Re: (Uh,) What is music?

[Seth Austen <klezmusic...>]

on 7/3/01 12:49 PM, Robert Cohen at rlcm17 (at) hotmail(dot)com wrote:

> I enjoyed Seth's delicious sardonicism; but as for John Cage's dictum, it
> does not follow at all that because All A is B, therefore all B is A.  All
> men are mortal; (hence) all mortals are men?  This is called reasoning by
> converse, and it ain't necessarily so; in fact, it ain't so, period.  I'm
> not sure what he was getting at.
> 

Robert,

I can't speak for what John Cage meant, but what I originally got from that
quote was an expansion of my horizons to the types of sounds that could be
musical, and thus available for use in my compositional vocabulary, ie, not
just notes, but also squawks, squalls, skreetches, scratches, squeaks,
clangs, found sounds, tape manipulated sounds, etc...

I remember reading that Cage could walk down the streets of NY City, where
he lived, and hear music in the jackhammers, police sirens and subway
rumbles. Personally, I just get sensory overloaded by that type of stuff,
and so I live in the country (This isn't meant as a dissing of NYC, I'm
originally from there).

Seth

-- 
Seth Austen

http://www.sethausten.com
emails: seth (at) sethausten(dot)com
klezmusic (at) earthlink(dot)net


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