on 4/23/03 3:48 PM, Herb Levy at herb@eskimo.com wrote:
But you can't argue both sides of this against Cage. If these works are no longer experimental, and they're now being performed by musicians who aren't avant garde specialists for audiences that aren't avant garde fans, well, that's exactly how things enter the classical repertoire.
Those audiences are accepting some of the works, just like they accept some of Ives, and some of Copland, Crawford, etc, for that matter. Yes these audiences think they're hearing something different from, say, Mozart or Brahms, but they know what they're hearing isn't brand new experimental stuff. They know it's fifty years old. Nobody's fooling them into thinking that it was improvised yesterday by some kid with a bunch of tattoos & a laptop using MAX/MSP; it's just some of the music from the 20th century that's working its way into the always conservative classical music culture.
Yeah, but the audience always walks out on it. The ears are still conservative. They even walk out on the Ives 4, which is arguably the greatest symphonic work on the 20th century. I saw the LA Phil do a killing version (Nagano conducted the shit out of it), and a lot of people walking out. Amazing how much dissonance they'll tolerate in a Prince record, but not out of an orchestra playing their balls off.
These audiences (and most of the performers) don't care about music theory for the most part, they just care about whether they like the sound of what they're hearing. That's why I discount all of Patrice's arguments about how shallow Cage's theories may have been. The audience for these works doesn't give a shit how the notes were selected if they like the sound of the notes. &, for better or worse, some of these pieces are quite appealing for those kinds of listeners.
Without cage there waving the ol' PT Barnum spell, it's a hell of a lot less enticing, and the sound of the notes isn't enough to keep them glued to their seat, let alone coming back to hear more.
That's what happens with the avant garde: some of it enters the mainstream, some of it stays within the realm of avant garde fandom and much of it virtually disappears. But, as much as we may wish it were otherwise, it's never the avant garde fans who get to decide what enters the mainstream. There are early Cage pieces being played for straight classical audiences and they're not walking out in droves when they hear it. That's a sign that, no matter what Cage's standing within the avant garde may be, some of his music may have a life in the classical concert repertoire.
The early Cage pieces are the ones he wrote when he still gave a shit about music as music, as opposed to a vehicale for his personality. They don't really typify what Cage made sure we thought of as Cage. IE they're not "events".
I think too, that as there are more performances and recordings of a wider range of Cage's work that some other later works will get heard more as well. A lot of it may not get far (I'd certainly be surprised if much from say the mid-fifties into the early seventies ever gets over for non-specialists) but some pieces from Cage's last 15 years or so may have more audience appeal than y'all might expect, given the right kind of players.
Perhaps. Zappa's music -- a much surer commercial drawing card, not to mention better music, I think -- is only recently starting to come around to that acceptance, and Zappa's celebrity was on a wider level than Cage's. skip h