explain how he is "experimental". outside of using tin cans, conch shell, ratchet, bass drum, buzzers, water gong, metal wastebasket, lion's roar, amplified coil of wire, muted gongs, audio frequency oscillators, variable speed turntables with frequency recordings and recordings of generator whines, amplified coil of wire and amplified marimbula nothing he does is that different from other artists. he sound good for what he is but calling him experimental is false.
he experimented
>>64754449
He literally was experimenting with music. He didn't give a shit whether it was pleasing to hear, just as long as it was something new.
I'm not a music expert, but I'm fairly sure he invented/popularized types of performances/compositions. No?
>>64754449
music indeterminancy
fucking idiot
( i hope i spelled that word right)
explain how he is "experimental". outside of using rubber plants nothing he does is that different from other artists. he sound good for what he is but calling him experimental is false.
>>64754506
kinky
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage#Music
i fucking hate illiterate retards
ITT: whooooosh
Nice thread. I am enjoying these replies. You did and good turny.
>>64755036
this
He's my favorite Mortal Kombat character
(this is a gamer joke DON'T laugh if you're not a gamer)
Bullshit thread but I just wanted to talk about this because it's awesome.
The most important thing John Cage ever did was pioneer removing human influence from music entirely, and instead use pure chance (the I Ching), in order to make "nature music" that reflected - and was the result of - the randomness of nature.
4'33 was just an extension of that, destroying composition entirely and making you listen to your specific environment, even if you made a sound yourself. People shit on Nils Frahm for "covering" 4'33 and playing piano during it, but they missed the point. 4'33 was about anything happening in that period of time; you could still play an instrument, shout and scream, whatever. It was still sound going on around you, whether you were creating it or not.
>>64755487
>>64755611
I disagree, I'd say the most important thing he did was his complex deconstruction of western harmonic theory with his pieces for prepared piano. It really set the stage for the rest of the 20th century in finding creative, out of the box ways to deal with the tools of 19th century music without completely disregarding them, and put a lot more emphasis on creativity rather than perfecting other models.
>>64755611
But that's fucking garbage.
Why would I want to listen to literal random sounds.
If you remove human influence from music, you remove any possible message from the music, it stops being art and having any value.
>>64756113
>muh feels
>>64756113
if you actually did any reading you'd know that he addresses this very directly and with plenty of compelling arguments
He was to music as Abstract Expressionism was to painting. Total Jewish Bollocks.
Western Art music still hasn't recovered from this reductionist crap that lowers the barrier of entry so much that anyone that can make a sound can call themselves an Artist.
![new_york_ny[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Syd5vnb.jpg "new_york_ny[1].jpg")
>>64756264
plenty of abstract expressionism that requires a ton of technical control and artistic vision and all that.
lowering the barrier for consideration doesn't devalue art, and it doesn't stop great artists who want to be maximalist or formally great from attempting to do so. It's funny because you bought into this moral hype but I'll bet you don't even care about new music or art at all.
>>64756222
What compelling argument?
Performing pieces that are uncapable of being reproduced with total exactitue each time is more similar to simple improvisation than pure randomness, the point is that there's still a performer and there's still a composer that together are relaying a message to the audience.
Even free-form music like free jazz has musicians interplaying with each other to convey a feeling with total freedom of form, indeterminist music is just pure garbage, because when there's no performer (and don't give me that "every member of the audience is a performer", a group of people making random noise together doesn't form a coherent message) and/or composer, there's nothing interesting.
We're surrounded by natural, random sounds from the moment we're born, if we prefer to listen to actual music over them is because we don't find incoherent noise interesting.
Even "noise" music has interesting textures and soundscapes, something that literal random noises lack.
>>64756403
>lowering the barrier for consideration doesn't devalue art,
It objectively does.
>>64756264
>anyone that can make a sound can call themselves an Artist.
What's wrong with that?
(other than maybe putting the Artiste's Elitist Sekkrit Klub Of Special People in jeopardy, which is a great thing in my opinion)
>>64756264
i bet you think old Roman sculptures and romanticism paintings were the peak of art, huh?
>>64756438
did you even read the text I posted? he specifically addressed the lack of a coherent message. If you have any critiques of the Cage text, let me know, but you're just restating a basic critique instead of even slightly addressing Cage's rebuttal.
>>64756446
How? How does comparing a Durer etching to some bitch's menstrual blood devalue the Durer? Anybody in the world with a bit of aesthetic value is going to prefer the etching, and the people who don't aren't worth appeasing in the first place.
>>64756554
I read the text and I didn't paid any mind because it reads like every artsy piece of mumbo-jumbo written by a liberal arts student.
>"I said that since the sounds were sounds, this gave people hearing them the chance to be people, centered within themselves, where they actually are, not off artificially in the distance as they are accustomed to be, trying to figure out what is being said by some artist by means of sounds."
If you extract the actual point out of this pseudo-philosophical nonsense, you realize how void it actually is.
>>64756680
You complain that there's no "point" to his music after I post a text where he specifically says that he's challenging the idea that artwork should have a "point" for people to try and understand. If you don't think that's a valid pursuit, please explain why, but you're not worth talking to if you're not smart enough to understand what he's communicating, considering how direct and obvious it is.
>>64754449
His patterns of organization you fucking numbskull
>"Wow he is using a piano just like Bach did, nothing new there"
Think about how fucking stupid you are for a moment
>>64756789
Because the whole idea is retarded.
Art is esentially a message, shrouded in a fancy envelope, but there's a need for a message to it.
Challenging that is not smart, or revolutionary, is purely moronic, and of course that the end result is what it is, incoherent noise that is of no interest to anyone and has no value to us.
You're thinking im missing his point when I'm not, I already addressed his point, that boils down to "hey if instead of making the audience a passive listener we make them take part on music perhaps they'll feel more involved in it", it turns out no, it doesn't, incoherent noise is still incoherent noise, whether you're listening to it or making it.
We're surrounded by noise from the moment we're born, we pay to it no mind because it's not interesting, it has no message, and it has no aesthetic value to it, the idea that for some reason people will prefer to hear what we're already hearing on a daily basis every moment instead of music just because they're being a part of it is hopelessly stupid, and that's why something like 4'33'' has absolutely no value.
>>64756991
The lack of a message is a message itself.
Also the noises we hear everyday are message despite what you think. They are all the results of certain actions taking place and hold a linear story. Do you think a blind man who lives by hearing doesn't receive any messages from the world around him? All the sounds around help him model his reality in that point in time from birds to a kid kicking a can
>>64756991
Where your thinking goes wrong is in the assumption that art must have a message. No one is saying that every combination of random sounds is good music at all. Cage was just pushing music away from being a message, a gift from the composer that the audience must mentally contort in order to "appreciate" it "properly". Instead, he was trying to make music that would challenge people's senses in a less obvious way.
Surely you agree that there are mental functions involved with listening to something that aren't adequately addressed through conventional classical music. Cage was just trying to push his audience into considering their senses on a more self-aware level, to get them to consider their listening as an act in and of itself, rather than using sound as a vessel to communicate directly to them. He wasn't saying that people should appreciate their refrigerator, or the crowd at a football game. He was creating music that stimulated people's thoughts in what he felt was a more constructive way.
It has nothing to do with feeling "more involved". The idea is for the audience to use their brainpower in a different way entirely from the conventional methods of understanding art.
Again, if you put this effort into reading some of Cage's texts, you'd get this in a lot prettier parcel then I'm giving you.
>>64757178
>>64757196
He's only going to dismiss this as "artsy mumbo jumbo".
>>64754449
shhhh
go listen to your radiohead and death grips OP
>>64757126
>The lack of a message is a message itself.
No it literally isn't.
>Also the noises we hear everyday are message despite what you think.
No they're literally not, a message is an interchange of information, there must be a conscious source.
The noises we hear everyday are stimuli at most, information about our environment that's mostly pointless, most of the times no one is communicating with ourselves with them.
>>64757196
But art must have a message, the whole point of making a piece of something and showing it to someone is making an impression.
>Cage was just pushing music away from being a message
Yeah, and I agree with most of his stuff, but the total indeterminist bullshit like 4'33'' is pointless, without a main composer mind behind the piece, the odds of there being something of value are astronomically low.
>Cage was just trying to push his audience into considering their senses on a more self-aware level, to get them to consider their listening as an act in and of itself, rather than using sound as a vessel to communicate directly to them.
There's no difference to the act of listening between a formal piece and the noises of the audience, even if you make the audience listen to their noses with the same intensity they listen to a formal piece, the only thing they'll discover is that what they're listening to is not interesting.
>He was creating music that stimulated people's thoughts in what he felt was a more constructive way.
Yeah, and I'm saying he failed because I can hardly describe that stuff as stimulating.
>>64757405
Not either of the people you're replying to.
You keep clinging to this vapid definition of art as "having something of value", that it has to be interesting, doing something, et cetera.
Cage doesn't give a fuck about that. He argues that life itself IS interesting, that your environment is beautiful, it's sounds are beautiful, that living is alright. His point is that nature is the ultimate art, and the purpose of his work is to point that out to people.
He's dissolving this idea that music is something to be understood and examined - which is fine, but he's arguing the opposite side of things - he wants to remove this transactory process and bring forth this idea of a deeper 'listening'; an attunement to your surroundings.
If you think that's artsy bullshit then you must have something up your ass. It's very peaceful to contemplate.
>>64754449
Explain how this experimental artist is experiential without using this criteria for experimentation
also
>>64756113
That's literally one of the foundations of 20th Century classical music you twit.
>>64757405
>pointless pointless pointless
>uninteresting
>boring
>not stimulating
you must be a drag to be around. i don't care if you find it boring, and john cage certainly isn't arguing that it's interesting, but it is the human process of the listening that is important
>>64757730
>20th Century classical music
only nerds care about that shit lmao
>>64757769
Well you're in a thread discussing it, so you must care to some extent, even your only are is to deconstruct it. Ironic since your critique was that deconstructing something doesn't have artistic integrity.
