From: maverick@cs.berkeley.edu (Vance Maverick)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: Re: Manners, children please...
Date: 26 Aug 1992 17:25:16 GMT
Organization: CS Division, UC Berkeley
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: mahogany.cs.berkeley.edu

In article <1992Aug26.044600.13544@uniwa.uwa.edu.au>, diarmuid@uniwa.uwa.edu.au (Diarmuid Pigott) writes:
|> Please note that this is the longer version of a reply -

Ditto.

|> : |> [Cage] could not have sat down and written a serious, tonally
|> : |> unambiguous, conventionally orchestrated, popular symphony.
|> 
|> : * How do you know?
|> [good evidence that no such work was actually written]

Your contention was that he was incapable.

|> : * Why does it matter?
|>  
|> Because I want to know. That's why it matters. If you just stick out
|> your tongue, it isn't exactly creative dialogue.

I note a degree of reciprocity in this sticking out of tongues.

|> : * Yeah, and he probably couldn't have painted like G.F. Watts, either,
|> : or built a hot-dog stand in the shape of a hot dog, or written _The
|> : Fountainhead_.  
|> 
|> Are you saying that (eg) Simpson 9th or 10th Symphonies are like any of these?

Don't know them.  Cage wouldn't have written Simpson's music in any
case.

|> What are you trying to say - the choices are between Cage or Lloyd Webber?

No, that these silly suggestions are about as relevant to what Cage
wanted to do as symphony-writing would have been; that we might as
well criticize him for not having painted _Hope_ as for not having
written a conventional symphony.

|> : * Have you ever heard _In a Landscape_?
|> 
|> Yes, why?

Fits your criteria, medium aside.

|> : 
|> : * There's a difference between one's taste in listening and one's
|> : habit of composition: much music of Mozart works great for my
|> : aesthetic, but I don't try to write like that.
|> 
|> This is not a rejoinder at all.

It is, actually.  Let me recapitulate.  You asked whether Cage had
written anything which could be appreciated outside "the bounds of"
his aesthetic.  I asked what the bounds were, and you responded with a
criticism of the bounds of his actual production.  Obviously you could
not have intended this usage of aesthetic in your original question.

|> What do you write like, anyway?

My music has been described as "tonal Milton Babbitt."

|> [of Cage's purported "neophilia"]
|> 
|> infinite possibilities, but only the
|> twin probabilities of gazing at navels or fundaments.

Last I checked, the possibilities of navel-gazing were pretty broad --
as is Cage's work.

|> :  
|> : |> : Did he ever tell people how to "evaluate" his pieces? 
|> 
|> Of course he did - he wrote books on the subjects! Why ask when we both know?

I can't remember any comments on how to evaluate his pieces. 
Seriously.  He mentions things like "sobering the mind and rendering
it susceptible to divine influence", but not in the discussion of his
own composition.  He does not say, "The measure of the success of
_Atlas Eclipticalis_ is <bla>."  Quite sensibly, his discussion (in
all the cases I can remember) bears on the intellectual/aesthetic
adventure of *making* his music, not consuming it.

|> Schmuck!

"Manners, children please...."

	Vance
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical