Cage Against the Machine

I suspect the the attempt by Cage Against the Machine to take John Cage's notorious 4'33" to the Christmas No.1 spot is doomed to failure. There doesn't seem to be quite the focussed support for a single anti-X Factor purchase this year as there was with Rage Against the Machine last year. Anyway, Cowell's a canny enough operator to know that even such projects ultimately fuel his own machine, keeping the brand in the public eye. All publicity is good publicity, and the high-trousered one wins (and the rest of us lose) whatever happens, as long as we're not ignoring him.

Having said that, it's bound to be a noble failure, that gives a wider circulation to some of Cage's ideas. Some people seem concerned that the CATM project is "overexposing" Cage's notorious work (although I wonder if there isn't an element of hating it when our friends become successful). Meanwhile over at the Quietus, David Stubbs worries that people aren't taking the piece seriously enough. (There's an interesting discussion about about the question of humour in the comments.) He's partly right of course: 4' 33" isn't a joke. Cage insisted to the end of his life that it was his most important achievement, and that he thought about it before beginning work on every other piece he wrote. But at the same time Cage was certainly alive to the absurdity of the situation that performing 4'33" puts an audience in, and would have considered laughter as valid a response as any. The idea is important and robust enough to survive those who mock it.

Will CATM spark an interest in Cage's other work, so over-shadowed by his most notorious piece? Well, it's unlikely. But it equally seems wrong-headed to complain that it risks making Cage a cult. For one thing, he is already. For another, Cage knew the power of popular culture, and was happy to appear on a TV gameshow for instance. 4'33" was originally conceived as a protest against Muzak, so it seems fitting to employ it as a protest against the souless sausage machine Cowell operates. I suspect he'd have been delighted by the project.

Sceptics like to question how Cage can be said to have "composed" this piece at all, but its form is one of the most intriguing things about it. In its original form, it appropriates all the trappings of a conventional piece. It's divided into three movements, and that's not a joke: Cage's intention was that it should observe exactly all the conventions of classical performance, except of course for the production of any deliberate sound. The boundary between performance and the spaces between and around performance become blurred and uncertain. it's tempting to see this as a deliberate satire on the anxiety that modern concert etiquette inspires in people: the questions of how you know when the piece is finished and when you're "supposed" to clap. The CATM version, with its celebs getting together for charity and its remixes, actually seems to me to be a rather more faithful approach in this respect than the smirking of the BBC Symphony Orchestra that Stubbs mentions in his article.

A lot of those conventions - including the diktat that the audience should be silent - are essentially a product of the recorded music era. It would be silly to applaud a solo on a record in your own home after all. 4'33" reflects a fundamental shift: the audience has become divorced from the performer, and 4'33" formalises this by making the listener rather than the musician the focus, while also opposing it: as the work consists of ambient noise, the audience is as much a performer as anyone on stage.

CATM seems to understand and enage with Cage's idea in a way that "serious" musicians often seem incapable of doing. And four an a half minutes of "dead air"* turning up on the Radio 1 chart show would represent a genuine challenge to all contemporary convention, perhaps more so than David Tudor's premiere. After all, we now live in a world where silence* is becoming almost impossible to find. Background music has invaded music, and every shop, restaurant, pub and public space (even tube stations, increasingly) is overlaid with a patina of sound, there to protect us from our fear of being forced to be aware of ourselves. It's there not to be listened to, but to be ignored. The opposite of music.

This is the most elegant and important point 4'33" has to make. What is music? It's what happens when you pay attention.

Now go buy! Oh, and listen to some of Cage's other music too, because it's great.

(By the way, if you want a good starting point to explore 4'33" and how it fits into Cage's career I highly recommend Kyle Gann's excellent book No Such Thing As Silence.)

*Yes, yes, I know.

** The Classical Music World has few questions as burning as this, and it wonders why it's seen as irrelevant and detached from real life.

Alone again with the dawn coming up

There's a link here somewhere with yesterday's post; something to do with blurring the boundaries of what constitute sound and music, of what sounds we might use to make music. This all goes back to John Cage, of course, and quite possibly beyond; Berlioz scored for thunder in The Trojans, after all*.

Anyway, after yesterday's orgy of feedback (which some spoilsports want to eliminate - boo!), today I'm in an entirely different place, namely the sun-bleached deserts of middle America - well, that what I'm put in mind of when listening to the KLF's album "Chill Out". Like Bill Drummond, I've never been there, but it certainly sounds like what it ought to feel like there, so much so that I suspect I should never go there in case the reality doesn't live up to the place in my mind.

It's a seamless collage of samples and original music that drifts by like clouds, essentially static, as is Metal Machine Music, but that's partly an illusion - things are happening, and by the end of the album you are somewhere different to where you started, it's just that the movement is glacial. I might make another connection, this time forwards to the mid 90s when I first heard Morton Feldman's music, which similarly uses apparent lack of development to mask a much deeper and more powerful progression.

It's about space, as is the other music I've mentioned; this is something Miles Davis learned from Stockhausen and used to good effect on "On the Corner". It's perhaps the great unrecognised concern of 20th century music that reverberates still: the creation of an almost physical sense of space. You can do it by the placing of your players, in the performance area or mix; you might do it by the careful placement of notes in time; it's difficult to describe adequately, but it sure is powerful when you hear it. And feel it, because it's as much about the physical sensation as the aural.

By the way, I thought this album was long out of print, but apparently you can get it on Amazon. It's getting increasingly hard to find music that's hard to find, isn't it?

*How he thought he was going to get a roll of thunder to order is an interesting question. Of course the practical answer is that you play it on a bass drum, but the fact remains that the score specifies "roule de tonnerre", not drums.

ill tempered klavier

Reading this interesting post* makes me think of the piano I grew up with, my mother's Blüthner baby grand, which she inherited from her father, and which, as she liked to remind us, travelled extensively through the North West Frontier Province before the War on the back of a donkey.

Blüthners have a very different tone to the Steinway sound you're almost certain to hear in a concert hall - it's a dark, rich, velvety sound. It feels different to play, too - the action on the keyboard is very heavy, and even now, whenever I play any other piano the action seems strangely insubstantial.

It's an interesting question, whether the near-ubiquity of the Steinway sound is inhibiting composers in their writing for piano - maybe the prepared piano is in part a subconscious rebellion against this homogeneity of sound. I also think of such things as Thomas Ades' Asyla, which features in its scoring grand, upright and honky-tonk pianos. Another piano-related memory of mine is when my university bought a fortepiano. I was fascinated by the sound, and the feel of playing it - it felt like a revelation to hear something that was a piano, yet radically different to the archetype in my mind.

There's always a danger that homogeneity will stifle creativity - but there's always the hope thatimagination will subvert conformity.


* I am particularly excited by the fact that Pleyel use fossilised mammoth tusks for the ivory on their keys!

Silence

John Cage, whose birthday I noted recently, is of course the first name you'd associate with silence, as enshrined in his notorious piece 4'33". But there's another composer whose career is partly defined by silence.

It's 50 years since Sibelius died, and approximately 80 years since he produced any significant work. I can't think of any parallel to this. It seems he worked on an eighth symphony for some years, before burning everything he had written in 1943. Tom Service in today's Guardian suggests that this 30 year silence was simply the only appropriate response Sibelius could make after what he achieved in his final symphonies and Tapiola; he simply could say nothing which would not diminish those achievements.

There's probably some truth in this, although it may be romanticising crippling self-doubt on the part of Sibelius. After he burnt the eighth symphony, he became much happier. Maybe this was because he had reached a point where he felt able to let go of his idea of himself as a composer.

I often think about what makes one a composer*, especially when I'm not actually writing anything. If I at what point do I cease to be a composer? Elisabeth Lutyens used to say "If you're a composer, you bloody well compose", which implies that you're only a composer if you're actually writing. This appeals to me, as I've always felt uncomfortable with the presumption and pretension that seems to go with a declaration of "I am a COMPOSER!". And yet, I'm always conscious, even during those dry, unproductive periods, that I feel that I am, in some way. And this is a disturbing feeling, because if I'm a composer, why am I not composing? Generally, before the suspicion that I'm not a composer anymore takes complete hold, I have an idea, start writing,and become myself again.

But that awesome, oppressive 30 year silence of Sibelius continues to haunt me, and sometimes seems as powerful as anything he wrote. I wonder if that happiness that was noted in him after his immolation was due to a sense of freedom, that he had finally abandoned ambition, had unshackled himself from reputation, had admitted to himself that he was a man who had once been a composer, but no longer was.



*Harrison Birtwistle once gave a talk to an audience of schoolchildren, one of whom asked him, "But how do you become a composer?" Birtwistle replied, "Well, you've got to write music. There's no way round it."

A post about Nothing

I am saying Nothing. Actually, that's not accurate: I'm not saying anything, but I am typing Nothing. As the time progresses, I type more and more of Nothing. I shall shortly type Nothing again, and then I shall be done, until I type Nothing once more and finish this paragraph.

This is the second paragraph of this post, and I am still typing Nothing. As time passes I am typing more and more Nothing. Is Nothing happening when I type Nothing, or does typing Nothing preclude the possibility of Nothing happening? I continue to type Nothing. More and more I am typing Nothing. This is the end of the second paragraph.

I have now reached the third paragraph of this post. I am typing Nothing. As time passes the amount of Nothing increases. I am not the first person to type Nothing, nor shall I be the last. I shall continue to type Nothing until the end of this post, whereupon I shall type no more. I shall stop typing Nothing. This is the third paragraph of this post, and it ends with Nothing.

The previous paragraph ended with Nothing, but now I am in the fourth paragraph, and still typing Nothing. Nothing will be typed after this paragraph ends. This paragraph will end after the last time I type Nothing in this paragraph. This does not mean that there will be no more typing after the last time I type nothing in this, the fourth paragraph, only that it will end after the last time I type Nothing within it.

Nothing begins the fifth paragraph of this post. As the time passes I am typing Nothing more and more. The fifth paragraph continues with Nothing, and ends with Nothing. Nothing is present in this paragraph. The next paragraph will consist of Nothing.

Nothing.

I am now typing the seventh paragraph of this post, and I am still typing Nothing. I shall shortly stop typing Nothing, as I have been typing for approximately 4 minutes and 33 seconds, which seems a reasonable amount of time to spend typing Nothing.

I have now typed Nothing for the penultimate time in this post, and shall shortly end it. John Cage would have been 95 today. I have now finished typing Nothing.