TeledyN

There's been a heated thread of exchange over on rec.music.classical.contemporary on the music of John Cage; so good to see that John can still stir them up after so many years! Along with the admissions of incredulity also came the betrayals of the same, especially in answer to "which Cage recordings should I buy first?" at the base of long threads about which audio products the neophyte should buy. Since my blog subtitle [was] a Cage quote, since John was the second most influential collaborator in my own career (next to Udo Kasemets), I felt compelled to throw my hat into the Cage Pundit ring ...

I would not start with his recordings. I would start with his books. Without understanding the man from his own words, his recordings may bewilder and disorient. When John said you might like the sounds of your everyday world more, he was serious: He hated recordings because they were dead, stale, passed, past. He did not want you to listen to his sounds, he wanted so for us to listen to the sounds we hear right now.

That computer fan, for example, do you hear it?

that fan plays the music of John Cage. John asked us to do only one thing:

... without expectation, without anticipation, without judgement of correct or incorrect (which he proved a fallacy) or for sense from sound (another fallacy) or intonation (another fallacy) or even of silence (the big fallacy). We all live perpetually in a teaming sea of endless unrepeating, ever novel, ever new John Cage scores.

Cage builds on Varese, Schoenberg, on Satie, on so, so many names that may not be totally familiar to new audiences, and what is more, what he takes from each of these influences is only the subtle core; he is just as much a protoge of Joyce, Pound, McLuhan, of Rauchenberg and Marcel Duchamp, of Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, a one man roaratorio tour of twentieth century art and literature, gentle and persistent as a sea breeze that can knock you flat out but only if you stand just so and listen just so.

If you asked me (and you didn't) I'd start you off on your Cage primer with "A Year from Monday" or his landmark "Silence", just to get your bearings, and then I'd invite you to join Silence, the John Cage discussion list.

Submitted by mrG on Mon, 2002-08-05 05:00