Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site cornell.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!houxm!hogpc!houti!ariel!vax135!cornell!gtaylor
From: gtaylor@cornell.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.music
Subject: 
Message-ID: <7946@cornell.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 2-May-84 17:19:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: cornell.7946
Posted: Wed May  2 17:19:28 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 4-May-84 01:12:39 EDT
Sender: gtaylor@cornell.UUCP
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept.
Lines: 109

From: gtaylor (Greg Taylor)
Attention all Foucalt fans of discourse! We open with Rosen
quoting Malik responding to Rosen, as quoted by Taylor....

> "P.S.  About that minimalism discussion re John Cage.  Cage is one of
> the biggest artistic charlatans of our age, who has made the resulting
> sensual result of the artist's work less important than the "artist's
> conception and ideas".  Utter poppycock!!  There, more discussion of
> classical music!!  (Well, of a supposed classical musician, anyway...)"
> 
> My response -
> My understanding of Cage's work, leads me to believe that you have
> things backwards. By using chance procedures (flipping coins, using
> the imperfections on the paper, consulting the I CHING), Cage assures
> that NONE of his ideas, conceptions, emotions, etc. come through. The
> result is pure SOUND - devoid of both expressive and intellectual
> manipulation.  [MALIK]

>>Pure sound is what comes from natural circumstances.  If you want pure
>>sound devoid of "human" expressive and intellectual manipulation,
>>go to a game preserve.
>>
>>Art is by its very nature the expressive and intellectual manipulation of
>>sensory media BY HUMAN BEINGS.  It is not a part of what some would call
>>"the natural order of things", it is an expressive attempt to create
>>a new order of things.  To choose to negate human intervention is to negate
>>art itself.

Whew! Just think of what all the folks in net.classical are missing!

I'd like to start by stripping down Rich's initial response to its
weighty core: that Cage has divorced the "result" (by which I
assume he means performance or the experience of hearing a piece)
from the concept of "intent", and then subordinated experience to
intent.

Karl Malik responds (again, pardon the reductio if I do you an injustice)
that Cage has made "pure" experience the substance of his work.

I would like to suggest that, seen in a slightly modified form, they
are not necessarily at odds with one another. While it is clear that
Rich disputes Cage's seat in the pantheon, Karl may well harbour some
similar reservations (though they are less easily gleaned from the
structure of his response).

I think that I agree with Rich that some separation of intent and
experience is central to Cage's work, but I'd say that he was 
not the first person to operate in that territory. That question
of the way that audiences perceive structural and tonal relationships
is at the core of the whole serial enterprise-Namely, that one can
"liberate" music from tonality and still maintain a sense of structure
(within the tone row and its permutative structure) which (its claimed)
a listener identify, if only in some vague way. Cage merely inherits
the tradition (which comes out of the old Hegelian and Positivist
Weltgeist of the time), and goes at it in a stripped down form. He
is, in effect giving you the heart of the Serialist enterprise without
the Schoenbergian heater and whitewalls.

Which brings me to Karl's idea about end product and manipulative structures.
THe manipulative structures that Karl refers to are (I think) precisely
the same ornaments that Serialism has. Cage is doing something that will
be echoed by writers and painters alike: That part of the process of
"hearing" is outside of the composer's "zone of control": in simple
terms, the process of attention and attenuation by the hearer are also
central in their own way to the experience of music. That, in fact, the
western ear is already trained to impose a set of conditions and limitations
on what constitutes "music" that can be said to be entirely outside of the
entire debate about art as a product of human enterprise. The classically
trained person will, for example, remark with considerably greater regularity
in the device of a composer imitating nature (the song of the Nightengale)
as opposed to hearing the "world" in a musical way. The westerner does not
often see the ritual mask as Art unless it is put in the museum.

In that light, Rich's comment about going to the game preserve fits
delightfully. At the heart of Cage's POSITIVE (in my view) contribution
is the continually posed axiom that we may never hear the sound of that
sanctuary with the same attention that we give to the Mozart minuet
played at the wrong tempo UNLESS we move the sound of that sanctuary
into the place we expect to hear music. Sadly, I find that much of
his music is very difficult to listen to (his prepared piano works being
a wonderful exception to this). For me, he's like the cubists: he's
posed an idea much larger than his work would even hint at in its
best moments.

But, Rich and Karl will, I suspect, both agree that there are a great number
of dangers in a total separation of experience and intention. There is
much in modern music that seems merely constructed as an irritant to the
bourgeois aesthete (Herbert Bru:n's music and theorizing being a delightful
example of a Marxist version of the most horrible stump-preacher that you can
imagine), or the product of some great oversystem of permutative combinations
that just by accident bear a person's name. Cage himself seems at pains in
his old age to place himself in a more conservative tradition (his disciples
seem to have driven him to it, I get the feeling).

Anyone want to talk with me about the dangers one finds in the 20th Century
of concentrating either on Structure (Neo-serialists, stochastics), Performance
(the New Virtuousity) or Experience to the expense of the others? How
come most of the net.classics folks seem to start staring at their shoes
as music starts easing past the era of the introduction of indoor plumbing?
Are they on to something? Don't we wind up defending the artistic integrity
of some composers we really DON'T like (I do) because it's difficult to
approach someone else's music without their ideas.

Grace and Peace to you all in the Whilemean.

gtaylor@cornell

(4 min. 33 seconds of inactivity at the terminal at this point)