Klarinet Archive - Posting 000835.txt from 2001/09

From: Virginia Anderson <assembly1@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Re: Bernstein Sonata/Audience & performer (was: Cage knocks)
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 10:10:34 -0400

on 26/9/01 9:15 pm, Roger Shilcock
<roger.shilcock@-----.uk> wrote:

> Are you Leicester-born, like me, or Leicesterian by adoption?

By adoption, m'duck (but I larned the lingo real wahl, as has been said of
Sherlock Holmes when he adopted a bad American accent in "His Last Bow").

> The problem with putting a value on "4'33''" is surely that it is
> essentially unique. It can't possibly be done again, because what one
> might call its musical language is not transferrable to anything else without
> an immediate implication of plagiarism. This is an extreme example of a basic
> problem for any avant-garde aesthetics - isn't it?

I hope that I understand where you're going here - what's the problem with
being unique? Outside of actual instances of unacknowledged "quotation", as
we are told was common in both Bach and Handel's work, every piece should be
unique, and it's just how the uniqueness manifests itself.

I remember reading about a commission carried out by a composer by handing
out music for each desk on the night. The music was _Sinfonie Fantastique_
(which the orchestra had played at its last concert), and the composer
billed the piece as _Sinfonie Fantastique No. 2_ by himself. (Perhaps,
given your e-mail address, you'd recognise this as being not dissimilar to
Borges' story in which the protagonist re-wrote _Don Quixote_ word for
word). While Cage had provided a framework for environmental sounds, this
was a framework in which to hear the Berlioz. Since the concert would have
been billed as a new work by this composer (presumably without the title so
as not to tip off the orchestra), a different audience would show up to the
ones who showed up for the (properly billed) Berlioz. They would have a
whole different set of expectations, which probably wouldn't be shaken by
the announcement of the title, nor even when the piece was underway, because
one would expect this to be a quotation and await the divergence and
transformation. Is it plagiarism? Well, the composer was right to use a
piece in the public domain - if my husband had written the original piece
he'd want a cut - but as a story of a one-off event it gives us an example
of how a framework can be used for performance and how the environment
affects the aesthetic experience. This is not just a new music concern:
when Roger Norrington embarked upon his concerts of Beethoven symphonies in
the 1980s, he was not just concerned with the instruments and tempi, but
also encouraged the audience to clap between movements to recreate the
contemporary ambience.

Is it the silence which would constitute plagiarism? Takehisa Kosugi's
_Anima 7_ of 1964 asks that the player perform an action as slowly as
possible. If that action is to play a note on a piano, as the pianist John
Tilbury has done, then most of the piece will be performed in silence as the
action to get to the note in the first place is largely silent. In LaMonte
Young's _Piano Piece for David Tudor #1_ the player brings a bale of hay and
a bucket of water for the piano to eat and drink and then is given the
option either to feed the piano or let it get on with eating the hay itself.
The latter option is silent (unless you have a really hungry piano). Is
this silence like 4'33"? The other week _The Independent_ announced that an
artist had released a CD compilation of all the recorded two-minute silences
at the Cenotaph. This CD has silence which is laden with all the emotional
content of Armistice Day.

I think that none of these silences are plagiarisms of 4'33"; rather they
come from different ideas which can be explored using silence. This is in
essence the musical theory, the building blocks of experimental music, which
I'm betting is part of what you call "avant-garde aesthetics" (incidentally,
this isn't true for the international avant-garde proper - of Boulez and
Babbitt and Martino and Stockhausen, whose music tends to work to Western
commmon-practice structure and the narrative curve as well as to an
analogous tonal theory). There's a sense of manipulation of sound and
silence, to see what music is and what it will do, to expand this to
notation and the role of the audience as well as the interaction between
composer and performer. If you think that this exploration has its limits,
well, it does. Many of the composers involved in this music in the 1950s
and 60s tend to use Western notation and instruments these days - and many
of them write tunes. Should we ignore 4'33" and experimental music, as it's
had its day? Only if we should ignore Mozart, who cashed in his chips over
two hundred years ago. There is no need to compose fresh music in the style
of Mozart (except as a school exercise) nor to re-write Cage (who went into
other methods as well before his death). There's every reason to play and
to study the originals.

Thanks Roger, for the really cool question. If I mistook what you are
asking, let me know.

Cheers,

Virginia
--
Virginia Anderson
Leicester, UK
<vanderson@-----.uk>
Experimental Music Catalogue: <http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk>
...experimental music since 1969....

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