In Alex Ross’, Searching for Silence: John Cage’s Art of Noise, he touches on John Cage’s influence on the understanding of music and how it could be composed. Cage believed that music wasn’t limited to the general instruments we think every day like a violin or a piano, he pushed the music industry to use sounds we hear in our everyday lives. His work, "4'33", doesn’t have any traditional instruments that you wouldn’ve seen in musical performances at the time. In fact, in my first listening of the piece I was very confused at first but after a while I started to understand his vision and it reminded me of meditation and allowing oneself to fully be immersed in the here and now. He challenges the idea of silence and it being real. At first many of the students in the class, along with myself, where we watched the reenacted version seemed confused by the seemingly lack of music. As I heard the coughs and shuffles of the crowd in the video I started to understand why he is so revered. Many new age artists use things like samples of everyday sounds or even other songs and edit the sound a little bit to add to their song, it’s so commonplace in the industry that now we barely even notice it unless it’s slowed. All of these crazy sample's artists use today derive from John Cage’s use of what looked like at the time to be random noises. I agreed with Ross when he described Cage as someone who broke the rules of classical music and that he encouraged people to think of music and sound as art in any form.
Related Posts
