On An Overgrown Path

happening - a gathering of people at which something happens. A party or function where people indulge in activities contrary to the social norm. ~ from John Basset McCleary's Hippie Dictionary . If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all ~ John Cage The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason ~ John Cage. Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? ~ John Cage As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency ~ John Cage There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear ~ John Cage John Cage was really happening in Bruges, Belgium on February 17, 2008 as my photos show. The one above w...

'In 1990, when I was Chief Executive of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra , we put on a series of modern music concerts, under the title Musica Nova , the originator of this series being Sir Alexander Gibson . We were greatly helped financially by the City of Glasgow, which had been made City of Culture that year. Among the composers featured was John Cage . I well remember meeting him at the airport, and taking him to Glasgow University. Cage was a great specialist in mushrooms, and on seeing some rather sad specimens growing on a patch of grass in the university precincts, he said ‘Ah! That’ll do for lunch.’ He invited me to join him, but I was cowardly enough to decline. I regretted this later, since, as the concerts progressed, I found he was one of the most delightful and engaging musicians I have ever met. His brilliant music made a great impact on the Musica Nova audiences.' That previously unpublished reminiscence comes from an unlikely source. Former EMI producer...

It will come as no surprise for regular readers to hear that the X Factor is further off my personal radar than Norman Lebrecht's blog . But last night, courtesy of our daughter, I sampled TV's most influential music show . Which brings me to a topic that has so far been conspicuously absent from this blog. Cage Against the Machine is a Facebook-driven project which involves an anti-X Factor supergroup trying to hit the Christmas UK number one chart spot with a variation on John Cage's silent 4" 33". Practically every aspect pushes Overgrown Path hot buttons - all the musicians are free thinkers and they include Imogen Heap who featured here in a recent Aldeburgh post , Cage Against the Machine is being released on independent label Wall of Sound , and proceeds are going to deserving charities including several connected with music. Plus, of course, the online buzz about the project is raising John Cage's profile among young people . So I honestly wish I ...

Number of recordings of John Cage's works in UK CD catalogue: In a Landscape (1948) - 12 Sonatas and Interludes (1948) - 11 Bacchanale (1940) - 8 Five (1988) - 8 The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942) - 7 Second and Third Construction in Metal (1940-1941) - 6 Four (1989) - 4 Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orcestra (1951) - 3 As John Cage would almost certainly have agreed, the numbers don't lie, and In a Landscape is surely his most accessible work. It was composed, together with his Suite for Toy Piano , at Black Mountain College, North Carolina in 1948. Cage was at the college to present a festival of music by Eric Satie , a composer whose influence can be heard in the meditative and hypnotic study for solo piano. Black Mountain College was recognised as one of the leading progressive schools in the States, and Cage taught there in 1948 and 1952. Lou Harrison was head of its music department in 1952 and he staged what is considered to be the first e...

Karlheinz Stockhausen died on December 5, 2007. In tribute I will be playing his orchestral work Gruppen on my Future Radio programme on December 16, preceeded by Palestrina's Missa Brevis . My article below explains the connection between the two works, and also looks at Stockhausen's position within the bigger picture of mid-twentieth century culture. This photo of Peter Orlovsky was taken in 1955, and he is the subject of the background portrait which was painted by Robert LaVigne . Orlovsky became beat poet Allen Ginsberg's lover and companion, and Ginsberg is listed as one of the thirty-six most influential people of the hippie era. Here is the complete list: Bella Abzug , Muhammad Ali , Joan Baez , Helen Gurley Brown , Rachel Carson , Bob Dylan , Buckminster Fuller , Jerry Garcia , Stephen Gaskin , Allen Ginsberg , Berry Gordy Jr ., Bill Graham , Germaine Greer , Dick Gregory , Tom Hayden , Jimi Hendrix , Janis Joplin , John Kennedy , Jack Kerouac , Ken Kesey , Rev...

Dear Bob, Thank you for deciding to broadcast the CD " Il Legno e la Parola ". Perhaps one of the most thought provoking elements in recording this CD was the interpretation of Cage's silences. It was obvious that by their very nature, their interpretation was bound to cause controversy and debate, in line with the spirit of Cage's works, and I am thankful to your provoking article for that. The idea of interpreting the silences with completely blank tracks was intended to allow listeners the opportunity to recreate and discover their own "personal" silence at each listening. Each silence is thus entirely determined by the ever changing non-intentional ambient sounds at the moment of listening. I purposely refrained from the most obvious temptation of recording my own ambient sounds, or for that matter, any other seemingly random sound that would have been inevitably crystallized in time and ultimately determined entirely by the interpreter's choice. I...

Song Books (Solos for Voice 3–92) is a collection of short works by John Cage , written and compiled by the composer in 1970. It contains pieces of four kinds : songs, songs with electronics, directions for a theatrical performance, and directions for a theatrical performance with electronics. Any may be performed by one or more singers . Song Books was published by Cage in 1970 as three volumes : volume one contained Solos for Voice 3–58, volume two contained Solos for Voice 59–92, and the third volume, titled "Instructions", contains various tables and other materials necessary for performance of some of the pieces. The work explores a very wide variety of notation systems. Some Solos are given in standard notation, others employ a special brand of notation with circles of different sizes and lines instead of notes , still others are systems of dots and lines, etc. Some are not notated at all: the text is given using different fonts and font sizes for different words, or...

It was, as I remember, through Jean [Erdman} - who is to dancing what Vivaldi was to music - that we met the other member of the party, composer John Cage, who had then become interested in the relationship of music to Zen and was beginning to explore the melodies of silence. My principal tie with John was that we had the same kind of humour, for he would simply bubble with laughter whenever describing his latest plans for musical outrage, such as a very formal piano recital in full evening dress, complete with an assistant to turn the pages, in which, however, the score consisted entirely of rests. The joke wasn't merely that he was getting away with murder in the hopelessly deranged world of avant-garde music, so as to constitute the master charlatan of all, but that beyond all this and to make matters still funnier, he had also discovered and wanted to share the meditation process of listening to silence. This is simply to close your eyes and allow your ears to resonate with wh...

'The form was so open that the music had slipped out.' That is Leo Black writing in BBC Music in the Glock Era and After about an unidentified work at the Kranichsteiner Musiktage at Darmstadt in the 1960s. Image is of a 1964 performance by Ben Vautier and Alison Knowles as part of the Fluxus Festival in New York City. Photograph is by Fluxus founder George Maciunas . Performance of Maciunas' Piano #13 (for Nam Juin Panik) here . John Cage's experimental composition classes at the New York's New School for Social Research (topical link here ) in the late 1950s contributed to the early development of Fluxus and he was later a neighbour of Fluxus founder Yoko Ono . This has meant that Cage's reputation is linked to the concept of 'anti-art' and his music is unfairly pigeon-holed as a 'difficult listen'. Which does not sit well at a time when 'easy listening' has moved from being a derided musical category to the turnkey solution to a...

At the centre of Buddhist teaching is the concept of impermanence as embodied in the Wheel of Cyclic Existence seen above. Or, in everyday language, what goes around, comes around. Impermanence expressed through constant decay and change are also central to John Cage's music. Cage's long journey took him from championing the economic piano music of Erik Satie at Black Mountain College , North Carolina via his own sparse 1948 In A Landscape to the multi-layered compositions of his later years. Now the musical wheel of existence has gone full circle and the new double CD, seen below, of music by a colleague of Cage has arrived to connect us back to the soundworld of Satie that started it all. Gordon Mumma was born in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1935. He studied piano and horn in Chicago and Detroit. From 1966 to 1974 he was, with John Cage and David Tudor , one of the three composer-musicians with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company , for which he composed four commissioned w...