
John Cage’s Gift to Us - tintinnabula
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/10/27/john-cages-gift-to-us/
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ThinkingGuy
From what I gather, the intent of a lot of Cage's work was that the listener
take a few minutes to observe and contemplate the sounds, natural or man-made,
being created spontaneously in their surroundings at that particular moment
and place, rather than just consuming a series of precomposed, pre-programmed
notes.

Given the increase in the average pace of life since Cage's time, and the
increase in the number and variety of distractions and intertainment
accessible to modern humans in the developed world, it would seem that
opportunities to "detach" in a socially acceptable way are becoming more and
more scarce, and thus more and more valuable.

Was John Cage just ahead of his time?

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arketyp
Cage was influenced by Zen teachings and other post-modern notions such as the
obliteration of the dualist subject. Reading his famous debut book Silence,
one gets the impression that his provocations were done almost in a state of
exigency, as a means of speeding up a necessary progression. And, as the
article makes a point of, music in his case is perhaps best seen as a metonym
for the creative process, and perhaps life, at large.

I think it's interesting to engage in Cage's work with the view of Cage as a
technologist. Today, our means of synthesizing sound, imagery and even
intelligble content I think dwarf those to which Cage was ever exposed. Cage's
urgency, however, is as relevant as ever.

~~~
0xADADA
> Today, our means of synthesizing sound, imagery and even intelligble content
> I think dwarf those to which Cage was ever exposed.

I think Cage would've been totally unimpressed with our technologic "mastery"
of the control of sound. His work revealed that the control of the structure
of sound was approaching a cul-de-sac (hence his boredom with
Tschaikowsky/Bruckner/Stravinsky) and therefore a very limiting perspective on
what is beautiful/emotive or even what it means to be "music".

~~~
arketyp
I agree, and I was hinting at that dissonance by saying intelligible content.
But I also think we find ourselves today in a post-postmodern era. The promise
of deconstruction never delivered and the allure of metaphysics and the
structures persisted, in the face of it all. So we find ourselves chained in a
truamatized relationship where perhaps the only option is to try to rejuvenate
a forgotten romance, taking lessons from the excursions.

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andybak
In case anyone is turned off by the more experimental and non-musical aspects
of Cage I'd like to point out he wrote some very pretty proto-minimalism also:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2wtmQkvX7A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2wtmQkvX7A)

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ciconia
The Github Audio [0] posting from a few days ago immediately made me think of
John Cage. I think he'd have a ball knowing that so much of today's music is
algorithmically generated, either based on "user taste" as in smart playlists,
or "aleatoric" sources (which Cage called "chance operations") like github
events.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12635247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12635247)

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zer0defex
Was hoping this was referring to Johnny Cage of Mortal Kombat fame. Left
disappointed.

~~~
gnarbarian
Me too. Lets get downvoted together.

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

