MSM CPP Survey EC 5. Experimental Music

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” David Foster Wallace

I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing. John Cage, Silence, 106.

Music as… innocent enjoyment personal expression ritual magic transcendental vehicle a kind of living?

Boulez, on studying with Messiaen: “in our enthusiasm we came to regard music as a way of life, rather than an art: we were marked for life.” Pierre Boulez, ‘A Class and Its Fantasies’, Orientations (London, 1986), 404.

When we separate music from life what we get is art (a compendium of masterpieces). With contemporary music, when it is actually contemporary, we have no time to make that separation (which protects us from living), and so contemporary music is not so much art is it is life and any one making it no sooner finishes one of it than he begins making another just as people keep on washing dishes, brushing their teeth, getting sleepy, and so on. Very frequently no one knows that contemporary music is or could be art. He simply thinks it is irritating. Irritating one way or another, that is to say keeping us from ossifying. John Cage, Silence, 44.

If there were a part of life dark enough to keep out of it a light from art, I would want to be in that darkness, fumbling around if necessary, but alive. And I rather think that contemporary music would be there in the dark too, bumping into things, knocking others over and in general adding to the disorder that characterizes life (if it is opposed to art) rather than adding to the order and stabilized truth beauty and power that characterize a masterpiece (if it is opposed to life). ibid, 46.

When one says that there is no cause and effect, what is meant is that there are an incalculable infinity of causes and effects, that in fact each and every thing in all of time and space is related to each and every other thing in all of time and space. This being so there is no need to cautiously proceed in dualistic terms of success and failure or the beautiful and the ugly or good and evil but rather simply to walk on “not wondering,” to quote Meister Eckhart, “am I right or doing something wrong.” ibid, 47.

Nothing more than nothing can be said. Hearing or making this in music is not different — only simpler – than living this way . MSM CPP Survey EC

Simpler, that is , for me, – because it happens that I write music. ibid, 111.

What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life – not an attempt 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 one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord. Cage, Silence.

A very cursory list of foundational people and communities:

New York School

John Cage

Earle Brown

Morton Feldman

Christian Wolff

Fluxus MSM CPP Survey EC

La Monte Young

George Brecht

Nam June Paik

Takehisa Kosugi

England

Gavin Bryars

Cornelius Cardew

Hugh Shrapnel

Howard Skempton MSM CPP Survey EC

John White

Sonic Arts Union

Gordon Mumma

Alvin Lucier

David Behrman

Robert Ashley

Others

James Tenney

Toshi Ichiyangi

Gordon Monahan