John Cage (1912 – 1992)
… prepared piano …
“Die Musik, mit der ich mich beschäftige, muss nicht unbedingt Musik genannt werden. In ihr gibt es nichts, woran man sich erinnern soll. Keine Themen, nur Aktivität von Ton und Stille.”
Music is a purposeful purposelessness, or purposeless play, but this play is an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we are living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out the way and lets it act of its own accord."
John Cage. Silence. Lectures and Writings (1961)
Pierre Schaeffer:
ADSR
[Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release]
SOUND = pitch
duration
timbre
loudness/amplitude
MUSIC = sounds heard (together)
"Reading Thoreau's Journal, I discover any idea I've ever had worth its salt."
Cage. M
"… the most glorious music I ever heard …"
"… the finest uses of things are accidental. Mr. Morse did not invent this music."
Thoreau. Journal
"Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable … At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept."
Thoreau. Walden
John Cage – Music for Carillon No. 1 [1952]
"Is not all music program music? Is not … music … representative in its essence?"
Ives. Essays
"The function of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation."
Cage. Silence
"… away from ideas of order towards no ideas of order …"
Cage. Silence
"This play … is an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and desires out the way and lets it act of its own accord."
Cage. Silence
4’33 (1952)
"until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music."
"There's no such thing as silence. What they [the audience] thought was silence because they didn't know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. The wind was stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.“
(Richard Kostelanetz. Conversing with Cage)
A mind that is interested in changing … is interested in precisely the things that are extremes. I’m certainly like that. Unless we go to extremes, we won’t get anywhere.
(John Cage, interview with Cole Gange and Tracey Caras, 1980)
1361 2000 2639
INLETS [1977]
This work exemplifies Cage’s interest in "contingency", in his definition meaning "improvisation using elements in which there is a discontinuity between cause and effect."
NUMBER PIECES [1987-92]: EIGHT
“Harmony means that there are several sounds being noticed at the same time, hmm? It’s quite impossible not to have harmony, hmm? ... This notion of ‘anarchic harmony,’ of pitches and sounds simply co-existing, and thereby establishing de facto relationships in a non-rule-bound way, is fundamental to much of what I enjoy about the number pieces.”