Word: cage
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From Zacher's organ at the Folkwang Academy in Essen come some of the most adventurous and innovative sounds heard in a time beset by strange noises. Playing music by such avant-garde composers as Mauricio Kagel, Georgy Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Ernst Krenek and, naturally, John Cage, Zacher treats the organ as though it were a giant musical synthesizer, capable of taking sound back to its primeval sources and building music anew. That is exactly how Zacher feels about...
...leaning on the keys with the butt of the hand and the forearm. Volumina radiates the same waves of contrived unreality as Ligeti's Atmospheres, which defined the mood of outer space conclusively on the sound track of the film 2001. As an experiment, Volumina recalls the way Cage and Henry Cowell, in the 1930s, used to beat the prepared piano with their fists and elbows for new sonority. Like Cage and Cowell, the "Zacher school" seems as fond of grotesquerie as grace. And even grotesquerie has its place. It was Berlioz, after all, who ordered the violinists...
Music for Stravinsky is speculative volition. The composer controls his art at the level of causality through his choices. This leads Stravinsky to make some forceful remarks on some of the avant-garde habits, particularly the extremes of solipsism and mathematics, as represented by Cage and Xenakis. "I still admit to a need to go from a beginning to an end through related parts...
...valuable contribution. Integrity and "modernity," separate from formal exploration, are antagonistic. The past lives in the art which lives. The mainstream flows to Schocnberg and Stravinsky, who are essentially similar in their conception of music, rather than antithetical, as is often assumed. The problem with such composers as Cage and enakis is whether they are belligerent in a healthy manner, whether in their individual attempts at radical changes, they do not really negate innovation, and impose a set of polemical restrictions more arbitrary and impotent than the ones they sought to replace. In his Poctics Stravinsky said, "The danger does...
...Three things bother Wilcox about filling in: 1) the time commitment, 2) not being ready, and 3) playing ahead of Landry, who has been participating all season. "The second Brian can turn his wrist one degree, I'm getting out of that cage," he said Thursday...