4:33" interpretations

[Boilk]

Does anyone know if Cage (and his estate) got income from performances of the score?

I suppose this is the one piece of "music" for which sampling part of a performance for unauthorised usage elsewhere would probably NOT result in litigation!

[Richard Barrett]

There'd probably be plenty of leg room for me at any retrospective series of concerts devoted to Milton Babbitt - and for the two or three dozen others in attendance. But was he ever considered "avant garde"?

Of course. Why would you think he wasn't? Although he was a far more important and influential figure in the USA than in Europe. I didn't really have much idea of what he was up to before Paul Griffiths explained his particular take on serial technique in his book about music since 1945 (I mean the first edition, that came out in 1981).

Returning to Cage though, I think one of the reasons why he and his work gained such international exposure is that there are so many ways of looking at what he did, which encompass a radical anti-intellectualism at one end of the spectrum and the most systematic of philosophical analyses at the other. Everyone can, so to speak have their own Cage; although in his own words "I am for the birds, not for the cages in which people sometimes place them.'"

[cloughie]

Does anyone know if Cage (and his estate) got income from performances of the score?

If he did I hope he had the decency to donate them to charity!

[Bryn]

That was Sellers in Balham, and they'd sold out by 2.50!

Though both Bal-ham and Puckoon play the role of gateway to the south,

[Bryn]

I suppose this is the one piece of "music" for which sampling part of a performance for unauthorised usage elsewhere would probably NOT result in litigation!

That can be swiftly Batted out of court:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-11964995

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I was interested in the date 1910 as being the date when people started talking about an 'avant-garde'.

I suspect (= "reckon" ) that people were using the expression earlier - and I'd thought that it started with the Impressionists, but maybe that was a documentary from long-ago whose details have merged and muddled in my memory. Interesting that the term (which has military origins: a small group of soldiers sent out to explore and gather information about territory before the rest of the regiment/platoon go there) becomes "popular" in the years leading up to the First World War. That sense of seeking out new areas (of expression and technique) before others take them up fits in with the Horizon quotation you give. I imagine (yup, "reckon" again) that it then became a "polite" term for describing new Art that people didn't like?

And, as such, "avant garde" thus becomes a term that people came to apply to any new Art that didn't follow technical and expressive procedures that they wanted (and found) in Art that they did know and love. So, for me, Babbitt - whose work is based entirely on the development of technical and expressive means found in 19th Century European Music - isn't "avant garde". I tend to avoid the term, anyway (because it is so nebulous) but would think that Cage could better be described as "avant garde" because the nature of his Musical thinking comes from somewhere very different and with radical (literally - this gets to the roots of why the Arts are important) effect on the way that Musicians think about what Music is and therefore, can/might be (even Musicians who hold these new ideas in contempt still have to come to some sort of hostile accommodation of them).

"Pockets of appreciation" - well, with the nature of instant international communication, the whole notion of "audience" has changed: the pockets have become very much deeper Now that access to performances and repertoires is becoming less and less reliant on recording companies, Music publishers, and Radio stations, everything will be "pocketed" - hopefully with listeners popping more readily from one pocket to another without moving from wherever they have their listening devices. Avant Gardes will become more quickly assimilated - and RVW (or Madetoja or whoever) will also reach a wider worldwide audience/"listenership". (Which RVW might well have done already - the statistical comparison with Cage comes from an article in Tempo or The Musical Times that I read 12 or 15 years ago based on information supplied by publishers.)

[Richard Barrett]

Babbitt - whose work is based entirely on the development of technical and expressive means found in 19th Century European Music

Serialised time-points? Electronic music?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Serialised time-points? Electronic music?

I think that these are developments of things that "already were" - just as Schoenberg's serial works are developments of ways of working he found in Brahms (or "imposed upon" or "misread in Brahms" for Postmodernist thinkers) - and his use of electronics was primarily a means of getting accurate reproductions of the rhythms in his Music, rather than an exploration of the special expressive potential of the electronics themselves (he said this himself, I think, when he spoke dismissively about the timbral nature of the work of other composers who used electronics; that was just something that was way down his list of priorities).

But I may be thinking more in terms that would better be described more as "Experimental" than "Avant Garde" - which is why I prefer to avoid the term. I would say that Schönberg's Music from 1910-18 can be described as "Avant Garde" (as I understand and use the term), but not the Serial works - and yet they, too, can be said to "radically rethink what Music can be" (or whatever gumpf I used to express this) and forced even those Musicians who held serialism in contempt to accommodate these new ideas. In the world of my terminology, Berlioz and Mussorgsky are Avant Garde, Bruckner and Brahms not (even though Brahms and Bruckner are as different from each other as ... well Berloz and Mussorgsky).

Essentially, I have difficulty with the term because so much of the Music so described (by others) as "Avant Garde" is everyday listening for me.

[vinteuil]

... Interesting that the term (which has military origins: a small group of soldiers sent out to explore and gather information about territory before the rest of the regiment/platoon go there) becomes "popular" in the years leading up to the First World War. )

... so by one reading the avant garde is a forlorn hope -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forlorn_hope

.

[Richard Barrett]

his use of electronics was primarily a means of getting accurate reproductions of the rhythms in his Music

... which was in itself a new idea. I don't think there are any precedents for the way he applied serial principles to rhythm either. I'm not saying these things in order to slap a big Avant-Garde label on Babbitt, just to acknowledge that his musical thinking was actually really quite innovative. I'm not speaking as a particular admirer of his music either really - I find his electronic music more interesting than most of his instrumental music, and principally for reasons to do with timbre, however he may have thought about it himself!

As for Cage, it's a shame that the piece supposedly under discussion tends in the minds of people who don't know his work or thinking very well (or at all) to be the first thing that springs to mind when his name is mentioned. If he hadn't written a silent composition someone else would have. Plus it isn't the only one. (Dieter Schnebel's Nostalgie for solo conductor is another that occasionally gets performed.) Many of Cage's pieces show an exceptional sensitivity to sound, a sense of poise which can most easily be compared to his beloved Japanese rock gardens, a sometimes startling tendency to sidestep received ("European") assumptions about music and what it is. While he's famous for suggesting that natural and/or unintentional sounds can be heard as music (as in the piece under discussion), his compositions often have the quality of natural phenomena that haven't been "forced" into existence by human intervention (although this quality is the result of his artistic sensibility rather than any lack thereof). Many people take him too seriously; many more don't take him seriously enough. To the question "is John Cage's work seriously or humorously intended?" the correct answer is "Yes".

[cloughie]

That can be swiftly Batted out of court:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan...shire-11964995

Beware your right to slience could be plagiarism. What a load of b.....

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... which was in itself a new idea. I don't think there are any precedents for the way he applied serial principles to rhythm either. I'm not saying these things in order to slap a big Avant-Garde label on Babbitt, just to acknowledge that his musical thinking was actually really quite innovative.

Oh, I completely agree - but whilst "innovative thinking" is the most important aspect of being Avant Garde, I wouldn't say that this means that everybody who "thinks innovatively" is Avant Garde. Bach (JS) was far, far more of an innovator than the too-easy description of him as a "conservative" composer allows - but I wouldn't think of Bach as Avant Garde. (Rameau, on the other hand ... )

Again, this may simply be my own, idiosyncratic definition of "Avant Garde".

I'm not speaking as a particular admirer of his music ...

Ooh! I am!

[Richard Barrett]

Ooh! I am!

This we know.

While I'm here: I've been getting into the newish first English-language collection of writings by Luigi Nono, Nostalgia for the Future. Anyone with an interest in ahem avant-garde music of the second half of the twentieth century needs to read this book. It opens with a long autobiographical interview with musicologist Enzo Restagno which is worth the price of the book in itself. Cage is mentioned, along with most of Nono's other colleagues, with a great generosity of spirit and insight even when there are fundamental disagreements. And of course Nono was a learned and inquisitive character who kept up many contacts with artists, writers and philosophers, quite apart from his political commitment which was by no means a matter of cheering from the sidelines - he describes being arrested and interrogated in Lima after giving a lecture there, before being deported back to Italy. But above all I've learned more about the detailed background to his music reading this interview than everything I've ever read about him and his work previously.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

This we know.

Oh! Mentioned it before, have I?

While I'm here: I've been getting into the newish first English-language collection of writings by Luigi Nono, Nostalgia for the Future. Anyone with an interest in ahem avant-garde music of the second half of the twentieth century needs to read this book. It opens with a long autobiographical interview with musicologist Enzo Restagno which is worth the price of the book in itself. Cage is mentioned, along with most of Nono's other colleagues, with a great generosity of spirit and insight even when there are fundamental disagreements. And of course Nono was a learned and inquisitive character who kept up many contacts with artists, writers and philosophers, quite apart from his political commitment which was by no means a matter of cheering from the sidelines - he describes being arrested and interrogated in Lima after giving a lecture there, before being deported back to Italy. But above all I've learned more about the detailed background to his music reading this interview than everything I've ever read about him and his work previously.

That book arrived in the post yesterday morning - irresistible, and for me an essential acquisition.