John Cage - In a Landscape

(This post has been a draft for a couple months. I thought I had posted it already and I was assuming that context for the Stockhausen blog.)

Aside from the occasional reference to 4'33", John Cage first came into my consciousness a couple years ago through this video. I really liked the ideas he was talking about. Enough, anyway, to mention the video to several people - although not enough to actually listen to any of his music. But it was bound to happen eventually. And, as the dedicated scientist that I am, the impetus to finally take the plunge came during my recent trip to the Materials Research Society conference in Boston. I was "at the conference" for a few days, and naturally a few hours of that were spent in the Newbury Comics a block away, trying to ward off all the powerpoint presentations with an impulse purchase. Thankfully I had a lot of time to kill, because I don't think John Cage came into my head until I had aimlessly flipped through the rock and jazz sections, twice.

 

I ended up with a collection of keyboard works entitled In a Landscape. Among them are works for acoustic and electronic piano, toy piano, and "prepared piano" - Cage's innovation of sticking things like bolts and insulating foam against the strings inside the instrument.

The music is a lot less glaringly avante-garde than I was expecting, although I'm sure part of this is my lack of reference point for what was going on in the 40's. But even the prepared piano used in these pieces sounds largely like a normal piano, with a bit of rattling or a complete lack of resonance on certain keys.


What is striking about this music is Cage's bold presentation of childlike, almost amateur sounding melodies. Naked in their simplicity, often repetitious. Cage famously said "if something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. It still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all". I don't agree with the letter of that, but it certainly illuminates some of the pieces here.


Cynically, to hear "Suite for Toy Piano" is to heat an average person play an awkward and rudimentary piece on a toy instrument, and pass it off to others with a highly inflated notion of its quality. Indeed, I spent the first few listens wondering whether to think of Cage as the emperor with no clothes; an opportunist with a gimmick.


But then I couldn't stop listening to this, and I started to really like it. So what if a melody or musical idea is simple? Cage's music can be dissonant or jarring here, and I'm no stranger to that in general. What I am a stranger to is the presentation of jarring ideas against a minimalist background. It takes a visionary to present us with a collection of sounds, and stubbornly demand that we reexamine them. Or maybe it takes a delusional eccentric, but in either case I'm glad somebody did.


Check out the thundering synthesizer tone of "Souvenir", followed by a ditty that sounds straight out of Ocarina of Time. It's ripe for the perennial criticism of the abstract art world - "anyone could have written that". But they didn't, and it sounds great to me.


Interestingly enough, the closest point of reference I have for some of this stuff in my CD collection is Burzum. The repetition of unabashedly simple melodies, and the way it encourages the listener to sonically reinterpret and listen for emergent structure in the resonances and distortion. Who knew black metal was just what I needed to start appreciating Cage?


I'll stress the "start" in that last sentence, since I briefly listened to Music of Changes and it makes this sound like The Beatles.

(Now I realize the reason I thought I posted this - because I apparently summarized it in the Hate Eternal post. Guess I'm just comparing John Cage to every metal band on here.)