John Cage _quotes
POSTED IN Inspiration, Reflections October 30, 2009
John Cage (1912-1992) was a composer, poet, graphic artist and teacher. I would like to share some quotes from his book Silence: Lectures and Writings.
John Cage (1968). Silence: Lectures and Writings. (Reprint 2009). London: Marion Boyers Publishers.
The Future of Music: Credo
I BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF NOISE
Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of “sound effects” recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of the imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.
TO MAKE MUSIC
If this word “music” is sacred and reserved for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.
WILL CONTINUE AND INCREASE UNTIL WE REACH A MUSIC PRODUCED THROUGH THE AID OF ELECTRICAL INSTRUMENTS.
Experimental Music
For in this new music nothing takes place but sounds: those that are notated and those that are not. Those that are not notated appear in the written music as silences, opening the doors of the music to the sounds that happen in the environment.
III. Communication
Contemporary music
is not the music of the future
nor the music of the past
but simply
music present with us:
this moment,
now,
this now moment.
(…)
There is no such thing as silence. Get thee to an anechoic chamber and hear there thy nervous system in operation and hear thy blood in circulation.
Forerunners of Modern Music
Definitions
Structure in music is its divisibility into successive parts from phrases to long sections. Form is content, the continuity. Method is the means of controlling the continuity from note to note. The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
(…)
A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.
