On John Cage and "Art"
Jul. 29th, 2006 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
acroyearI just wrote this in the classical music group...
The intent of art, as Disney repeated in his tv shows in the 50s and 60s, is to invoke an emotional response out of the audient.
I would add that to my mind, great artists' work doesn't just invoke a response, it allows the audience to recreate in themselves the emotion that the artist himself was feeling at the time of the work's creation.
As a sophisticated example, take Bambi. Everything you feel, the filmmakers felt while making it, and if seeing the work didn't recreate the feeling the artists had in themselves, they went back and redid it so that it did. this wasn't just reinvoking the memory of the feeling, but the feeling itself.
To do this, each level of development had to acquire the feelings of the previous level, so Disney and the directors and had to capture the emotion of the book, then the storymen and music composers had to capture the feeling of the director, then the animators and layout had to capture the feeling from the storymen and the music, then the cleanup people, the ink and paint "girls", and the technicians working the camera and the sound mix had to hold onto that same feeling that still only existed as sound recordings and a bunch of paintings in pieces on glass and plastic. Yet the result still had the feeling that Disney had when he read the book and presented it to the team as a potential movie, now magnified in intensity by that shared collective team. and we in the audience continue to hold that same feeling in its magnified form. Artists at every step, carrying this feeling into a new medium. For the brief 90 minutes we watch that film, we ourselves feel like artists...
Cage does none of this. Cage invokes emotions, but they're emotions he planned for the audience to have, not emotions I believe he himself felt. He's a manipulator of feelings, and i don't call that good art. He's more a Ciceronian, only he doesn't use words to get his point across.
Added later:
Even in music alone, this idea of sharing the emotion, passing it on, is critical. If a soloist for a piano solo, for example, isn't feeling the music and feeling the composer's intent and emotion, he is only presenting his own emotion to the audience and the performance falls flat. Its not enough just to have the performer's emotions in that type of work, the performer has to be a means of amplifying the composers emotions for it to work.
This is a reason I feel that many "superstar" performers from east asia, the stereotypical 5 year old girls who can play chopin, are missing the point. They are technically perfect, and as such can get the composers intent across, but they add nothing of themselves to it. Its an exercise in technique, but its not music.
An orchestra takes that even further. The conductor has to feel the composers intent and emotion, amplify it and present it to the orchestra so they can capture what he's presenting and turn it into sound, each adding their own emotions to the mix. If they're not feeling the music, but instead their own little frustrations, the performance still dies. But as the orchestra shares the feeling of the conductor, himself feeling the music and emotion and the reach of the composer across time and space through those little black markings on paper, something magical happens.
The intent of art, as Disney repeated in his tv shows in the 50s and 60s, is to invoke an emotional response out of the audient.
I would add that to my mind, great artists' work doesn't just invoke a response, it allows the audience to recreate in themselves the emotion that the artist himself was feeling at the time of the work's creation.
As a sophisticated example, take Bambi. Everything you feel, the filmmakers felt while making it, and if seeing the work didn't recreate the feeling the artists had in themselves, they went back and redid it so that it did. this wasn't just reinvoking the memory of the feeling, but the feeling itself.
To do this, each level of development had to acquire the feelings of the previous level, so Disney and the directors and had to capture the emotion of the book, then the storymen and music composers had to capture the feeling of the director, then the animators and layout had to capture the feeling from the storymen and the music, then the cleanup people, the ink and paint "girls", and the technicians working the camera and the sound mix had to hold onto that same feeling that still only existed as sound recordings and a bunch of paintings in pieces on glass and plastic. Yet the result still had the feeling that Disney had when he read the book and presented it to the team as a potential movie, now magnified in intensity by that shared collective team. and we in the audience continue to hold that same feeling in its magnified form. Artists at every step, carrying this feeling into a new medium. For the brief 90 minutes we watch that film, we ourselves feel like artists...
Cage does none of this. Cage invokes emotions, but they're emotions he planned for the audience to have, not emotions I believe he himself felt. He's a manipulator of feelings, and i don't call that good art. He's more a Ciceronian, only he doesn't use words to get his point across.
Added later:
Even in music alone, this idea of sharing the emotion, passing it on, is critical. If a soloist for a piano solo, for example, isn't feeling the music and feeling the composer's intent and emotion, he is only presenting his own emotion to the audience and the performance falls flat. Its not enough just to have the performer's emotions in that type of work, the performer has to be a means of amplifying the composers emotions for it to work.
This is a reason I feel that many "superstar" performers from east asia, the stereotypical 5 year old girls who can play chopin, are missing the point. They are technically perfect, and as such can get the composers intent across, but they add nothing of themselves to it. Its an exercise in technique, but its not music.
An orchestra takes that even further. The conductor has to feel the composers intent and emotion, amplify it and present it to the orchestra so they can capture what he's presenting and turn it into sound, each adding their own emotions to the mix. If they're not feeling the music, but instead their own little frustrations, the performance still dies. But as the orchestra shares the feeling of the conductor, himself feeling the music and emotion and the reach of the composer across time and space through those little black markings on paper, something magical happens.
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-31 07:43 pm (UTC)Regarding Bambi, the studio was working on Walt's vision/emotions/message, NOT Felix Salton's. The book version has a lot of parts that are very different from the Disney movie and (for me) the feeling is also quite different (Salton's other book Florian is likewise very different from the movie version). If the studio was really trying to bring in Salton's view, why not include Gobo in the movie? His experiences before the hunt are critical to the emotion of the book (and the reaction/emotion of the reader).
no subject
Date: 2006-07-31 08:00 pm (UTC)Disney's Bambi is not Salton's Bambi, though I believe it captures the emotion of the original, amplified by Disney's own, which it can do just as well without the additional character. I never said it was capturing the "view", but the emotion. There is a difference, and remember my post *started* with the axiom that art is invoking emotion, great art the emotion of the creator.
At any rate, its still Walt Disney's Bambi for a reason. If it was Walt Disney Presents Felix Salton's Bambi, there would have been more grounds for an audience (familiar with the book) to have been annoyed. His Winnie the Pooh was pushing it as far as the British press went, and the rest of Europe has always been dismayed at the happy endings he gave to Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.
A performer is allowed to put his own stamp on something all he wants to the point that the original is so lost in the new that it no longer is part of the new. In classical music, Vaughn-Williams's Fantasias (on Tallis and Greensleeves) are a perfect case in point. Greensleeves's original melody and spirt is so hidden away as to be non-existent. However, its now a Vaughn-Williams piece, not a Henry VIII piece as a result.
When a performer puts their own emotions in place of the composers, they should acknowledge that because its not the same thing as performing a piece with the intent of capturing the composer's emotion.
In classical music (the context of my post), these things are treated very carefully. Failure to let the audience know your intent of your performance and you have a failed performance and a broken reputation. In recital for graduating with a music degree, the performer would have failed.
Folk music is considerably different - in folk music (and partially in rock), its expected that the performer's stamp will change the music away from the artist's original intent. Hendrix's or Hedges's "All Along the Watchtower" are both a far cry from Dylan's original. Only the current practice of copyrights and credits keep's Dylan's name on it by itself.