![]() ![]() ![]() He told us straight away, didn't make us wait: by putting bits of paper, rocks, old nails or screws, maybe old pieces of Wrigley's to keep it all together, in the back of the piano. That was a little lesson: We could be like our dads without being like them, or doing what they do. We were told that Cage was inventive in the piece we heard, and that his dad was an inventor. All I knew about cowboy music was Johnny Cash from "Sesame Street", and the names were quite close. I thought Cage might be some sort of cowboy singer. He played us some recordings of piano music: a minute of a Haydn sonata, 45 seconds of a Chopin mazurka, nearly 2 minutes of Henry Cowell's The Banshee, and then I don't remember how much of a piano piece by John Cage. In between singing "This Land is Your Land" and telling us that we could get out of square-dance practice tomorrow if we had religious objections to dancing in general, he'd play us records or show us filmstrips and talk about the music performed or depicted. In addition to playing the piano for us and singing with us, he would speak to us- loudly, or at least authoritatively. He was an old man, a polio victim with the shiny metal leg braces, called Mr. The elementary school I went to shared a music teacher with the school down the street. ![]() Together, they weave a portrait of a legacy that- in 2012, 100 years after Cage's birth- largely still compels by way of ideas, if not necessarily sonics. And yet.īelow, I've gathered the best dozen or so anecdotes about Cage from all the musicians I contacted. Two decades ago, Taruskin likely wasn't looking for traces of Cage in Canadian rappers, bearded bards, or noise lords. It's worth noting that Matthew Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces originally referred me to Taruskin's article, saying that, despite his deep appreciation for Cage, that kind of viewpoint was necessary in considering his application at this point in history. His career has been analyzed into a great mass of confusion and conjecture, meaning Cage sometimes stands as the butt of endless jokes about art without a point or purpose, as though it requires one. One day, Taruskin prophesied, Cage's works for the piano will be his only lasting contribution to the greater musical vocabulary. In a provocative and sometimes vindictive 1993 essay for The New Republic called "No ear for music: The scary purity of John Cage", writer Richard Taruskin explored the unease Cage created within musical establishments, sometimes without warrant. As The New Yorker's Alex Ross pointed out two years ago, "4'33"" very often stands as an artistic punchline. For Cage, revolution was an infinite concept.Ĭage's legacy and influence remain a point of contention. In the liner notes for a new set of Cage-centric reissues on Japan's EM label, Gen Igarashi wrote, "Perhaps for Cage this was the natural outcome of the musical emancipation process which had begun with "4'33"". "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action," the original score read. The often-missed corollary to "4'33"", though, is "0'00"", a 1962 piece in which Cage shattered one of his earlier work's remaining musical rules: time. It still tried to teach us about music we have missed up until now, caught up as we are in tonality, or our own mundane sound production." As Paul Hegarty wrote in Noise/Music: A History, this silence was a canonical point in the history of noise and, so, music: "'4'33"' is still didactic. Watch Cage muse on his beliefs about silence and laughter in a 1991 interview:ĭespite his proliferating tendencies and lengthy career, Cage remains best known for "4'33"", a 1952 piece premiered by longtime accomplice David Tudor in Woodstock, N.Y., where Tudor sat at the piano, not playing anything. After all, the late composer, thinker, and artist posed fundamental questions about the essence of sound, music, chance, arrangement, and instrumentation if there was a rule about music in place, Cage found a way to break or at least tease it. In fact, most said they either felt unprepared to say something salient or sufficient about such a luminary, or that they couldn't condense their thoughts in a mere matter of days and weeks. Of the three dozen or so people who responded, not one said they didn't care for Cage, his music, or his ideas. Several weeks ago, I began sending out inquiries about John Cage to an intentionally broad range of musicians, essentially asking: Do you like his work, and, if so, would you talk to me about it? Obscure noise artists received the questions, as did rock musicians who have appeared on "Saturday Night Live", metal dudes, warped pop chanteuses, singer-songwriter types, and bleeding-edge hip-hop acts. John Cage photos courtesy of EM Records/Omega Point ![]()
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