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POETRYETC Home

POETRYETC  December 2007

POETRYETC December 2007

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Subject:

Re: Cage's *boring*

From:

joe green <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Poetryetc: poetry and poetics

Date:

Sat, 1 Dec 2007 08:52:01 -0600

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text/plain

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Ok, this is a damn fine reply and I am now with you.  Best  reply to my
points I have ever read and convincing.  Thanks , I hope that you are busy
writing this sort of thing and being published.



On Dec 1, 2007 6:27 AM, Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Joe:
>
> <snip>
> You assume that the "alienation strategies" work to cause a turn [to]
> something new and better. [JG]
> <snip>
>
> I was only addressing ostranenie because you yourself had raised it.
> However, I didn't (and I don't) make that assumption; I just see it as one
> out of various sorts of shtick. And in fact alienation isn't at all an
> issue
> for Cage, as far as I can see, whereas openness is.
>
> <snip>
> I do think that these works (the usual stuff I am reprehending)  reconcile
> us to the world as it is -- the only change is that this world now
> includes
> veneration for works of "art" that are rather shallow. [JG]
> <snip>
>
> But Cage's music v compositions distinction, to which I had drawn your
> attention, does rather put paid to that sort of argument altogether: 'when
> we separate music from life we get art', whereas '... our highest business
> is our daily life'. Indeed at some stage Cage actually said that, in his
> opinion, 'Art's business is over.' So works of *art*, shallow or
> otherwise,
> are simply not the point in the Cage aesthetic except insofar as some
> things
> may be more or less 'useful' than are others. And if Cage implies some
> sort
> of musical florilegium or chrestomathy in his writings, which he does,
> things 'most needful for all men to know', to use King Alfred's locution,
> it's largely by drawing attention to stuff he personally finds most
> interesting, stuff he finds helpful or otherwise 'needful to know' in the
> course of his attending to what he does. Past tense, of course, since
> 1992.
>
> And this is fundamentally different, I think, from Silliman and his blog,
> which I find very conservative. Indeed Silliman seems to me to act rather
> in
> the manner of an old fashioned trade union leader attempting to recuperate
> the spontaneous discoveries (gained through experience) of those he sees
> as
> his members, actual or potential, back into the orthodox (ie syndicalist)
> narrative fold. Silliman's use of branding, the way in which he evokes two
> shadowy canons of his own devising, is part of that same process and I
> think
> it is unhelpful. I feel he writes in bad faith; although, of course, I
> could
> be wrong.
>
> <snip>
> How does it feel, for example, to have music to which we think we are not
> listening but which surprises us nonetheless? [...] 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? [CW]
> <snip>
>
> I repeat all that because I think you missed both points. Not your fault.
> Nor mine, I hope. They are tricky to put across.
>
> The first is about *attention*. Which is not just about seeing a table
> upside down, listening to an indefinite sustain or whatever and
> experiencing
> surprise, though that is *attention* as well. It's about an awareness of
> immanence, about trying to heal those rifts between producers &
> recipients,
> work & leisure, public & private and so forth. How we behave in our lives
> flows from all of that and from where we stand with respect to these sorts
> of rifts. And unfortunately we are too used, as Silliman precisely does,
> to
> excluding, to saying *this* is not *that*. In Cage's artistic and/or
> ethical context the admission of noise and unpredictability into the
> concert
> hall is less about *making it new* than it is about actually living
> _within_ or as part of one's environment and about breaking down the walls
> of the concert hall altogether. Which is another aspect of what I mean by
> *ecology*. And leads onto my second point.
>
> Think of *music* as like *language*. So there is more than one of them out
> there. My dictionaries are *language*, of course, but a random set of
> keystrokes simply isn't. (It requires an act of consensus to make 'C6?'
> mean
> 'Are you there?' in Italian which, in fact, is what it does mean if you
> are
> texting.) Equipped as one is with *language* one makes utterances, lots of
> them, all of which are _soundings_ of whatever particular language one is
> using. And it's this approach, with its awareness of sameness through
> difference, with its blurring of what might otherwise seem a clear
> distinction between what's through-composed and what's inherited, that
> seems
> to me much commoner or more pronounced in, say, Eastern musical traditions
> than in, say, the Western classical tradition: the maqam system in Arab,
> Turkish and other musics, for example; or the raag system in Indian
> classical musics. (Bhairavi played at dawn by Varanasiji at the end of an
> all night concert is simply not the same sort of animal as yet another
> rendition by Edgard von Steinway of Beethoven's Ninth or even Beethoven's
> Tenth.)
>
> I went to a concert last night which included Charlemagne Palestine, who
> talked to the audience (not at them) and also gave us brandy: not by any
> means a standard concert hall approach. Some invocatory mouth music and
> glass harmonics followed, receiving scattered applause. CP was genuinely
> pained: 'Please, no clapping. None of all that stuff.' That's somewhere
> close to where I'm heading with my first point.
>
> Two Austrians played before the interval: free improvisation with wind
> instruments, electronics and video. And I had absolutely that sense of
> simultaneously knowing and not knowing the course that was being set which
> seems to me characteristic of what I called rather vaguely the 'folk
> tradition' and which arises through a sort of musical housekeeping, the
> repair and maintenance (or perhaps the facilitation) of something which is
> simply _going on_. That's more or less my second and final point.
>
> And maybe all that makes more sense.
>
> CW
> _______________________________________________
>
> 'We live in such sad times.'
> (Charlemagne Palestine)
>



-- 
Joseph Green
The Pleasant Reviewer
Headmaster, St. John Boscoe Laboratory School

Switchboard Captain, Hollywood Colonial Hotel

All complaints shall be directed to:

Camelopard Breathwaite
The Fallows, 200 Fifth Avenue, Fredonia City

"That's Double Dependability"

Brought to you by Zenith Trans-Cosmic Radio

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