Re: [F_MINOR] OT John Cage still going

["Lawrence T. McDonnell" <trixie@KSTS.SEED.NET.TW>]

Hello, again--

I'm with Kate in all she says, including the "one big point" (in this case, six hundred-odd years) she says I miss--that we can't consider and appreciate this work as a whole.

Well, we can--the notes are written down, and others can play them at another tempo, and so we can enjoy (if that is the right word...) this piece in that form.  Now, this particular performance will outlast me, and so I will have to savor (tongue firmly in cheek here) every moment I'm allowed--but that's life, isn't it.  Quite literally.

I was watching Truffaut's Antoine Doinel movies this week when Cage came up on the list, and thinking how remarkable it was to see Leaud pop up--after so many years--in Tsai Ming-liang's _What Time Is It There?_, in a cemetery no less.  Very Cage-y trick.  Not to digress, but isn't this the problem GG struggled against:  there is no "take-two-ness" to life itself.  In many things, we must leave before the end of take one.

That seems to me like a very good reason to sleep all day and work all night, drive like a maniac, run up huge phone bills and live in terror of catching a cold.  People do much stranger things than that.

I doubt that Cage and Gould would have lasted long in the same room, but if someone locked the door they might have discovered a _little_ common ground, I think.  And how does this all go back to Schoenberg, I wonder?

Best,

Larry

Kate Clunies-Ross wrote:

Elmer Elevator wrote

So ... does this seem like a worthwhile project?
[ ] Yes, this is just amazing, remarkable, a profoundly important creative
and philosophical achievement.
[ ] No! This guy was a cheesy scam artist, and the people cranking this
thing out need to get a life.

Vote, and pidgeonhole yourself instantly and for the next six centuries.
 

 Well, I'd vote No, on this occasion, about this particular piece. Still, since I am no expert on Cage's work as a whole, I am not qualified to judge the value of the rest of his output. But this project sounds at best just like an interminable (for people alive today, at any rate!)  posthumous  publicity stunt. And hey, its working....here we all are, discussing it seriously!

The comparison with Lichtensteins pop art ( thanks to Larry McDonnell ) is interesting but misses one big point. Lichtenstein may tinker with the way we view our familiar world, and may produce items of beauty....but then, we can consider and appreciate each of his works as a whole. This is surely true of all works of art, including music; we are able to experience them in their entirety, we can see ideas and themes developed and concluded, we can grasp their structure and see how their various parts are interrelated and perhaps how they relate to other works of art. But it is not possible to do any of this with a 'work' presented note by unrelated  note over centuries, each separated by months or years, without even a whole phrase being presented at one time for the listeners's appreciation.

Nope; as a jokey talking point its fine but its not"art". And incidently, how many of you think that the project will actually manage to reach its conclusion in six hundred-odd years? I would hazard a guess that somewhere along the line, it will simply be forgotten, and slip into oblivion.

Kate
 
 

 

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