As I read
off the list of songs on my Spotify playlist, I remember just why it is that I
chose section J8 over any other English 1102 section. It was a single line from
the class description that had me from the get-go:
"...a
pianist sits down at a piano and proceeds to not play music for 4 minutes and
33 seconds."
As an avid
pianist of over ten years and a regular listener of recordings of the classical
canon, I have to say that finding the word "piano" in any context
tends to draw me to that subject. The irony of my selection was the piece in
question; that of a man named John Cage. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds
of silence, in three movements, performed by either a full symphony or a solo
pianist.
There were
many classical composers whose later works strayed away from the conventional
notion of music and experimented with different sounds, but John Cage took it a
step further; either the dissonance was pronounced or (as in the case of 4’33”)
the silence was. Cage’s
music is based on the concept of aleatory (leaving some part of the music to
chance.) Though primarily an experimentation with sound, Cage’s work is
intentionally controversial in an effort to evoke a response from the audience,
which subsequently contributes to the pieces themselves. It is clear that his
was an unconventional method, both by classical and modern societies’
standards.
Yet, any
attempt I make to argue against John Cage’s position in musical history as an
“inspired genius” draws a blank. Why shouldn’t John Cage’s work be considered
music, just as Kenneth Goldsmith’s is considered literature, albeit an obscure
section of it? One might consider the John Cage movement analogous to the
conceptual literature movement. Goldsmith was himself inspired down the road of
conceptualism by John Cage’s essays, and once said, “[John] Cage gave me license to become an
artist by doing less and saying less and fearing less.”
In
some ways, however, the two are quite different. Music doesn’t inherently draw
a parallel with literature, because the definition of music is more subjective.
Ordinary individuals of today’s society hold stricter standards for the music
they listen to than they do for what they consider to be literature. Literature
encompasses anything and everything written, just as sound, not music, does
everything heard.
Sound
is music, noise and everything in between. What people traditionally consider
music is sound with certain restrictions on its frequency ratios. Noise is a
random scattering of sound of all frequencies, and does not resonate well with
the human brain. Music thus has the ability to appease and provoke at the same
time, and at its core is its enjoyability. Granted, 4’33”’s silence is
naturally soothing, but that can hardly be attributed to John Cage in the first place. And
everything else John Cage is noise, right?
Well,
we must consider the most important aspect with classifying art – peoples’
tastes as a function of time. John Cage’s work is simply not for our time; that
doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t music. In the early 18th
century, Bach was utterly unimpressed by the concept of the new “piano”, and
didn’t believe that it would ever catch on. Beethoven’s early compositions,
leading into the romantic period, were not received well by the hardcore
“classicists”. And I’m sure that Beethoven would gladly have his deafness back
if he had a chance to listen to Eminem. Perhaps, then, John Cage’s work isn’t a
statement of where music is so much as where it’s going. Music is trending
towards unoriginality, and it’s only a bad thing to one of the “old is gold" mentality.
So is
John Cage a musician? He may be dead, but I still answer: not yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage http://www.studio360.org/story/310817-aha-moment-kenneth-goldsmith-john-cage/
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~syverson/worldsfair/exhibits/hall2/yoshimura/music.htm
It’s kind of unfair that you’re judging John Cage by 4’33. Even though 4’33 is in his own words, “his most important work” and his most famous and controversial piece, it is not his only creation. He has other pieces of music such as “In a landscape” which is more mundane and relatable, so it can be easily said he qualifies as a musician, unlike Goldsmith that most of his works are under the same umbrella and therefore can be questioned. So instead, your argument should be “should 4’33 in itself count as music?”
ReplyDeleteNow on 4’33, what makes it music is the fact that it concerns duration. According to Cage, duration is the essential building block of all of music. This distinction is motivated by the fact that duration is the only element shared by both silence and sound. As a result, the underlying structure of any musical piece consists of an organized sequence of "time buckets". They could be filled with either sounds, silence or noise; where neither of these elements is absolutely necessary for completeness. In the spirit of his teacher Schoenberg, Cage managed to emancipate the silence and the noise to make it an acceptable or perhaps even integral part of his music composition. 4′33″ serves as a radical and extreme illustration of this concept, asking that if the time buckets are the only necessary parts of the musical composition, then what stops the composer from filling them with no intentional sounds?
Maybe you’re right, and our generation just isn’t ready to unanimously accept John Cage’s work as music yet, even though from the description above it clearly meets all the standards. If all the music around our time was like 4’33, and Beethoven got a chance to listen to them he would agree that he wasn’t missing much. With some more time, tastes will change and so will people’s views. But as of now, I will still vouch for John Cage as one the bravest conceptual musicians of all time.