Cage and Boulez

> Why do Western composers and critics and
> music theorists so fanatically chart and
> diagram and plot out and schematize modern
> compositions?
Harry Partch had a few things to say about this. He said that western
art gradually turned from presentations of abstractions to explanations of
abstractions, until the explanation began to "proxy" for the experience
itself. This is found in musical scores that are impossible to play, as well
as scores that verbally explain what to do. The art isn't found so much in
the presentation as the idea. I think this is fine, but as long as the art is
found in the idea, let's just keep it an idea and not bother with actually
playing the pieces (then Boulez's music could still be popular!)
Since you mentioned Nancarrow, note how he wrote pieces that are
impossible to play, but used the player piano to realize those pieces. His
music is meant to be HEARD.

> At least *we* euro-dudes can ALWAYS
> come up with bigger, better, more
> impressive *charts* of our compositions
> than any other musical culture on earth!
> (A typically priapic male obsession. "Mine
> is bigger than yours..." My compositional
> diagram, that is. No wonder there are
> so few famous women composers. Can anyone
> imagine a *woman* wasting 6 months of her
> life straight-edging a bunch of chicken-scratches
> that explain something everyone can already
> *hear*???)

One of my many mottos about music is, If it doesn't SOUND interesting,
it isn't.

> So here's a helpful suggestion: when giving lectures or
> concerts, microtonalists should project an overhead
> transparency of the New York subway system and
> throw in some gibberish about "pitch class
> matrices" and "all-interval sets" and "maximally
> symmetric stochastic distributions."
> --mclaren

Yeah, I think I was at that lecture. A Xenakis collaboration with
Cage (or maybe it was Andy Warhol).
Thanks for a very Entertaining and thoughtful posting.
Morgan E. Smith


______________________________________________________________________
Smithme@hiramb.hiram.edu "I'm not an actor, but I play one on TV."

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