[Dixielandjazz] Contemporary Music

[Bill Gunter]

Hi Kash (and all),

I said:

>"As we all realize, this is total garbage".

And you said:

>I must agree that things like that "long" concert are stupid.  However, we
>shouldn't blow off all of contemporary music along with it.

I didn't say anything general about contemporary music although I did 
mention two items from the University of Califolrnia at Davis Music 
Department that were distinctly non-music.  By the way, Cage was a driving 
force at UC Davis for a period and, as Steve Barbone pointed out, he got 
lots of attention, press coverage and grants.  What a world!

His composition "organ/ASLSP" is only designed to last 639 years. I hope 
they allow the audience an opportunity to go to the bathroom now and then.

For a peek into the mind of John Cage, here is an exerpt from an interview 
he did on Pacifica Radio back in (I think) 1969.

----start snip

CAGE: I have, as far as, oh, a loftier notion of what to do in the future, I 
have the idea to make another large work that might be considered in the 
series of Atlas Eclipticalis. This would be called Atlas Burialis, with the 
ten thunderclaps, and the ten thunderclaps are from James Joyce's Finnegan's 
Wake. And they are, as you probably know from MacLuhan a capsule history of 
technology, so that the last thunderclap refers to the time in which we're 
living and electronics, uh, specifically. And I want the work to be 
performed by a conventional orchestra and chorus, but the instruments and 
the singers provided with contact or throat microphones, so that the tones 
that are produced, and the sounds that are produced, go through these 
microphones and are transformed to fill the envelope of an actual 
thunderstorm. So that, though it would begin as Finnegan's Wake in terms of 
the text and notes taken from a book of maps called Atlas Borealis, that the 
voices would produce the thunderclaps and fill those envelopes of actual 
thunderclaps and the orchestra probably -- and most of it is string 
orchestra -- would, um, fill the envelopes of rain dropping on materials 
suitable to that history of technology. In a sense, it's a project like that 
that Jasper Johns completed when he made those Cans of Ale. In other words, 
he saw something in his environment and then made it. Also, I remember a 
girl in Cincinnati who, um, emptied -- took out the yolk and the white from 
an egg, very carefully. and then inserted wax and then took the shell off 
and she had a waxed egg. (laughter) And this would be, so to speak, you'd 
take a real thunderstorm, with the rain and everything, and you'd take it 
all out to find out what the shell of it was, you see, and, then, fill it up 
with people.

----->end snip

Isn't that just precious!

Now, friends - I'm here to state that Cage was limited in his thinking.

I'm creating a work that will last for a REALLY long time.

Since time can be measured as a line with a specific dimension (one of the 
four demensions in our space-time continuum), we must understand that any 
line contains an INFINITE number of points.

My composition calls for a single discrete note to be sounded at each and 
every point in the specific time line. That means an infinite number of 
notes and you'll just have to guess at how long that will take.

There are a few details to work out yet (from a musical point of view) -- 
since a point has no dimension of it own the note must have no dimension. 
I'm working on how to produce a dimensionless note. And you thought music 
was easy . . . hah!

Respectfully submitted,

Bill "Cage was a piker" Gunter
jazzboard at hotmail.com