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From: koko@uthub.UUCP (M. Kokodyniak)
Newsgroups: net.music.classical
Subject: Re: Four American Composers - Cage/Ashley/Monk/Glass
Message-ID: <264@uthub.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 26-Mar-86 12:43:45 EST
Article-I.D.: uthub.264
Posted: Wed Mar 26 12:43:45 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 26-Mar-86 14:27:56 EST
References: <708@mprvaxa.UUCP>
Organization: CSRI, University of Toronto
Lines: 31

>                     I have long felt that  John Cage  is an entertaining
> charlatan, whose ideas, though  provocative, are wrong  (music, I think,
> is a place  for minimizing  entropy),  and whose music   is unlistenable
> didactic masturbation.  I  still  think this -  mostly.
> 
> Tim Bray  (ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision!mprvaxa!tbray)

	I like your reference to entropy in music.  It seems that many
modern composers (or at least the ones I have heard) maximize the entropy
in their music.  One piece that comes to mind is "Little Organ Concert"
by some composer whose name eludes my memory.  (This piece was first performed
at the inaugural organ concert at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto.)
	I have never heard the Canadian Brass and the Elmer Eisler Singers
make such pitiful and grotesque sounds.  At times, one could hear the
audience giggling and even laughing.  I don't know what the composer's
intentions were, but I certainly got a few laughs out of it.  At certain
seemingly random moments, various choir members made the sounds similar
to cats in heat, hissing at a human intruder.  However, at one point, it
sounded as if the composer really got going with a musical idea.  The choir
and brass were going at full blast and full organ was engaged -- it
started to sound like the majestic ending to a symphony.  But within
a few seconds, the organ stopped, the choir went flat and the brass
fell off their notes and dwindled into a menagerie of random notes
so typical of modern composition.
	In general, the entire piece seemed to be a disarray of
detatched musical ideas, like islands in a sea of entropy.  Listening
to that piece is analogous to hearing a would-be philosopher utter
some broken phrases, some of which superficially sound as if they were
extracted from some great literary works.  My reply would probably
be "So what?  What does it all mean?"  But if it doesn't mean anything,
then what is the point of expending the effort to say anything at all?