“Visuality overwhelms aurality in the cultural balance of
the senses. The light that sparks the presence of objects and environments
seems to be instantaneously everywhere and thus assumes a state of being that
has proved to be particularly attractive to Western culture, whereas the
actions that produce sounds appear scattered in space and time, tied to events
that merely take place within a larger state of being. John Cage set out to
tilt the balance in favor of the ear, and many people hear the world differently
because of his efforts.”[1]
John Cage, the grandfather of the sonic-arts, and contemporary
experimental music in general, spent his career attempting to open peoples ears
to silence, as he termed it; “silence is all the sound we don’t intend. There is
no such thing as absolute silence.” [2] His
method’s ranged, from his early experiments with percussion and the use of
noise in his compositions, to his famous silent work 4’ 33”, “which entailed
rejecting the importance of whether a musical sound was present or absent
within a composition and, in the process, extending the field or artistic
materiality to all nonintentional sounds surrounding the performance – that is,
by shifting the production of music from the site of utterance to the site of
audition. This musicalization was then extended to all sounds, inside and
outside the performance space, since the ability and willingness to listen were
only requirements, and these abilities in turn were extended, with the aid of
amplification and other technological devices, to small sounds and inaudible
sounds.” [3]
With this piece Cage thrust open the doors of the concert
hall, ushering in a whole world of sound. Opening the ears of those who were
willing to listen, to sounds that had previously lay latent, ignored, as
largely irrelevant or secondary to their visual correlates. Whilst 4’33” was
performed within the context of the highly codified tradition of western
classical music, and part of is significance is specific to that particular
context (establishing the whole world of sound as material to be appropriated
within a musical register) it also took on a broader conceptual significance,
heralding a call to listen; “Silence is about listening, listening to small
sounds, tiny sounds, quiet and loud sounds out of any context, music, visual,
or otherwise.”[4]
No comments:
Post a Comment