Can any of us ever perfectly understand another person? However much we may love them?
If we hope to truly see another person, we have to start by looking within ourselves.
Kafuku couldn’t think of what to say. So he kept silent.
Misaki didn’t answer.
She quietly studied the road.
Kafuku was grateful for her silence.
I have just marked this book as ‘read’ on Good Reads but I confess that I have not read every word, sentence or line .
I doubt whether there are many that have.
This is a source book.
A book to dip into.
If you attempt to read it form beginning to end your brain will hurt.
This is not a story and there is nothing linear about the text.
John Cage was not a conventional musician and not a conventional thinker. He knew the limitations and possibilities of sound and the difficulty of explaining what music was and/or what it was for.
John Cage
He wrote that “the way to get ideas is to do something boring”.
He didn’t pretend that his lectures were interesting. His lecture on nothing comes with the warning: “The text itself is repetitive and at times excruciatingly boring”.
Creativity is what happens between doing or thinking about something and nothing. It’s a Zen thing.
In Darling Boy (Beautiful Boy) John Lennon sang “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”.
He begins his Lecture on something: by saying : “This is a talk about something and naturally also a talk about nothing. About how something and nothing are not opposed to each other but need each other to keep on going”.
Opening text to Lecture On Nothing.
He begins his Lecture on Nothing: by saying; “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry”
He liked asking questions but one of these was ‘Is it true there are no questions that are really important?”
The final talk in this collection is entitled ‘Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?‘ but don’t expect to find the answers in the text.
Many may regard this as pretentious and deliberately obtuse – two of many criticisms levelled at Cage. It was suggested that Cage would shock people more if he gave a conventional talk, to which he replied : “I don’t give these lectures to surprise people but out of a need for poetry”.
He composed his talks like he was giving a musical performance so the timing of the delivery was often as important as the words. They were meant to heard and not read so the book attempts to replicate the character and shape of each lecture. For example, a lecture on ‘Indeterminacy’ is written in extremely small type “in an attempt to emphasize the intentionally pontifical character of this lecture”.
It is not an easy read but it contains a wealth of ideas and it’s a book I continually pick up much as believers might pick up a bible looking for revelations or insights from a random choice of text.
The debt modern musicians owe to Cage is enormous even if they have never heard his music OR listened to / read his lectures. His experiments with sound were dismissed as the actions of a lunatic but today samples, tape loops, field recordings, random noise , programmed beats and the use of ‘non musical’ instruments are commonplace.
As I said, the talks were meant to heard and Ubuweb has many valuable sound archives that illustrate the point. For instance it is interesting to compare two recordings of Lecture on Nothing.
One is performed by Frances-Marie Uitti From the album “Works for Cello; Lecture on Nothing”, (EtCetera Records, 1991)
The other is by Kaegan Sparks with ambient noises of Christian Marclay
I didn’t know how much I needed this book until I began reading it. I realise now that there was an enormous gap in my musical knowledge which Alex Ross’ brilliant study has helped to fill. By the end, he won me over to his central argument that “at the beginning of the 21st century, the impulse to pit classical music against pop culture no longer makes intellectual or emotional sense“.
One of the main strengths of the book is that Ross does not write from an elitist perspective. He is all too aware of the negative popular perception of classical music which means that it is “widely mocked as a stuck-up, sissified, intrinsically un-American pursuit“. At the same time he doesn’t argue that self appointed musical experts are always right : “Mainstream audiences may lag behind the intellectual classes in appreciating the more adventurous composers, but sometimes they are quicker to perceive the value of music that the politicians of style fail to comprehend“. It is this open minded, even handed approach that makes his description of 100 years of ‘difficult music’ so illuminating. Continue reading
Plenty of topics floating through my head but none seem compellingly Blogworthy.
Gaining some consolation from the fact that the once prolific blogging (mostly about Devendra Banhart) on the excellent Naturalismo has all but dried up of late. This is ironic since a post there on October 2nd said:
“I’m excited to get back to writing here at Naturalismo, looking around at other blogs it occurred to me again why I started it…no one covers these artists!”
Those are my italics because I , for one, in my ‘umble way am trying to cover these artists, although admittedly I want to stretch the net a bit wider than Devendra’s extended family.
Anyway – new posts are being hatched as you read ………..until then, enjoy the silence………..
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