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)