From TheevilD Sent Mon, Aug 23rd 1999, 11:17
From TheevilD Sent Mon, Aug 23rd 1999, 11:17
>I think Cage was probably the most important experimentalist ever. BUT his
>aesthetic system ("all sound--intentional or not--is musical") isa pretty
lame one, >imo. To be sure, all sounds can be considered artistically. But
I think "music" has >to be reserved for something separate from the buzzing
noise of the computer >terminal I sit in front of. If noise is music, then
everything is music (everything is >intrinsically noisy), and music, as an
art form, loses its virtue.
Fair point, but a couple of things:
Its very difficult to define what is intentional: once our attention is
called to a sound, we put it on a pedestal, and listen to that rather than
other sounds. That seems to be intentional, even though the sound itself
isn't. This in itself makes the sound 'sonic art' (horrible phrase), if you
consider it to be, but I'm not quite sure whether this makes it music. I
think it should: certainly if you treated it as a performance ('Concerto for
computer terminal?) it would be, or if you recorded it. imo, the moment at
which a sound becomes music is when anyone decides that it is.
> I think there's something fundamentally different in the way a Bruckner
symphony >or an Autechre track affects my mind than the sound of my breathing
(a sound I >hear every moment of my life) or other nonintentional noises that
Cage would class >as music. The word "music" loses all its meaning in the
Cagean aesthetic.
Certainly it affects you differently, but is it fundamentally different?
No-one said that because it is music it must be good music. This can also
apply to your argument that as all sound becomes music, music looses its
value. Add to this, if you were deaf and could not experience the music,
would you still consider it to be music?
Finally, bringing the thread full circle, the examples that you state are
both relatively traditional music, whereas this entire debate stems from
bands who could, essentially, be unintentional noise.
Enough, before I write myself into a corner
Jorkens