I’ve been an amateur musician just about all my life, mostly playing traditional American and Irish music, with a couple of brief forays into rock and blues. I’ve been an avid listener of other kinds of music, notably jazz and classical, but am not educated in them at all.
I’d like to hear the opinions of my fellow amateurs on the John Cage composition 4’33". Not informed opinions, not educated ones, and not intellectual analyses. Just your gut reactions. If you’ve never heard it, do a web search and familiarize yourself (if you’re so inclined).
I have a couple of other questions relevant to musical appreciation, and I’ll pose them another time if this goes well. I’ll let this one sit for a couple of days and then explain why I asked and what I was thinking.
Is that the one that’s 4’33’’ of silence? I know that one,
“In C,” is about four minutes of middle C hammered on the piano. Somebody was actually “practicing” that in the practice rooms at SF State when I was a student there.
I guessed Cage was an aborted politician–that’s where true conceptual art is today
Although I heard a violonist once say, seriously as a “deep thought”: First you listen to songs
Grow up to music
Then to Bach
Finally to silence…
I still think that Cage’s attempts came really late: Duchamp committed his random concert almost half a century before… So this “piece” is about like drawing today a black triangle on a white canvas and pretend you went beyond Kasimir Malevich’s art :roll:
I have written many pieces similar to 4’33". They’re all of different lengths though. They’re all totally brilliant, of course. However, the In C that I know is by Terry Riley. It consists of a whole bunch of short phrases-sometimes just one note. The musicians start, one at a time, and play through the phrases in sequence. They can play a phrase as long as they want but when they move on, there’s no going back. When they’ve played all the phrases they quit and can’t play any more. I think you can have as many musicians as you want. I’m not sure about how they know when to start. Just when the spirit moves them I guess. When all the musicians are playing the piece sounds like you might imagine the inside of a hornet’s nest would sound.
That’s right Steve. I had forgotten all about Terry Riley, as distinct from Cage. How estupid of me.
It’s hard for me to see anything beyond shock value of these guys at the moment they “release” their brilliant ideas. I’m sure the critics would love to disagree. The would characterize Cage as some sort of soldier for the campaign to raise consciousness and cause us to question all that we presume and assume. I guess…
But it seems like the perfect set-up to wear odd clothes, hang out at cocktail parties and chase skirts of the young and impressionable.
My favorite celebrity artist has to be Leroy Neiman. I mean, the guy does actually do some illustrating; but to me, it was all about the white suit, the doofy mustache and the celebrity appearances. I think he franchised out to KMart, like Martha Stewart.
OK, here’s few opinions. The 20th century being what it was, if Cage hadn’t written this someone else would have. A very slightly interesting thing to do once if only to get poeple reflecting on what the minimal requirements are for something to be a composition.
What I find puzzling is that there are people around who regard it as not just good, but groundbreaking, art. I suppose they think it somehow explodes or challenges our conception of what a composition has to be and this must be important. To me it raises questions but they are very easy to answer. Is it art? Is it music? Yes, it’s both. But it’s bad music and bad art. It’s excruciatingly boring and boring music is bad music.
Why is it music? Well, why not? Take any piece of music. Take away a few notes—do you still have a composition? Well, yes. This is the limiting case of that process. One single note played just once would clearly be a composition. So why insist that we stop there?
We concede nothing of importance by calling it music. There is very bad poetry, very bad painting and very bad music. This is very bad music.
Geez, Wombly: you mean you don’t think Cage was equally as important in his concept as that German guy who wrote tunes in all the major and minor keys to demonstrate equal temperament? You are sooooo picky!
PS: Further proof of why the Weekender shys away from any kind of relativism despite the excesses of the alternative.
I had an art history teacher way back in 1970 who insisted that the definition of art was “whatever artists do”. So, his entries in the faculty art exhibition that year were three unprimed canvases with one or two swaths of spray paint on them. I didn’t get it then…I still don’t get it. Ditto for musicians and other artists who are trying to MAKE A STATEMENT.
Mike
Perhaps the idea is that finding 4’33" of silence in this cacophonous world is truly an art.
However, my initial thought is the same as one of my favorite authors, Patrick Dennis, when someone made a comment as he was typing a piece of what he considered drivel to fulfill a magazine contract. The person remarked that Dennis was working at his art to which Dennis replied, “This isn’t art. It happens to be crap.”
Well, I actually think that Cage’s composition was both art and crap. I don’t see any point in denying that it is art so long as one accepts that there is such a thing as bad art.
Cage had a point to make and to make it he produced some bad music. OK, he’ll be remembered as the guy who made that point which is marginally better than being remembered as the guy who wrote that boring composition.
The premiere of the piece would not have been boring of course. It would have been extremely interesting. People got angry and it is not appropriate to get angry because one has paid to see a bad composition performed.
I actually like a lot of art and writing categorised as modern. Part of me thinks that for modern art to thrive it was perhaps necessary for someone to do what Cage did once. What puzzles me is that people get worked up about it beyond the point of finding it a mildly amusing stunt to pull on an unsuspecting audience once.
BTW, has it ever been performed before a paying audience a second time?
The piece falls on its face. The lone C-note should never have been played on something so pedestrian as a piano. Among other possibilities, that note expressed on a jaw-harp would have been more ethereal.
According to Larry Solomon the piece is not silent but only the absence of intentional sound. Since unintentional sound forms the basis of it, it can’t be copied because unintentional sounds will vary from occasion to occasion. The ambient sounds will be different in different locations and different for each listener. Each period of “silence” will be a brand new composition. Suing someone for copyright infringement would be like suing someone because they used the same notes in a piece that you had used. Anyway, here’s Solomon’s abstract to his essay. Dig it.
“ABSTRACT: The purpose of this essay is to examine the aesthetic behind Cage’s “silent” composition, 4’33”, to trace its history, and to show that it marked a significant change in John Cage’s musical thought – specifically how it forms a point-of-no-return from the conventional communicative, self-expressive and intentional purpose of music to a radical new aesthetic that informs the field of unintentional sound, interpenetration, chance, and indeterminacy. The compositional process is described, both the writing of 4’33" and its evolution from past thought. Implications for performance are examined, and recommendations are made. "
I guess I’m uncultured and intolerant, but I don’t even think it counts as music. Just one guy’s ironic way of securing a name for himself. The saddest part is that there are actually people in the world who take it seriously.
Personally I think the point of art is to trigger deep emotional responses in the viewer, of the kind that can not be triggered by mundane means.
Hence, when someone produces a work of art to “make a statement” or “make a point,” I wonder if this is missing the whole point. If the statement is some concrete thing that you could simply tell people in plain words, then I think the artist is really just using an artistic medium for mundane communication, rather than art.
I like listening to 4’33’’ in a concert setting. Not many performers are brave enough to play it, though.
As with any piece of music, when the performers are finished, move away from their instruments (or put them down, but that doesn’t apply here ), look up to their audience again, the tension that has build up during the piece is released, and there’s a break which is usually filled with applause from the audience. Would you applaud after four and a half minutes of silence?
Once a recorder player at a contest played a certain set of pieces, then 4’33’', then again the same set of pieces. He didn’t just perform, but wanted to make people think about listening, and about the value of live performances in times of perfect technical reproduceability of music (at least that was what he said in the interview in the radio coverage of the contest, unfortunately I didn’t hear his recital).
Is this art? I can’t judge, but it is food for thought. “Music has to be better than silence, if it isn’t, you can just as well stop playing.” Quote from another recorder player in a master class setting.
Just rambling, and it all only applies to the highly intellectual world of modern classical music. 4’33’’ wouldn’t have a place in a folk session or concert, of course
