John Cage's 4'33

I've got "Empty Words" in the rotation right now..

Actually met him years ago. Odd fish that one.

That must have been something; what was your time like w/ him?

Was at a concert. Just got to shake his hand. Long time ago.

:thumbsup:

my favorite of his.

He was, as far as I am concerned, just trying to see how far out he could go, how far he could push until people said, WTF!......

And since some writers of the New York "in" writers were enamoured, so were all the Blue Blood patrons who support the classics...

Kind of like Marylin Manson, on a baser level of course.....

that movement produced the likes of robert rauschenberg: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/rauschenberg_r.html merce cunningham: http://www.merce.org & arthur penn: http://www.ronaldbrucemeyer.com/reviews/bigman.htm while effecting many others such as twyla tharp: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/tha0bio-1

i think it clearly more important to understand what we are talking about & we ain't talk'n bout no "Marylin Manson", or neil sedaka here, no sir.

beyond the horizon you & i are standing on & perhaps even looking at, it is the continuation of the expression of an art scrawled first on a cave wall in French tens of thousands of years ago, a sound of a bow after an arrows release, a reed blown while held between two human fingers with a gentle breath. the essentials.

cage studied with Schonberg http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/schonberg.html @ UCLA, himself lending much angst to the cycle of fifths itself by way of his atonal, 12 tone/tone poems & such.

art & music can be 'corporate'; much of it is, fulfilling little more than the requirements to fill an audio, or visual space in an aesthetically pleasing way, no particular breaking of any new ground and that is fine & dandy. asking no; or indeed preferring no questions be asked of themselves, many prefer it. it is a form of 'binky', or safe-house. again, that's fine. folks of cage's caliber, however, seek ways to re-formulate a set of established means into a/the avant-gard what then becomes common to you & me.

with respect to music: during the inquisition (and believe me i understand the python adage "no one expects The Spanish Inquisition") composers were subject flame & pain of death, or dislocation, for combining whole, godly notes with dissonance.

with respect to art: artists were made to suffer for little more than rendering a mole, or wart upon the gentle cheek of a monarch, noble, or aristocrat.

time marches on...

hubby has a line i've heard him deliver at openings & exhibitions when they ask him where contemporary artists view themselves in relation to their surroundings...and yes...'they' buy it,

"the contemporary artist can be seen with the tips of his toes curled round the edge of a tempest's cliff leaning into a great swirl of contemporaneous events, society, symbol & color theory, allegory & godhead, the droll & sorrow both of everyday, common life experience; pulling bits of expression that they then hand back into a contiguous time-line of human expression. if it is done right, there will be little duplication"

cage was, many artists are: spacey, childlike, intense, non-sensical, intense over & again. others still make 'a living' producing works that have no more loft than what you would see in the exhibition of a manufactured home @ the state fair...

but when we lost cage...we lost an american master :hi:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/cage_j.html


http://images.google.com/images?q=robert+rauschenberg&hl=en&lr=&sa=N&tab=ii&oi=imagest

http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en

:kick:

I can't get that song out of me head now. :grr:

:rofl:

Hello, you! I missed you quite terribly.

:spank:

after many tears you show up. You know how many people have lamented your recent abscence?

Know how I feel? I'm reading something and I'd love to share it, but only you would get the jokes. So I can't share them... and it feels very very lonely.

You gave me a great gift... and then took it away.

Khash.

:thumbsup:

no one plays Cage like Zappa.

and a scholar of composers like Schonberg and Cage. He wrote and recorded a program on Cage for WFMT in Chicago.

Dad was just the coolest. I miss him so.

:hi: :hug:

From Wikipedia:

In 2002, British songwriter Mike Batt released an album containing a track called A one minute silence, credited to himself and John Cage. The estate of Cage launched a lawsuit against Batt, claiming it infringed the copyright of the earlier Cage work. The case was settled out of court for a large undisclosed sum. However, Cage’s friends, Yoko Ono and John Lennon, released a piece entitled “Two Minutes Silence” on the album “Life with the Lions — Unfinished Music Part 2” to no apparent lawsuits. It is understood that the lawsuit against Batt was initiated because of the "Batt/Cage" credit, not because the track was a silent composition.

It was a joy actually seeing it performed having only read about it. I got my Dad to play it to the Primary School class he teaches. Apparently they managed about a minute, then just ignored the TV and started talking!

:kick: