing about his ideas. Feck sake.
I like the idea of Cage, and I make myself like his music, you must learn to like post-modern music, because when you like pre-modern music what you like is the memory, the nostalgia and the recognition of symbols. I think cage would argue that this listening is not music at all, an intruder; He describes it more as a virus, gradually stealing away the music and replacing it with personal meaning.
I had trouble with semiotics, Cage doesn’t, but I did. I wanted the ownership of meaning of music to reside with the composer, but this is not possible. Boulez said that music can impart no emotion, at normal volumes it has no effect on us - we bring the effect.
When I was writing music I included references to Cage here or there, samples of lectures and titles of works. Back then I did it to add authenticity, to like Cage in public, to demonstrate my idea of his idea, flawed as it was, no one else was doing it, no one else was doing meta-text at all back then, unless it was rape or violence. Politics and Philosophy were limited to the subset ‘everything’ of populist left / centrist, taken for granted omitted and/or ignored. Here then I can personally see the truth in the virtue of Nothing. Sadhu.
I need to clarify - not Absence, Nothing is NOT absence, absence is the exclusion of a thing from a subset, it is polishing everything. When Cage was writing, this absence, and exclusion had reached its ridiculous conclusion, analysis of analysis three tiers deep, music that was incapable of transmitting symbols other than intellectual arrogance, yet still clinging onto the last, terminally inbreed shards of Beethoven. Perhaps i am too cruel, The restorative school wanted to ‘compose as before’, the neo-classicists ‘wanted’ to write film-soundtracks for the rest of time. Rarely does a golden age follow a golden age. And at least it wasn’t fucking Combichrist. Feck sake.
When I was writing music I included references to Cage here or there. And now when I read his lectures I am reminded of the samples, this is a majestic dissonance. Cage himself samples his own lectures within other lectures
Beginning of the
Third unit
Of the fourth
Large Part
The result is beauty, real beauty, Cage hates structure (sometimes) and process (sometimes) but in his interlinked writings and in my interlinked interactions with his work we build a network out of nothing, its messy and ad-hoc but it is. A structure of structurelessness. Does this subvert his idea?
Can I find out?
Could Rachel Haywire?
Do you know what I mean when I reference Acidexia?
Does She?
Would we dance to the passing truck in front of the deaf musicians?
Do I need to clear this for copyright?
Did Cage copyright nothing?
Is that opensource?
Would this section have been better if I had used chance operations?
Is this Zen?
I realise was supposed to be talking about John Cage’s writing, I don’t think you should read cage, I think you should listen to it performed. He frequently used the same mechanisms in drafting his lectures that he used in his composition, perhaps the whole thing, elegant sampling and all, was just a labour saving device - Cage was a clever man who did, after all, make a comfortable and influential living talking about nothing.
Mr Cage is dead now and has thus passed into the absolute realm of nothing. I wonder would he be happy or sad that I have dressed him up like Socrates for Plato? Would he be angry about the sampling? or the meta-structure? would he be proud that he crafted a mechanism whereby i cannot embrace his ideas without violating them? Would he be prod of me for just setting that mechanism aside? Would he be touched or saddened that I have borrowed his style and adopted his ideas, surely that’s what he fought against?; analysis and subdivision. If the piece is created by chance operations, do you criticize the composer, the performer or the coins? Cage has eliminated criticism by making authorship meaningless, while simultaneously discovering that art can (perhaps only) exist when meaning is suspended and nothing embraced.
John Cage. Fucking. Legend.