John Cage Essay

legerdemain cage in was cardinal of the artists who moved the furthest a dash from tradition. confine himself says that he was act to accomplish what Ives wanted m whatsoever days before to be able to posture on the back doorstep at sundown, lis xing to the medicament. In continuing and expanding the Ivesian tradition, hencoop shattered the old nonions of music as organized sound consisting of melody, harmony, and one shot (Nicholls, 2007). He wondered why music had to be these things. His disbelieving led to unseasoned designs of how tuneful elements could be freed from the restraints imposed on them by established thinking. n azoic music contains only a few of the available swages. Melody in its most elementary sense draws assistance to a single line, which is a quite primitive way of perceiving music. Rhythm in which til nowtsoccur in metre is also limiting. why, deep down a particular space of judgment of conviction, nates an event non happen at any poin t, its rhythmic dioramas thus be freed from time in the much handed-down sense? As confine puts it In a painting an image feces go anywhere on the offervas. Why dejectiont a rhythm do the same thing at bottom the frame give way of a piece of music? chicken coops subversive ideas confirm led to many an(prenominal) innovations. He is ordinarily credited with having invented contingency music, music created chthonic conditions that leave certain of its move to the vagaries of the hour (Nicholls, 2007). Virgil Thomson notes that chance in composition is quite like a kaleidoscope, and what kaleidoscopes and arabesques lack is import unanimity (Grant, 2001, p. 243). The music may not constantly gather in this quality, a condition that idler ultimately hinder its expression in purely musical terms. b bely on that point is a rising cast of musical aw atomic number 18ness, a vitality of thought and of imagination. detain has redefined the entire concept of directio n in music, since he has not been particularly elicit in where events are going. Rather, he is much intrigued with the moment and with the possibilities of what bathroom happen during that moment. detain has also thought to the highest degree musics purpose, decision making that actually there does not have to be any intent, that sounds alone can be the purpose. He says that a sound accomplishes nobody without it action would not last out the ostentation( Pritchett, 1996). His aesthetic that everything is music is important, for it opens countless possibilities. cages ideas have do a generation of composers rethink concepts that were taken alike much for granted or were rule out of musical con facial expressionration by previous generations. These concepts have, in fact, get alonged music beyond its old boundaries. Many of cage ins ricks are famous because of the r organic evolutionary concepts that formed them. The composition for softly that consists of quartet m inutes, thirty-three seconds of silence, 4? 3? , is a cause in point. To dismiss the ferment up as a gimmick or as insignificant because it really is not music is to miss the point.Composers have pondered the silences in music in previous ages, however it took detain to realize that silence itself was an opportunity for a complete work and a complete experience. According to henhouse, silence is deciding in favor of sounds that are not intended. And Cage feels that silence has philosophical overtones, for it strikes the foundations of the ego. 4? 33? is a difficult work, for there is so much to hearnothingand it is a memorable experience, for it shows a piece of multiplicity, something that interests Cage far more than aspects of unity at heart a particular work (Pritchett, 1996).Because anything is possible in Cages compositional process, some hearty kit and caboodle are highly organized, while separates give an outbound impression of random and unrelated sightings. M ost of his early pieces, among them the 5 Songs for Contralto (1938) and the foursome for Twelve Tom-Toms (1943), are carefully conceived and conventionally notated. euphony of Changes (1951) was created with the aid of the Chinese script of changes, I Ching, one of Cages favorite aids in the evolution of a work (Pritchett, 1996). In summing up to his novel approaches to the general aspects of composition, Cage utilizes charming instruments in some of hispieces.He has write compositions containing parts for brake drums. He has dispassionate music for toy piano. Cage, in fact, has not rejected any scuttle if that possibility has an intriguing sound. Thus, the amplified sound of water macrocosm swallowed, of a glass breaking or clinking, and of a balloon bursting are nice sources, as good in their way as a piano or a trombone (Kostelanetz, 1991). Cages have intercourse of both conventional and unconventional sounds has made him reconsider the various traditional instruments and how they can be changed to produce a new result.One of these investigations resulted in the prepared piano, which consists of objects such as nails, bolts, pins, and other materials placed between the strings of a piano, creating a mixture of contrastive timbres. Henry Cowell had experimented with various possibilities of piano sonorities earlier in the century, including playing on the inside of the instrument, and Cage was doubtlessly influenced by some of Cowells discoveries. But in most respects, Cages is an archetype concept.As a result of his pioneering efforts, the prepared piano is for all practical purposes a new instrument, reminiscent of a Balinese gamelan orchestra (Kostelanetz, 1991). other unusual effect occurs in The marvelous Widow of Eighteen Springs, a verse for voice and piano in which the piano player plays on the piano lid and on various other foresten parts of the instrument rather than on the keys. The piano, in other words, has many sound poss ibilities from which Cage has realized a diversity of new and unusual timbres (Pritchett, 1996). Cage has been acc employ of be narrow-minded, of only working with novelties and current new wave fashions.This is untrue. Cage actually is an important visualise whose mind is an open one and whose novelty-fashions in their total implications are significant and even visionary. They are not fraudulent, nor are they aimed at the destruction of Western musical civilization, although Cage has been accused of that and of just about everything else by his critics. The problem is simply that to the casual percipient Cages music is undisciplined. But this is also false. In some of his works chance itself is the discipline, a regularity that is used to bring about that which is not deficiencys intended.The compositional premises behind one of Cages latest works, the Etudes Australes, is evidence that there is a definite method behind chance procedures and that the results can precede a s unified a whole as if more conventional methods of physical composition had been employed (Patterson, 2001). Cage reports that the pieces created the impression of serial publication music to some listeners, and indeed the morose aspects of the method of creation and the resulting combinations of pitches from that procedure would undoubtedly give an audience an impression of twelve-tone writing.rigorously speaking, of course, it is usually impossible to tell if a work is serial simply by listening to it (Cage, 1966). Yet this association proves a point, for to mistake the chance operations of Cage for serial procedures is to demonstrate that two different methods can produce similar aural results. For a serial composer, serial procedures run the answers to most of the compositional questions and to the tenacity inwardly a particular piece.For Cage, chance operations answer the compositional questions, and from these procedures a continuity of musical expression develops. One of Cages literary methods is a further example of the logical use of chance operations. In trying to find a human activity for a discussion of literary works that in a typical Cage manner contains a liberal disperse of absurdities. Cage subjected the twenty-six earns of the first rudiment to a chance operation with the wait on of the I Ching. The letter m was the winner, and the book was subsequently entitled M.Although any letter would have worked as well, Cage remark that m was a good woof and particularly appropriate because it begins the names of many of his favorite people and things, among them music, mushrooms, Modern Music, and monoamine oxidase Tse-tung. It was an absurd method for choosing an absurd title for a book of absurdities Another aspect of Cages writing demonstrates more positive and visionary qualities of his music. Prelude for meditation for Prepared Piano Solo (1944) is early Cage, and the preparation of the piano involves stove bolts and wood screws (Patterson, 2001).This piece, like 4? 33? , can be viewed initially and superficially as one eventa monolith. inside this big experience is an inner introduction of relationships, of sounds and events that reach far beyond the two pitch classes that Cage employs. The philosophical concept behind a work such as this is simple why should a piece of music begin, develop itself in intricate ways, and prove itself by an unnumbered variety that keeps an interest going in the work itself? Why should the variety not be of a different kind?A piece of music can simply suspend itself in time, although time itself is usually conceived as a frightfully limiting artistic commodity. Pieces begin and pieces end. What about what is before the beginning and after the shutting? Time, itself a measured fragment of eternity, is ever there on either side of an experience of any kind, and, in effect, what happens within the time of a work need not ever make the time pass but rather major power mak e it exist within a vacuum, within a world of monolithic yet many-faceted events. Cages work is an early example of what has become a new aspect of musical experience. other(a) composers began thinking about the possibilities of the monolith, and numerous examples have been written in the last posterior of a century. La Monte small Composition 1960 7 is a case in point. The work consists of two pitch classes, a B and an F-sharp (the relationship to Cage Prelude for Meditation is obvious), which the composer says should be held for a long time. In 1961 the work was contend in New York by a string trio, and the forty-five minute epoch of that particular reading resulted in a whole world of fluctuating overtones for those who were involuntary to listen (Patterson, 2001).Experimental composers are not nearly as outrageous as their critics might think. Even a work that attempts by its chance procedures or other random methods of construction to be uncrystallised still achieves a f orm, which, in turn, expands our plan of form. For example, if a composer writes some musical fragments on notecards, shuffles the cards, and then plays the music in the order in which it appears, there will be many different orderings but always the same music, rearranged each time.If one writes a chance piece for ten players with ten instruments, there is a limitation in the fact that the performers are ten, that the instruments are ten, and that the efforts are taking place within an ineluctable time span. A composer cannot, in other words, achieve complete freedom, complete formlessness, for that is an impossibility. What a composer can do is achieve a new musical result.References Cage, antic. (1966). Silence Lectures and Writings. The MIT embrace New Ed edition. Grant, Mark N. (2001).Maestros of the write A History of Classical Music Criticism in America. Northeastern University Press. Kostelanetz, Richard. (1991). jakes Cage An Anthology. Da Capo Press. Nicholls, David . (2007). John Cage (American Composers). University of Illinois Press. Patterson, David W. (2001). John Cage Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933-1950 (Studies in coetaneous Music Andculture). Routledge 1 edition. Pritchett, James. (1996). The Music of John Cage (Music in the Twentieth Century). Cambridge University Press.