David Runnion and I have some things to sort out about 4'33".  I'm not
surprised that I annoyed somebody enough to come back at me on this one!

>What could be more interesting than hearing the world around you, than
>enjoying a few minutes of suspended silence, peace, listening to time
>pass?

Almost anything.  What David describes may be relaxing, therapeutic, and a
wonderful and valuable way to spend (almost) five minutes.  But it isn't
*interesting* unless some particular feature of the ambient sound calls
part of my analytic intelligence into play and focuses my attention on a
part to the exclusion of the whole (a very un-Zen thing to happen).

>>4'33" is not, in my view, music -
>Wow.

Yes I do mean it.

>And what constitutes music? Notes in a diatonic scale played by
>serious-looking people in tuxedos?

May I politely suggest that David spends a few minutes looking in the MCML
archives under my name? That should get rid of any notion that I have that
kind of approach to music.

>Is that all? How can any aware person in this century say a work by a
>composer is "not music?"

Is the suggestion here that whatever is produced by anyone who calls
himself a composer is therefore "music"? If so, I'm tempted to declare
myself to be one of the over-looked great composers of the late twentieth
century and offer up this posting as one of my minor masterpieces.  After
all, I'm a composer, I made it, so it's music.  Good, isn't it??

If that seems silly, which it undoubtedly is, then perhaps we should
conclude that "being a composer" is not something that can be self-declared
without justification, but requires some form of public consensus - based
on assessing the putative composer's output to judge whether enough of it
sufficiently matches some agreed concept of "music".  And if that is true,
then it follows that any of the three classes of humanity (non-composers
 [me included], putative composers and accepted composers) may produce works
which don't qualify as music.  IMO John Cage was fully entitled to be
called a composer.  It does not follow from that judgement that everything
he produced was music.  His books weren't music.  4'33" isn't music either.
It's *about* music, which is not at all the same thing.

>That's what people said two centuries ago about Beethoven's string
>quartets.

But not because of a remotely comparable argument, so that's a side-issue.

>Music, in my view, is organized sound.

I agree with that, although I think that an adequate definition would have
to refer to human intelligence as an organising principle.  I also think
that a definition of music must make some reference to some form of
communication between composer, performer and listener.

>4'33" is nothing more, nothing less than organized sound.

No. It is unorganised sound, in the sense that the "composer" has
abdicated all responsibility for organisation.  Some of the sounds that
occur during a performance may be organised in the mathematical sense, and
some of them may be in a statistical sense predictable (turning pages in
the concert programme, shuffling in seats, suppressed laughter, etc.), but
no pattern is imposed on them by human intelligence and decision-making,
and nothing is communicated except the simple ideas that others have
thoroughly expounded on this thread and which, as I argued before, do not
require a "performance" for their expression.  4'33" can be understood as
thoroughly without a performance as with one.

>What sets it apart is that the musicians don't actually play notes,

So musicians aren't actually necessary. A few out-of-work actors and some
crocked instruments not in working condition would do just as well. I don't
feel like pursuing that thought to its end just now . . .

>the sound is the sound of silence,

Meaningless.  And surely at least part of Cage's point is that if you take
away what is conventionally regarded as "music", what is left is *not*
silence.

>...the sound of humans and nature, the small quiet voice of God.

I don't believe that I believe in God.  But if I did, I would hear his
voice expressed through humans taking responsibility for their creations,
not abdicating it to chance.

>>It is a rather shallow theatrical trick
>
>Well then, we'd have to eliminate a whole lot of works from the repetoire
>if that is our criteria for "music." Paganinni Caprices, for example.
>Cheap theatrical tricks designed to show off how much a musician has
>practiced.  Certainly not music.

Of course a lot of music is theatrical.  Of course the Paganini Caprices
are music.  Probably they are not very good music, possibly because of
their cheap theatricality.  One of my very favourite composers, James
MacMillan, is often extremely theatrical.  All this has nothing to do with
the point, which is that one particular work is not music because the
"composer" totally abdicated responsibility for its sound-content, and
turned the concert platform into a stage and the auditorium into a theatre
for a very short piece of Theatre of the Absurd designed to make a very
simple point in a rather effective way.  Paganini did not do that.

>>designed to make the audience think
>
>This is a bad thing?

No. Where did I suggest that it is?

>For this it is not music?

Is the argument now that anything that makes people think is music?

>Beethoven's Grosse Fugue doesn't make you think about what "music" is?

It does, rather more effectively and much more deeply than 4'33" does.

>>Nothing is gained by repeat performances, even if performed by different
>>instrumental groups, and the full meaning of the piece can be derived
>>from reading about it as easily as by going to a performance.
>
>Again, not true, and you miss the whole point of the work.  Everything
>is to be gained by repeat performances, because each performance is
>different and unique.

That is true of *music*, because in every performance the sound-content
that is organised by the intelligence and emotions and etc.  etc.  of
the composer interacts in a different way with the variables of different
audience, different external sounds, different state of mind of the
performers / conductor, different weather conditions, you name it.  In
4'33" there is no such organised sound-content, so there is no such
interaction.  In a sense, there can be no repeat performances, because
there is nothing to repeat.  As others have written, there is no need to
go to a performance of 4'33", because there is one going on all the time,
if you care to listen to it.  Endlessly fresh, endlessly renewed.  But not
music, because not consciously patterned.  Except possibly in the sense
that each listener's brain will do its best to perceive patterns in
whatever auditory input it can get, and therefore in a way each listener to
4'33" becomes his/her own composer, seeking out organisation in un-ordered
sound and imposing pattern and meaning onto it.  But then there can be no
communication, because each listener is his own trinity of
composer/performer/audience, isolated from any others.  So even that
argument can't turn 4'33" into music.

>I played a concert last night with my trio (http://serafinotrio.com/
>...shameless plug) in a spectacularly beautiful country mansion in the
>mountains of Mallorca.  There are sheep in the fields surrounding the
>house, and the sound of the sheepbells lent a wonderful atmosphere to the
>the slow movement of the Brahms.  I kept thinking of how Brahms loved
>nature and how perhaps there were sheepbells tinkling in the background as
>he composed this music.

I wish I had been there!

>It would have been a perfect setting for the Cage.  The music of the
>place was so lovely and peaceful, the sea moving in the background, the
>parrot squawking, I could have easily listened just to the beauty of
>that "silence" for, oh, about 4 and a half minutes, and if it had been
>"organized" as such, let's just enjoy these sheepbells and that wind in the
>trees, it would have been a concrete musical experience that would stay
>with me.

Exactly.  It would have been consciously "organised".  You would have
said "Nice sounds!  Good spot to do the Cage.  Let's do the show right
here!!".  It would not have been whatever sounds happened to turn up,
but ones that you consciously decided to listen to in advance of the
"performance".  Unless I thoroughly misunderstand him, that goes completely
against what Cage was after.  You would probably have had a very pleasant
experience, and so would I if I had been there.  But neither of us would
have been listening to John Cage's 4'33" but to David Runnion's "Four and
half minutes or so in Mallorca, for wind, trees and sheepbells".  A
different piece altogether, and possibly just qualifying as "music" in an
object trouve kind of sense: "listen to these sounds; I have selected them
from all the other sounds around because I find them beautiful".  That's
very definitely not what Cage was doing in 4'33".

Ian Crisp
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