I really wish guys like John were just honest about their motivations for once.
"This piece of music demands that we give attention to the world around us, rather than drown it out. I refuse to teach it because I would rather the world be drowned."
Comes off either oddly elitist ("This isn't how this piece is meant to be experienced! The way I think it should is the only way!") or as someone with an ulterior motive grasping at straws.
"Does the piece require you to become aware of the sounds of the world around you? Yes. But I don't want you to be aware of some of those things! Instead we will listen to John Phillips Sousa."
It’s a core course taught by a cohort of profs, grad students, and adjuncts in order to keep the classes small. It’s framed in a very conservative way as “masterpieces of western music” tho many instructors teach it with a critical approach to the canon.
Sounds like Music Appreciation by another name, but I guess I wouldn’t know since I never had to take either. I made the mistake of criticizing the canon exactly once in a music history class and my prof looked at me like I’d just suggested we all defrock and streak through the quad. Never again.
Sorry you had that experience. I was one of those grad students who taught the course against the grain, starting from the premise that there is no such thing as an objective "masterpiece" or music or anything else.
We had a prof in the department who helped us to develop radical teaching strategies for the course. He was denied tenure, and then went on to have an extremely successful career elsewhere.
John Cage also had a piece performed as a solo or ensemble for 1-8 performers, each at one radio tuning to different frequencies for 45 minutes. That wouldn't work here either.
Coming from someone who earned a liberal arts degree in music and spent a whole unit learning about John Cage, whoever was the prof here is a real loser.
If there is a better piece that symbolizes the idea of ignoring the world's problems in order to maintain the status quo I'd like to see it except in that it doesn't exist.
The piece that wants you to stop and listen to what others are saying cannot be listened to. Otherwise, you would stop and listen to what the protesters are saying.
Peak cognitive dissonance there. Have people forgotten that the entire point of protest is to be disruptive and difficult to ignore?!
He compares it to like Neo Nazi protests and you know what I’ll bite the bullet fuck it if there was a Neo Nazi protest going on and it made a student deeply upset as part of the piece? This is music! That is worth doing! What the hell is the point of this exercise?
Gonna push back here. There's a difference between experiencing art as a willing participant and art as a captive audience. Sure, you can let students leave, or listen to their own music on headphones, but it's easier to just reschedule.
I'd look heavily askance at a professor who went on with a performance of 4'33 while neonazis chanted outside, and if I were a student I'd leave the room for the duration or otherwise occupy myself wrt audio.
Yeah I don’t mean that it’s a captive audience scenario. College classes should never be captive audiences unless they rely on participatory student input. Never come to class if you want if you pass the final you’re good
I'll push back on that a little bit in return, as someone who attended a craft and trade college to be a professional artist.
The beauty of art is that it carries meaning. Politics and inspiration for social change is a huge part of what we study, with entire electives based around using art as a-
- form of protest! Certainly, you would rightly be offended at having to listen to Neo-Nazis chanting outside. That's exactly how you should feel, in a perfect world.
But ignoring them negates the point of the piece. Why would you look askance at a professor who is doing exactly what the point-
It is a little amazing that a guy reacting to a presentation on John Cage in his music humanities class has so thoroughly failed to understand John Cage, music, and humanity.
No one in the history of humanity has had the meaning of a piece of art fly so above their head the international space station was threatened by their stupidity.
The absolute gall to publish this, as if the inability to listen to a piece of music once is somehow worse than protesting a genocide that will keep tens of thousands from ever listening to music again...
It’s right there in Cage’s score: “Birds, or people walking by in the hallway, are acceptable performance conditions, but angry chanting sounds are not”
Comments
"This piece of music demands that we give attention to the world around us, rather than drown it out. I refuse to teach it because I would rather the world be drowned."
- John Cage
So not "listen to the birds outside".
https://youtu.be/7WSrFeNFuCI?si=y8HtMBxcSDQShWjJ
Yeah man, right there, those words should have brought you up short and forced you to ask yourself some awkward questions.
Audio Grooming
Actual conservatives in academia: The song that's about ambient noise is only about specific ambient noises.
Peak cognitive dissonance there. Have people forgotten that the entire point of protest is to be disruptive and difficult to ignore?!
I had one class, once, that let me do that. And then I went to law school. :(
The beauty of art is that it carries meaning. Politics and inspiration for social change is a huge part of what we study, with entire electives based around using art as a-
But ignoring them negates the point of the piece. Why would you look askance at a professor who is doing exactly what the point-
I'd be infuriated to hear a Neo-Nazi protest, but it would strike me to the core. That's. The. Point.
You're supposed to become *aware* of your surroundings, for better or worse. If the surroundings are bad, then become motivated to change them.
Everybody look what's going down.