It's trivial to make extremely long time-based pieces on the web. You load the page, it works out the time/date, and it plays whatever the algorithm says is right for the time date. With the right algo you can make pieces that last for millions of years.
And so on.
There is a sense in which it's an interesting idea, but it's also a cultural dead end. You can only make it bigger and more extreme, and that's more about spectacle than music.
The authenticity of the piece and it's validity is reinforced by our conversation and replay.
On this measure the timeline is arbitrary, and trumping it is a second work all together, creating a new conversation.
Most people think it is uninteresting and a total waste of time.
I can also understand the aggression a lot of Cage's work got in the past. It's very destructive for people to listen a long time to a man who is only speaking letters. Almost like torture.
Is a waste of time art?
None of these things are meant to be enjoyed in the traditional sense. But they might make you think, or make you angry.
So what good do these things bring the world? I don't know, probably none.
Art, and media in general are productions of culture which celebrate our humanity. That is, they rejoice in all of our abilities to perceive, conceive and enact upon the world. Wasting people's time in this light makes people aware of their time, and allows for further interrogations of our humanities to arise. Just as we're doing now.
It's good to remember that art only gains it's status through a production being named art by an exhibitor. IMO there's no special purpose to the term. Consuming art is just another form of recreation, and people are right to hate it for any reason, just that tyranny of what is useful is usually not in the human spirits best interest.
https://www.americanpoems.com/poets/eecummings/introduction-...
Because you have to keep the computer running continuously. That turns out to be extremely difficult.
So there is no spectacle, here.
Part of the magic of Cage's piece, in this incarnation, is that someone actually built the special organ, in a suitable space that might plausibly remain undisturbed for several centuries. It requires some maintenance and some care and feeding, of course, but not much. So one doesn't have to suspend disbelief too much, here—this performance may actually occur as planned. It's been going for over 20 years so far, after all.
I'll take listening to an amateur messing with guitar chords while drunk in a shitty bar over something like this. Because I can actually experience the shitty bar music. You literally cannot experience this "art project".
I'd suggest all three are present in artists across the ages, but in recent times the last seems to have become more prominent.
That aside, John Cage was having these ideas when they weren't as obvious as they are today and we have the benefit of hindsight. Dismissing that is also a pretty ignorant mistake.
We must be in different Western cultures because I definitely don't see a lot of skill and virtuosity in most popular music.
I think it depends on the lens you use. If you're looking through a "Tom Scholz" lens, that kind of skill and instrumental virtuosity may not exist today (although artists like St. Vincent are an argument that they do). But tech has completely changed music making, production, and distribution since that time, so today's Toms are people like Finneas O'Connell, and making music today is more akin to software design and engineering.
It was my understanding that everyone had heard.
Why is that a bad thing?
Fuck me, you say? No, fuck YOU.
Feel free to mute me (edit: assuming HN has that feature) if you're unwilling to engage in an exchange of opinions and perspectives like a reasonable adult.
John Cage didn’t intend this piece to last 639 years, right? What ideas of his are you referring to? This long running organ piece was conceived by someone in Germany and is intended to highlight the history of Halberstadt, right?
The question @TheOtherHobbes is raising seems relevant: how does this performance contribute to musical culture, or even to Cage’s work? It can’t be enjoyed as music, it’s more of a logistical piece intended to create a mythology. In that sense, this performance is, in a way, very much lauding a sort of skill over most other things about the music - the skill of pure perseverance. Like other conceptual art, it’s the story of this work that is interesting, but not really the work itself. You seem to suggest otherwise, would you mind coloring that in for me, so I can appreciate it more?
It would be hard to explain in an easy sentence or two on here. If I thought I could do it, I'd try. It might end up looking like a Zen koan. :)
> I don't think any of that sort of music will survive long, because the concept is no longer clever after it loses its novelty.
At some point it stops being a novelty and becomes a historical event, where a piece of music has already been playing for 400 years. Wouldn't it be interesting to visit a place where you know that people hundreds of years ago have listened not only to the same piece of music but to the same performance as you are experiencing right now. That listenership spans centuries?
> Exploring the boundaries of what constitutes music or art is interesting to me.
Interesting, yes, as a concept, and perhaps even as a cultural event, but we certainly agree that it's a different kind of experience than a musical performance.
> Wouldn't it be interesting to visit a place where you know that people hundreds of years ago have listened not only to the same piece of music but to the same performance as you are experiencing right now. That listenership spans centuries?
I honestly have no interest in visiting such a place to hear a note, or even the change from one note to another. And recognize that what interests you in such a visit is not musical interest, but conceptual interest.
Firstly, it presupposes that the music and the ‘concept’ are distinct. I love say Mahler 2 and the Rite of Spring but I love those pieces as a collection of notes and a concept together and trying to separate the ‘concept’ from the notes is impossible - when I listen to them the concept is an essential part of the experience.
In this case I can imagine listening to the notes in the knowledge of the wider context and being profoundly moved by the experience. I don’t see this as any different to music that is highly repetitive (and so not ‘interesting’ musically), for example, but still elicits an emotional response from many listeners.
Finally, if the classification is of composers into two camps, with Cage being in the wrong camp, then I’m afraid that the idea that Cage’s music won’t survive long isn’t backed up by the evidence as most of it is still doing really well many years after it was composed.
I think there's a value distinction to be drawn between boundary explorations that expand the art form and those that simply depart from any definition of it separate from the other arts. That leaves a broad scope for innovation: the composers of the ars subtilior, Carlo Gesualdo, Hector Berlioz, Debussy and Satie, Harry Partch, Antheil and Edgard Varese, and the progression of serialism from Schoenberg through Webern to Boulez — all of them explored and expanded the boundaries of music, but you can still experience their works as music, even if some have argued that it's bad music. It all can be, and has been, accepted as music.
But some of Cage's works (of those which he presented as musical) depart from musical material and musical experience to play with the nonmusical culture that surrounds music and musicians, or, abandoning that, the idea of performance itself. Obviously 4'33", with its formalities of opening and closing a piano, is an example of the former, but his lesser-known 0'00" runs simply, "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." In that case, the performer is as justified in a disciplined soiling of their pants as any musical act. I refuse to countenance such wanking. (Cage was by no means alone in this, but he's probably the most famous.)
I'm glad to see that even academic composers seem to have retreated from this dissolution.
I don’t relate to most of his music but I do think he was on an honest quest for something. In fact, I think it could even be fair to say he was a philosopher using sound as his medium, instead of a musician.
That I find myself using the word "point" so often here emphasizes, to me, that Cage was engaging in philosophy rather than musical composition.
Messiaen found sitting in a meadow quite a musical experience!
It's a matter of taste, of course.
Then you could go listen to a snippet of it, in this extremely slow version, and get a sense of that.
Then combine the two.
Go to a gallery full of abstract expressionism. Hear people asking, "what does it mean?"