Comment by gweinberg
7 days ago
It doesn't make sense to me that the piece should start with a 17 month rest. Surely it doesn't really start until the first note is played?
7 days ago
It doesn't make sense to me that the piece should start with a 17 month rest. Surely it doesn't really start until the first note is played?
It’s a deliberate provocation, he certainly anticipated exactly this sort of response.
In a sense he is exploiting a lack of rules that would prevent a piece from starting with this long of a rest.
In other words, he is hacking the process.
To be fair, while the piece is a deliberate provocation, like some of his others, the rest wasn’t imagined by Cage to take 17 months, that’s just an artifact of someone else’s decision to play the piece for 639 years. In typical performances while Cage was alive, the opening rest wasn’t more than a few seconds.
Ever been to see an orchestra play? In my opinion, the part where the conductor puts his hands up and the audience and orchestra both grow quiet in anticipation of the start of the piece is semantic.
Especially given how loud and sometimes discordant the tuning process is.
Pedantic note, the tuning is typically before the conductor raises the baton. Depending on the concert, it is often done before the conductor even comes on stage.
Beethoven’s 5th symphony (da-da-da-DAA) starts with a rest too, it’s not unusual to notate like this. Many pieces have “pickup” measures which are not complete and much shorter than a full measure. But when the pickup is more than 50% of a normal measure, it’s no longer much of a pickup and starting with a rest to make up the complete measure makes sense.
That's all fine and dandy when you're talking about a genuine piece of music. But for something like this, counting a rest that goes for 17 years is taking it way too far.
Please explain what makes a composition “genuine” and show your work
This is as genuine a piece of music as the original.
17 months. But in what sense isn’t this a genuine peice of music? It certainly meets Merriam-Webster’s definition:
a: vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony
b: the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity
7 replies →
Not the 639 year recital?
Complaining about a rest (however long) in a piece by the composer of 4'33'' is certainly A Take.
Regardless of the philosophy of it (which is certainly interesting), many pieces uncontroversially start with a rest. If the first bar doesn’t start on a note, then the piece starts on a rest.
You could argue that the first bar is actually shorter than all the following ones and only starts on the first note, but… no one thinks like that that I ever heard of
> Surely it doesn't really start until the first note is played?
That question itself is built on a radical assumption. Example:
Just skimming, it looks like 38 out of 48 of the fugues from Bach's WTC Books 1 & 2 begin with rests followed by several beats worth of melodies in the first measure[1]. If you think the piece only really starts when the first note of the melody is played, then you've got problems. Either:
1. You hear the first articulation of the melody as the downbeat. But that would mean the first measure is in a disparate (and probably irregular) meter. Radical!
2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!
You can use accent patterns on a modern piano to play any of these fugues using either of these methods, and it will sound silly to non-silly keyboard players.
What's more, non-silly keyboard players do feel the pulse for the first downbeat of these pieces when they perform. Most of them will even inhale before the downbeat, as if they are somehow singing the melody through their fingers.
Finally, lots of music begins with rests: not just conservative cases like Bach, but progressive cases like the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth, and of course the radical cases like Cage's.
This leads to one of the things I love about Cage's music: it compels criticisms that reveal fundamental misunderstandings about music. E.g., you don't buy the radical case-- perhaps reasonable. But you then speculate there are no cases-- which is at odds with common musical practice.
If Cage's music did nothing but compel these questions it would be worth its weight in pine nuts.
Edit:
1: Bach does this because nearly all the fugues have three or more independent melodies singing at the same time. If they are all singing on every downbeat it can quickly sound really clunky and predictable.
> 2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!
Why is this radical at all? This is exactly how most humans perceive it: as a lead-in to the second (I might even argue first) measure. It's very strange to me to say that most humans are supposed to understand the piece to have started before any sound is played. In fact that's quite preposterous: play a song that starts with a rest to 1000 people and ask them to gesture as soon as the song starts, and every single one of them will gesture on the first note played. How are they supposed to perceive the song to have started any earlier than that? A song "starting with rests" is written that way to make it understandable to the performer who is reading the notation. It's a purely notational thing. The notation is not the song, the sound is the song.
> If you think the piece only really starts when the first note of the melody is played, then you've got problems. Either:
> 1. You hear the first articulation of the melody as the downbeat. But that would mean the first measure is in a disparate (and probably irregular) meter. Radical!
> 2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!
Why? Why can't you just say the piece starts partway through a bar, and we notate that with a rest for convenience? Just as when a piece ends partway through a bar we would generally accept that it ends when the last note ends (and while we might notate that as being a full bar in the case of a long held note, we don't always play it that way), not after some trailing rests, and we wouldn't consider this as being some kind of radical accented thing.
> This leads to one of the things I love about Cage's music: it compels criticisms that reveal fundamental misunderstandings about music. E.g., you don't buy the radical case-- perhaps reasonable. But you then speculate there are no cases-- which is at odds with common musical practice.
Love this thought. You disagree with an extreme interpretation, do you take the exact opposite? If not, up to where do you go?
This idea is applicable to so much
In a live orchestra performance, the conductor raises his hands. The audience quiets in anticipation.
He gives an up tick indicating the beginning of the music, then the downbeat of the start of the first measure.
No sound is heard.
The conductor continues to mark time. The silence is deep...profound.
The conductor continues to mark the time of the passing measures.
The audience listens.
At some point, positive sound breaks the silence - suddenly, loudly destroying the stillness! Or possibly very nearly silently - at the uncertain threshold of perception, the audible music begins...
> the audible music begins...
right, so it begins when the music starts playing?
It is 1973.
You go to your hi-fi setup, a veritable temple of sound reproduction.
You peruse your library and select an album. Or perhaps you have a new one that you have carefully carried home from the store. Whichever.
You lift up the cover of your turntable.
Carefully, you extract the vinyl disc from its cardboard and paper sleeves. Taking care not to touch it by its surface, you place it on the turntable. Perhaps you clean its surface with a special lint-catcher designed for this.
You lift up the needle by its little handle. Delicately, you place it on the disc, in the space between the very edge and the visible band of the first track.
There is an anticipatory crackle. A fuzzy pop. The sounds of the needle skidding across the smooth surface of the disc, and dropping into the groove.
A pause.
And then the music begins.
Perhaps the music begins loud and fast. Perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps it's a few words from the bandleader, welcoming you to their new album. Perhaps it's a collage of natural sounds that gradually gives way to music.
When, precisely, did you begin the experience of "listening to music"?
----
It is 2025.
You take out your phone. You turn off its notifications.
You find your headphones and put them on. Perhaps they give off a beep complaining of being out of power, and you have to put them on the charger, and dig up your backup pair, possibly along with an adaptor to plug them into the headphone jack that no longer exists on your new phone.
You open up Spotify, Youtube, whatever you use to stream music. You type in the name of what you want to listen to.
You hit 'play'.
Your phone begins downloading music off the internet. Perhaps first there's an ad. Perhaps several ads. Perhaps not. Perhaps it takes a while to buffer. It's an indeterminate thing.
And then the music begins. As before, perhaps it hits the ground running immediately; perhaps there's some collection of anticipatory sounds, some pause, before the music really gets into gear. Perhaps it's interrupted five seconds in by your discovery that this is actually just the first five seconds of the track followed by an ad for Bitcoin, or the discovery that this is a track with a name similar to what you asked to be played, and you get to go back a few steps. Perhaps you actually get what you wanted.
At what point did you begin the experience of "listening to music"?
1 reply →
The experience begins when the conductor starts marking time.
8 replies →
Check out his other work 4'33". It's an even more extreme try at silence as music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3
It looks like this is his gimmick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3#/media/F...
Haters gonna hate, but there's not much more to his work than using extreme pauses and tempos as art. Maybe it's meta art.
It certainly got him attention.
Not unless it was a "meaningful", aka "musical", rest
Lots of music starts with rests. If the first note isn't on the 1, you'll have rests before it. Not usual at all.
If the first note isn't on the 1, you'll write rests before it, so that the person reading your sheet music understands what's going on. That doesn't mean the music has started yet. The notation is not the music.