Re: Two6

1973

Vol 9, Issue 29 May 28-Jun 3, 2003 

Avant-Garde Memories 

How the CAC moved us through the years COMPILED BY RICK PENDER 

Photo By Jon Hughes/photopresse.com

We asked some friends to recall their favorite moments involving events and
exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center. We received the following
memories, ranging over 30 years of provocative art. It's intriguing to
imagine the tales and events to be inspired in the years ahead by Zaha
Hadid's addition to Cincinnati's downtown skyline. 

http://www.citybeat.com/current/cover.shtml

it's 1973. Music by the composer John Cage will be performed at an opening
at the CAC, and John Cage himself is there. Because I'm the art critic for
The Cincinnati Post, I am introduced to him. He's standing next to me,
actually, when the performance begins. A woman plays, on a "prepared"
piano, a composition with quite a lot of silence in it. Longish periods in
which there's no sound at all. Cage is rapt, more silent than the piano,
but makes a small movement. I look down at his feet. One of them is tapping
without sound to the nonexistent music.

-- Jane Durrell, CityBeat contributing writer

Music in 4'33"

Hello,

I've never posted here and I lack formal music training, but I've had an interest in listening to Cage for
some time now.  Previously, I'd thought that the idea of 4'33" was to listen to the unintended sounds that
occur when it is performed and that they could be concieved of as music.  However, as I was listening to
Indeterminacy the other day, one of the stories struck me as being related: Cage describes his experience
of listening to a pianist when a window was open and outside noises obscured the sound of the music. Yet the
story didn't seem to suggest that the noises were music themselves, only that they did not interfere with
the music being played.  So would it be reasonable to say that the music of 4'33" is the silence, but you can't
hear it because the unintended noises are too loud?  This might be a little too depressing, though.

-Zac Bond

Re: Music in 4'33"

Hi Zack.  The surrounding sounds he did not consider noise, and one of the 
objects of the piece was to sensitize the audience to the sounds always 
present in  our lives. Not the same as listening to the pianist with the 
window open. I think your original concept, "to listen to the unintended - 
I prefer unscripted - sounds, etc.", is the correct one.

Best, Edouard

--On Monday, June 2, 2003 4:42 PM -0500 zwb2 <at> cwru.edu wrote:

>
> Hello,
>
> I've never posted here and I lack formal music training, but I've had an
> interest in listening to Cage for some time now.  Previously, I'd thought
> that the idea of 4'33" was to listen to the unintended sounds that occur
> when it is performed and that they could be concieved of as music.
> However, as I was listening to Indeterminacy the other day, one of the
> stories struck me as being related: Cage describes his experience of
> listening to a pianist when a window was open and outside noises obscured
> the sound of the music. Yet the story didn't seem to suggest that the
> noises were music themselves, only that they did not interfere with the
> music being played.  So would it be reasonable to say that the music of
> 4'33" is the silence, but you can't hear it because the unintended noises
> are too loud?  This might be a little too depressing, though.
>
> -Zac Bond
>

****************************************************************************
Edouard Forner                                         forner <at> macalester.edu
Music Department                                   phone/v-mail 651 696 6189
Macalester College                                          fax 651 696 6785
St. Paul, Minnesota 55105

"The best way to make dreams come true is to wake up"     --     paul valery
****************************************************************************

Re: Music in 4'33"

108 is 43'30" long, by the way. Something to ponder?

Zac Bond wrote:

> Previously, I'd thought that the idea of 4'33" was to listen to the unintended sounds that occur when it is performed.

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Ne(x)tworks June 4 at 8 PM

Hi,

In case you're interested: the Electronic Music
Foundation will be presenting Ne(x)tworks in an
evening of world premiers on June 4 at 8 PM at the
Chelsea Art Museum (22nd Street and 11th Ave.) The
program will include new pieces by Joan La Barbara,
Kenji Bunch, and myself, as well as very interesting
works by other members of the group. 

For more info:

www.arts-electric.org/specialpages/030515emf.html

Hope to see you there! 

Best,

Cornelius 

__________________________________
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Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com

Uncaged: JC and the New York School (January 2004)

Dear All,

Just got a blurb for a "Composer Weekend" in January 2004 at the 
Barbican Centre in London, UK (Europe):

"Friday 16 - Sunday 18 January
Uncaged: John Cage and the New York School

The music of a true original, the American composer John Cage, his 
predecessors and followers. A weekend of concerts, films, 
happenings and talks, with music by Cage's influences including Ives, 
Varèse, Harrison, Hovhaness and Satie, and his students of the New 
York School, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff and 
David Tudor. John Adams leads a line-up of guest artists including 
Joanna MacGregor, Rolf Hind and Nicolas Hodges among others.

Full details and tickets available from Autumn 2003.
Call the Barbican on 020 7638 8891 to leave your details or email 
bbcso <at> bbc.co.uk in order to receive a brochure once they are 
available."

That's all there is in the blurb. Once I know more, I will email it to the 
lists again. Otherwise, you can also look out at their website: 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/orchestras/so

Best wishes,
Clemens

c.gresser <at> gmx.net
http://www.soton.ac.uk/~cgresser

Remember, it's always someone else who dies.
Marcel DuchampÆs epitaph.

Re: Uncaged: JC and the New York School (January 2004)

Hi all,

Thanks, Clemens, for this info.  I'd be a lot happier if the Cage thing was
done by the British musicians who have been playing and championing his work
for years and years.  The line-up of guest artists would then start with
John Tilbury (often known as the David Tudor of England), playing Cage and
Feldman as he has done so wonderfully over the years (his Sonatas and
Interludes is still great and he played a sublime concert series surveying
Feldman's piano works in 1987).  John White has been one of the best
interpreters of Satie over the years and Chris Hobbs premiered the entirety
of Les Fils d'Etoiles a hundred years after Satie himself (and is publishing
the first decent edition soon).  That's just off the top of my head - there
are others who do classic American experimentalism, folks like Smith,
Parsons, and others.

They sure need some folk who know about Cage.  What's this about Tudor being
Cage's student?  And why are Varese and Hovanhess there?

Adams is a good bloke, with excellent experimental pedigree, and probably
doesn't have control over who they hire.  But unless they just haven't
mentioned the core performers, this is just another case of the dilettante
modernists jumping on the bandwagon and slumming with Cage because the guest
star has got a paying gig to do it.  If all things go to plan, the Beeb will
decide that it's all experimental, so the recording can be cut anywhere,
like it did when we did Paragraph 1 of Cardew's Great Learning.

My current research work is on the cultural hegemony of the modernist
mainstream and this could be another example, unless the BBC SO changes its
normal practice.  In any case it sounds a real disaster.  I'll save my money
to hear the real artists, if only in some back-street church or hall.  Hmph.

Grumpily,

Virginia

-- 
Virginia Anderson
Editor
JEMS: Journal of Experimental Music Studies
An online publication of the Experimental Music Catalogue
<http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk>
for submissions and information: jems <at> experimentalmusic.co.uk

on 4/6/03 11:08 am, Clemens Gresser at c.gresser <at> gmx.net wrote:

> Dear All,
> 
> Just got a blurb for a "Composer Weekend" in January 2004 at the
> Barbican Centre in London, UK (Europe):
> 
> "Friday 16 - Sunday 18 January
> Uncaged: John Cage and the New York School
> 
> The music of a true original, the American composer John Cage, his
> predecessors and followers. A weekend of concerts, films,
> happenings and talks, with music by Cage's influences including Ives,
> Varèse, Harrison, Hovhaness and Satie, and his students of the New
> York School, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff and
> David Tudor. John Adams leads a line-up of guest artists including
> Joanna MacGregor, Rolf Hind and Nicolas Hodges among others.
> 
> Full details and tickets available from Autumn 2003.
> Call the Barbican on 020 7638 8891 to leave your details or email
> bbcso <at> bbc.co.uk in order to receive a brochure once they are
> available."
> 
> That's all there is in the blurb. Once I know more, I will email it to the
> lists again. Otherwise, you can also look out at their website:
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/orchestras/so
> 
> Best wishes,
> Clemens
> 
> c.gresser <at> gmx.net
> http://www.soton.ac.uk/~cgresser
> 
> Remember, it's always someone else who dies.
> Marcel DuchampÆs epitaph.
> 
> 

British Players

Virginia Anderson writes

>I'd be a lot happier if the Cage thing was
>done by the British musicians who have been playing and championing his work
>for years and years.  The line-up of guest artists would then start with
>John Tilbury (often known as the David Tudor of England)

Yes indeed Tilbury is a wonderful pianist, but so is Nic Hodges. I heard
him in a numinous performance of 'For Bunita Marcus' at Huddersfield last
year which was one of the highlights of the Festival. He's certainly no
"dilettante modernist"'.

Cheers

Jim

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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James Gardner
director, 175 East

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AW: Uncaged: JC and the New York School (January 2004)

Virginia Anderson wrote:

"And why are Varese and Hovanhess there?"

One answer:

They damn well ought to be.  Besides being composers for whose work Cage
always expressed admiration, they are quite central to what might be called
Cage's "First New York School", along with Harrison and Cowell (albeit with
Hovhaness living in Boston and later in the West).  This "school" might be
characterized negatively -- as belonging to neither the Americanism of
Copland, nor that of Thomson, nor to the emerging serialism -- or
positively, with the shared attention to noise and percussion, to rhythm as
a more central organizing factor, and to a music situated without a
priveleged regard for the western classical tradition.  Varese was both a
generation older than Cage and a particularly difficult personality, so one
would not expect a real friendship between the two, but Cage's enthusiasm
for Varese's use of percussion and electronics was genuine and
well-documented. The music of Hovhaness, on the other hand, was a joint
"discovery" of Cage and Harrison -- after attending Hovhaness's New York
debut together, Cage went backstage to meet Hovhaness while Harrison rushed
off to the offices of the Herald Tribune to write Hovhaness's first
enthusiastic review. The friendships among the three (Cage, Hovhaness,
Harrison) were permanent.  To be certain, these composers wrote with an
expressivity that Cage would later, for himself, essentially repudiate with
the move towards chance, indeterminacy, and the "Second New York School",
but Cage never repudiated these composers or their music.

Daniel Wolf
Budapest