John Cage

This week we watched a video on John Cage (1912-1992), a famous composer in electronic music, who was known for using aleatory, or chance, in his compositions.  The video was actually based on 10 different documentaries based around a 10 day, 9 evening, performance in New York City.  The performance ran between October 13-October 23 in 1966.  We only watched the John Cage performance, called Variations 7.  I found the documentary on his performance to be very interesting, because it consisted of various household appliances, such as blenders, fans, 10 telephone lines which were placed throughout the city, radios, and juicers, just to name a few of the 'instruments' involved.  Cage also told his 'performers', if you will, to bring whatever gear and appliances that could bring to use.  The reason I put quotations around the words instruments and performers, is because one thing that this performance did, was bring about the discussion as to whether these could really be thought of as a performance, instruments, or performers; a discussion which we did have in the class:

• Could Cage be considered a composer or a performer or both? 

I believe that Cage could definitely be considered a performer, because a performer is considered someone "who entertains an audience" (the definition of "performer" OxfordDictionary.com), and Cage definitely entertained his audience (at least that's what it looked like by the end of the performance in this documentary) and opened their minds with his 'unconventional' performances.  I believe that one job a performer, as well as a composer, has to do is to open up their audiences' minds to sounds and feelings that are conveyed when they hear these sounds.  After looking up on Cage and some of his known performances, I looked up on his 4'33" which consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of entire silence; it was meant to be a way for people to hear everything that surrounds them and how they interpret these sounds.  I watched a video of this performance that was done in Britain, and the thing I found entertaining, was how the audience was trying to stay silent the entire time and the only time they would make a sound is between the movements, when the composer and performers would turn the page, at which point the audience would cough, shift, sneeze, and clear their throats; the reason I found this entertaining is because (from what I watched in the documentary), I think Cage would have used the audiences' noise as part of the performance itself.

• Could the instruments that were used really be considered instruments (I mean, they were mostly household appliances)? 

It depends on the way in which the instruments are used. They may be used as normal appliances at home, but in this case, I do believe that they were instruments, because they were meant to be used as such.  As I said before, one of Cage's purposes in his performances was to open up people's minds to things beings utilized in ways that we were not, and still are not, used to them being utilized.  A blending being used as a musical instrument? Who would ever think that the noises that a blender makes, as being musical? In this case, Cage did. Who would ever think that attaching some strings to an oddly formed block of wood and then plucking those strings would ever make a good sound? Apparently enough people did, because we now have guitars.

• Can Variations 7 be a piece? What makes a piece a piece?

This is one question that I honestly don't know how to answer because I'm not really sure I can, for sure, what a piece is.  I know that one of the definitions talked about in class, is that a piece is something that has a beginning and an end, and Variations had a beginning and an end; so, technically this is a piece.  I consider a piece because it something that was performed by performers and had instruments in it, as unconventional as they may have seemed.  Based on other pieces that I've listened to, also have movements, a middle, where the story changes. And I honestly could not find a middle or movement in this piece, but then does that not make it a piece? I don't know.

• How was the performance more than just a sound performance? 

The performance was more than just a sound performance in that it was a visual performance because Cage used the shadows that were being made from the photoelectric cell lights as part of his performance; at one point, his pants were catching on fire, and he somehow found a way of using that as part of his performance. It was also an interactive performance because he used the audience as a part of it; the audience was only supposed to sit and watch, but they soon decided to go up in order to get a closer look, and he used that as all a part of it.  When it came to Cage, it was all about chance, nothing was determined.

Something I really learned from this class and some of the readings, so far, about Cage and Varese and Theremin, is that items we see as being conventional items shouldn't always be used in conventional ways. You never know what kind of other uses you could get out of them.