[High Praise! to Mental Floss]
101 Masterpieces: John Cage’s 4’33”
This article isn’t necessarily good, or even interesting, but I did find it fascinating how many ridiculous notions one has to hold to think that 4’33” is an example of genius, and not a grown man’s version of a toddler’s foot-stamping.
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Bizarre stuff.
Heh – I wonder if the author was intentionally going for a pun when he said about the soundless performance: “Cage’s point has largely fallen on deaf ears.”
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“…that everything is one and the same, that labels are arbitrary. Art, non-art. Music, noise. Sound, silence. There’s no difference. It’s just perception. The croak of a frog can be just as musical as the purr of a cello if you choose to hear it that way. This wasn’t a new concept.”
— Democrats have been treating citizenship the same way for years.
Perhaps I should be embarrassed to say I took a course in “EthnoMusicology” back my college days where we briefly studied John Cage. 4’33” is boring and stupid but I enjoyed some of his noisier stuff in a proto-punk kind of way. Yes, I was a bit wacky back then..
“Music, noise. Sound, silence. There’s no difference. It’s just perception.”
“It’s a fictional product. It doesn’t matter. ”
Melon: “Doesn’t matter — Tell that to the bank.”