{"id":157,"date":"2010-11-30T14:51:32","date_gmt":"2010-11-30T19:51:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rosewhitemusic.com\/piano\/?p=157"},"modified":"2013-09-02T08:23:47","modified_gmt":"2013-09-02T13:23:47","slug":"more-on-cheap-imitation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rosewhitemusic.com\/piano\/2010\/11\/30\/more-on-cheap-imitation\/","title":{"rendered":"More on Cheap imitation<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

After my previous post on Cage’s Cheap imitation<\/em>, I have been thinking more about the piece and doing some poking around.<\/p>\n

Kyle Gann’s blog<\/a> has a post on “Cage in the mind’s repertoire”<\/a>, in which he takes John Adams to task for saying that, while he found Cage to be hugely influential on his work, he never listens to it.\u00a0 Gann cites a bunch of his own favorite pieces, but Cheap imitation<\/em> isn’t among them, although to me it would fit nicely in his playlist, which includes the String quartet in four parts<\/em> and other similar works of the 1940s.<\/p>\n

Of course, the source of this kind of comment is the old view that Cage is “more a philosopher than a composer”, which as far as I’m concerned is just thought-free babble.\u00a0 The people who say this, do they actually read the writings of philosophers?\u00a0 Don’t they actually listen to the music of composers?\u00a0 If they do, and if they’ve read Cage’s writings and listened to a goodly sample of the music, they’d never say such nonsense.\u00a0 But it’s just been the standard thing to say about Cage for so long that it just hops out of people’s mouths.<\/p>\n

But this all made me think:\u00a0 what if Cage had been more like Ives?\u00a0 What if he had toiled in obscurity for years and was only discovered late in his life, after a large chunk of his work was done?\u00a0 And what if the first work anyone ever heard of his was Cheap imitation<\/em>?\u00a0 If you started from Cheap imitation<\/em> and then traced the history backwards and forwards from that, what would Cage’s reputation be?\u00a0\u00a0 We’d take Cage’s love of music for granted:\u00a0 the simplicity, the gentleness and all of it.\u00a0 What does 4′ 33″<\/em> look like from that point of view?\u00a0 Where did all those precious philosophical ideas go?<\/p>\n

I think that part of the “philosopher, not composer” judgment comes from the true story of what made Cage’s reputation.\u00a0 What made Cage famous was none of his music\u2014maybe not even 4′ 33″<\/em>\u2014but rather the publication of Silence<\/em> in 1961.\u00a0 I’d venture that 80-90% of everyone’s view of Cage comes from reading that one book.\u00a0 I’d even include myself in that statement (it was my first introduction to Cage, that’s for sure).\u00a0 I’m certainly aware of constantly having to watch out for the “Silence <\/em>effect”:\u00a0 flattening Cage’s history in the way that the book does.\u00a0 By combining essays from the 30s, 40s, and 50s into a single undifferentiated mix, it leads to a monolithic view of Cage, that he was always the way he was in 1961.\u00a0 On various occasions when researching some article or another I’ve made it a careful point to read the writings in chronological order to counteract this and to put things into proper historical context.\u00a0 In any event, because Silence<\/em> is what everyone discovered first, it has conditioned their view of Cage\u2014that’s my theory.<\/p>\n

Other random points about the piece:<\/p>\n