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What do you say list? Let's take up a fund and give
Elmer his 14 bucks so he can listen with less rage and frustration to some
"avant guard" music.
You know what, Elmer, 14 bucks is too much to pay for crowd
noise and I agree that some of what Cage did was not interesting at the end of
the product stage. However, with so much commercial and cliched music out
there, it's hard for me to work up my ire at someone doing so very different
than the norm. In a way, Cage and Glass and Riley and Reich (and let's
throw in Steve Roach as well) and their record companies are making
counter-culture statements simply by producing such albums, as do people when
the buy the records. In a very real way, I think, the interest and worth
of some of these recordings is extra-musical, and I don't mean that in a bad
way. I mean, there are worse things in the world to do than support
strangeness.
I don't think Cage was trying to rip you off. Heck, he
might even have been amazed that you bought the album. Probably the idea
of recording such an event and actually releasing the physical album was more
important to him than selling copies of it.
By the way, I'm not familiar at all with Cage's music, but he
and Glass seem to be very different sorts of composers, with Cage being much
more interested in other forms of artistic _expression_ than Glass is. As a
matter of fact, I don't know of any time that Glass dappled in aleatory
music. Witold Lutoslawski, one of my favorite composers, however did,
though not in as free-form of a way as Cage. Look for his composition
Venetian Games. The Naxos discs of his music, in my opinion, are great
bargains.
Jim (who maybe should come clean and say he also enjoys the
likes of Ligeti and Feldman, who you could say are more interested in composing
sonic events than what is commonly known as music. See Feldman's Music of
Samuel Beckett for a great example of seething repetitive angst. I
actually heard the entire 45 minute piece on the radio on German state-funded
radio one night. Go here for the liner notes to that work http://www.cnvill.demon.co.uk/mfjahn.htm)
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