John Cage wrote a lot of music using a variety of unconventional techniques but the piece that he will likely always be most famous for is the untitled piece usually known as 4'33. The piece, for no particular designated instrument or ensemble, is in three movements. The only detail in the score is the duration of each movement. Added together the total duration of the three movements comes to 4'33. It was premiered on piano by pianist David Tudor in 1952. The Wikipedia article linked above provides some context on the history of the score and performances, historical predecessors and context and so on. I have seen the Peters edition of the score, sometimes referred to as the First Tacet Edition because the instruction to the performer(s) for each movement is simply "tacet" or remain silent.
Cage has made a number of observations about the piece over the years. An early concept seemed to imply that the function was to insert three or four minutes of silence into a stream of music. He contemplated selling it to the Muzak corporation. A later conception was that the silence of the performer would simply reveal that there is no true silence--the space would be filled by the sounds of nature or even the breathing and heartbeat of the listeners, not to mention birds, passing cars, etc.
I say that the piece is never going away because it has utility in all sorts of dimensions. The conductor Kiril Petrenko used it to protest the closing of orchestra concerts in Germany:
I notice that even though he seems to be conducting from the score, he rushes the performance which is well under four minutes. Must have been the excitement of the moment.
One of the most interesting aspects of the piece from an aesthetic or semantic point of view is that it has potentially unbounded meaning or significance. Every time you play a note or a chord or a rhythm you are defining and hence restricting the expression. But the emptiness of this piece is like the emptiness of the open sky: it is open to all possibilities, all thoughts, all moods and atmospheres.
The contrast of this piece with almost all others highlights the busyness of so much music, the flurries of notes and rhythms, dashing helter-skelter from one moment to the next. This piece is one moment (or three moments) of silence which reveals to us the noisiness of our usual environment. It is like a meditation on silence--or anything, really. But a meditation, not an endeavour or pursuit. It pursues nothing, states nothing and implies nothing. And in doing so it implies anything and everything.
No, we will not be getting rid of this piece any time soon. Another performance, this time on piano by David Tudor:
Very different interpretation, don't you think?
Of course Kyle Gann's book No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33" is the must-read work on this piece and its place in Cage's work.
ReplyDeletesee also
https://www.kylegann.com/NoSuchThingasSilence.html
Gann laid out three basic views of Cage years ago as follows:
https://www.kylegann.com/LongyearLecture.html
1. He was a charlatan.
2. He was an important philosopher, but his music isn't very good.
3. He was the pivotal figure of 20th-century music, the source of everything good that came afterward.
I lean toward what I'd call the 3b variation which is, "He played a significant and valuable role within classical music in the United States of repudiating Teutonic art-religion in American music reception but his role was one of many and should not be oversold". I like that Cage influenced Nikita Koshkin to experiment with "prepared guitar" but I think it's possible to regard Cage as NEITHER a charlatan or as pivotal to the present as his fans might think he is.
I think I basically agree with your evaluation. I have gone through a few stages. The first was mostly reading his several books which I found very interesting and profound. Then I went through a phase where I did rather regard him as a charlatan. Now I think he is one of the most important American composers of the second half of the 20th century and very influential. But his output is rather uneven.
ReplyDeleteI think it's Wenatchee who demonstrated to me how Cage's reception history is much closer to Beethoven's than not. My own take is that you can't really challenge the Western canon if you're writing scores to be performed in the concert hall. Cage had a big impact on the academy but for the culture at large, he can't compete with young Black people in the Bronx freestyling in the park.
ReplyDeleteI'm indebted to Richard Taruskin and Leonard Meyer for their observations on Cage as a continuation of Romantic ideologies as "late, late Romanticism". What has stuck with me about Cage was that he seemed to basically reject popular music and that's where I can never really sign on with his approach.
ReplyDeleteI've beat this drum for years at my blog, of course, but rather than view "high culture" as a new "counterculture" that merely flips the script back on a musical scene where writing about popular music is more influential than writing about classical music, I think that both traditions can benefit from a synergistic exchange on the part of musicians, composers, journalists, theorists and historians who show that the boundaries maintained by ... musicians, composers, journalists, theorists and historians are all far more permeable than the partisans let on.
Take Toru Takemitsu, his concert music is only moderately well-known in the United States but his soundtracks for Ran and Woman in the Dunes are both memorable. He also did some fun arrangements for solo guitar of pop songs, including a couple of songs by the Beatles. I'm not so much a Beatles fan but I will go so far as to propose that what Takemitsu did that a lot of other composers in the classical scenes haven't done is demonstrate the will and ability to write "classical music" that recognized the last century of popular song actually happened.
But as I anticipate Joseph Horowitz is going to discuss in his forthcoming book and Douglas Shadle has alluded to in his work, one of the things we'll be looking at is that the heroes of music from a couple of generations ago like Bernstein or Thomson) can come across as bad guys in light of the concerns and interests of people in the present. Shadle quoting Bernstein saying he had conclusively proven American Indian melodies were not useful for good teutonic musical "development" was something I'd say is utterly wrong. If I wanted to take melodies from Thomas Commuck's shape note hymnal Indian Melodies and write a 25-minute guitar sonata from those I'd do it for the fun of it but retroactively I'd do it to show that Bernstein was wrong.
So, yeah, Ethan I agree that Cage is more a figure who charted an alternative path within the academy by rebelling against what he saw as an overly Germanic influence but outside the academy his influence in 2021 may be closer to 0 than 100 percent. I'm okay with that.
Bryan, your last several posts have really got the comments flowing!
ReplyDeleteWelcome home from your Austrian peregrination. Your time away clearly got the blogging bug re-energized.
Yes, after I got over my travel exhaustion and jet-lag I really got back into blogging. And I really treasure the comments!
ReplyDeleteTo Wenhatchee: So Cage’s apparently total eschewing of popular music is unfortunate, but Bernstein, who certainly embraced what may be considered not high-art music (see Mass, etc.), is not pure enough in that he didn’t have a favorable opinion of Native American song. Give the guy (Lenny) some credit…
ReplyDeleteAnd your use of the term ‘teutonic’ for (apparently) all of European art music may not play well in France and Italy and probably other places…IMHO…
I should add that I totally agree with you and others that the seemingly enforced siloing of various genres is highly unfortunate and that cross-pollination can enrich all of them.
Patrick, I was referencing work by Douglas Shadle who quoted Bernstein on the Teutonic stuff, so the weird wording was Lenny's original claim, Shadle mentioned it over on his Substack blogging. Bernstein's choice of words that I alluded to help frame how the way he was a musical hero "then" makes him seem less of a musical hero "now". I've generally never warmed up to composers who set out to be "American" on purpose whereas American composers who wrote in their time and place (Joplin, Ellington and others) I do admire, perhaps the way I could put it is that the American composers who composed by the accident of being Americans and aspiring to express something more specific than BEING AMERICAN I have enjoyed (whether Ellington or Ives) whereas composers who set out to prove that AMERICAN MUSIC could be taken SERIOUSLY haven't quite won me over so much in classical music. Kyle Gann's joke about Roger Sessions springs to mind. ;)
ReplyDeleteI never actually liked Bernstein's Mass overall, though it has some fun parts. Chittchester Psalms is a much more satisfying choral work imo.