Silencio
We were chatting about the joy of transcriptions the other day; how they let you hear aspects of a piece which you previously missed through familiarity or sonic occlusion. Well here’s a transcription which doesn’t quite provide those advantages, but which is curious nonetheless. It’s a version of 4′33” for orchestra:
Things to watch out for: the conductor mopping his brow between movements, the audience holding off on coughing until the intervals, the blond chick on the edge of her seat.
One of my most surprising musical learning moments was when I realized that 4′33″ wasn’t a load of bullshit. It forces people to clarify and consider what their definition of music is, without strictly being a composition itself. It is sort of meta-music. I think it is quite fascinating how much of a conversation (internal or external) you can produce by simply questioning if the piece is music, and if not, why not?
But then I feel all pretentious and artsy-fartsy and have to go play Mario Kart.
July 2nd, 2008 at 6:23 am
I don’t know, I still think it’s bs . . .
July 2nd, 2008 at 8:46 am
Hah!
So… why do you still think that it’s bs?
July 2nd, 2008 at 10:14 am
When I play in the orchestra (amateur) I sometimes have trouble counting the rests (because of tempo changes, or lack of concentration).
Now, from what I see here, the pages only say “tacet” (meaning, not to play in the movement), no rests, so the conductor has to have a stopwatch. It would be more interesting if there would be a beat given, with rests for everybody. So the conductor has to give beat, and everybody has to “read” (count) the pauses, with a lot more page turning (from both conductor and musicians). Or even add some tempo changes?
As if, everything’s there, except the “music” — not in the broad sense Cage says “everything we do is music”.
In the end, we might even get some different performances, depending on whether the conductor takes the tempo literarily or not!
July 2nd, 2008 at 10:44 am
Well in the video it looked like they were having fun, so as a cute little joke I don’t have a problem with it. But presented as serious art? That’s what I think is BS. It’s not music (obviously). It’s not art because it contains no actual creative content. Much of modern art seems to be more about the medium and form rather than about actual creative content, things like wrapping a building in paper, throwing paint at a canvas, creating a sculpture out of garbage, etc. It’s no longer art, it’s commentary about art meant to shock the public and show how clever the artist is. In the case of 4′33, it doesn’t tell me anything about music. If sitting in silence makes you reconsider your definition of music, it’s not because of any special creative ability of John Cage. It would work just as well if someone told you “turn off your music for a while.”
July 2nd, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Zoltan,
That would indeed be a lot more interesting to watch. It would be particularly interesting if it had both tempo changes and real orchestration, so that the conductor had to not only mix up the beats, but also do a lot of enthusiastic gesturing. As you point out though, that moves away a bit from the original intention… but it has a lot more replay value.
Andy,
I sort of agree, I think… but I sort of disagree as well. Pretty clear, huh?
I definitely agree that if this were being presented as a deadly serious performance I’d think everyone involved were a bunch of pretentious gits. I also would not want to witness a performance of this more than about once in my entire life. I think the important thing is the concept, not the performance. All the interesting stuff (for me, anyway) comes out of arguing whether a performance 4′33″ actually constitutes music — but it’s not at all necessary to hear it performed in order to achieve this. It’s not the sitting in silence which is important, but rather the worrying thought that if it doesn’t constitute music (as it certainly doesn’t seem like it does) then you have to provide a good argument as to why it doesn’t.
That’s why I called it meta-music. To me it seems more like a cheeky way of bringing up a philosophical argument, which happens to be via musical score. I reckon that it’s pretty successful at provoking argument, and thus you could argue it is successful art. But… it’s an entirely different class of art than a symphony. It’s almost like musical graffiti.
I think where it gets really pretentious is when people lose track that it’s the idea which is important and not the actual rendition. Then it seems like posturing. In the same way I think that in principle the *idea* of an all-white painting is art because it makes people argue about what a painting is, but it’s completely idiotic when someone pays thousands of dollars for that “painting”, because you aren’t buying that idea, you’re buying a blank canvas.
Additionally, there’s a real limit to how many times that trick works…
July 3rd, 2008 at 9:41 am
It doesn’t constitute music because there are no notes! It’s a pretentious bunch of post-modern twaddle designed, like most contemporary or “post-modern” art, to annoy and create media hype (the gushing praise of sycophantic critics afraid to look like they don’t “get it” if they don’t praise it) in order to mask a basic lack of artistic skill and creativity; i.e. it’s more about PR than art.) Music consists of audible notes, played by instruments and ordered in time to create a particular sound - melody, harmony, counterpoint, etc. Cage’s “piece” is just people sitting silently together for 4 and half minutes. If that’s “music”, then it’s also “music” when I sit alone in silence for a few minutes on the toilet. Essentially Cage and his devotees seems to think everything - even mere unorganised ambient noise - is music, which is simply absurdly overbroad definition of music. Music, noise, and silence may overlap and interact with one another, but they are not equivalent to each other.
I also have to question the use of the term “meta-music” to describe what is going on here. The great contemporary Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov (one of my happiest musical finds of the past year) has for several decades used the term (perhaps he even coined it as far as I know) meta-music (or ususally the more Germanic “meta-musik”) to describe his own muscial style. His music, however, consists of actual notes, not mere stop-watched periods of silence!
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:11 am
Dennis,
I agree completely with your statement that if 4′33″ constitutes music, it would also be “music” when you sit on the toilet for a few minutes. I don’t think there is anything special about the “performance” of 4′33″, as everybody “performs” it hundreds of times a day. Like when you are on the toilet. I think the question is: do the sounds which become audible when you are quiet constitute music or not? The silence is only important because it allows you to hear all the sounds which you otherwise would not have heard.
Intrinsically I don’t feel that whether something is music or not should depend on the motivation for it’s production (but I could be swayed on that point). Right now I am sitting in the optics room in my lab and various pieces of equipment are emitting overlapping tones. Because of variations in what the equipment is doing, the key and volume of these tones are slowly shifting relative to one another. It’s fairly pleasant to listen to, and if I heard a recording of it I would think it were music… even if it was a rather uninspiring example. Therefore, I feel like these sounds really are a form of music.
If I were not sitting quietly I would not hear those sounds.
I’m using meta- in the sense of “a higher level of description”, in analogy with physics::metaphysics. I don’t think forced silence (well, low-volume) is music, but it affects how and if we perceive sounds, which may or may not constitute music. It might not be the ideal choice of words, but it seems kind of appropriate to me. Silvestrov sounds interesting, I’m intrigued as to how he considers the term! I’ll look him up later.
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:46 am
I’ve just finished re-reading C.S. Lewis’ “Screwtape Letters.” One part which relates to this is when the devil Screwtape describes both music and silence as being from heaven, and the devils can’t stand either. Hell is filled only with noise.
July 3rd, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Of course the motivation or intention behind the sound and its production matter in determining whether or not something is music. Music is a human art - one of the seven mediaeval liberal arts - and thus requires human intention. What Cage and others are doing is simply perverting the fundamental definition of music as it has been understood since the ancient Greeks (after all, the word music is itself derived from the Greek word meaning “Art of the Muses”. Music is the art of organizing sounds in time using various elements like pitch, rhythm, harmony, melody, tempo, dynamics, etc. Unorganized or unintended sounds or mixtures of sounds like those made by your lab equipment may sound like music at times, but in fact are simply noise. Lacking any artistry, i.e. intent, the sounds such equipment makes are mere noise, byproducts of their mechaninical functioning. Some noises may sound more pleasing or “musical” and less annoying than others (ex. car alarms whose owners seem to be nowhere in sights!), but by arguing that any sound - whether intended or organized or not - is music, Cage et al. have simply confused music with noise.
July 3rd, 2008 at 9:28 pm
The problem I have with accepting that the intention behind the music matters is that you then cannot decide whether something is music or not without knowing the process which created it. For example, imagine if a set of windchimes happens by chance to ring out a simple melody in the key of C, and this is recorded onto a CD. Now imagine someone independently writing this melody and recording it using a separate set of chimes. Doesn’t it seem odd that even though an independent listener could not distinguish between the two, one of these identical recordings constitutes music, while the other doesn’t?
I guess the question I am getting at is that if you don’t know how a series of sounds was created, does that mean you can’t say if it is music or not? That doesn’t seem right to me.
July 4th, 2008 at 3:56 am
But if intention is of such importance, doesn’t that imply that 4′33″ is music in its most purest form? If you consider the history of this piece, and the way it came about (after Cage visited a room in which no sound could be heard, but found that he could hear lots of sound), and the effect he tries to establish with the audience, I don’t know many other pieces that were so well-considered when it comes to intention.
The great thing about this piece is that, when you are in the audience and listen to it, it actually reflects your own emotions at that time in an incredibly direct way, rather than imposing the composers sentiments on you. If one of the goals of music is to touch people, then John Cage did a terrific job. The fact that there’s still so much controversy going on, that so many people still care to be indignant about this piece only proves that point.
Stating that ‘everybody can do this’ is kind of irrelevant in this light; sure, we all have the same set of musical notes and rests to our disposal, but this doesn’t mean that we can all think up original concepts like Beethovens 7th, Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring, or Cage’s 4′33″ (or anything by Shostakovitch
)
I don’t agree with the idea that it’s only the sounds that make the music; silence is just as important. Try playing timpani, counting out 280 bars of rest as you wait for that final (and only) sound in a movement
July 4th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
“But if intention is of such importance, doesn’t that imply that 4?33? is music in its most purest form?” - No, because there are no notes! The question regarding intention came about above with regard to the noises made by the machines in Ben’s lab, i.e. are such unintentional, unorganized noises music? Cage’s “intention” was an extramusical one, since his “piece” consisted of no actual musical notes, and has nothing to do with the question of intention as it relates to the issue raised above regarding the lab machines. No matter what one’s “intent” if there are no notes there is simply no music, and thus it cannot be “music in its purest form”.
Music consists of notes, played by instruments, arranged in certain order, at a certain tempo, dynamic range, etc. Yes, silence is important to music, but it is only important insofar as it exists as a space BETWEEN notes. Silence, and only silence, is simply not music. It’s just silence.
I also agree with the statement above that it would have been better, and arguably more “musical”, if Cage had actually included tempi and written out actual rests, rather than simply saying “tacet” and handing the conductor a stopwatch. It’s that lack of any musical notation whatsoever, and any need for a conductor at all (except as a stopwatch operator), that make this more a PR ploy than an actual musical piece.
July 5th, 2008 at 10:14 am
“Music is a human art - one of the seven mediaeval liberal arts - and thus requires human intention. What Cage and others are doing is simply perverting the fundamental definition of music as it has been understood since the ancient Greeks (after all, the word music is itself derived from the Greek word meaning “Art of the Muses”.”
Again, beg to differ here
What Cage does, is returning to the roots of music that go way further back than our own, quite recently developed, but much overrated Western Classical Music tradition. Music has been around a lot longer than the ancient Greeks (and certainly much longer than the medieval liberal arts); the Indian musical culture, for instance, is much older. And it is this tradition, music as a means to return to silence and inner harmony, that was the inspiration for 4′33″.
If you don’t feel that 4′33″ is music, that’s of course fine. But to dismiss it as a PR stunt is taking things a bit too far in my opinion. Cage wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t unmusical either. Why being so dismissive about someone trying to break the boundaries of our own tradition? Why would notating stuff in ‘proper’ bars and rests all of a sudden make something more musical? Because it’s more confined, more rigid, more familiar to what you’re used to?
Oh well, at least, 4′33″ is easier on the ears than a lot of “post-modern twaddle” that you seem to dislike
July 7th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
“Music as a means to return to silence and inner harmony, that was the inspiration for 4?33?.” Note the word MEANS there - music as a MEANS to an end. What Cage does is not music as a MEANS to return to silence…it’s just silence itself (i.e. the absence of music).
My point about the Greeks was not about the origins of music as such, but about it’s understanding and developments in Western Culture for over 2500 years. The Greek etymological root of the word Music is undeniable, whatever you think of the supposed value of ancient Indian music. But then again, I have a hard time taking seriously the arguments of anyone who thinks anyone who thinks the Classical music tradition of Western Culture is “much overrated”. I enjoy the occasional sitar Raga by Ashwin Batish or Ravi Shankar, but I wouldn’t put any such piece on the same level as, to use just one Western example, Bach’s The Art of Fugue.
July 8th, 2008 at 3:36 am
Hi Ben,
You’re right, I should have reworded that phrase to “music a a means to return to inner silence”. Because that’s what Cage was after, in my opinion. The way he does this is quite similar to meditation: by shedding off layers of sound, and focussing on what you discover next, you ultimately arrive at silence.
I’m a bit weary of defining/ assessing something by its etymological history. For one, it doesn’t really say that much. Sure, ‘music’ derives from Ancient Greek ‘muse’, but what exactly does that say about the intrinsic value of a word? Its place in our society? Ultimately, the majority of our words stem from either Greek, Latin or Germanic, simply because English (and Dutch in my case) belong to the same language family as those languages. It would be weird if we used the African word for music.
Second, etymology doesn’t stop at ancient Greek; the root of ‘muse’ (mousa), itself derives from a much earlier ‘language’, the Indo European stem mendh-, which means ‘to learn’ and also ‘to dream’. It’s a shared root for both muse, music, but also mathematic, and features in both indian and european language families. Muses typically inspired artists in their dreams, so perhaps that’s where the connotation comes from.
It is interesting to observe what has been considered to be music throughout the centuries: at certain points in Roman history, music also included poetry, which we now see as a separate genre (but what about rap & hiphop). In the medieval trivium & quadrivium that you mentioned earlier, there were actually three kinds of music: music of the instruments (the ‘traditional’ music as we know it), the music of the spheres, and another one, which I can’t recall now. The music of the spheres is completely silent, it’s not supposed to include sound. Indian music has rhythms and microtones that sound completely amusical to Western ears. But in our own Western tradition too, at one time, intervals that are now totally acceptable and even boring for us (such as the major third) caused just as much indignation and discussion as this comment thread on 4′33″.
So, music (just as language) isn’t as well-defined and invariable as you seem to argue.
But you haven’t really answered my question: why are you so upset by 4′33″? Apart from the whole definition thing?
Thank you Ben for the stimulating discussion, signing off now, my cats need food & attention
July 8th, 2008 at 3:38 am
Argh, that should have been Dennis. Apologies!
Truus, no, Maaike
July 8th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
I’m upset by 4′33″ because its emblematice of the general decadence of so much “post-modern” “art”, whether music, painting, literature, etc. The gesture, the hype, the PR, the critical swooning, is more important than substance and artistic merit. I would go so far as to define 4′33″ as quintisential Kitsch. The great Austrian writer Hermann Broch defined Kitsch as anti-art, as non-art essentially masquerading as art and perverting the ethical value system of genuine Art. I think that’s what things like 4′33″ do.
I have no problem with anything you said above in your last post about the history of music (both the word and the thing itself), but I don’t think a facile “work” like 4′33″ helps further that discussion. 4′33″ is basically a rather banal didactic idea masquerading as a genuine art work. Just as Kitsch is essentially non-art as opposed to being simply bad art, 4′33″ is not even bad music, it’s just non-music.
Speaking of micro-tones, everyone should check out the works of Michael Harrison. He uses a piano tuned in Pure Intonation rather than the tradtional Well-Tempered tuning that has been the norm since Bach in the West. Quite interesting stuff.
Well, I’m off now to enjoy the Music of the Spheres.
July 9th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Thanks for the insightful back-and-forthing Dennis and Maaike, it’s commenting like this which makes it feel particularly worthwhile to write. On the other hand, I am now even less certain of how I feel about the “musical” value of 4′33″. I think I’ll try to sum up some of the arguments for each side in another post when I get a chance to mentally process stuff a bit more.
Ben
July 27th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Well it is only a didactic idea I think. A way to prove a point, I do not think it is aimed at being “art”.
August 16th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
I realise I’m replying to a fairly old blog post, but I think interpreting it as music in isolation is the problem here. Cage is basically highlighting the ritual associated with creating and appreciating music, and in that sense it’s meta-music: it has the psychological and social connotations of music without the music itself.
If you look at it as music alone then sure, it’s an utter wank, but otherwise I don’t think it’s without merit.