Cassette Recordings of Cage's 4'33"
Eli Messinger
that the third one he pulled out of the box had prerecorded music on it!
Apparently someone at the TDK factory thought it would be funny to
package a supposedly blank cassette with prerecorded versions of John
Cage's 4'33".
My friend said that side one of the tape featured four different versions
of the piece, while side two had one long, extended 43'15" version, with
only brief breaks between the movements.
Does anyone know of any other extended or alternate versions of this piece?
--
"Hang on to your ego." --Brian Wilson
CSNET: e...@ibm.com / UUCP: ..!uunet!ibmarc!ebm / BITNET: ebm@almaden
Chang
have to be quite noisy to be even like 4:33.
The noises from people coughing, people breathing,
the turning of the scores, etc. are unique to each
performance. These are the things Cage wants us
to pay attention to.
Try Maxell or Sony tapes for a change :).
Bernard Chang.
Paul Hughes
>Apparently someone at the TDK factory thought it would be funny to
>package a supposedly blank cassette with prerecorded versions of John
>Cage's 4'33".
>Does anyone know of any other extended or alternate versions of this piece?
Check out side 4 of Joe Jackson's "Big World" double LP.
A stunning, albeit brief, version of 4'33".
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Paul Hughes
Internet: pa...@flipper.csd.harris.com (preferred)
UUCP: ...!uunet!hcx1!flipper!paul
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Jeremy York
>package a supposedly blank cassette with prerecorded versions of John
>Cage's 4'33".
>
>My friend said that side one of the tape featured four different versions
>of the piece, while side two had one long, extended 43'15" version, with
>only brief breaks between the movements.
>
>Does anyone know of any other extended or alternate versions of this piece?
I perform this piece for my own enjoyment quite often, sometimes several
times a day. If you like, I can record my next rendition and send it to you.
********Warning -- Dull serious comments approaching -- Warning********
However, most of Cage's later work doesn't make the transition to tape very
well. With the chance pieces, and pieces like 4'33" that depend on the
immediate environment of the performance, nobody knows what it's going
to sound like. In the performance, the state of ignorance is gradually
stripped away, and it's that process that's at the heart of the piece.
To record it and say "this is Cage's 4'33" is like my handing you a photo
of Ethel Murman and saying "Eli, I'd like you to meet my friend Ethel".
--
jer...@quito.stat.washington.edu
Douglas C Ling
|> Assuming there is no joke here, the blank cassettes
|> have to be quite noisy to be even like 4:33.
|>
|> The noises from people coughing, people breathing,
|> the turning of the scores, etc. are unique to each
|> performance. These are the things Cage wants us
|> to pay attention to.
It's quite alright if the tape is "clean"; John Cage also invites the listener to experience his/her immediate environment (ie in your listening room). In this lies a great philosophy or purpose for art: Indeed, for music, or any artform, it is merely a provocation, an opportunity for one to EXPERIENCE. The artist shares with us his/her experiences (past-present-future!), and, if successful, evoke us to experience the same, or differently.
John Cage found the beauty and intrigue of the environment in "random" background; he offers the listener an opportunity in 4:33 (among others) to share and appreciate that discovery.
Ecoutez!
Jack Campin
e...@ibm.com wrote:
> Does anyone know of any other extended or alternate versions of [Cage's
> 4'33"]
I heard it done by a folk band a few weeks ago. Cage was one of the four
featured composers at this year's Musica Nova, and the Whistlebinkies did
4'33" and a much more recent piece, Scottish Circus, with Cage in
attendance. They were a bit more dramatic about not playing than I
expected; Cage seemed delighted with the performance, as with their
treatment of Scottish Circus. The leader of the Whistlebinkies is the
flute player Eddie McGuire, or Edward McGuire in his alter ego as an
academic composer. Also Eddie as a member of the Communist Party of Great
Britain (Marxist-Leninist), of which the Whistlebinkies used to form an
appreciable fraction. (I don't know if they're still in it).
Cage was less than delighted with some of the other performances he got. I
heard the Paragon Ensemble play "Five", a piece I knew nothing about and
had never heard before; it struck me as a limpid pool of clarity. Cage
mentioned it in his talk the following day; apparently they disregarded the
score very seriously - Cage accused them of "improvisation" and he wasn't
being flattering. He said that Stockhausen's reaction to similar treatment
would have been to leap to his feet and order the performers to stop, and
he wished that he had intervened (but in his own way) to similar effect.
Maybe I was more impressed with it because I'd just suffered through a huge
lump of derivative self-important waffle from Nigel Osborne? Or maybe the
piece is more idiotproof than Cage thought? Heck, why should the composer
be the final arbiter on whether a performance works?
I also saw the Scottish Chamber Orchestra doing Cage's Etcetera I. They
didn't look as though they were trying very hard and the result was an
undisciplined shambles mostly played for laughs. Cage didn't look exactly
chuffed about that, either.
The other featured composers were Wolfgang Rihm and James MacMillan. I
didn't hear enough of Rihm's music to really understand what he's doing,
though enough to make me curious, which is more than all the Osborne pieces
did. Cage said listening to Rihm's pieces was what he'd most enjoyed about
being here.
MacMillan was the high point of this for me. He's a 30-year-old Scottish
composer, and, on the strength of the pieces I heard, is by far the most
interesting composer to emerge in Britain in the last 20 years. His style
is very distinctive and rather hard to categorize - a sort of hybrid of
Poul Ruders and Bartok, maybe. Or in American terms, John Adams with a
hell of lot more raw oomph. Macmillan is politically on the radical left,
supports Celtic (Glasgow's originally-Irish-immigrant-and-mostly-Catholic
football team) and is probably gay, if the number of single left earrings
on his fans was anything to go on.
The critical comments I saw were unanimously dismissive of Cage as a
charlatan and the English ones didn't even mention Macmillan's existence.
Make of that what you will.
There were also two concerts of women's music, mounted on a shoestring with
no support from the mainstream arts organizations and probably timed to
coincide with Musica Nova. I didn't manage to get to either of them and
saw no reviews of either. This is fairly typical of Glasgow District
Council and the Scottish Arts Council in their treatment of women's art
work. Several women's visual art exhibitions this month have been dumped
in unbelievably obscure places around town with no support provided by
their respective publicity machines to help the punters actually find them.
--
-- Jack Campin Computing Science Department, Glasgow University, 17 Lilybank
Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland 041 339 8855 x6044 work 041 556 1878 home
JANET: ja...@cs.glasgow.ac.uk BANG!net: via mcsun and ukc FAX: 041 330 4913
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William Alves
>Assuming there is no joke here, the blank cassettes
>have to be quite noisy to be even like 4:33.
>
just on the tape) also become part of the experience.
I do know that there was an LP called (I believe) "The Best of Marcel
Marceau" (i.e. the mime). It consisted of about 20 minutes of silence
followed by applause on each side.
Bill Alves
Peter Farson
--
It's a very funny thought that, if Bears were Bees, | Peter Farson
They'd build their nests at the BOTTOM of trees. | Rhythm & Hues, Inc.
And that being so (if the Bees were Bears), | celia!pe...@usc.edu
We shouldn't have to climb up all these stairs. - Winnie The Pooh's Complaining Song
Peter Farson
I have a version on CD that I highly recommend. It's an AAD mono
original instruments live recording of the work, performed by an
Eastern European musician who is now working on his MBA at UCLA.
R o d Johnson
>have to be quite noisy to be even like 4:33.
>
>The noises from people coughing, people breathing,
>the turning of the scores, etc. are unique to each
>performance. These are the things Cage wants us
>to pay attention to.
This is a common *interpretation* of 4'33", but it is by no means
clear that it's Cage's intention, or that Cage's intention matters. I
think 4'33" is in part a stunt, in part an attempt on Cage's part to
take his personal "withdrawal" from his compositions to some kind of
ultimate point, and in part a quite natural development of his
immediately prior work (like the Music of Changes), in which huge
silences played an increasingly important part. It's easy to see that
when one brings the kind of heightened concentration Cage's work
demands to 4'33", the environment takes on a new role, and no doubt
this was a congenial turn with Cage. But I think 4'33" was originally
prompted by other considerations; the "environmental" reading strikes
me as a little too facile to really be Cage's style.
--
Rod Johnson * rjoh...@vela.acs.oakland.edu * (313) 650 2315
"Dogs bark at strangers" -- Heraclitus
Ronald van Loon
--
Ronald van Loon (rl...@praxis.cs.ruu.nl)
There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do -
once you find them - Jimmy Croce "Time in a bottle"
Stephen Smoliar
Johnson) writes:
> It's easy to see that
>when one brings the kind of heightened concentration Cage's work
>demands to 4'33", the environment takes on a new role, and no doubt
>this was a congenial turn with Cage. But I think 4'33" was originally
>prompted by other considerations; the "environmental" reading strikes
>me as a little too facile to really be Cage's style.
>
favorite story about the anechoic chamber. The experience taught him that
there was no such thing as absolute silence, because when he went into the
anechoic chamber, instead of perfect silence he heard the sounds of his own
circulatory and nervous systems! Thus, Cage became more interested in defining
durations of time than in filling them with sounds of his own choosing. 4'33"
is, as Rod put it, the "ultimate point" of such reasoning. Nevertheless, if
the moral of the story is that there is always SOMETHING to listen to, this
would seem to be basically consistent with the "environmental" reading.
=========================================================================
USPS: Stephen Smoliar
USC Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way Suite 1001
Marina del Rey, California 90292-6695
Internet: smo...@vaxa.isi.edu
"It's only words . . . unless they're true."--David Mamet
R o d Johnson
>I heard [4'33"] done by a folk band a few weeks ago. Cage was one of the four
>featured composers at this year's Musica Nova, and the Whistlebinkies did
>4'33" and a much more recent piece, Scottish Circus, with Cage in
>attendance. They were a bit more dramatic about not playing than I
>expected;
I've never seen the score of 4'33" (what a concept) but it's my
understanding that Cage specifically asks the performers to make it
clear that this is a musical performance--not just any four minutes
and thirty-three seconds of silence are a performance of 4'33" (though
if you want to hear it that way, why not?). Not playing isn't the
same thing as not-playing--or something.
There's a theatrical aspect to any performance of 4'33", it seems to
me. That's one of the most fun things about it. Apparently these
Wistlebinkies (great name) got into that.
I'd love to do a concert of 4'33" and Ligeti's "Poeme Symphonique"
(for 100 metronomes). (Anyone ever heard the Ligeti performed?)
--
Rod Johnson * rjoh...@vela.acs.oakland.edu * (313) 650 2315
"Next week: ROME FALLS" -- Guy Debord
Colm Mulcahy
>In article <2...@rufus.UUCP> e...@ibm.com writes:
>>Apparently someone at the TDK factory thought it would be funny to
>>package a supposedly blank cassette with prerecorded versions of John
>>Cage's 4'33".
> [...]
>
>>Does anyone know of any other extended or alternate versions of this piece?
>
>Check out side 4 of Joe Jackson's "Big World" double LP.
>A stunning, albeit brief, version of 4'33".
which Johnny Winter also covered a long time back.
the CD studio version of Cage's piece has to be the clincher though, exposing
the raw power of the work and revealing a clarity undreampt of before.
personally i think Joe Jackson's take of Lennon's Nutopian National Anthem
is pretty stunning, but then JJ was always as adept at non vocal pieces as
he was at more traditional song structure.
--
Colm Mulcahy | email address: | still seeing
Dept. of Math & CS, | co...@mathcs.emory.edu | peace
Spelman College, | co...@emory.bitnet | as poison ?
Atlanta, GA 30314 | {sun!sunatl,gatech}!emory!colm |
Mark Gresham
>>The noises from people coughing, people breathing,
>>the turning of the scores, etc. are unique to each
>>performance. These are the things Cage wants us
>>to pay attention to.
>
>demands to 4'33", the environment takes on a new role, and no doubt
>this was a congenial turn with Cage. But I think 4'33" was originally
>prompted by other considerations; the "environmental" reading strikes
>me as a little too facile to really be Cage's style.
In its most obvious sense, perhaps a bit too facile. But I would
not call it basically a "stunt." What Cage did was to stretch a
sonic canvas, or provide a "picture frame" for the listener's
attention. What's important isn't the sounds (or lack of same) in
the environment, but how the listener focuses attention: away from
a single point to a "full field," with the ability to let the ear
wander. Cage was influenced (and influenced) those friends of his who
were primarily visual artists. Most people think of Jasper Johns,
naturally, but he was also familiar with the work of Morris
Graves. (The all black paintings, etc.) And he'd been influenced
by Duchamp, of course, who had, like some other artists of his
genre, been messing around with the viewer's expectations. Cage
noted that much "modern" art allowed the eye to wander to this or
that (any part of a canvas, for example) rather than trying to
draw the attention to one point. Both Cage, in music, and
Cunningham, in choreography, brought that basic ida into their
works; one reason was practical: They often were forced to
perform in situations that were atypical (i.e. not a theatre
with the ususal "box" stage) in order to get bookings. So they
ran into situations where the audience was all around them (out of
necessity) or in odd places. (In one instance, they had to place
the theatrical lighting outdoors, shining through the windows to
light the performing area, in order to have enough room for the
audience.) The dance and music had to "work" when seen or heard
from any perspective.
Also, what so often is ignored concerning 4'33" is the
performer's discipline: How to sit quietly as possible throughout
and give it full attention. David Tudor (a brilliant pianist) had
to practice opening and closing the piano's keyboard cover the
first time he played it. (The opening and closing distinguished
the beginning and end of each movement.) That aspect is more
clearly demonstrated in a followup work, 0'00" which calls for a
performer to perform a single, disciplined act (amplified). In
one performance of 0'00" Cage ate an apple (amplified, of course).
The important idea: Be aware of what you do, as well as what is
going on around you.
Cheers,
--Mark
========================================
Mark Gresham ARTSNET Norcross, GA, USA
E-mail: ...gatech!artsnet!mgresham
or: artsnet!mgre...@gatech.edu
========================================
Ray Shea
> Does anyone know of any other extended or alternate versions of this piece?
What I wanna know is, when is it coming out on CD?
--
Ray Shea "I had to leave out reality to keep the
post clean and to the point"
-- Jeremy York
ntmtv!sh...@ames.arc.nasa.gov