How to say nothing. Paul Griffiths John Cage SILENCE Lectures and writings 50th anniversary edition 310pp. Wesleyan University Press. $30. 978 1 8195 7176 2 Rob Haskins JOHN CAGE 184pp. Reaktion. Paperback, £10.95. 978 1 86189 905 7 PROM 47: CAGE CENTENARY CELEBRATION Royal Albert Hall, August 17 Published: 5 September 2012 “ I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.” “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.” At once the converse and the equivalent of Cage’s statement is one to which many more artists of his time would have subscribed: “I have something to say, and I am unable to say it”. Silence, being his first collection of such items, is more anchored in consistent meaning than are later volumes, and, as Kyle Gann points out in his useful introduction to the jubilee edition, this is also the book in which Cage says most about music.
Two further paradoxes arrive here. Cage’s celebration of nothing made him highly sympathetic to what he learned from the Zen master D. “I dedicate this work to the U.S.A., that it become just another part of the world, no more, no less.” : Kenneth Goldsmith : Harriet the Blog. By Kenneth Goldsmith LECTURE ON THE WEATHER (1975) by John Cage(courtesy of the John Cage Trust. Score available from C.F.
Peters) COMMISSIONED BY THE CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION IN OBSERVANCE OF THE BICENTENNIAL OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PREFACE The first thing I thought of doing in relation to this work was to find an anthology of American aspirational thought and subject it to chance operations. I thought the resultant complex would help to change our present intellectual climate. Of all professions the law is the least concerned with aspiration. John Cage’s Silence and Noise.
On August 29, 1952, David Tudor walked onto the stage of the Maverick Concert Hall, near Woodstock, New York, sat down at the piano, and, for four and a half minutes, made no sound. He was performing “4'33″,’’ a conceptual work by John Cage. It has been called the “silent piece,” but its purpose is to make people listen. “There’s no such thing as silence,” Cage said, recalling the première.
“You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.” Indeed, some listeners didn’t care for the experiment, although they saved their loudest protests for the question-and-answer session afterward. This past July, the pianist Pedja Muzijevic included “4'33″ ” in a recital at Maverick, which is in a patch of woods a couple of miles outside Woodstock.
Cage’s mute manifesto has inspired reams of commentary. Cage = 100: Tudor and the Performance Practice of Concert for Piano and Orchestra. John Cage in August 1992, the last month of his life. Photo by John Maggiotto, courtesy S.E.M. Ensemble In 1958, the premiere of John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra was marred by disruptive behavior from both audience members and musicians. By Cage’s own account, “some of [the musicians]—not all—introduced in the actual performance sounds of a nature not found in my notations, characterized for the most part by their intentions which had become foolish and unprofessional.”[1] These intrusions included, among other things, exaggerated corny blues riffs, prolonged and sarcastic applause, and a tuba ostinato from Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps.[2] This was certainly not the only incident of this kind in Cage’s life.
In a 1975 performance of Song Books, soloist Julius Eastman proceeded to slowly undress his boyfriend onstage, and then to attempt to do the same to his own sister, who stopped him by protesting, “No Julius, no!” Figure 1. World’s longest concert will last 639 years - The Style Blog. Posted at 02:25 PM ET, 11/21/2011 Nov 21, 2011 07:25 PM EST TheWashingtonPost You’d be praying for intermission if you attended even just a fraction of the world’s longest concert. Now in its 10th year, “Organ²/ASLSP(As SLow aS Possible),” by avant-garde composer John Cage, is just getting started. Composer, John Cage rehearses his 12-hour composition "Empty Words" in Hartford, Conn., in 1981.
The concert began in 2001 at the former St. The Halberstadt performance, by an automated organ, progresses so slowly that visitors have to wait months for a chord change (for one note change, in 2008, more than 1,000 visitors came to listen). The performance is so slow that the organ it is being played on was not even complete before the music began. Supporters can sponsor a note for a year with a donation of 1000 € or more. Fans of Cage, such as board chairman of the town’s John Cage Organ Foundation, Rainer Neugebauer, say that the performance is a rebuke of hectic modern life. More from ArtsPost:
John Cage - Litany for the Whale (1/2) John Cage’s Silence and Noise. JOHN CAGE, ONE11 AND 103 | The High Line. High Line Art, presented by Friends of the High Line, and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) celebrate the John Cage Centennial with a special outdoor presentation of Cage’s film and sound composition One11 and 103 (1992) at the High Line. This screening marks the launch of the new series High Line Channel 14, which presents a program of films, videos, and sound installations in the 14th Street Passage, on the High Line at West 14th Street. One of the most celebrated and iconoclastic figures of the American musical avant-garde, Cage was instrumental in reshaping post-war Western music. Cage’s radical innovations in composition and theory—the concept of chance and “found” sound as integral compositional devices, the creation of musical structures based on rhythm rather than tonality—were influential in altering traditional concepts of musical interpretation.
One11 and 103 is made up of the film One11, the eleventh work in the Number Pieces series, and the sound composition 103. The John Cage Century. John Cage would have been a hundred years old tomorrow. Scratch that: Cage is a hundred. He remains a palpably vivid presence, still provoking thought, still spurring argument, still spreading sublime mischief. He may have surpassed Stravinsky as the most widely cited, the most famous and/or notorious, of twentieth-century composers. His influence extends far outside classical music, into contemporary art and pop culture. When I wrote at length about Cage in 2010, I noted that he accomplished something like a colossal land grab, annexing the entire landscape of sound, from pure noise to pure silence.
If you hear several radios playing together, it sounds like Cage. If the P.A. system makes a horrible noise during a lecture, it sounds like Cage. I’ve attended quite a few Cage concerts this year—an event at Juilliard’s FOCUS! The global scope of the Cage celebrations has surprised even the composer’s most committed admirers. Photograph by Vincent Mentzel 1988/Hollandse Hoogte/Redux.
Silence And Sound: Five Ways Of Understanding John Cage : Deceptive Cadence. Hide captionComposer, conceptual artist and professional provocateur John Cage, in a 1966 portrait. Victor Drees/Getty Images Composer, conceptual artist and professional provocateur John Cage, in a 1966 portrait. Today, exactly 100 years after his birth, composer, writer and conceptual artist John Cage is still, for many, Public Enemy No. 1.
On a scale far beyond the reach of any other 20th-century art composer, this master provocateur is still the one who inflames and infuriates. (I like to imagine that Cage, a natural-born trickster, would have loved the bit of April Fool's mischief that iTunes pulled a few years ago when they offered his "silent" 4'33" as their free download of the day.) But Cage was no flim-flam artist; 4'33" wasn't silent and it wasn't a joke at all. His habit of putting a frame around chance encounters and stamping those cosmic accidents with his own signature may well anger you, but at the very least he forces you to reconsider your expectations and assumptions.
As Slow as Possible. The performance of the organ version at St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany, began in 2001 and is scheduled to have a duration of 639 years, ending in 2640. History[edit] The piece was commissioned for a piano competition by The Friends of the Maryland Summer Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts as a contemporary requirement. Cage employed an open format mainly to ensure that no two performances would be the same, providing the judges a break from the monotony of most compositions. Performances[edit] On February 5, 2009, Diane Luchese performed "Organ²/ASLSP" from 8:45 AM to 11:41 PM in the Harold J.
On September 5, 2012, as part of John Cage Day at the University of Adelaide, Australia, Stephen Whittington performed an 8-hour version of ASLSP on the Elder Hall organ. Halberstadt performance[edit] The Bellows The Organ Background[edit] The instrument[edit] An organ built specifically for the performance was completed in 2009[citation needed]. Performance[edit] See also[edit]
As Slow As Possible - A Scott Smith Documentary. 33 Musicians On What John Cage Communicates. John Cage in The Hague, Netherlands, 1988 Paul Bergen/Courtesy of Redferns hide caption toggle caption Paul Bergen/Courtesy of Redferns John Cage in The Hague, Netherlands, 1988 100 years ago today, John Cage was born. In celebration of his birthday, we asked contemporary musicians across a wide range of genres and backgrounds — not only in classical music, but also pop, rock, metal, electronic and experimental — what they've taken from the late composer's musical and philosophical ideas.
Cage was known throughout his career for experimental, indeterminant avant-garde compositions. We turned his question around, and present here 33 musicians responding to this prompt: John Cage, what does he communicate?