Cage, John (1912 - 92)

[NatBalance]

Many would say that any musical score could be described in terms of instructions. (I prefer "proposals".) Again, though, why does this matter at all?

Yes the score will be an instruction, but the 4'33" score is not an instruction to perform a piece of music, it is an instruction to time a period of listening to music. I don't understand the concept that making terminology understandable doesn't matter.

4'33" has a timeframe determined by John Cage, so it's a "piece" of time, purposely separated off from what comes before and after it (unlike in your example), with the implication: if you aren't listening to the sounds around you otherwise, please listen to them - perhaps in a "musical" way, during the next few minutes.

That seems the same as my example. Someone at the dining table defines a time when to stop talking and start and then later stop listening to the background pianist.

Sometimes people criticise contemporary composition on the grounds that (they think) it isn't going to "last" in the way that the classical canon has. Well, we are still talking about 4'33" after 70 years, and people are still performing it;

I don't get this idea that because people are still talking about something decades after, there must be something in it. That may well be true but that applies to infamy aswell. As for still 'performing' it, that's a different matter, and it's with the word 'performing' that I get lost. Where does the performance part come in?

Cage describes it as a piece of music. Shouldn't we be at all concerned with what he has to say?

Concerned yes, listened to yes, but understanding is the key. I have never got past that bit, and correct use of language is key to attaining understanding, although as I've mentioned, it can be bent to a certain degree.

[NatBalance]

OK, l am starting to understand you a little bit better. Can I ask you a question? Suppose someone transcribed the sounds they heard when listening to ambient sounds as music for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, and then performed them on a musical instrument. Would that transcription be a musical work which is subsequently performed?

Hey that's a good one. I'll have to think on that. Haven't the time at the moment but I'll get back to you on that one. My first thoughts are that the person with the stop watch is still not the performer. He could perhaps be the conductor, if signalling 'go' and 'stop' constitutes conducting. It may be a bit like my suggestion of how he should have done it but no, perhaps not. Anyway, thanks for that, I'll get my thinking cells fired up.

[RichardB]

I don't understand the concept that making terminology understandable doesn't matter.

This immediately suggests Cage's own "I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it." I think you're placing too much importance here on "understanding". Don't forget that we're dealing with a Zen-related idea here. Anyway, this is going round in circles and I've said pretty much all I have to say about 4'33". Why not discuss some of Cage's other compositions? - you know, the less annoying ones, that actually involve some sounds being made!

[smittims]

I'm fond of Etudes Australes which I bought as sheet music in the '70s and actually tried to play on the piano , an old grand which was already in my loft-apartment. Many years later I heard a performance and was surprised to hear the pianist playing them at a much faster tempo than mine!

[cloughie]

4’33” can be anything you wish it to be - but to me it is


nothing

[Mandryka]

I'm fond of Etudes Australes which I bought as sheet music in the '70s and actually tried to play on the piano , an old grand which was already in my loft-apartment. Many years later I heard a performance and was surprised to hear the pianist playing them at a much faster tempo than mine!

I once heard someone say that Sabine Liebner - who seems much much slower than anyone else - is the most true to the score. Apparently she spent ages and ages working out the various durations with a ruler.

It’s a lot of music which, to me, sounds like random pitches. Why does there need to be so many etudes?

And another question, which probably betrays my complete ignorance - why didn’t Cage notate it as a standard piano score with a stave of five lines etc? Is there any performer discretion in Etudes Australes, or are they on rails?

[Mandryka]

Here’s my favourite Cage based music - a CD of interpretations of Variations II

https://open.spotify.com/album/1WqaocmGXIK9hwK0TEYEE0

[Mandryka]

Here’s Claudio Crismani's essay on the Etudes Australes - I have enjoyed his performance possibly more than any others. I listened to it once with someone I know who worked with Cage in New York and he just grumped “too wilful!”

"ETUDES AUSTRALES": A PLANETARY JOURNEY

John Cage is without a doubt one of the most extraordinary figures in today's musical world. In Cage's works the Sonic Phenomena' are isolated, even separated, from any reference whatsoever to rhythm, harmony, melody and development: the sequence of these sounds is determined by the ancient Chinese 1-Ching and therefore appears, and I stress appears, to be random.

Cage introduced this Random Element' into contemporary western music in the early 1950's. What followed was a re-evaluation of the hitherto traditional figures of Composer and Performer. This proved to be a provocative and determined challenge for those who were still assessing the heritage of the Vienna School (Stockhausen and Boulez, for instance).

Cage became a reference point, a prophet and provocateur: but all prophets are above all natural provocateurs, are they not?

This was then linked to a new way of perceiving, and therefore writing music, which was innovative in its fundamental elements, such as time and melody.

In his book entitled 'A Year From Monday' John Cage says: "we have played Winter Music many times recently; I remember that when we played it for the very first time, the pauses were very long and the sounds seemed to be very much separated in space. They were of no hin-drance whatsoever to each other. In Stockholm, when we played at the Opera, I realised that Winter Music had become melodic. Christian Wolf had foreseen this a few years earlier when he told me that: "what we create today will inevitably become melodic."

The Etudes Australes are of fundamental importance in Cage's numerous works written for piano. This is due to the sheer size of the Etudes Australes, (two parts divided into four volumes, each of which is divided into eight studies) and to Cage's extraordinary exploitation of piano sounds, that is his use of the keyboard and therefore of the sounds produced by the piano.

In the Etudes Australes Cage transcribed, or translated, Stellar Maps of the Southern Hemisphere taken from the book Atlas Australis' into musical signs and paths.

According to Cage: "when music is played, the correspondence between space and time should result in the music sounding as it appears." In each study both the exact pitch of each note and the seemingly random sequence (1-Ching) of the notes themselves are written with great precision; there is no absolute rhythmic pattern; instead, the amount of time to be taken into consideration between one note and the next and between one chord and the next while the music is being played is carefully written. The music is therefore independent of gravity, as would occur during a journey into outer space. In Cage's fertile imagination, the musician playing the Etudes Australes is compared to the captain of a team of astronauts. In each study the harmonic resonance created by the piano's strings are dead), stated. These are obtained with the use of the sustaining pedal and by keeping certain keys depressed throughout the Study by means of purpose-built rubber objects.

This music is devoid of a narrative th= e proper. It is rather series of feelings be experienced bravely 'on the spot.'

The duration of each Study is linked to the visionary nature of its graphic plan. I also believe that the perfection of the piano's strings is of paramount importance, too.

With regard to the Etudes Australes, a brilliant observation was made by the critic James Rosenbaum in his book One day with John Cage'. According to Rosenbaum: "In a purely visual context an extremely interesting phenomenon occurs: when one is looking at the horizon in an attempt to find an indefinite and indefinable point in space where the blue line limiting the view of the surface of the sea and that of the visible heavens become one, our eyes perceive images which do not exist, images which the laws of physics do not allow us to see; this phenomenon is known to sailors as 'Morgan le Fay'. With regard to hearing, in conditions of absolute silence we hear noises or sounds which we would not perceive otherwise. These circumstances of 'static sound' have provided us with and influenced the writing of some of the most memorable pieces of music for piano, such as the Finale of the Chopin's Second Sonata, the beginning of Scriabin's Fifth Sonata, Debussy's 'Canope' Prelude and John Cage's 'Etudes Australes'."

Mention was made earlier of Cage's being inspired to write the Studies by a series of Stellar Maps, or perhaps by an imaginary journey across the Southern Hemisphere; in the light of these considerations, the Artistic Producer Eduardo Ogando and I would like to dedicate this recording of the Etudes Australes to the memory of the most romantic and visionary of all cosmonauts, to the bravest of visitors to this planet: 'To the Small Prince and to its Creator Antoine de Saint-Exupery.'

Claudio Crismani (Translation: The Office - Ts)

[RichardB]

I'm fond of Etudes Australes which I bought as sheet music in the '70s and actually tried to play on the piano , an old grand which was already in my loft-apartment. Many years later I heard a performance and was surprised to hear the pianist playing them at a much faster tempo than mine!

I always found Etudes Australes a bit hard going as a listener, mainly I think because the process they undergo between single pitches and chords (or "aggregates" as Cage tended to call them, since he didn't think of them in terms of "harmony" as such) goes by too slowly, and when listening to a recording I'm tempted to skip a few so as to speed things up... same goes for the Freeman Etudes for violin whose density increases to a "transcendental" maximum. On the other hand I have no problem with the ninety-minute orchestral piece 103 in which very little is happening most of the time. So I'm now listening to 103 on Youtube simultaneously with Etudes Australes with Sabine Liebner on Qobuz. I highly recommend this combination!

edit: I think I was lucky with that combination because Liebner's recording has a similar spaciousness to the recording of 103 by the WDR Symphony Orchestra. Having listened to that for 45 minutes or so I exchanged Liebner for Irvine Arditti playing Book 3 of the Freeman Etudes to make a Cagean violin concerto, but the result is unfortunately quite unrealistic given the close recording of Arditti (which makes perfect sense on its own of course).

While looking for the Etudes on Qobuz I noticed that there are quite a few releases of 4'33". Enough to make quite an interesting episode of "Building a Library" I would say. Perhaps with NatBalance and myself as presenters.

[Serial_Apologist]

Concerned yes, listened to yes, but understanding is the key. I have never got past that bit, and correct use of language is key to attaining understanding, although as I've mentioned, it can be bent to a certain degree.

Only, I would say, if one holds a vary narrow view as to what constitutes "understanding". One can understand the moment one sees the punchline of a joke, for instance, but can one put that understanding into words? The funniness in a joke cannot be explained in words without killing it: as with my Aunt Marj, who had no sense of humour, and would respond to a joke explanation by saying solemnly "Oh I see". Her reaction was in itself very funny to bystanders, though asked to explain why they themselves would have had to resort to lengthy explanations with nothing whatever to do with the joke. There are different types of what we think of as "understanding".

[Mandryka]

Yes the score will be an instruction, but the 4'33" score is not an instruction to perform a piece of music, it is an instruction to time a period of listening to music.

Let me try to play Socrates to help understanding

Do you think that Sergey Zagny's opus 27, called i]Metamusica[/i], is a piece of music? Here is the start of it



As you can probably see, it is inspired by a very well known thing which many people would say is a piece of music.

http://conceptualism.letov.ru/sergei-zagny/Scores/008-Metamusica.pdf

[Serial_Apologist]

Let me try to play Socrates to help understanding

Do you think that Sergey Zagny's opus 27, called i]Metamusica[/i], is a piece of music?

I would have to say he rests his case!

[NatBalance]

OK, l am starting to understand you a little bit better. Can I ask you a question? Suppose someone transcribed the sounds they heard when listening to ambient sounds as music for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, and then performed them on a musical instrument. Would that transcription be a musical work which is subsequently performed?

I would say yes. That's a bit like Vaughan Williams immitating the call of the skylark, except he was not trying to immitate it exactly. If immitating an ambient sound with a musical instrument you are very unlikely to get it sounding the same. It would be better if the ambient sounds were created by the same objects that originally created them, and from the same places relative to the audience. Trouble is those sounds would then be competing with other ambient sounds, so you could never get an exact performance. I call it a performance there because in that scenario musicians are actually performing as opposed to listening.

So yes I say that transcription would be a musical work which could be performed, but it could never be performed to exactly match the original. In my restaurant analogy it would be like the person who's decided to listen to the background piano music, copying down what they heard, and then next time at the restaurant bringing their own piano and playing what they had heard the previous time. They would then be performing instead of listening ..... but .... trouble is they would be competing with the existing background piano player who is still there but now playing something different.

[Bryn]

I would say yes. That's a bit like Vaughan Williams immitating the call of the skylark, except he was not trying to immitate it exactly. If immitating an ambient sound with a musical instrument you are very unlikely to get it sounding the same. It would be better if the ambient sounds were created by the same objects that originally created them, and from the same places relative to the audience. Trouble is those sounds would then be competing with other ambient sounds, so you could never get an exact performance. I call it a performance there because in that scenario musicians are actually performing as opposed to listening.

So yes I say that transcription would be a musical work which could be performed, but it could never be performed to exactly match the original. In my restaurant analogy it would be like the person who's decided to listen to the background piano music, copying down what they heard, and then next time at the restaurant bringing their own piano and playing what they had heard the previous time. They would then be performing instead of listening ..... but .... trouble is they would be competing with the existing background piano player who is still there but now playing something different.

You might like to get your hands on the score of Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning. There's an optional component of Paragraph 5 called TUBE TRAIN STOPPED BETWEEN STATIONS. It calls upon the performer(s) who qualify to perform it to reproduce the sounds they heard while on a tube train stopped between stations in the weeks preceding the performance. No audio recording is to be used in the reproduction of what was heard during the stop(s).

[RichardB]

You might like to get your hands on the score of Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning. There's an optional component of Paragraph 5 called TUBE TRAIN STOPPED BETWEEN STATIONS.

And indeed another one called "Silent Music".

But since NatBalance is clearly not interested in Cage's work, beyond dilatory arguments about 4'33", I don't imagine The Great Learning will be of much interest either.