Re: RE: OT Now We Will Hear Freedom

[Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com>]

  Jeremy devros wrote:
> "......The "dip in" quality of the book---Isn't that what he was all 
> about? Pick a place and begin! I remember people dissing Cage back in 
> the day as silly. --pointing out 4'33" as the ultimate in lazy art, 
> but as I've matured I have come to love his works and his thinking...."
Cage to me is not unlike Eno in that they are true visionaries who have 
helped change
the musical world irrevocably......they are both very intellectual and 
quite brilliant theoreticians.....
and , frankly,  I find most of both of there musics not as intriguing as 
their theories
(with great exceptions like Cage's music for prepared piano and toy 
piano and Eno's
ambient work with Fripp,  most notably 'Evening Star' and his early 
forays into
pop,  "Another Green World and Before and After Science).

The brilliance of 4'33" is that Cage is asking the listener to listen to 
the entire
world as potential musical sources.    The audiences reactions, coughs, 
chair
fidgeting, etc.  IS the music in 4'33".

I'm not sure where the source but I've oftened quote Cages' definition of
music.      He said,   "Music is Organized Sound".

He completely anticipated the revolution in sound that was coming with the
advent of cheap sampling and looping.  Like Eno,  I think we all owe him 
a pretty
large debt (not that there aren't others who also deserve this praise).

I once knocked a large doctors bag full of percussion instruments over 
in my hurry to
get out of the room and turn the digital recorder off (which , at this 
early time, was in
another room so that it's own noise wouldn't get into the recording I 
was making).

Going back into my computer's digital audio editor (Sonic Foundry's 
Sound Forge at the time)
I started goofing around with merely finding different loop lengths and 
randomly moving it
around to all the different places in the long spill of the 
instruments.  I sped these loops up and
down and re-pitched them as well.

It was beautiful how many good percussion loops I got out of this 
process especially since
I went back and recreated the 'accident' several times on purpose 
afterwords.

Cage was entirely responsible for me even thinking in this way.

To this day when my wife is micro edting tracks in her own recording I 
always ask her to make
little sound files of the snippets that she hacks off her edited parts 
and put them in a separate folder
which she saves for me.

I love going to that folder for random bits of musical 'noise'.

Yeah,   thanks a lot John Cage!!!!




rick walker
"...I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours..."
                   ------Bob Dylan


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