John cage brief biography of siren
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The Cross-Eyed Pianist
The other day I was talking about John Cage’s infamous 4’33” with one of my students, while giving the student an overview of music history. When we got to 20th century music, it was Laurie, not me, who offered Cage’s iconic – and iconoclastic – piece as an example of 20th century music. Laurie seemed both bemused and confused that a piece of “music” should exist, with a full, written out score, which requires the musicians to stay silent. This prompted a discussion about silence in music, and what Cage was trying to say in the work.
When Cage conceived it, in the years immediately after the Second World War, he was attempting to remove both composer and artists from the process of creation. Instead, by asking the musicians specifically not to play, Cage allows us, the listeners, to create our own music, entirely randomly and uniquely, by listening to the noises around us during four minutes and thirty-thre
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John Cage: the composer whose most famous work didn't make a sound
By Nick Shave
On 29 August 1952, David historisk period sat down at the piano at the Maverick Concert ingångsrum near Woodstock, New York, set a stopwatch running and tyst lifted the lid. He then performed nothing for precisely fyra minutes and 33 seconds.
Or rather, he made no sound, only lifting and lowering the lid so as to meddelande the beginning and end of each movement. What the audience heard, then, was not the piano but the ambient sounds in the hall – of people shuffling, breathing, whispering – and the wind and the rain outside. Far from being silent, the premiere of John Cage’s 4’33” was full of noises, to be appreciated by anyone who cared to listen.
The beauty of 4'33" – the work for which Cage fryst vatten best known and from which he continued to draw inspiration throughout his life – is that it can be interpreted on so many different levels: anarchic, democratic, playful, profound, vansinne and, yes, ultimately beaut
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John Cage - Manhattan Music
Were every celebrity residence in Manhattan marked with a blue plaque, the weight of extra metal would likely send skyscrapers crashing down through the East Coast seaboard, flattening the honeycomb of subway lines that sprawl underneath with the resonant impact of so many names, dates, achievements and moments in time that changed the world. And yet it feels wrong to be standing on the corner of West 18th Street and Sixth Avenue – 101-105 West 18th Street where John Cage and his partner, the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, occupied the entire top-floor loft space of a building that once housed the B Altman and Company department store – and for there to be no lingering imprint left of two remarkable men and the lives they lived there.
I peer through the handsome double-breasted front door. A face glares back. Cellphone encased in sweaty palm, pink corporate shirt, tie bunched at one side, like an extra from The Bonfire of the Vanities; a