No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33". Nikil Saval.
Lifting the lid No composition of the 20th century seems so inevitable as John Cage's 4'33". Like the Robert Rauschenberg white canvasses that partly inspired it, Cage's totally silent 1952 work - intended for a single performer, closing and opening the lid of a piano at the beginning and end, respectively, of each of its three movements - seems in retrospect like a historical necessity in musical modernism: someone had to do it. Does it matter, one wonders, that the someone happened to be Cage? Kyle Gann, a composer, blogger and former music reviewer for New York's Village Voice paper, seems to think so. No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33" is a solemn justification for what many at the time (and since) perceived as a prank or a hoax. Trawling through Cage's writings and examining the score and performance of the piece, Gann elaborately reconstructs the genesis of 4'33" in the hope of making a case for it as a serious, galvanising work in the history of music and, indeed, of the arts more generally. Gann's argument accepts and enlarges Cage's own: that by reducing the performer to silence, the hierarchy between music and noise was obliterated and the ambient sounds of the world set free. more... http://www.newstatesman.com/non-fiction/2010/05/cage-gann-piece-music-silence _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
