From: marck@nwu.edu (Jater & Co.)
Newsgroups: rec.music.misc,rec.music.compose,rec.music.classical
Subject: This man knew what music was about.
Date: 13 Aug 92 19:54:16 GMT
Followup-To: rec.music.misc
Organization: NU ACNS


one of the bad parts of waking up listening to NPR is that i usually get
whapped with the news of the passing of a hero or inspiration at 6 a.m. 
this morning's zinger was a biggie:  John Cage passed away yesterday after
suffering a stroke Wednesday evening.  he would have turned 80 on September
5.

i called a friend in New York this morning who was close to both John and
his main collaborator, choreographer Merce Cunningham.  Merce said that the
passing was painless:  he came home to find John unconscious on Wednesday
night.  by Thursday, a brain scan had showed that there had been so much
damage that one should hope John just let it go.  a few hours later, that's
just what he did.  the NY Times obituary, riddled with errors, closed with:
"There were no immediate survivors."  a strange thing to read, considering
how large his family was in New York City.  the concert in the MOMA
sculpture garden this friday will be mobbed by them, i'm certain.

i consider myself fortunate to have met John once, at a performance of one
of his and Merce Cunningham's collaborations.  as i shook his hand, my
friend introduced me as a composer.  feeling the awe of being in his
presence, i began to protest:  "Well ..." but John stopped me:  "Oh no, I'm
sure you are."  and i took this to mean that he saw us all in this light.

i've always thought that John Cage's ideas and contributions to music were
vastly underrated, but NPR tried to prove me wrong this morning.  you would
think he was the head of a foreign state, the way they're paying attention
to this death.  come to think of it, that's not a bad moniker for the man. 
he seemed to be working on another plane.  so many people thought of him as
a composer standing on the outer banks, but perhaps our sense of direction
was just skewed, and in fact he was standing closer to the center, closer
to the significance of music.

the media will describe his compositions as "nontraditional," but that word
diminishes his importance.  i prefer to think of his work as primal and
focused:  he would examine musical concepts the way scientists examine
micro-organisms under heavy magnification.  and, like the image of those
magnified slides, the music he created took on an entirely new form,
alienating some people because they no longer recognized the sounds they
heard as music.

this was probably best epitomized by his piece _4'33"_, a work that has
earned a remarkable amount of attention on rec.music.misc.  i stayed out of
the fray when everyone was raging about whether 4'33" was music or not.  it
may sound strange, but the topic was a little too emotional for me.  the
piece amounted to a one-word command from Cage:  "Listen!"  that's really
all it was about.  and judging from the debate that grew from 4'33" (not
only here but in other circles as well), a lot of people were far too busy
making their own noise to hear what Cage was saying.

Cage and my music professor taught me a favorite definition:  music is what
happens between two defined points in time, and that's all.  it is how we
prepare that length of time that makes the music an "event," and it is our
decision as to what structure we apply to that length of time that
indicates the classification or label that music will earn.  John Cage
certainly had some radical ideas on the structure of his music.  in the
field of architecture, the radical thinkers are the ones who get acclaim;
but for some reason that doesn't seem to happen in music.  so maybe, for
his sake, we should remember Cage as a musical architect rather than a
composer.

i imagine that John Cage and Frank Lloyd Wright are having some
mind-blowing conversations right now, wherever they are.


mlb

*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+* marck@nwu.edu +*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+
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