Monday, January 22, 2007

Cage

The other day I heard a performance of John Cage’s most famous piece, 4’33”. Let me describe it: A pianist approaches the piano and takes a seat, ready to perform. The audience, greatly numbered and open eared, wait for it – the music, that is. He lifts the lid and stares at the keys without playing a note. Nothing. More nothing. After a few minutes he closes the lid. This is repeated, making it a total of three completely silent movements. For a full 4 minutes and 33 seconds not a sound is made. Strange, don’t you think?

For Cage, though, it made perfect sense. There is never absolute silence, he came to realize at some point in his life. Every moment is accompanied by some sound, whether profound and unavoidable or, like one’s steady breath, passing nearly unnoticed. And Cage considers these ambient sounds to be music. The whirring of my computer, the squeak of the chair, the shutting of a door down the hall, etc. – all of them taken together make up music. And a performance, in which the pianist remains as silent as possible, not playing a note or moving a muscle, brings just those random sounds to the forefront. Every cough and every scratch in such a spookily quiet auditorium would be heard, and there would be a musical performance of a totally different sort.


Part of me is with Cage. Music, melody, and rhythm, all find their source in the way people talk and the kinds of sounds we hear in life. Our aversion to unsteady rhythms is possibly due to the comfort we got from the nearly perfect beat of our mother’s heart back when we each lived in a womb. So I can understand Cage’s insistence that music and the random sounds we’re so constantly confronted by are not so different after all. Cage isn’t so crazy, I guess.

But another part of me – a bigger and more correct part – thinks Cage is a little off. Not everything is music. Random sounds, especially, are not music. Random sounds are random sounds, and nothing else. When your instincts so strongly tell you something is not quite music, or not quite a piece of art, maybe it is right. I’m not about to convince myself the shuffling of feet in a hallway and the general din of sound one normally hears when it’s busy is anything to get too exited about.

I won’t try to explain what music is because I just haven’t figured that out. But I will commit myself to at least one idea: Music is supposed to move people on some kind of emotional level. And I feel Cage’s 4’33” just isn’t capable of doing that. Let me show you how I know this. I decided to test the theory that music is meant to move people emotionally by performing an a cappella version of 4’33”. While in Vancouver for the Christmas break I stood on a street corner where musical street performers, or buskers, normally go. I decided not to announce the commencement of my performance and just start when I felt ready. Well, I stood there and didn’t make a sound – Cage would have been proud – nor did I move a muscle. It was the perfect vocal performance of his 4’33”. But no one seemed to notice me. People just walked by oblivious of the fact that I was performing a great musical piece. I knew then that Cage’s 4’33” is not music since no one was moved on an emotional level upon hearing my street-corner a cappella version of it.

P.S. This was written before I realized I must have just looked like a guy standing quietly on a street corner. They might have thought I was waiting for a friend, or something.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

This is an introduction

Welcome to my blog - a place to house my thoughts on politics, culture, philosophy, and whatever else I may find of value. Of course, for the sake of readership, I hope the things I find valuable and the things other people find valuable overlap somewhat. If they don't at all, or if they do, but only a little, I'll prepare myself to watch that ship (Readership) sail.