Wow, the TH-cam algorithm is bringing me videos that interest me from 10 years ago. Moving on, I “happened” to be fortunate to go to Berlin for a week of avant-garde music and experience John Cage’s HPSCHD in the summer of 1972 rounding out my year of musical study in Vienna. I remember in college purchasing Cage’s book (can’t remember the name) but experiencing his event live was fascinating-you walked around the halls of the Berlin concert hall with all kinds of speakers playing electronic snippets and the main concert hall, all of which created a fascinating “soundscape.” This musical experience was certainly based on “chance.” I have a photo of Cage and computer music composer John Chowning (I hope I got that right), lying down on the floor during HPSCHD.
My photo was actually with John Chowning. He had given a talk the day before at the conference though he music was not played. Thanks for the heads up on Lejaren Hiller.
@knots46 "It was here that composers such as Boulez and Cage among many other key figures in modern music met in the 50s and 60s." Boulez and Cage didn't meet in Darmstadt, as he explains in the video - Cage didn't go to Darmstadt before the late 50's. If you're interested in this kind of stuff, I would highly recommend reading the Boulez-Cage correspondence edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez
What I meant was the composers intentions are philosophical. The abstract thing that is music itself carries no philosophy, but composers imposed philosophical ideas onto it. They set up imaginary boundaries of what it can and can't do (such as it's wrong to do a parallel 5th). Therefore the abstract thing that is 'music' isn't 'philosophy', but composers treated their compositional practice in a philosophical manner, and questioned the laws imposed by earlier composers.
Boulez was not only an innovative composer, but also quite a good conductor, one who championed other composers whose styles were different from his own.
All western art music is philosophy. The only reason why earlier music sounds nice is because it was developed within a framework of harmonic/tonal rules. The great composers are great because they pushed these rules and boundaries through philosophical thinking - ironically, they then became the new accepted boundary. If you think of music history as the development of philosophy pushing boundaries, the modernist period makes sense - it's just a continuation of what was already happening.
Nobody cares about cage or Boulez? Are you serious? Just because no one is still writing in their style doesn’t mean no one cares about it; no one is writing in Mozart’s, chopin’s, or rachmaninoff’s style either. Cage and Boulez still get hundreds if not thousands of performances around the world each year, and get studied just as carefully as any pre-modern composer, even though they’re both dead. The mere fact that we’re even having this conversation proves how lasting of an impact their music still has, 70 years later. You act like you’re smarter than them, like you have some deep knowledge about natural harmonics that immediately invalidates everything they ever composed, but the tonal system itself is already far removed from natural harmonics, and jazz music and the Beatles are just about as far as you can get from any physical acoustic laws; the “psychoacoustic inevitability” theory of tonal music hasn’t been taken seriously for generations. You also speak as though cage and Boulez were ignorant of the foundations and evolution of the tonal system, when they could lecture you into the ground about them. Boulez especially was one of history’s greatest scholars on theory in pre-modern music. And you may come back with some snappy retort about how “theory isn’t music,” but you yourself just used it to justify the tonal system. You’re also speaking from a 21st century perspective; it’s impossible to understand any music without considering its time, and cage and Boulez defined the 40s, 50s, and 60s in ways few people later can understand. vilxan is absolutely right when he says that all music is philosophy: whether consciously or not, Mozart and Haydn translated into both vertical and horizontal musical terms the ideals of reason, simplicity, balance, symmetry, and logical dialectic that had infected Europe in the late 18th century. Beethoven consciously introduced Rousseau’s ideas of unbounded natural expression and Goethe’s emotional intensifications while keeping the universality that his predecessors had cultivated and that still dominated napoleonic and congress of Vienna europe. Without that backdrop, his music wouldn’t make sense; it certainly doesnt make any sense if you’re expecting ecclesiastical renaissance vocal polyphony, or debussyan Impressionism. So of course cage doesn’t make any sense taken out of Zen Buddhism, American experimentalism, and early counterculture, and Boulez doesn’t make sense taken out of post-war european politics and Darmstadt experimentalism. But nothing else seems to make sense within those.
Its kinda sad to see people still act like they knew more than Cage and Boulez. They were prodigious, and their music is more musical than pop music.Their music might not be as easy to like but in all music there is some sort of arbitrary delimitations, arbitrary start points. Thats why its called art, because there is no perfect way that renders all other art forms as shit. Just looking at the history of diatonic music and one will see that its a short and small history: Its not the only music.
@Bruno53ification thats what people said about bach back in the 1700s, but now the sound he created is the basis of western music. If musicians dont experiment with sounds, no one will break any boundries. I'm sorry you don't understand the reasoning for cage's compositions but please don't call it crap.
Nor did Berlioz, or Bruckner. And no it wasn't nicknamed that. It was a dedication to Alma Mahler's daughter who had recently passed away. "how many concerti Brandeburg Concertos of Bach consists". "How many De Ponte's operas Mozart composed". "how many violin concertos composed Mozart,...". "How many symphonies Beethoven...". "But you guesses which ones are they?". None of these make any sense grammatically the way they are written. More to come.
Probably the most superiority-complexed comment section I have ever come across. You're not smart just because you like "High philosophical avant garde intellectual art" -Nor is one dumber because they hate it. I, personally hate philosophy and don't find his minimalistic style of experimental music very interesting, yet it is very hard to start to start liking and appreciating it when I'm contstantly bombarded with "It's so philosophical, like What even is music? What is Art? See, these are PHILOSOPHICAL questions about Man's existance, and everyone who distates it on first listen is not up to my intellectual standard." You guys see one negative comment and you feel the need to boost your egos by showing off your superior intellectual music taste. This is the precise reason I have been jaded on experimental music for a while, not even for the music itself, but I cannot get over this type of behavior
As a contemporary fan, that’s fair. However I will say some might be overly defensive because of people saying stuff like “this isn’t music” or “sounds like a two year old wrote it”.
@@largebill1245 Yes, but everyone starts like that. You're lying if you say didn't think this type of music was a bit stupid when you first heard it. A natural progression into more "inacessible" types of music should be encouraged, yet those types of comments still drive people away instead of allowing them to understand it more. I've seen plenty of level headed comments under someone saying "Noise, just noise". The reason I feel like some people get so defensive is simply, as I said, an ego boost. "Ha this person doesn't understand this music but I do so I'm going to show off my intellect"
Sorry. Cage's music is for the intelligent. You may be 60, but you don't have the mental capacity to understand the things that he creates. It may seem to you like garbage, but I have tried to compose the things that Cage's composes. It takes a lot of time, care, and love. The only reason that Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, etc. composed the things they did is because they heard it in the world around them. Cage just makes it a literal experience rather than more abstract.
This has no relevance to what we are talking about. Alas, I will answer them: 1. 6 "How many of Brandenberg Concertos are there?" is the proper way to say that. 2. 4 3. In order of composer: 9, 9, 4, 14 string symphonies and 5 orchestral, 9, 6 and a sketched but not orchestrated 7th, 9 and unfinished 10th, 11 and unfinished 12th, 7, 6, 8 large and 2 small, 3. 4. Tristan und Isolde. And it wasn't a note it was a chord. The Tristan chord. spelled F B D# G# All incredibly simple.
I'm sorry, who's the jerk here? I'm not the one going around calling things "crap" without provocation. If you're that opposed to it, why were you watching this video in the first place? Why did you insult it? Obviously you do "give a fig" about what Cage had to say, or you would have never commented in the first place. Which is the jerk: The guy who gets upset because someone insulted one of your favorite composers without provocation, or the guy who did the insulting? You tell me, "boy."
I wonder if any of you know Boulez' intellectual background. He has earned degrees in advanced mathematics on the graduate level. Music is mathematics. Cage did not care for this under Schoenberg but understand this. Cage understands probability very well.
Do "guess" I that "good" grammars "are" just "for "younger"" guys too. Do you know anything at all about John Cage or his philosophy? I'm guessing not, since you don't even get the name of the piece right. The point of 4:33 is not to be weird and new, but to show that in what we think of as "silence" there is a whole world of sound that we hardly ever notice. John Cage is all about finding beauty in the natural and man-made sound that surrounds us every day: Sound as Music.
Since when nouns before verbs go? I suppose literacy isn't necessary for an understanding of complex ideas, as you've clearly demonstrated full comprehension of everything you've read. (In case that's to complicated for you, I don't actually think you're very smart!) The beauty of Cage's philosophy is that any sound experience can become art, even the blustering of old codgers who refuse to accept any way of thinking besides their own. If only I could hear it in person! :)
Following your logic, we should put all of Mozart, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, Schöenberg, Faure, Palestrina, Hildegard, Beethoven, Mahler, Chopin, Vivaldi, Shostakovich, Sousa, Copland, Scriabin, Prokofiev, Bartok, Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Ives, Scarlatti, Grieg, Schumann, Strauss, Schubert, Elgar, Liszt, Telemann, Gershwin, Holst, Dvorák, Berlioz, Bernstein, Sibelius, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Vaughn Williams away because they are dead.
@Bruno53ification Yep, now is different, so it would be stupid to keep writing the same old music. If you don't like it it's one thing - strictly a matter of taste - but saying "music should be this or that way" and that everything else "is not music" (as though you were in any position to judge what should be and what isn't) just shows your narrow-mindedness and inability to keep up with your own times. It's just like saying that quantum physics is nonsense just because you can't understand it!
Wow, the TH-cam algorithm is bringing me videos that interest me from 10 years ago. Moving on, I “happened” to be fortunate to go to Berlin for a week of avant-garde music and experience John Cage’s HPSCHD in the summer of 1972 rounding out my year of musical study in Vienna. I remember in college purchasing Cage’s book (can’t remember the name) but experiencing his event live was fascinating-you walked around the halls of the Berlin concert hall with all kinds of speakers playing electronic snippets and the main concert hall, all of which created a fascinating “soundscape.” This musical experience was certainly based on “chance.” I have a photo of Cage and computer music composer John Chowning (I hope I got that right), lying down on the floor during HPSCHD.
Lejaren Hiller. Not Chowning.
My photo was actually with John Chowning. He had given a talk the day before at the conference though he music was not played. Thanks for the heads up on Lejaren Hiller.
Not jumping into this pool. I enjoy both of them. Thanks for posting this, knots46.
still love it!!
R.I.P. Pierre Boulez 1-6-2016....He will be sorely missed.
I won't miss him.
What a crushingly predictable response.
Wonderful!
@knots46 "It was here that composers such as Boulez and Cage among many other key figures in modern music met in the 50s and 60s."
Boulez and Cage didn't meet in Darmstadt, as he explains in the video - Cage didn't go to Darmstadt before the late 50's. If you're interested in this kind of stuff, I would highly recommend reading the Boulez-Cage correspondence edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez
What I meant was the composers intentions are philosophical. The abstract thing that is music itself carries no philosophy, but composers imposed philosophical ideas onto it. They set up imaginary boundaries of what it can and can't do (such as it's wrong to do a parallel 5th). Therefore the abstract thing that is 'music' isn't 'philosophy', but composers treated their compositional practice in a philosophical manner, and questioned the laws imposed by earlier composers.
Boulez was not only an innovative composer, but also quite a good conductor, one who championed other composers whose styles were different from his own.
Can you please add the name of the man who appears at 02:30 in this video to the video description above, so everyone can know who he is?
Hello it's gyorgy kurtag a really great hungarian composer
All western art music is philosophy. The only reason why earlier music sounds nice is because it was developed within a framework of harmonic/tonal rules. The great composers are great because they pushed these rules and boundaries through philosophical thinking - ironically, they then became the new accepted boundary. If you think of music history as the development of philosophy pushing boundaries, the modernist period makes sense - it's just a continuation of what was already happening.
Nobody cares about cage or Boulez? Are you serious? Just because no one is still writing in their style doesn’t mean no one cares about it; no one is writing in Mozart’s, chopin’s, or rachmaninoff’s style either. Cage and Boulez still get hundreds if not thousands of performances around the world each year, and get studied just as carefully as any pre-modern composer, even though they’re both dead. The mere fact that we’re even having this conversation proves how lasting of an impact their music still has, 70 years later.
You act like you’re smarter than them, like you have some deep knowledge about natural harmonics that immediately invalidates everything they ever composed, but the tonal system itself is already far removed from natural harmonics, and jazz music and the Beatles are just about as far as you can get from any physical acoustic laws; the “psychoacoustic inevitability” theory of tonal music hasn’t been taken seriously for generations. You also speak as though cage and Boulez were ignorant of the foundations and evolution of the tonal system, when they could lecture you into the ground about them. Boulez especially was one of history’s greatest scholars on theory in pre-modern music. And you may come back with some snappy retort about how “theory isn’t music,” but you yourself just used it to justify the tonal system.
You’re also speaking from a 21st century perspective; it’s impossible to understand any music without considering its time, and cage and Boulez defined the 40s, 50s, and 60s in ways few people later can understand. vilxan is absolutely right when he says that all music is philosophy: whether consciously or not, Mozart and Haydn translated into both vertical and horizontal musical terms the ideals of reason, simplicity, balance, symmetry, and logical dialectic that had infected Europe in the late 18th century. Beethoven consciously introduced Rousseau’s ideas of unbounded natural expression and Goethe’s emotional intensifications while keeping the universality that his predecessors had cultivated and that still dominated napoleonic and congress of Vienna europe. Without that backdrop, his music wouldn’t make sense; it certainly doesnt make any sense if you’re expecting ecclesiastical renaissance vocal polyphony, or debussyan Impressionism. So of course cage doesn’t make any sense taken out of Zen Buddhism, American experimentalism, and early counterculture, and Boulez doesn’t make sense taken out of post-war european politics and Darmstadt experimentalism. But nothing else seems to make sense within those.
Boulez was a brilliant man.
Its kinda sad to see people still act like they knew more than Cage and Boulez. They were prodigious, and their music is more musical than pop music.Their music might not be as easy to like but in all music there is some sort of arbitrary delimitations, arbitrary start points. Thats why its called art, because there is no perfect way that renders all other art forms as shit. Just looking at the history of diatonic music and one will see that its a short and small history: Its not the only music.
@Bruno53ification its funny that that's what people thought of Mahler when Mahler was alive.
who is the man talking at the end?
Otto Tomek
@@pauljackson1029the same Otto Tomek that Stockhausen mentions in the spoken section of Hymnen.
@Bruno53ification thats what people said about bach back in the 1700s, but now the sound he created is the basis of western music. If musicians dont experiment with sounds, no one will break any boundries. I'm sorry you don't understand the reasoning for cage's compositions but please don't call it crap.
I can't find this article, and I'm very interested.
Nor did Berlioz, or Bruckner. And no it wasn't nicknamed that. It was a dedication to Alma Mahler's daughter who had recently passed away. "how many concerti Brandeburg Concertos of Bach consists". "How many De Ponte's operas Mozart composed". "how many violin concertos composed Mozart,...". "How many symphonies Beethoven...". "But you guesses which ones are they?". None of these make any sense grammatically the way they are written. More to come.
Probably the most superiority-complexed comment section I have ever come across. You're not smart just because you like "High philosophical avant garde intellectual art" -Nor is one dumber because they hate it. I, personally hate philosophy and don't find his minimalistic style of experimental music very interesting, yet it is very hard to start to start liking and appreciating it when I'm contstantly bombarded with "It's so philosophical, like What even is music? What is Art? See, these are PHILOSOPHICAL questions about Man's existance, and everyone who distates it on first listen is not up to my intellectual standard." You guys see one negative comment and you feel the need to boost your egos by showing off your superior intellectual music taste. This is the precise reason I have been jaded on experimental music for a while, not even for the music itself, but I cannot get over this type of behavior
As a contemporary fan, that’s fair. However I will say some might be overly defensive because of people saying stuff like “this isn’t music” or “sounds like a two year old wrote it”.
@@largebill1245 Yes, but everyone starts like that. You're lying if you say didn't think this type of music was a bit stupid when you first heard it. A natural progression into more "inacessible" types of music should be encouraged, yet those types of comments still drive people away instead of allowing them to understand it more. I've seen plenty of level headed comments under someone saying "Noise, just noise". The reason I feel like some people get so defensive is simply, as I said, an ego boost. "Ha this person doesn't understand this music but I do so I'm going to show off my intellect"
@@finneganlindsay yeah I agree that these pretentious comments are really shitty. It’s just that I get their frustration.
Nah. Fuck the plebs.
Sorry. Cage's music is for the intelligent. You may be 60, but you don't have the mental capacity to understand the things that he creates. It may seem to you like garbage, but I have tried to compose the things that Cage's composes. It takes a lot of time, care, and love. The only reason that Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, etc. composed the things they did is because they heard it in the world around them. Cage just makes it a literal experience rather than more abstract.
😂
This has no relevance to what we are talking about. Alas, I will answer them:
1. 6 "How many of Brandenberg Concertos are there?" is the proper way to say that.
2. 4
3. In order of composer: 9, 9, 4, 14 string symphonies and 5 orchestral, 9, 6 and a sketched but not orchestrated 7th, 9 and unfinished 10th, 11 and unfinished 12th, 7, 6, 8 large and 2 small, 3.
4. Tristan und Isolde. And it wasn't a note it was a chord. The Tristan chord. spelled F B D# G#
All incredibly simple.
Symphony 4 and 5 had no names.
I'm sorry, who's the jerk here? I'm not the one going around calling things "crap" without provocation. If you're that opposed to it, why were you watching this video in the first place? Why did you insult it? Obviously you do "give a fig" about what Cage had to say, or you would have never commented in the first place. Which is the jerk: The guy who gets upset because someone insulted one of your favorite composers without provocation, or the guy who did the insulting? You tell me, "boy."
@Bruno53ification that's absolute nonsense.
I wonder if any of you know Boulez' intellectual background. He has earned degrees in advanced mathematics on the graduate level. Music is mathematics. Cage did not care for this under Schoenberg but understand this. Cage understands probability very well.
Do "guess" I that "good" grammars "are" just "for "younger"" guys too. Do you know anything at all about John Cage or his philosophy? I'm guessing not, since you don't even get the name of the piece right. The point of 4:33 is not to be weird and new, but to show that in what we think of as "silence" there is a whole world of sound that we hardly ever notice. John Cage is all about finding beauty in the natural and man-made sound that surrounds us every day: Sound as Music.
1919viola Idiotic pseudo-philosophy; it makes me want to vomit.
@@rumataastorskiy5734 ...because you're dumb yourself.
Since when nouns before verbs go? I suppose literacy isn't necessary for an understanding of complex ideas, as you've clearly demonstrated full comprehension of everything you've read. (In case that's to complicated for you, I don't actually think you're very smart!) The beauty of Cage's philosophy is that any sound experience can become art, even the blustering of old codgers who refuse to accept any way of thinking besides their own. If only I could hear it in person! :)
Following your logic, we should put all of Mozart, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, Schöenberg, Faure, Palestrina, Hildegard, Beethoven, Mahler, Chopin, Vivaldi, Shostakovich, Sousa, Copland, Scriabin, Prokofiev, Bartok, Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Ives, Scarlatti, Grieg, Schumann, Strauss, Schubert, Elgar, Liszt, Telemann, Gershwin, Holst, Dvorák, Berlioz, Bernstein, Sibelius, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Vaughn Williams away because they are dead.
@Bruno53ification Yep, now is different, so it would be stupid to keep writing the same old music. If you don't like it it's one thing - strictly a matter of taste - but saying "music should be this or that way" and that everything else "is not music" (as though you were in any position to judge what should be and what isn't) just shows your narrow-mindedness and inability to keep up with your own times. It's just like saying that quantum physics is nonsense just because you can't understand it!
Muy conmovedor
Wrong. There is no philosophy in any music.
Actually, there is but it is obviously a phenomenon that can only be experienced by music composer or music listener on a personal level.