On John Cage and Art pt II

[acroyear]

explaining Cage to my mom, who forgot who he was since, well, we don't have conversations like this very often anymore ;-)

Cage is the 20th century guy who started "avant-guard" music, trying to free music of all of the rules it had acquired, after he noticed that every rule up to that point was usually broken by the next generation of composers.  So everything he did he did to an extreme.  Where Shoenberg and Copland were experimenting with 12-tone (very much atonal) music, Cage started mucking about with quarter-tones (notes "between" the chromatic scale), only without the rules of jazz to give it some framework.  In the same way as impressionist music reflected the philosophies behind french impressionist art, Cage was the first "Modern Art" composer.

And his stuff often just sounds like mud thrown on a wall.

He did correctly note that silence is technically impossible given the realities of the world.  To demonstrate his view on silence (and to mock the trend of minimalism that was coming in which would eventually be repeated by "new age" composers in the '80s and '90s), his most famous work was 4'33", where the player would walk on stage up to the piano, sit down, lift the cover, and do nothing...for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.  Then get up, bow, and walk off.

Needless to say, nobody has bothered to download an mp3 of that tune yet. :)

Cage definitely reflected and influenced modern art and "performance art", but musically his contributions were a dead end; nobody of any significance took what he did and built on it to make it something more.  Is that a requirement for great art?  I think so, though Cage fans disagree.

The issue with Cage is that in spite of his lack of influence in the music world today, music appreciation classes still treat him as the be-all effect of 20th century composition rather than the side trek to nowhere that I believe he is.  The heart of 20th century music, now recognized in hindsight given that its over, are the synchopations and new harmonies of dissonance- in Europe, those brought into the canon by the neo-classicist Russians (Stravinski, Shostakovitch, Prokofiev), and in America the rhythms and harmonies brought into the tradition from Jazz in the works of Shumann and Copland.  (yes, both sides brought it in from their local "folk" music).  These works of the early 20th century were the most influential to the work of the late 20th century composers like Bernstein, and were incorporated into the neo-Romantic composers that dominated film music like Rogers (of R and Hammerstein), Jerry Goldsmith, and John Williams. 

The other musical aspect of the 20th century, also started from Jazz, is Rock and Roll and all of its variations.  Rock is, of course, just the folk music of our time.  Sometimes very sophisticated folk music, but still folk music. :)

In my opinion, in 50 years time, Cage should just end up a footnote in a music history book, not the "be-all" of 20th century music that he was painted as when I took the class.  Music of the 20th century was not "music without rules" which is how it was presented to me; it was the *selective* use of all of the rules up to that point to achieve the goal.

but that's just my opinion :)

Comments

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

from there he leads into Ives being the first really successfully unique American composer of the 19th century.