<snip>
Oh, I know what points are being made -- again and again.
Creation against erasure and etc.  Bravo.  But they seem like slogans to
me. [JG]
<snip>

Perhaps 'slogans' owing to the brevity of my recapitulation but not
otherwise. There is, for a start, an ecological difference between *chuck
away what you dislike* and *do each thing right from the start*. Respect
rather than license: 'Permission granted but not to do anything you want,'
to quote another such. Pair that with *music* rather than *compositions*,
another ecological distinction with very political implications, and you get
a working aesthetic which I don't think you've engaged with.

<snip>
And that world as it is includes a ballet for artichokes (I suppose) and
performance pieces intended to make the usual philosophical, theoretical and
so on points, and this and that quite easy to do and justified by changing
the frame.  That's one version of the world as it is.  Very intellectual.
[JG]
<snip>

Issues such as elitism, intellectualism and somehow not being grounded are
complex. (I chose Enzo Del Re precisely because he's very very far away
indeed from all of that, working in a small S Italian coastal town, and
because busking is not at all the same as doing 'performance pieces' in that
awful sense you mean.) Cage is elitist, certainly, and discussible under
that heading, 'ethics is the aesthetics of the few-ture' and so forth, but
you are simply not being serious about doing so. Starting with dislike, you
(mis)identify traits without much further thought beyond that mere dislike:
a prejudice announced from behind a retaining wall. Thus you accuse Cage
successively of aesthetic quietism ('tends to reconcile one to the world as
it is.  Very motivational') and of alienation strategies ('changing the
frame', ostranenie), even though these two are pretty much incompatible. And
the territory you keep missing is beyond that sort of binary altogether. How
does it feel, for example, to have music to which we think we are not
listening but which surprises us nonetheless? (In Cage's terms we too often
*listen attentively*, playing at being an audience, without _hearing_: our
own sort of performance.) How does it feel to be singing a song for the
first time that no one sang before and no one wrote but which everybody
knows? That's analogous to a folk tradition: the shock of what isn't new.

You mentioned Shakespeare at some point, as though that settled the matter.
But periods of intense creativity don't, I suspect, come about through some
sort of baby boom in highly gifted kids who go on to do gifted things. So
how do they come about?

CW
_______________________________________________

'How Much Better if Plymouth Rock Had Landed on the
Pilgrims' (piece by David Rosenboom 1969-72)