4'33"
There are a lot of things I've been wanting to post about -- not the least of which are the comments by Thomas and Karlo on the evolution vs. ID issue -- but there's just no time to do any of them justice at the moment.
I wanted to note, briefly, that, thanks to ubuweb, I just watched an orchestral performance of John Cage's 4'33" . . . wow. I found it perplexingly, startlingly moving. The ritual theatre of the piece -- which is made all the more real by it being performed by an orchestra and not on a stage and by a set of actors -- authentically brings a moment on non-ness to the something-ness that is generally the focus of such performances. Attention is drawn not only to ambient sounds, but also to expressions, physical movements. A moment of reverence, the sort of reverence one has at a religious ceremony, a funeral, a wedding, or a baptism. In that moment, so much wells up -- and what wells up is, I imagine, different for everyone. And this fact, which one realizes during the performance, becomes, in itself, part of the experience of the piece. Not just "who are we"/"what are we"/"what is this" -- but "who/what are we now"? and "who/what/why is now?"
In my classroom experience and beyond, 4'33" has always been regarded as something of a joke -- "a piece of music that's nothing but rests -- how funny and ironic and clever!" My experience of it, though, was quite the opposite . . . 4'33" is a ritual, a ceremony in the most austere sense . . .
4 Comments:
(I apologize in advance for typos, I'm in a hurry.)
I had interesting experience recently with a live performance of 4'33". A composer had undertaken to record the audience's (our) reaction to the performance (standard solo piano) and then play the sounds in the room back (slightly embellished and filtered, however; mainly in order to handle the fact that the main ambient sound in any room, as heard by a microphone is the buzzing of lights. But this is an incidental point to what I want to say...)
The audience, which was sophisticated and educated,etc. (academics mostly) sat in respectful silence (having of course long ago "gotten it") for the whole of 4'33".
But for the playback, "Audience listening to 4'33" they began to do all sorts of disrespectful things (including: laughing, talking, commenting, pointing fingers, even getting up and leaving, though not in protest.)
It think this goes a long way toward deconstructing the Cult of Cage, which makes listening to 4'33" too much like going to church, and nothing like its debut.
Indeed, "Audience listening" had effects on the audience that was listening which were much more in the spirit of Cage's original composition than today's performances.
I wonder is this is line with your experience watching the film?
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I'm afraid my take on the performance was much more of the "going to church" variety -- but it worked for me, probably because it was (I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit) the first performance of 4'33" I've witnessed. Every now and then I make it to contemporary music festivals with Cage in the lineup, but 4'33" seconds has never been on the bill. I've always thought it was because no one took the work very seriously -- the sterility angle had never occured to me. Makes sense, though.
The amount of coughing in the moments between the movements was quite astonishing and amusing.
Hmmm. On the other hand . . . church-like moments in artistic contexts don't necessarily strike me as bad things. I suppose it depends on whether the reverence is aimed at, say, the experience itself, or at our Image of Cage. For me it was the former, but I can see how it could easily become the latter.
Jay - I have a copy of a Cage piece of tape music from the 50s, which was played in 1958 at a celebration of his quadricential as a composer, and even there, gathered in his name, the audience is split between boos and applause after the piece. in fact, the recording alone - and the musical, tidal quality of the alteration of boo and yehhh - is riveting.
Cage himself is on record so many times saying he does not mean to agitate, disquiet, but rather to have us notice, to have art heighten awareness rather than box it nicely and then wrap it neatly.
And yet he has become branded. And while he did massive work towards redefining our sense of music as noise, and of silence as more noise too (in a sense pointing that non-being is but more being, and this is where i find his connection to zen fraught if not exactly severed) we still bear this massive predisposition towards finding meanings in Mozart and the Beatles we rarely if ever extend to cooks in a kitchen, or riding the bus. And, in some way, a perversity is born here, not so much due to the fluctuations in our intensity of response, as the habitual justifications and labellings ("art"/"non-art") which birth so much sloppy and destructive (yet fecundly destructive, endlessly generative of further destructos) thinking.
But the penetration of ritual into that piece - its fascinating, no? And not so often talked about. Its reduction to a joke and its church-like canonziationa re to me flip sides of the same effort to reduce it to one idea, pinning it to the wall as another art-butterfly in the museum, and thereby missing the bulk of the experience offered.
You know, you should email me if these occassional posts are in bad manners - I have this weird sense of intruding on a tight-knit community here. Its an impressive feat, really (not my part - unless my imagination here is impressive.)
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