JOHN CAGE
http://youtu.be/pcHnL7aS64Y
I typed out the transcript to the Interview as I wanted to read and understand what John Cage was expressing about Silence. I find it easier to understand when I have written something, than I do when I only hear it.
(The noise of traffic in the background, JC sits with his cat in his apartment that looks down on to Sixth Avenue)
"When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking, and talking about his feelings or ideas about relationships. But when I hear the sound of traffic here on sixth avenue for instance, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking, I have the feeling that sound is acting, and I love the activity of sound, what it does is, it gets louder and quieter, it gets higher and lower, it gets longer and shorter, it does all those things ...... I’m completely satisfied with that, I don’t need sound to talk to me.
We don’t see much difference between time and space; we don’t know where one begins and the other stops. Most of the arts we think of as being in time, and most of the arts we think of as being in space. Marcel Duchamp began thinking of music as being not a time art, but a space art. Sculpture Musicale – different sounds coming from different places and lasting, producing a sculpture which is Sonaris and which remains.
People expect listening to be more than listening, and sometimes they speak of inner listening, or the meaning of sound. When I talk about music, I’m talking about sound that doesn’t mean anything, that it is not inner, but is just outer, people say you mean it’s just sounds, thinking for something to just be a sound is to be useless. Whereas I love sounds, just as they are. And I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are, I don’t need them to be psychological, I don’t want a sound to pretend that it’s a bucket, or a president, or that it’s in love with another sound…..laughs….I just want it to be a sound.
I’m not so stupid either, there was a German Philosopher Emanuel Kant, he said there were two things that don’t have to mean anything …that is don’t have to mean anything in order to give us very deep pleasure. (Talks to cat and laughs).
The sound experience that I prefer to all others is the experience of silence. The silence almost all over the world now, is traffic. If you listen to Mozart or Beethoven you hear that it’s always the same. But if you listen to traffic, you see that it is always different." John Cage (1912 - 1992)
MARCEL DU CHAMP
With Thanks to http://www.abdn.ac.uk/french/duchamp.shtml for the following two images.
Portrait of Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Du Champ Installation "Mile of String"
http://youtu.be/TYGUERvcjZQ
I listened to this with my headphones on, and at times thought there were sounds coming from inside my house. There were surprising sounds that made me jump, and then laugh at myself for doing so. There is the sound of a Squeaky Toy and the sound of a Musical Box that is tuneless ... a little disturbing ...and then there comes the surprise ... a Horn ...just one sound of the Horn to jolt you out of your comfort zone! The Music Box continues and begins to jar a little on the nerves...I think "when will it end".....then finally there is a recognition of a nursery rhyme that you question .... is it or isn't it.... the the sounds end.
THank´s!
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