Word: cage
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...John Cage was in his element-chaos. The audience of 7,000 wandered to and fro in the University of Illinois Assembly Hall. Wandering happily right along with them, Cage drank in the beeps, doinks and sputterings coming from loudspeakers spaced along the walls. He gazed serenely at the color-crazy patterns sprayed by rotating slide projectors on the walls and the temporary translucent ceiling. He stared at the NASA space films and the clips from the silent era that flickered on the movie screens...
...student stepped up, handed Cage a book and asked him to autograph it: "In view of what's going on here tonight, I thought it would be an appropriate place for your signature." It was a Donald Duck comic book. This random happening was something that only the father of chance music could appreciate fully. Cage smiled and signed...
...symphony of Webern (c1923) the architecture, sonorities, and phychology of music were recreated. The only significant development since then have been Edgar Varese's employment of the daily persuasiveness of the city as part of his musical material; Olivier Messiaen's elegant experiments in multiple asymmetrical rhythms; and John Cage's interpretation of Webern's principle of the "music of silence" to mean that music fundamentally consists of random sounds within a formal background of silence. Schoenberg stated his fecund principle in 1932 as follows...
...radical post-war avant-grade split into those wishing to fulfill the logic of dense twelve-tone organization, represented by such composers as Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez, and those desiring to create music with the least possible constraints, represented by Cage and Stockhausen. The latter reacted against the old ghosts of Kingsor and Vienna, Wagner and Schoenberg himself. The new principle was that the legitimacy of music flows simply from the auditor's effort to feel sheer sounds. Music is the sensitized constancy of the world's masses. To borrow a term from language studies, music is mimetic...
...leads into a problem. If music ultimately depends solely on the individual nervous system rather than patterns imposed by the composer, then music may reduce itself out of existence as an identifiable, separate art. The further extremity of Cage's esthetic of chance would eliminate Cage himself. The universality of the art would have been destroyed as well as all reasonable artistic communication, since that presupposes some conscious relation between at least two people. I suppose that the reason for anxiety over the death of music is that the avant-garde will lead unswervingly to solipsism, in which each sound...