Re: (Uh,) What is music?

[George Robinson <GRComm...>]

hey, Austin, you  got a problem with our jackhammers?

George (I hear music and there's no one there) Robinson


Seth Austen wrote:
> 
> 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
> 

-- 
"And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without
me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the
agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants,
the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors
the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book
pages -- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because
of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.'"
                        --Doris Lessing

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