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Peter Clark

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On 06/02/2024 at 21:10, John Robinson said:

Cage!  What a load of absolute nonsense this so-called piece of 'music' is.

A rather narrow minded and thoughtless remark, if I may say so. Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

Arnold Schoenberg said of Cage that "he's not a composer but an inventor - of genius". To categorize him as simply “a composer” would certainly be failure to adequately describe all that John Cage was, nor would it serve to encompass the vastness of his influence on the arts as a whole.

I worked with John Cage when he was in residence at York in the heady days of the early 1970's. He was, believe it or not, a quiet, thoughtful man. You never won an argument with him and he had a huge pallet of knowledge on a wide variety of subjects. (He was considered the world's leading authority on mushrooms!!!) The performances he directed, at that time, fully demonstrated Schoenberg's definition of an inventor of genius!

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I'm only an amateur among a number of professionals here, but the thing I like best about music, and indeed all the Arts, is its difference from science (where I suppose I can claim to be a professional because I succeeded in raising a family by doing it as a day job).

With science, the topic you are studying defines what you do, to an extent which imposes the strictest of bounds on how you can think.  The more you study this topic, the more restrictive those bounds become.  For instance, once Newton had proposed the laws of gravity as then understood, both he and everyone who came after (until Einstein) had to follow them.  In science you can't un-discover something and go in a different direction.  Einstein was only able to do this with gravity because he was clever enough to discover something beyond Newton.  Those who have since followed him, because they had no option, have also been trapped within his thinking.

But with music, you can become a Cage.  The topic does not define you, you define the topic.  This does not mean you can just think of things willy-nilly.  You have to be able to bring others of similar intellect and capabilities along with you, at least to some extent, otherwise you have difficulty avoiding charges of charlatanism, ignorance and worse.  Having studied what Cage did and tried to understand at least some of his thinking, I consider it wrong to dismiss his work lightly.  Instead, I have tried to understand it.  However, as I said in my last post, that still hasn't persuaded me (yet) to spend money queuing outside concert halls where his most extreme works are to be performed.

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