John Cage performs one of his pieces on TV. Wonderful piece of history! Two unions were in dispute and could not figure out who should plug in the radios, so he hits them and throws them off the table…
John Cage performs one of his pieces on TV. Wonderful piece of history! Two unions were in dispute and could not figure out who should plug in the radios, so he hits them and throws them off the table…
That is awesome!
thank you for sharing =)
Call me a curmudgeon, but I just can’t get my head around how this is music, or worthwhile as anything more than an interesting oddity. “I consider music the production of sound.” That says it all, I think. Cage and I just have different conceptions of music. Not to say I didn’t enjoy the performance, it was enthralling in its own way; it just simply wasn’t so as music. For sure, Cage may make interesting points about music through his “pieces” (4:33 is the prime example), but to call them music – a sort of meta-music, then – seems to be a big mistake.
Then again, having anything related to the classical music tradition (say what you will about what Cage has done to that tradition) on a popular TV show is a relic of a bygone day, anyway! Would a grand piano fit on TV outside of an American Idol backing band? Also, I’m not sure if the fact that he warrants the audience’s laughter justifies their showing that kind of disrespect.
As I said, call me a curmudgeon. but I’m unpausing the Beethoven :)
I seems like a precursor of Zappa’s and John Lennon’s sound collages which were precursors of ambient music. I thought it was pretty cool and way ahead of it’s time.
Noted musical innovator to the world of modern dance. “Cutting edge”, for the time period and not involved with the opinion of the audience. A great thinker/pioneer/artist.