John Cage took a simple approach to music. While Cage believed that music can merely be found anywhere and within any sound, traditionally, music remains described as the art of arranging tones or sounds in a way that produces a composition having unity and continuity (Merriam-Webster). John Cage had a Zen Buddhism philosophy of music, meaning music is everywhere and anything can be interpreted as such (House of Solitude). However, I believe music is only the intentional arrangement of sounds.
John Cage traveled around the world and found that he particularly enjoyed most of the Asian cultures. “It was in the last three years of the 1940s that Cage also started to develop an aesthetic of silence” (James). He began to incorporate the ideas of Zen Buddhism into his life, as well as his music. Zen Buddhism stands as the experience in which you sit to become one
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with your surroundings. You become at peace with yourself and everything around you. This silence became a massive part of Cage’s work. With time, he found himself enjoying the time he spent meditating probably because it allowed him to be calm and find inspiration in what he heard while he remained silent. The composition 4’33” is literally four minutes and thirty-three seconds of nothing; the song remains silent for over four minutes. Cage’s purpose for writing this work existed to allow listeners to sit in silence and observe the sounds around them. He helped them to find the calm that he finds by meditating in silence. The absence of noise within the song allowed for people to hear the noise around them and appreciate that as a part of the music piece (hermitary). The idea of enabling people to sit in a room without the option to leave and notice the sounds of their surroundings is quite revolutionary. Cage saw this as the only way to share with others how he viewed the world. Compelling everybody to notice and absorb all the little noises around them remained part of his original approach to music. Allowing others realize that there can be music in everything was John Cage’s goal of 4’33”. “There’s no such thing as silence”, Cage said” (Ross).
The idea of silence explains that there is nothing to hear, nothing to create vibrations for a person’s ear drums to feel. ‘Silence’ only occurs in space where there remains no medium for the vibrations to travel through. However, here on Earth, air and water remain the mediums, therefore, I can concur with Cage in that there exists “no such thing as silence”. Comparing this philosophy with the definition of what music should be, then “Mr. Cage’s work fails totally” (Rockwell). Several of Cage’s works were just long periods of silence. If you played a John Cage CD, you might as well have put it in the machine and not even pressed play (Rockwell). Music is supposed to entertain people with its lovely melodies and colorful moods. However, John Cage’s music did not entertain people, it allowed people to entertain themselves. Listening closely to what surrounded them, people need to work for their entertainment, not mindlessly listen to music somebody has already composed. In a way, Cage created an entire new perspective on the way music is seen and
heard. When a friend came to study Western music, Cage asked her what the purpose of music was, to which she responded, “The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.” He subsequently decided to apply her idea of the purpose of music instead of the one he had come to identify, “having an idea, or having a feeling and expressing it” (John Cage Interview). From then on, Cage’s music took on the characteristics of his philosophy of Zen Buddhism. While some of his songs were concerned with getting people to realize the noise as music around them, his other works were composed with “chance operations”. Cage would compose his songs using noises that occurred by chance. “Pieces…used twelve radios played at once and depended entirely on the chance broadcasts at the time of the performance for its actual sound” (PBS). By doing this, I feel that Cage was opting out of composing. He thought about the instruments he wanted to utilize, except he did not ponder about how he wanted them to sound together. Composing music is arranging sounds into an orderly form. It occurs by purposely making sounds that are harmonious. Nevertheless, Cage did not do that. He instead chose to call whatever happened on the radios at the time his work. To me, it feels a bit lazy. Though, Cage stated in Conversing with Cage that “I like to make suggestions and then see what happens, rather than setting down laws and forcing people to follow them. Since I don’t hear music in my head to begin with, I don’t lose anything at all by leaving a little more freedom” (Kostelanetz 112). By not being able to hear the music before it is played, Cage is unlike Bach or Mozart. He physically cannot imagine a composition before he writes it down. This quality of John Cage contributes massively to the type of music he created and his “chance operations”. Cage received his inspiration to use chance operations from Marcel Duchamp (PBS). In the beginning, he employed different experimental forms of instruments, altering them in a way to construct a new sound. Moving on from altered instruments, Cage next became fascinated with using random items that were not traditionally considered musical instruments. In “Cartridge Music”, Cage gathered household objects to hit and to amplify the sounds they made (PBS). He still used his idea of chance operation by hitting and working with whatever noise the object made. Since these items were not traditional instruments, there arose no way to write down the notes being played, and therefore, no way to reproduce the exact piece again. To many Westerners, this form of chance operation music was not pleasing. It can be equated to sounding like numerous young children banging on pots and pans. Cage felt as though these “songs” he created were wonderfully composed and extremely revolutionary. However, I do not equate sound and noise as Cage does. Sound, described as harmonious, melodious, and wondrous; and noise, described as annoying, piercing, and chaotic can be understood as different. To Cage, though, noise and sound are the same things. To him, street traffic is glorious meant to be taken in, but to me, street traffic is a large commotion meant to be tuned out. Although he is European and I am American, and the difference may not seem clear to me, Cage distinguishes between this difference by saying, “I think the European audiences are mostly mature people. The audiences in the United States are more generally in the universities and are people who are not yet economically members of society” (Kostelanetz 115). Clearly John Cage thought eccentrically about his music and the ways in which he wanted to convey his messages. Cage developed his inspiration from the stillness and silence of Zen Buddhism and continued using those ideas throughout his career, molding them into innovative, revolutionary ways of creating sound. Silence played a huge portion in what Cage wanted the world to experience. Silence permitted him to notice all the noises around him, in turn leading him to the claim that silence remains non-existent. John Cage was not a born prodigy; unlike Mozart, he could not create music in his head before hearing the sounds. His fix for this happened using what he called, “chance operation”, which allowed him to mindlessly compose pieces that resemble chaos. John Cage created an avant-garde way of not only hearing music, but listening and even thinking about it.
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In William Deresiewicz’s essay, “The End of Solitude,” he describes how technology has made it impossible to be alone. Media, social networking sites, television have so much influence on our mind that our lives revolve around these things. Everyone wants to be recognized, famed and wants to be appreciated by others such that being alone isn’t appealing to them. William Deresiewicz argues that being alone is a vital part of life and everybody should try to achieve that solitude in their lives, but with technology it has become impossible to be alone when we have technology in our pockets. He suggests that solitude is very important to hear God and to hear our inner selves. He compares the eras Romanticism, Modernism and
John Cage has always been known as a controversial and new age composer. Some say that his pieces lack the very structure that makeup classic forms. I argue that John Cage’s work Living Room Music, despite instrumentation with no set pitch, has conclusive harmonies and is in the style of a Baroque suite. This is a strange concept for some because pitch has become such a focal point around harmonic analysis when in reality it can be determined simply by ensemble texture and dominate features.
Since the earliest days of human civilization music has been a key tool for communication of stories which carried emotions through them. If we think back to our youngest years of life music has surrounded us whether it was from our parents singing us lullabies or from some sort of toy that played music we can say that musical melodies have helped shape or lives one way or another. Once we start growing up and figuring out who we are our musical preferences change; some people like classical and some like punk. We start to befriend people who like the same music as us and eventually we may attend a musical event. Our lives somewhat revolve around the music that we listen to.
Originally from Japan, Soyen Shaku was the first Zen master to arrive in America. His followers urged him not to come to a nation that was so ill-mannered and uncultivated and that the Japanese were facing extreme discrimination. Shaku’s countrymen Hirai Ryuge Kinzo “offered pointed examples: the barring of a Japanese student from a university on the basis of his race; the exclusion of Japanese children from the San Francisco public schools; the processions of American citizens bearing placards saying ‘Japs Must Go!’” (Eck 185). After several decades, there was a Zen boom of the 1950s and that was how Buddhism affected western culture, especially in regards to entertainment. “‘Zen’ is “the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese character "chan," which is in turn the Chinese translation from the Indian Sanskrit term "dhyana," which means meditation’” (Lin).
Imagine a life without sound, would it not be one value living? All of these completely different parts of music and different styles and arrangements of notes and beats has had the ability to fully alter generations and alter the course of history for various people. Music comes all told completely different forms from hardcore to soft and mellow. As a result of these distinction a method of music exists for each kind of person and has the flexibility to go beyond generations. Music is important to our senses and vital to our needs, so listen up!
Most people are familiar with the word "music", however they barely consider the definition of it. After carefully think, everyone has their own opinions on this term and it is hard to have an uniform criterion of music sounds. According to the text book, Michael B. Bakan states five propositions to define the music. The first one is about the tone and the second one talks about the music is organized in some way. The next two are claims that music is human organized and a product of human intention and perception. The last proposition argues music cannot separate from Western culture. Among these propositions, I think the music is a product of human intention and perception is most interesting and worth to discuss. So I assert that the most
Cage was born into a Los Angeles middle class family in 1912. His father was a less than successful inventor -- dabbling in the areas of submarines, medicine, space travel, and electrical engineering -- who instilled in him the idea that "if someone says 'can't', that shows you what to do." (Cage, An Autobiographical Statement) Cage learned how to play the piano as a child and took a liking to Grieg, and even briefly considered becoming a concert pianist. However, when Cage went to college it was to become a writer. He was deeply disillusioned by the conformity he saw in the students:
Music is far more than the sum of its parts. It can be thought of in a highly mathematical sense, which leaves one in awe of the seemingly endless combinations of rhythm, tone and intervals that a good musician can produce. Admiring music in this way is a lot like admiring an intricate snowflake, or shapes in the clouds; it's beautiful, but at the same time very scientific, based on patterns. All of the aforementioned qualities of music have one thing in common: they can be defined with numeric, specific values. However, the greatest aspect of music lies elsewhere, and cannot be specifically defined with words. It is the reaction that each individual has when they are confronted with their favorite (or least favorite) kind of music.
5. that even when there are no strings being plucked by fingers or hands hammering piano keys, still there is music, it is the everyday soundscape that arises from the audience themselves: their coughs, their sights. Cage’s point is that there is no such thing as true silence. The world is alive with musical