Steve Schwartz wrote:

>Hmm.  So therefore a note isn't music either, but merely a component.
>How about a group of notes? Is that music? If so, why not a group of rests?
>Ian goes on to point out that it's the organization of these components
>that gives rise to music.  I agree.  I would, however, contend that Cage
>organizes the rests - etremely loosely, I admit, but it's there.  There
>are movements and timings, etc.  (although not much of an etc.).

I don't see how you can organize silence without putting sounds in between.
That's like drawing with white ink on white paper.  Of course there's an
organizing 'frame' - the concert-hall surroundings, the person at the
piano, the fixed no. of seconds - but is that enough? I've already made
the comparison with a picture gallery in which one of the 'paintings' is
a window inside a picture frame.  I'd no longer say, as I did a couple of
days ago, that this isn't 'art' of some sort - probably the only objective
criterion you can set down for something to be 'art' is that it must
involve the communication of consciously expressed ideas from one person to
another - but I'd prefer to call it conceptual art or a 'Gesamtkunstwerk'
or whatever the terms are, rather than music or a painting.  Why? Because
the conscious expression of ideas isn't taking place on the level of the
sounds or images themselves - only on the level of the frame that surrounds
them.  It might be a different story if, in a piece like 4'33", the concert
environment has been chosen to create a limited 'palette' of sounds
(shuffling, programme-flapping etc), or if the window is deliberately
situated by the artist to focus on a particular view.

That should get rid of the bird-song (and of Don Satz's car-engine) -
there's no doubt that birds organize sounds, but to the best of my
knowledge they do this instinctively, as mating-calls etc - and to my
mind that's not conscious enough to be 'art' as opposed to 'nature'.
Ditto for imitative birds.  Of course we are talking about a continuum,
and it's probably impossible to say definitively where imitation or craft
or instinctive ritual end and art begins - but again, the key element
would seem to be a certain level of (self)consciousness.

Felix Delbruck
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