6 ms·

Does anyone love this as music, rather than as an idea? Of composers, there are two schools: those who try to express something interesting musically, and those

Does anyone love this as music, rather than as an idea? Of composers, there are two schools: those who try to express something interesting musically, and those who produce interesting concepts. Some of Cage's work, especially, takes the second approach to extremes, where it cannot even be experienced as music. I don't think any of that sort of music will survive long, because the concept is no longer clever after it loses its novelty.

jeegsy 4y ago
Its an excellent point. You really cant get a sense of the whole thing since its mostly one tone stretched out most of the time. Hopefully it survives the stated 639 years
- Bud 4y ago
  You could listen to one of the versions out there that only lasts an hour. That would give you a good sense of the full piece. Then you could go listen to a snippet of it, in this extremely slow version, and get a sense of that. Then combine the two.
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
It's pretty silly IMO. Extreme Concept™ isn't difficult to do, and it's even less difficult to imagine. It's trivial to make extremely long time-based pieces on the web. You load the page, it works out the time/date, and it plays whatever the algorithm says is right for the time date. With the right algo you can make pieces that last for millions of years. And so on. There is a sense in which it's an interesting idea, but it's also a cultural dead end. You can only make it bigger and more extreme, and that's more about spectacle than music.
- Honga 4y ago
  The work doesn't necessarily argue against you. It may have been the intention, or it may be the effect of the work that ideas like yours come into existence. One idea of conceptual art is that the work plays out in your mind, and the physical creation is secondary, utilitarian even. The authenticity of the piece and it's validity is reinforced by our conversation and replay. On this measure the timeline is arbitrary, and trumping it is a second work all together, creating a new conversation.
  - blenderdt 4y ago
    What good does this work of Cage bring the world? Most people think it is uninteresting and a total waste of time. I can also understand the aggression a lot of Cage's work got in the past. It's very destructive for people to listen a long time to a man who is only speaking letters. Almost like torture. Is a waste of time art?
    - Bud 4y ago
      I think the best response to your claim that "most people" find Cage uninteresting is this book intro that e. e. cummings wrote. He had a few things to say about "mostpeople": https://www.americanpoems.com/poets/eecummings/introduction-from-new-poems/ https://www.americanpoems.com/poets/eecummings/introduction-...
    - vlunkr 4y ago
      IMO the point is to question the limits of what can be considered music. There's precedent (way too much in fact) in visual arts. Is a signed toilet art? Mona Lisa with a mustache? Banana taped to a wall? None of these things are meant to be enjoyed in the traditional sense. But they might make you think, or make you angry. So what good do these things bring the world? I don't know, probably none.
    - Honga 4y ago
      It's not the job of the work to bring good to the world, nor to interest people in the slightest, as can be said for yourself, or myself. Though you're right that the success of the work is probably intrinsically tied to it's interest. Art, and media in general are productions of culture which celebrate our humanity. That is, they rejoice in all of our abilities to perceive, conceive and enact upon the world. Wasting people's time in this light makes people aware of their time, and allows for further interrogations of our humanities to arise. Just as we're doing now. It's good to remember that art only gains it's status through a production being named art by an exhibitor. IMO there's no special purpose to the term. Consuming art is just another form of recreation, and people are right to hate it for any reason, just that tyranny of what is useful is usually not in the human spirits best interest.
- Bud 4y ago
  No, it's not trivial to make extremely long time-based pieces on the web. Because you have to keep the computer running continuously. That turns out to be extremely difficult. So there is no spectacle, here. Part of the magic of Cage's piece, in this incarnation, is that someone actually built the special organ, in a suitable space that might plausibly remain undisturbed for several centuries. It requires some maintenance and some care and feeding, of course, but not much. So one doesn't have to suspend disbelief too much, here—this performance may actually occur as planned. It's been going for over 20 years so far, after all.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- NoOneNew 4y ago
  Agreed, extreme concepts are not hard. But I think the fascinating part is the salesmanship involved. Something I've noticed, really high concept artists are fantastic salesmen... and really shitty artists (80% of the time). They can convince people that a duct taped banana on the wall or just splatter paint can emotionally transcend you. Dont get me wrong, I like some abstract art when there is an aesthetic quality to it. But the worship status given to something like this, one incredibly slow note every however months... come on. You could do the same with Vanilla Ice's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 song from the 90s. Doesnt mean anything... other than that song still slaps :) I'll take listening to an amateur messing with guitar chords while drunk in a shitty bar over something like this. Because I can actually experience the shitty bar music. You literally cannot experience this "art project".
  - somewhereoutth 4y ago
    The artist as messenger - through inspiration or otherwise to bring us a new way of looking at things; the artist as theoretician - to build on work that has gone on before and progressively expand our horizons; the artist as performer - acting out a role in society. I'd suggest all three are present in artists across the ages, but in recent times the last seems to have become more prominent.
- enduser384729 4y ago
  This is a bad take, but unsurprising when most Western culture still lauds virtuosity playing and "skill" over most other things. If it's a cultural dead end it's because of the culture not the idea. That aside, John Cage was having these ideas when they weren't as obvious as they are today and we have the benefit of hindsight. Dismissing that is also a pretty ignorant mistake.
  - dahart 4y ago
    Would you mind elaborating on what you mean? Why is that a bad take? What is culturally relevant about this? I’m not saying it isn’t, but I don’t know what it is, and tearing down others doesn’t help me. John Cage didn’t intend this piece to last 639 years, right? What ideas of his are you referring to? This long running organ piece was conceived by someone in Germany and is intended to highlight the history of Halberstadt, right? The question @TheOtherHobbes is raising seems relevant: how does this performance contribute to musical culture, or even to Cage’s work? It can’t be enjoyed as music, it’s more of a logistical piece intended to create a mythology. In that sense, this performance is, in a way, very much lauding a sort of skill over most other things about the music - the skill of pure perseverance. Like other conceptual art, it’s the story of this work that is interesting, but not really the work itself. You seem to suggest otherwise, would you mind coloring that in for me, so I can appreciate it more?
    - Bud 4y ago
      The best guide is probably Cage's book, "Silence". Contains a lot of Cage's interaction with Zen, random change procedures, silence, form and time in music, and all the ideas that are contained within his various experiments. It would be hard to explain in an easy sentence or two on here. If I thought I could do it, I'd try. It might end up looking like a Zen koan. :)
      - dahart 4y ago
        That ignores the fact that this Halberstadt project wasn’t designed by Cage, and the timing is for reasons specific to Halberstadt. Do you feel like Cage’s ideas call for a piece to last hundreds of years? It seems like all the ideas you just mentioned are thrown out the window when a single note lasts for years at a time, and zero people are present to witness the full performance, or even the full playing of a single note. This isn’t being done for music reasons, it’s being done explicitly for spectacle reasons, as described by the project page.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
rerx 4y ago
This is all concept, of course. But walking around the dishevelled old church, listening to the constant humm in the background is an experience that grows from knowing that this tone will last for years until it will change as prescribed. A tone change is a small event that draws some attention from wider circles. There are people who have cared for the project for more than 20 years and it's not only folks who initiated it. It will be fascinating to see how long there will be interest and resources to keep it up.
chki 4y ago
Maybe that's part of his art? To show where music and experiencing something as music "ends" and where art "begins". Exploring the boundaries of what constitutes music or art is interesting to me. > I don't think any of that sort of music will survive long, because the concept is no longer clever after it loses its novelty. At some point it stops being a novelty and becomes a historical event, where a piece of music has already been playing for 400 years. Wouldn't it be interesting to visit a place where you know that people hundreds of years ago have listened not only to the same piece of music but to the same performance as you are experiencing right now. That listenership spans centuries?
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  I believe we're agreeing, except in our value judgments. You say: > Exploring the boundaries of what constitutes music or art is interesting to me. Interesting, yes, as a concept, and perhaps even as a cultural event, but we certainly agree that it's a different kind of experience than a musical performance. > Wouldn't it be interesting to visit a place where you know that people hundreds of years ago have listened not only to the same piece of music but to the same performance as you are experiencing right now. That listenership spans centuries? I honestly have no interest in visiting such a place to hear a note, or even the change from one note to another. And recognize that what interests you in such a visit is not musical interest, but conceptual interest.
UncleMeat 4y ago
Is it wrong to explore the boundaries of the art form for reasons other than enjoyment? Formal experimentation is powerful and gives ideas to later composers. By constraining oneself to the goal of enjoyable performance, one can't be as free to experiment formally.
- ogogmad 4y ago
  plausible but [citation needed]
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  Wrong? I don't see it as a moral issue. I see it as an abandonment of music, but not a moral wrong. I think there's a value distinction to be drawn between boundary explorations that expand the art form and those that simply depart from any definition of it separate from the other arts. That leaves a broad scope for innovation: the composers of the ars subtilior, Carlo Gesualdo, Hector Berlioz, Debussy and Satie, Harry Partch, Antheil and Edgard Varese, and the progression of serialism from Schoenberg through Webern to Boulez — all of them explored and expanded the boundaries of music, but you can still experience their works as music, even if some have argued that it's bad music. It all can be, and has been, accepted as music. But some of Cage's works (of those which he presented as musical) depart from musical material and musical experience to play with the nonmusical culture that surrounds music and musicians, or, abandoning that, the idea of performance itself. Obviously 4'33", with its formalities of opening and closing a piano, is an example of the former, but his lesser-known 0'00" runs simply, "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." In that case, the performer is as justified in a disciplined soiling of their pants as any musical act. I refuse to countenance such wanking. (Cage was by no means alone in this, but he's probably the most famous.) I'm glad to see that even academic composers seem to have retreated from this dissolution.
  - fipar 4y ago
    I enjoy reading Cage a lot more than listening to his music (for that matter, he was fine with not being called a musician if people deemed his work not worthy of that, I can’t recall exactly but I believe sound architect is the alternative job description he proposed). I don’t relate to most of his music but I do think he was on an honest quest for something. In fact, I think it could even be fair to say he was a philosopher using sound as his medium, instead of a musician.
tomcam 4y ago
The first 15 years weren’t so catchy, but the chorus starting in easily 2016 is catchy as hell
swayvil 4y ago
Artists are generally in the first camp. Nonartists in second. Go to a gallery full of abstract expressionism. Hear people asking, "what does it mean?"
caymanjim 4y ago
klelatti 4y ago
I think that there are several issues with this perspective. Firstly, it presupposes that the music and the ‘concept’ are distinct. I love say Mahler 2 and the Rite of Spring but I love those pieces as a collection of notes and a concept together and trying to separate the ‘concept’ from the notes is impossible - when I listen to them the concept is an essential part of the experience. In this case I can imagine listening to the notes in the knowledge of the wider context and being profoundly moved by the experience. I don’t see this as any different to music that is highly repetitive (and so not ‘interesting’ musically), for example, but still elicits an emotional response from many listeners. Finally, if the classification is of composers into two camps, with Cage being in the wrong camp, then I’m afraid that the idea that Cage’s music won’t survive long isn’t backed up by the evidence as most of it is still doing really well many years after it was composed.

jeegsy 4y ago

Its an excellent point. You really cant get a sense of the whole thing since its mostly one tone stretched out most of the time. Hopefully it survives the stated 639 years

Bud 4y ago
You could listen to one of the versions out there that only lasts an hour. That would give you a good sense of the full piece. Then you could go listen to a snippet of it, in this extremely slow version, and get a sense of that. Then combine the two.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago

It's pretty silly IMO. Extreme Concept™ isn't difficult to do, and it's even less difficult to imagine. It's trivial to make extremely long time-based pieces on the web. You load the page, it works out the time/date, and it plays whatever the algorithm says is right for the time date. With the right algo you can make pieces that last for millions of years. And so on. There is a sense in which it's an interesting idea, but it's also a cultural dead end. You can only make it bigger and more extreme, and that's more about spectacle than music.

Honga 4y ago
The work doesn't necessarily argue against you. It may have been the intention, or it may be the effect of the work that ideas like yours come into existence. One idea of conceptual art is that the work plays out in your mind, and the physical creation is secondary, utilitarian even. The authenticity of the piece and it's validity is reinforced by our conversation and replay. On this measure the timeline is arbitrary, and trumping it is a second work all together, creating a new conversation.
- blenderdt 4y ago
  What good does this work of Cage bring the world? Most people think it is uninteresting and a total waste of time. I can also understand the aggression a lot of Cage's work got in the past. It's very destructive for people to listen a long time to a man who is only speaking letters. Almost like torture. Is a waste of time art?
  - Bud 4y ago
    I think the best response to your claim that "most people" find Cage uninteresting is this book intro that e. e. cummings wrote. He had a few things to say about "mostpeople": https://www.americanpoems.com/poets/eecummings/introduction-from-new-poems/ https://www.americanpoems.com/poets/eecummings/introduction-...
  - vlunkr 4y ago
    IMO the point is to question the limits of what can be considered music. There's precedent (way too much in fact) in visual arts. Is a signed toilet art? Mona Lisa with a mustache? Banana taped to a wall? None of these things are meant to be enjoyed in the traditional sense. But they might make you think, or make you angry. So what good do these things bring the world? I don't know, probably none.
  - Honga 4y ago
    It's not the job of the work to bring good to the world, nor to interest people in the slightest, as can be said for yourself, or myself. Though you're right that the success of the work is probably intrinsically tied to it's interest. Art, and media in general are productions of culture which celebrate our humanity. That is, they rejoice in all of our abilities to perceive, conceive and enact upon the world. Wasting people's time in this light makes people aware of their time, and allows for further interrogations of our humanities to arise. Just as we're doing now. It's good to remember that art only gains it's status through a production being named art by an exhibitor. IMO there's no special purpose to the term. Consuming art is just another form of recreation, and people are right to hate it for any reason, just that tyranny of what is useful is usually not in the human spirits best interest.
Bud 4y ago
No, it's not trivial to make extremely long time-based pieces on the web. Because you have to keep the computer running continuously. That turns out to be extremely difficult. So there is no spectacle, here. Part of the magic of Cage's piece, in this incarnation, is that someone actually built the special organ, in a suitable space that might plausibly remain undisturbed for several centuries. It requires some maintenance and some care and feeding, of course, but not much. So one doesn't have to suspend disbelief too much, here—this performance may actually occur as planned. It's been going for over 20 years so far, after all.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
NoOneNew 4y ago
Agreed, extreme concepts are not hard. But I think the fascinating part is the salesmanship involved. Something I've noticed, really high concept artists are fantastic salesmen... and really shitty artists (80% of the time). They can convince people that a duct taped banana on the wall or just splatter paint can emotionally transcend you. Dont get me wrong, I like some abstract art when there is an aesthetic quality to it. But the worship status given to something like this, one incredibly slow note every however months... come on. You could do the same with Vanilla Ice's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 song from the 90s. Doesnt mean anything... other than that song still slaps :) I'll take listening to an amateur messing with guitar chords while drunk in a shitty bar over something like this. Because I can actually experience the shitty bar music. You literally cannot experience this "art project".
- somewhereoutth 4y ago
  The artist as messenger - through inspiration or otherwise to bring us a new way of looking at things; the artist as theoretician - to build on work that has gone on before and progressively expand our horizons; the artist as performer - acting out a role in society. I'd suggest all three are present in artists across the ages, but in recent times the last seems to have become more prominent.
enduser384729 4y ago
This is a bad take, but unsurprising when most Western culture still lauds virtuosity playing and "skill" over most other things. If it's a cultural dead end it's because of the culture not the idea. That aside, John Cage was having these ideas when they weren't as obvious as they are today and we have the benefit of hindsight. Dismissing that is also a pretty ignorant mistake.
- dahart 4y ago
  Would you mind elaborating on what you mean? Why is that a bad take? What is culturally relevant about this? I’m not saying it isn’t, but I don’t know what it is, and tearing down others doesn’t help me. John Cage didn’t intend this piece to last 639 years, right? What ideas of his are you referring to? This long running organ piece was conceived by someone in Germany and is intended to highlight the history of Halberstadt, right? The question @TheOtherHobbes is raising seems relevant: how does this performance contribute to musical culture, or even to Cage’s work? It can’t be enjoyed as music, it’s more of a logistical piece intended to create a mythology. In that sense, this performance is, in a way, very much lauding a sort of skill over most other things about the music - the skill of pure perseverance. Like other conceptual art, it’s the story of this work that is interesting, but not really the work itself. You seem to suggest otherwise, would you mind coloring that in for me, so I can appreciate it more?
  - Bud 4y ago
    The best guide is probably Cage's book, "Silence". Contains a lot of Cage's interaction with Zen, random change procedures, silence, form and time in music, and all the ideas that are contained within his various experiments. It would be hard to explain in an easy sentence or two on here. If I thought I could do it, I'd try. It might end up looking like a Zen koan. :)
    - dahart 4y ago
      That ignores the fact that this Halberstadt project wasn’t designed by Cage, and the timing is for reasons specific to Halberstadt. Do you feel like Cage’s ideas call for a piece to last hundreds of years? It seems like all the ideas you just mentioned are thrown out the window when a single note lasts for years at a time, and zero people are present to witness the full performance, or even the full playing of a single note. This isn’t being done for music reasons, it’s being done explicitly for spectacle reasons, as described by the project page.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

rerx 4y ago

This is all concept, of course. But walking around the dishevelled old church, listening to the constant humm in the background is an experience that grows from knowing that this tone will last for years until it will change as prescribed. A tone change is a small event that draws some attention from wider circles. There are people who have cared for the project for more than 20 years and it's not only folks who initiated it. It will be fascinating to see how long there will be interest and resources to keep it up.

chki 4y ago

Maybe that's part of his art? To show where music and experiencing something as music "ends" and where art "begins". Exploring the boundaries of what constitutes music or art is interesting to me. > I don't think any of that sort of music will survive long, because the concept is no longer clever after it loses its novelty. At some point it stops being a novelty and becomes a historical event, where a piece of music has already been playing for 400 years. Wouldn't it be interesting to visit a place where you know that people hundreds of years ago have listened not only to the same piece of music but to the same performance as you are experiencing right now. That listenership spans centuries?

JasonFruit 4y ago
I believe we're agreeing, except in our value judgments. You say: > Exploring the boundaries of what constitutes music or art is interesting to me. Interesting, yes, as a concept, and perhaps even as a cultural event, but we certainly agree that it's a different kind of experience than a musical performance. > Wouldn't it be interesting to visit a place where you know that people hundreds of years ago have listened not only to the same piece of music but to the same performance as you are experiencing right now. That listenership spans centuries? I honestly have no interest in visiting such a place to hear a note, or even the change from one note to another. And recognize that what interests you in such a visit is not musical interest, but conceptual interest.

UncleMeat 4y ago

Is it wrong to explore the boundaries of the art form for reasons other than enjoyment? Formal experimentation is powerful and gives ideas to later composers. By constraining oneself to the goal of enjoyable performance, one can't be as free to experiment formally.

ogogmad 4y ago
plausible but [citation needed]
JasonFruit 4y ago
Wrong? I don't see it as a moral issue. I see it as an abandonment of music, but not a moral wrong. I think there's a value distinction to be drawn between boundary explorations that expand the art form and those that simply depart from any definition of it separate from the other arts. That leaves a broad scope for innovation: the composers of the ars subtilior, Carlo Gesualdo, Hector Berlioz, Debussy and Satie, Harry Partch, Antheil and Edgard Varese, and the progression of serialism from Schoenberg through Webern to Boulez — all of them explored and expanded the boundaries of music, but you can still experience their works as music, even if some have argued that it's bad music. It all can be, and has been, accepted as music. But some of Cage's works (of those which he presented as musical) depart from musical material and musical experience to play with the nonmusical culture that surrounds music and musicians, or, abandoning that, the idea of performance itself. Obviously 4'33", with its formalities of opening and closing a piano, is an example of the former, but his lesser-known 0'00" runs simply, "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." In that case, the performer is as justified in a disciplined soiling of their pants as any musical act. I refuse to countenance such wanking. (Cage was by no means alone in this, but he's probably the most famous.) I'm glad to see that even academic composers seem to have retreated from this dissolution.
- fipar 4y ago
  I enjoy reading Cage a lot more than listening to his music (for that matter, he was fine with not being called a musician if people deemed his work not worthy of that, I can’t recall exactly but I believe sound architect is the alternative job description he proposed). I don’t relate to most of his music but I do think he was on an honest quest for something. In fact, I think it could even be fair to say he was a philosopher using sound as his medium, instead of a musician.

tomcam 4y ago

The first 15 years weren’t so catchy, but the chorus starting in easily 2016 is catchy as hell

swayvil 4y ago

Artists are generally in the first camp. Nonartists in second. Go to a gallery full of abstract expressionism. Hear people asking, "what does it mean?"

caymanjim 4y ago

klelatti 4y ago

I think that there are several issues with this perspective. Firstly, it presupposes that the music and the ‘concept’ are distinct. I love say Mahler 2 and the Rite of Spring but I love those pieces as a collection of notes and a concept together and trying to separate the ‘concept’ from the notes is impossible - when I listen to them the concept is an essential part of the experience. In this case I can imagine listening to the notes in the knowledge of the wider context and being profoundly moved by the experience. I don’t see this as any different to music that is highly repetitive (and so not ‘interesting’ musically), for example, but still elicits an emotional response from many listeners. Finally, if the classification is of composers into two camps, with Cage being in the wrong camp, then I’m afraid that the idea that Cage’s music won’t survive long isn’t backed up by the evidence as most of it is still doing really well many years after it was composed.