I have always taken for granted that John Cage's 4'33'' was a joke. The idea of a piece of music without any music just seemed like avantgarde arriving at its final point where it abolishes itself. After having read most of this longish essay on 4'33'' (discovered at popshots) I must admit that I was wrong. In the essay it says on the first performance of 4'33'' at Woodstock, New York, on August 29, 1952 by David Tudor, a young pianist:

This account already shows what 4'33'' is about. It is not about silence at all but about its opposite. About noises. The roles of composer/performer and audience are kind of reversed. The audience (plus outside environment) make the "music". 4'33'' is the only piece of music which hands over the performance to the audience. That means of course that 4'33'' is totally different every time it is "played". It is unforeseeable which sounds the listeners will make. In a way it is the most democratic of all compositions. Cage says it better:

But there is another more profound experience behind this piece:

Now this is fascinating. We cannot hear silence (even if it existed) as to be able to listen we have to live and to live our heart has to beat and beat is sound. We enter philosophical territory here. I'd like to quote an extreme point of view. Berkeley's subjective idealism says : "To be is to be perceived." From this follows that not to be perceived is not to be. What we cannot perceive simply does not exist according to Berkeley (he is a kind of doubting Thomas). Ok there are many things our senses cannot perceive but they are there. High frequencies for example. Our ears are not precise enough to hear those frequencies. But this seems to be a completely different problem. Which could be solved by widening the range of frequencies we can hear using transformation (or measuring) devices like radios for example. Not being able to hear silence as we always hear our pulse and nervous system is more like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which states (in layman's words) that you cannot observe something without changing that which you are observing. This is a fundamental dilemma.

Scientists tell us that there is silence in the space between the stars but this silence is meaningless if we cannot hear it. As meaningless as a God stuck in a black hole, a God whose existence or non-existence wouldn't have any effect on our lives.

People say that silence is unbearable. That it can be used as a torture. But that's rubbish. We can't hear silence. We always hear the rhythm of our body. Maybe this kind of feedback is unsupportable and kills us in the end. Maybe real silence would be wonderful, would be paradise. The torture actually consists in making us approach silence very closely without ever making us reach it. People subjected to this false promise of silence are driven crazy. By themselves.

Thanks to John Cage I now know an answer to the famous koan "What is the sound of one hand?". In the morning it would be the birds singing. In a stormy autumn night the wind blowing etc.

P.S. An afterthought which makes these ramblings rather dubious. What about deaf people? They should "hear" silence, shouldn't they?

great bands just sound like themselves. i haven't heard a band just sounding like themselves for a long time. maybe massive attack. but they didn't really on their best album mezzanine. more like the cure for the late 90s. sufjan stevens does but he is not a band.

p.s. of course the beta band sounds special. but their singing is absolutely unsupportable. arab strap? always the same song. the ones which sound like themselves today are so boring. please prove me wrong if you can.

Ich frage mich gerade, ob man sich Musik schöntrinken kann. Zuerst dachte ich ja natürlich, angesäuselt kann auch Schlagermusik gut sein. Aber eigentlich stimmt das nicht. Es ist das Setting, was die schlechte Musik erträglich macht. Man hört sie im Grunde gar nicht richtig, man konzentriert sich auf das Gespräch, aufs Flirten, auf das Drumherum.

Wenn ich mein eigener DJ bin, was meistens der Fall ist, und was getrunken habe (kommt auch vor), ist mein Anspruch an die Musik eher höher als niedriger als wenn ich nüchtern bin. Allein schon das Problem aus meiner Sammlung das Richtige auszuwählen. Plötzlich ist alles Mist, zu offensichtlich, zu abgenudelt. Und doch ist in diesem Zusammenhang die Vertrautheit mit der Musik ganz wichtig. Wobei die Musik schon etwas älter sein sollte und fast vergessen. Nichts ist schöner als das Wiederentdecken. Man hat sich Reihen von Albumtiteln angesehen, die alle mal wichtig oder halbwichtig waren, aber jetzt gerade nur noch kalter Kaffee. Und dann sieht man ein Album im CD-Regal, das man lange nicht gehört hat, von dem man weiß, dass es gut ist, aber nicht mehr ganz genau wie. Und es ist klar, dass es diese CD (s.u.) jetzt sein muss. Und dann ist sie auch noch viel besser als in der Erinnerung. Ist mir vorgestern so gegangen. Und heute wieder.

By the way I am just relistening to PJ Harvey's awesome To Bring You My Love. An absolute killer. Her "bass" organ "riff" on Working for the Man. Her shrieking on The Dancer. What a power girl. Minus ten pints. I am very much looking forward to her new one.

The Rambler draws a couple of Venn diagrams on the elements of the set of pop music and the set of non-pop music (inspired by clap clap blog's posting on three definitions of pop). I guess I like the music exactly on the border where art and pop or music for its own sake and music with a function meet. Like Howe Gelb for example. He is doing it also for the money (not for the big bucks though) but mainly doing it for itself. He struggles (I guess) and his down to earth music seems to show it. Maybe I am just repeating the old myth of the poor sincere artist here but who cares.

When Keith Jarrett says that it is not him creating the music in his improvised piano solo concerts but some outer force. That it is not him playing the piano but him being played (by the piano?).

A catchy single is to a well flowing album what a quickie is to real sex.

The wisdom goof Graham C with a great improvised theory on ambientish music:

P.S. What I wrote at the end seems highly unrealistic. In case the waves would stop to roll when I was asleep I guess the reason would probably be something like the end of the world so that I would probably not wake up at all anymore. Whatever.

Is a record you love on first listen necessarily more shallow and of lesser quality than a record you have to warm up with, you have to force yourself to listen to in the beginning to appreciate?

I am not sure about the answer. There is a tendency in me which dismisses music which is easy to like like chart music as artistically inferior to music which is harder to get into. At the same time I am almost 100% sure that music which I instantly like is music which I will also instantly (after few listens) dislike. Easy getting in means also easy getting out.

Music which takes its time to sink in seems to me music which also settles in more permanently. The relation is deeper than to superficial chart pop. The investment of listening to music which wasn't amazing in the beginning pays off later. Falling in love slowly means falling in love more intensely. Or is this theory too simple to be true?

For me usually getting to like music is a slow process of discovery. By listening I try to predict if I will like music I am not sure of yet in the future. It is a little like on the stock market where you try to forecast the evolution of the future price of the stock you buy. Often it works but sometimes it doesn't at all.

Let's take Giant Sand which is one of my favourite bands right now. It was pretty difficult to fall in love with their music. I bought Center of the Universe in 1992, listened to it and thought that it was ok but nothing special. Another band trying to sound like Velvet Underground without succeeding really. I didn't hate the record but I didn't find it extraordinary. At the time I was very much into My Bloody Valentine which immediately drew me in and which I still like but not as much as in 1992. Somewhere around 2000 I got Chore of Enchantment and I was enchanted (I couldn't resist) almost immediately. Howe Gelb sounded like Lou Reed, the music was close to the third VU album but even more relaxed, more American, more wide. And I relistened to Center and was totally hooked. It was like a hard rock Neil Young album with lots of psychedelics. Gorgeous. It had taken me eight years to get it but now it was mine.

I ordered the new Howe Gelb album The Listener last week-end and I liked the piano-dominated samples I heard immediately. Is this a bad sign or does it just mean that my knowledge of the music I like just gets better and better?

Adorno könnte eventuell der Nietzsche meiner zweiten Lebenshälfte werden. Mal sehen. Am Liebsten mag ich seine Widersprüche. In der Musik ist er extrem elitär und lässt Pop und Jazz nicht gelten, da sie Musik für die Massen sind. Andererseits ist er überzeugter Aufklärer. Adorno braucht man glaube ich nicht zu widerlegen. Das hat er selbst schon ausgiebig getan. Und genau deswegen ist er auch heute noch relativ aktuell.

Words are so vain. Sometimes I ask myself why I still use them. I seem to be drowning in an ocean of words. And they are not even mine. I think what I love most about music is that it does not need words. Music is immediate. More true than talk and writing. It is unfiltered by rationality. At least the music I fall for seems to be. Is there an autistic quality to the music I like? What a load of meaningless generalities. Just words...

P.S. I somehow really sympathize with the idea of writing the whole blog crossed out from now on. It's only as I don't want to lose my last reader that I won't. Just imagine that everything I write should be crossed out immediately after having been read. Words really should destroy themselves after having been written down...