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Where is the music, exactly?

✤ Music requires performers and performances

✤ But what is the musical work?

✤ The performer’s performance?

✤ Or the composer’s written score?

✤ People began to view the true essence, meaning of music as in the score

✤ Composer’s intentions become of supreme importance

✤ In the moment-ness overshadowed by timelessness

John Cage

✤ 1912-1992

✤ American

✤ Avant-garde composer

✤ Opposed to preservation of past music

Music as experiencing sounds

Chance

Indeterminacy

Leaving aspects of the music unspecified

“When we separate music from life what we get is art (a compendium of masterpieces). With contemporary music, when it is actually contemporary, we have no time to make

that separation (which protects us from living), and so contemporary music is not so much art as it is life and any one making it no sooner finishes one of it than he begins making another just as people keep on washing dishes,

brushing their teeth, getting sleepy, and so on. Very frequently no one knows that contemporary music is or

could be art. He simply thinks it is irritating. Irritating one way or another, that is to say keeping us from ossifying.”

–John Cage

John Cage

✤ 1912-1992

✤ American

✤ Avant-garde composer

✤ Opposed to preservation of past music

✤ Music as experiencing sounds

✤ Chance

✤ Indeterminacy

✤ Leaving aspects of the music unspecified

John Cage’s 4’33”

✤ 1952

✤ Three movements

✤ Blurring the boundary between art and life

✤ Sounds as sounds, sounds as music

✤ Partly a reaction against the concert hall as musical museum

Connecting the Dots

✤ Symphony as a grand artistic statement

✤ Ultimate meaning seen by many as in the score

✤ Composers of “museum pieces” had to participate in tradition, while still being unique

✤ John Cage reacting against musical museum