
John Cage: How to Get Started (2010) [pdf] - mrzool
https://slought.org/media/files/how_to_get_started.pdf
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purpled_haze
Referenced was the Freeman Etudes:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ze845nRYc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ze845nRYc)

I consider myself a music lover, but people listening to 46 minutes of that
while reading it to determine not one note was missed I don't understand.

For those that like Cage's work, what do you appreciate about it and do you
listen to his pieces often?

~~~
jdale27
I've been a fan of John Cage's work for a long time. However, for me his
oeuvre kind of splits into two halves. Many of his early works (say, up to the
mid 1950s?) can be listened to as decent works of modern music in the
classical tradition. They are "composed"; they have internal structure and
purpose. Sonatas and Interludes is a great example; Four Walls is another.

After 4'33", however, a lot of his work seems to me to be aiming only towards
achieving some sort of ideological purity in explicating Cage's philosophy of
indeterminacy. To some extent, once you've heard a few of these pieces, you've
heard them all. The Freeman Etudes in particular have always been, for me, one
of Cage's least listenable pieces.

It reminds me of a couple of concepts that I think Cage might have resonated
with. One is "Wittgenstein's ladder"
([http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WittgensteinsLadder](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WittgensteinsLadder)):
"My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who
understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used
them - as steps - to climb beyond them. He must, so to speak, throw away the
ladder after he has climbed up it." In other words, once you "get" what Cage
was trying to say (in, e.g., 4'33"), you've gotten it, and you don't really
need to keep listening.

Along the same lines, what Alan Watts said about using psychedelic drugs:
"Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a
glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in
which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up
the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes,
telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently
glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen..." The
analogy might be a little bit of a stretch, but Cage's music is something like
an "instrument" that gives "a glimpse of genuine [musical] insight": the fact
that beautiful, indeterminate music is happening all around you all the time,
if you stop and listen to it.

~~~
julian_t
I think the same about some modern art, such as Duchamp's urinal, or Craig-
Martin's oak tree. Once you understand what the artist is trying to say, there
is no need ever to see the work again.

Although it gets me into trouble, I tend to divide art into "craft", where
skill is important, and "visual philosophy", where the message is the thing,
and skill is often secondary. And I have to say that I prefer that to the Old
Masters!

------
dave2000
I love the PDF format as much as anyone, but surely this would have been
better as a HTML file; indeed, just about any other format?

~~~
ilzmastr
I agree. Not much formatting but:
[http://cl.ly/1T080R0y2V15/how.html](http://cl.ly/1T080R0y2V15/how.html)

After a wget I did:

``` pdftotext how_to_get_started.pdf how.txt iconv -f iso8859-1 -t utf-8
how.txt | pandoc -o how.html ```

~~~
mrzool
Great, thanks for sharing! That PDF is indeed terrible.

