John Cage and the New Era: an Obituary-Review
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Sonification As a Means to Generative Music Ian Baxter
Sonification as a means to generative music By: Ian Baxter A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Sheffield Faculty of Arts & Humanities Department of Music January 2020 Abstract This thesis examines the use of sonification (the transformation of non-musical data into sound) as a means of creating generative music (algorithmic music which is evolving in real time and is of potentially infinite length). It consists of a portfolio of ten works where the possibilities of sonification as a strategy for creating generative works is examined. As well as exploring the viability of sonification as a compositional strategy toward infinite work, each work in the portfolio aims to explore the notion of how artistic coherency between data and resulting sound is achieved – rejecting the notion that sonification for artistic means leads to the arbitrary linking of data and sound. In the accompanying written commentary the definitions of sonification and generative music are considered, as both are somewhat contested terms requiring operationalisation to correctly contextualise my own work. Having arrived at these definitions each work in the portfolio is documented. For each work, the genesis of the work is considered, the technical composition and operation of the piece (a series of tutorial videos showing each work in operation supplements this section) and finally its position in the portfolio as a whole and relation to the research question is evaluated. The body of work is considered as a whole in relation to the notion of artistic coherency. This is separated into two main themes: the relationship between the underlying nature of the data and the compositional scheme and the coherency between the data and the soundworld generated by each piece. -
4' 33'': John Cage's Utopia of Music
STUDIA HUMANISTYCZNE AGH Tom 15/2 • 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.7494/human.2016.15.2.17 Michał Palmowski* Jagiellonian University in Krakow 4’ 33’’: JOHN CAGE’S UTOPIA OF MUSIC The present article examines the connection between Cage’s politics and aesthetics, demonstrating how his formal experiments are informed by his political and social views. In 4’33’’, which is probably the best il- lustration of Cage’s radical aesthetics, Cage wanted his listeners to appreciate the beauty of accidental noises, which, as he claims elsewhere, “had been dis-criminated against” (Cage 1961d: 109). His egalitarian stance is also refl ected in his views on the function of the listener. He wants to empower his listeners, thus blurring the distinction between the performer and the audience. In 4’33’’ the composer forbidding the performer to impose any sounds on the audience gives the audience the freedom to rediscover the natural music of the world. I am arguing that in his experiments Cage was motivated not by the desire for formal novelty but by the utopian desire to make the world a better place to live. He described his music as “an affi rmation of life – not an at- tempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord” (Cage 1961b: 12). Keywords: John Cage, utopia, poethics, silence, noise The present article is a discussion of the ideas informing the radical aesthetics of John Cage’s musical compositions. -
Staging New Materialism, Posthumanism and the Ecocritical Crisis in Contemporary Performance
City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2020 Acting Objects: Staging New Materialism, Posthumanism and the Ecocritical Crisis in Contemporary Performance Sarah Lucie The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/3828 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] ACTING OBJECTS STAGING NEW MATERIALISM, POSTHUMANISM AND THE ECOCRITICAL CRISIS IN CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE by SARAH LUCIE A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Theatre and Performance in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2020 © 2020 SARAH LUCIE All rights reserved ii Acting Objects: Staging New Materialism, Posthumanism and the Ecocritical Crisis in Contemporary Performance by Sarah Lucie This manuscript has been read and accepted by the Graduate Faculty in Theatre and Performance in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. __________________________________________________________________________ Date Peter Eckersall Chair of Examining Committee __________________________________________________________________________ Date Peter Eckersall Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Erika Lin Edward Miller THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Acting Objects: Staging New Materialism, Posthumanism and the Ecocritical Crisis in Contemporary Performance by Sarah Lucie Advisor: Peter Eckersall I investigate the material relationship between human and nonhuman objects in performance, asking what their shifting relations reveal about our contemporary condition. -
John Cage's Entanglement with the Ideas Of
JOHN CAGE’S ENTANGLEMENT WITH THE IDEAS OF COOMARASWAMY Edward James Crooks PhD University of York Music July 2011 John Cage’s Entanglement with the Ideas of Coomaraswamy by Edward Crooks Abstract The American composer John Cage was famous for the expansiveness of his thought. In particular, his borrowings from ‘Oriental philosophy’ have directed the critical and popular reception of his works. But what is the reality of such claims? In the twenty years since his death, Cage scholars have started to discover the significant gap between Cage’s presentation of theories he claimed he borrowed from India, China, and Japan, and the presentation of the same theories in the sources he referenced. The present study delves into the circumstances and contexts of Cage’s Asian influences, specifically as related to Cage’s borrowings from the British-Ceylonese art historian and metaphysician Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. In addition, Cage’s friendship with the Jungian mythologist Joseph Campbell is detailed, as are Cage’s borrowings from the theories of Jung. Particular attention is paid to the conservative ideology integral to the theories of all three thinkers. After a new analysis of the life and work of Coomaraswamy, the investigation focuses on the metaphysics of Coomaraswamy’s philosophy of art. The phrase ‘art is the imitation of nature in her manner of operation’ opens the doors to a wide- ranging exploration of the mimesis of intelligible and sensible forms. Comparing Coomaraswamy’s ‘Traditional’ idealism to Cage’s radical epistemological realism demonstrates the extent of the lack of congruity between the two thinkers. In a second chapter on Coomaraswamy, the extent of the differences between Cage and Coomaraswamy are revealed through investigating their differing approaches to rasa , the Renaissance, tradition, ‘art and life’, and museums. -
Liner Notes, Visit Our Web Site
“Music of Our Time” When I worked at Columbia Records during the second half of the 1960s, the company was run in an enlightened way by its imaginative president, Goddard Lieberson. Himself a composer and a friend to many writers, artists, and musicians, Lieberson believed that a major record company should devote some of its resources to projects that had cultural value even if they didn’t bring in big profits from the marketplace. During those years American society was in crisis and the Vietnam War was raging; musical tastes were changing fast. It was clear to executives who ran record companies that new “hits” appealing to young people were liable to break out from unknown sources—but no one knew in advance what they would be or where they would come from. Columbia, successful and prosperous, was making plenty of money thanks to its Broadway musical and popular music albums. Classical music sold pretty well also. The company could afford to take chances. In that environment, thanks to Lieberson and Masterworks chief John McClure, I was allowed to produce a few recordings of new works that were off the beaten track. John McClure and I came up with the phrase, “Music of Our Time.” The budgets had to be kept small, but that was not a great obstacle because the artists whom I knew and whose work I wanted to produce were used to operating with little money. We wanted to produce the best and most strongly innovative new work that we could find out about. Innovation in those days had partly to do with creative uses of electronics, which had recently begun changing music in ways that would have been unimaginable earlier, and partly with a questioning of basic assumptions. -
John Bewley Lejaren A
John Bewley Lejaren A. Hiller: Computer Music Pioneer Lejaren Arthur Hiller, Jr. led a remarkable life. His learning encompas- sed the fields of chemistry, computers, electronics, acoustics, information theory, linguistics, and music. Acknowledged as being the composer of the first significant computer music, he spent much of his musical care- er fighting the musical establishment’s perception of him as an amateur musician who was only capable of writing computer-assisted, mechanized music. His music remains largely unstudied even today, ten years after his death in 1994. Hiller was born in New York City in 1924. His father was a noted illustra- tor and photographer. Hiller received musical training during his teenage years, including piano studies, saxophone, oboe, and clarinet lessons, har- mony, and composition. He was admitted to Princeton University in 1941. He completed his studies in chemistry with the completion of his Ph.D. in 1947 at the age of 23. Hiller also continued his musical training while at Princeton. He studied counterpoint, ear training, and composition with Milton Babbitt 1941-42 and composition, analysis, and fugue with Roger Sessions until Sessions left Princeton for Berkeley in 1945. Following his 1947 graduation Hiller went to work as a chemist for DuPont in Waynesboro, Virginia until 1952. During that period Hiller successfully created a process for dyeing acrylic fibers. Although Hiller decided to leave DuPont to return to an academic position at the University of Illinois, DuPont demonstrated their apprecia- tion for Hiller’s work on acrylics by writing him a bonus check for $12,000, a considerable sum of money in 1952. -
Camille Gunter the Music of John Cage: Exploring Liminal Space Through Algorithmic Composition 9 December 2019
Camille Gunter The Music of John Cage: Exploring Liminal Space through Algorithmic Composition 9 December 2019 Algorithms, used in a variety of ways ranging from algebra to musical composition, are useful in reducing something down to its formal and structural elements. Algorithms allow composers to hold aesthetics and organization in tension. While it’s true that forms and structures are essential in music across cultures and genres, the term algorithmic composition seems to imply a diversion from traditional compositional technique. Traditionally, across musical eras, structures are used to express certain aesthetic decisions and narratives. Algorithms in mid-20th-century music, such as in the music of John Cage, are employed in order to reject a sequential narrative and instead focus on structural elements to expose a different side of music. Cage sought to explore the results when the ‘story’ is removed and only the structure remains, in order to understand compositional processes and challenge the expectations of audiences. Cage harnessed the power of the algorithm to relinquish the control that any composer works hard to tightly grasp. John Cage explored the algorithmic techniques scattered across the Medieval, Baroque, and Classical eras and applied them to his own 20th-century compositions to create structures and leave the sonic landscape up to chance. Using grids; ones he created, ones found in divination books and ones computer-generated, Cage was able to explore musical territory that other composers dared not traverse. Examining Cage’s music, we can begin to understand algorithms through a contemporary lens in relationship to structures of music and their evolution over time. -
18 Contemporary Opera and the Failure of Language
18 CONTEMPORARY OPERA AND THE FAILURE OF LANGUAGE Amy Bauer Opera after 1945 presents what Robert Fink has called ‘a strange series of paradoxes to the historian’.1 The second half of the twentieth century saw new opera houses and companies pro- liferating across Europe and America, while the core operatic repertory focused on nineteenth- century works. The collapse of touring companies confined opera to large metropolitan centres, while Cold War cultural politics often limited the appeal of new works. Those new works, whether written with political intent or not, remained wedded historically to ‘realism, illusion- ism, and representation’, as Carolyn Abbate would have it (as opposed to Brechtian alienation or detachment).2 Few operas embraced the challenge modernism presents for opera. Those few early modernist operas accepted into the canon, such as Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, while revolu- tionary in their musical language and subject matter, hew closely to the nature of opera in its nineteenth-century form as a primarily representational medium. As Edward Cone and Peter Kivy point out, they bracket off that medium of representation – the character singing speech, for instance, in an emblematic translation of her native tongue – to blur diegetic song, ‘operatic song’ and a host of other conventions.3 Well-regarded operas in the immediate post-war period, by composers such as Samuel Barber, Benjamin Britten, Francis Poulenc and Douglas Moore, added new subjects and themes while retreating from the formal and tonal challenges of Berg and Schoenberg. -
The Cage Dialogues: a Memoir William Anastasi
Anastasi William Dialogues Cage The Foundation Slought Memoir / Conceptual Art / Contemporary Music US/CAN $25.00 The Cage Dialogues: A Memoir William Anastasi Cover: William Anastasi, Portrait of John Cage, pencil on paper, 1986 The Cage Dialogues: A Memoir William Anastasi Edited by Aaron Levy Philadelphia: Slought Books Contemporary Artist Series, No. 6 © 2011 William Anastasi, John Cage, Slought Foundation All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or parts thereof, in any form, without written permission from either the author or Slought Books, a division of Slought Foundation. No part may be stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. This publication was made possible in part through the generous financial support of the Evermore Foundation and the Society of Friends of the Slought Foundation. Printed in Canada on acid-free paper by Coach House Books, Ltd. Set in 11pt Arial Narrow. For more information, http://slought.org/books/ “The idiots! They were making fun of you...” John Cage Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anastasi, William, 1933- The Cage dialogues : a memoir / by William Anastasi ; edited by Aaron Levy. p. cm. -- (Contemporary artist series ; no. 6) ISBN 978-1-936994-01-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Cage, John. 2. Composers--United States--Biography. 3. Artists--United States-- Biography. I. Levy, Aaron, 1977- II. Title. ML410.C24A84 2011 780.92--dc22 [B] 2011016945 Caged Chance 1 William Anastasi You Are 79 John Cage and William Anastasi Selected Works, 1950-2007 101 John Cage and William Anastasi John Cage, R/1/2 [80] (pencil on paper), 1985 Caged Chance William Anastasi Now I go alone, my disciples, You, too, go now alone.. -
John Cage and Recorded Sound: a Discographical Essay
SOUND RECORDING REVIEWS Edited by Rick Anderson JOHN CAGE AND RECORDED SOUND: A DISCOGRAPHICAL ESSAY By Rob Haskins Record collections, - that is not music. ... A lady in Texas said: I live in Texas. We have no music in Texas. The reason they've no music in Texas is because they have recordings. Remove the records from Texas and someone will learn to sing.1 John Cage's ambivalent attitude toward recorded sound is well known. Ever skeptical of an aesthetics that privileges objects, he felt that audi- ences should pay more attention to art, like existence itself, as a continual process of becoming. In conventional music, according to Cage, com- posers imprisoned sounds within relatively straightforward structural de- signs that were intended either to impress listeners with intellectual inge- nuity or to drown them in sentiment, preventing the sounds from tending toward their natural complexity and ambiguity. As a result, musical recordings brought about the mistaken impression that performance - a naturally evanescent experience - could be reified and that the resul- tant objects, now possessed by its consumers, held the same ontological status as the music itself. Cage's emphasis on becoming also included an ethical dimension. He famously spoke of his music and ideas as useful for society - that princi- ples embodied in his music could be used to solve social problems - and also noted that he had no use for recordings. While this statement sug- gests that Cage doubted the social usefulness of recordings, the implica- tions of the remark are unclear. He possibly meant that the false objecti- fication of music through recorded sound discouraged difference: the ideal state of societies comprising many individuals. -
PROGRAM NOTES My Entire Recital Takes Place Within the Context of a Cage Piece Consisting Only of Written Directions for Translating a Book Into Music
Fink 1 MATRICULAPHONY, a percussive circus on Van Meter Ames’ A BOOK OF CHANGES (title of composition) (adjective) (author) (title of book) PROGRAM NOTES My entire recital takes place within the context of a Cage piece consisting only of written directions for translating a book into music. The piece requires the creation of an original title followed by “circus on” and then the name of the book being used. As might be inferred from “circus,” the piece becomes a pandemonium of the book’s contents. In his directions, Cage calls for reducing the book’s words to a mesostic poem (think acrostic but with the spine down the middle. See example on page 4) and finding recordings of all sounds and from all places mentioned in the book. These sounds, after chance-determined manipulation, become the contents of an audio track that makes up the piece. Accordingly, my recital will be an hour of non-stop music and text, both live and pre-recorded. In the premiere of this piece, Cage used James Joyce’s novel, titling his piece “Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegan’s Wake.” In my realization, I am using an unpublished manuscript written by late UC philosophy professor Van Meter Ames, which I discovered while working at UC’s Archives and Rare Books Library. The manuscript details Ames’ friendship with Cage and consists largely of stories from Cage’s one year in residence at CCM in the 1966-67 academic year. Cage and Ames bonded over their shared interest in Zen philosophy and the aesthetics of art/music. -
Digging in John Cage's Garden; Cage and Ryōanji
Stephen Whittington, University of Adelaide Digging In John Cage’s Garden; Cage and Ryōanji1 To me a composer is like a gardener to whom a small portion of a large piece of ground has been allotted for cultivation; it falls to him to gather what grows on his soil, to arrange it, to make a bouquet of it, and if he is very ambitious, to develop it as a garden. It devolves on this gardener to collect and form that which is in reach of his eyes, his arms – his power of differentiation. In the same way a mighty one, an anointed one, a Bach, a Mozart, can only survey, manipulate and reveal a portion of the whole flora of the earth; a tiny fragment of that kingdom of blossoms which covers our planet, and of which an enormous surface, partly too distant, partly undiscovered, withdraws from the reach of the individual, even if he is a giant. And yet the comparison is weak and insufficient because the flora only covers the earth, while music, invisible and unheard, pervades and permeates a whole universe. (Ferruccio Busoni) 2 There is something very appealing about likening composition to gardening; both activities are part art, part science, and part manual labour. Busoni’s gardening analogy seems particularly appropriate for John Cage, who was a keen gardener himself; tending plants was part of his daily routine. My work is what I do and always involves writing materials, chairs, and tables. Before I get to it, I do some exercises for my back and I water the plants, of which I have around two hundred.