Open thread for discussion and questions related to the third of the six-part series.
John Cage and the Post-War Aesthetic Revolution. This session will examine the work of John Cage and the “liberation of sound.” We will consider both the playful and theoretical aspects of Cage’s work and delve into his influence on European composers including the Darmstadt circle (Boulez, Stockhausen) as well as the New York and Pacific Rim Schools.
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Those wishing to read John Kennedy's writings on William Russell and Johanna Beyer are invited to go to his website and click the "Writings" link.
Class three...so much great music, so little time! Can't emphasize enough how Henry Cowell and his treatise "New Musical Resources" opened up vistas for music as visionary as any composer of the first half of the 20th Century. Here is the quote of his I shared:
“I believe in music, in the force of its spirit, in its exaltation, its nobility, its humor, and in its power to penetrate to the basic fineness of every human being...I believe that a truly devoted musical work acts to humanize the behavior of all hearers who allow it to penetrate their innermost being.”
Also, I glossed over the Thoreau/Cage connection, which we will be able to hear more closely in SFNM's December 11 concert. Cage was a close reader of Thoreau's journals, a contributing influence to his development of what I call "music as a form of environmental consciousness", and the formation of the multiple interpretative possibilities for 4'33". Here is a bit from Thoreau, that might describe the ears of Cage:
"To ears that are expanded what a harp this world is! The occupied ear thinks that beyond the cricket no sound can be heard, but there is an immortal melody that may be heard morning, noon, and night, by ears that can attend, and from time to time this man or that hears it, having ears that were made for music."
– Henry David Thoreau
Note how in this quote, Thoreau basically offers an expansive definition of "music" long before our 20th century composers did.
In this middle juncture of the course, we hit one of the big conceptual issues of "Beyond the Noise", and our consideration of Ross' "The Rest is Noise". We heard some of the more notorious evocations of noise as music in Antheil, Varese, and Russell. We considered Cage's influence in expanding the "noise parameter" to all things, not just the mechanized sounds of the machine age, but to include all vibrations in the air, in the ecosystem.
When I formed my first musical organization in New York in 1987, I named it Essential Music from a quote which struck me in a book by Jacques Attali called "Noise: The Political Economy of Music":
"Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise."
It is from this place in musical development in the 20th Century, that everything exploded stylistically post -WW II, as we shall see in class four. And here is a wonderful mid-century quote from Aldous Huxley's 1945 "The Perennial Philosophy":
“The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire - we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions - news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears , through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego’s central core of wish and desire...”
I moved to Santa Fe in 1999 to escape that in New York. And then, wouldn't you know it, something called the Internet came along...
Listening in class three included:
Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question
George Antheil - Ballet Méchanique
Edgard Varese - Ionisation
Henry Cowell - The Banshee
Ruth Crawford - Music for Small Orchestra
Johanna Beyer - IV
Johanna Beyer - Music Of The Spheres
William Russell - Made in America
John Cage - Sonatas and Interludes
John Cage - In a Landscape
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