"The amplifier broke. hm? That one was the moment of freedom from intention" Interview recorded at the Dip In The Lake festival, Chicago, 1982 The interviewer is Wim Mertens
For weirdos who know and value the music these people made, this is as hard of an unexpected pleasure nuke one could divine in the most favorable of circumstances. THANKS FOR POSTING!!
Now Cage and Branca are both gone - what a sad loss hearing of Branca's death. I respect Cage as a philosopher/artist, but he didn't understand Glenn Branca. The shattering energy of his music is nearly as powerful a statement about this harshly beautiful world as a Beethoven or Shostakovich symphony.
It's an interesting conversation. Cage says a lot about his feelings on how music interacts with society. I do not know that I agree with everything that he says but enjoy that he is thinking a lot deeper about the experience of music than most do when they hear and discuss music. I some ways I think his points are even more salient today in 2018 than they were in the early 80s. It's easy to discount people because of their demeanor or look or if they say something that perhaps may make you think a bit. SOmething that Cage does not do. We gain a lot more from experiences when we can put ourselves aside as best as possible and just let an expression in. This is something that I think we do less and less these days. I would have liked to have Branca in on this conversation to hear some of his thoughts about music and society.
Wow, I was at this Branca performance at Navy pier in Chicago at the New Music festival, John Cage, of course was there too. Branca played with Sonic Youth , standing onstage in a row, they played in a kind of drone that evolved, and it was POWERFUL and I was blown away. I remember hearing afterwards that John Cage didn't like the performance, and I didn't quite get it. John Cage was awesome, he accessible
The pictures here of Cage and Branca speak volumes about the ocean of difference between the two men. Branca looks bewildered or furious, the graffiti splattered behind him feels explosive. He is smoking. His is an image of power and profanity. Cage gazes calmly from a world of stillness, light and shadow tempered evenly. His cat sits peacefully with him. I get the feeling from Cage's picture that he exists in a stillness Branca can't or won't achieve. Is it any wonder they butted heads?
Exactly. Pharisee and publican. I'm always on the side of the publican, i.e. Branca. Which doesn't mean I don't think Cage wasn't a great composer. I do. Just that he could be as narrow-minded as anyone when he chose.
@@danytomi3087 That's fair. Although, given the context of the interview, I still find these two particular images strikingly descriptive of Cage's and Branca's respective "territories" in the musical world.
I think brancas music has a place in the world just like cage. I think cage wants to call Branca fascist but is too polite to say it. Brancas music is ( possibly) about darkness and rage and power and it is perfectly valid to express this. This was the art of Francis Bacon, Vincent Van Gogh, Goya, shotakovitch, Gorecki. Should we not allow dark disruptive art because it doesn’t align to principles ?
Hummm... This stands for, maybe, the eternal sociopolitical terms, issues and non eidetical morphologies of the raw power, which deals of supremacist-physicalist-mainstream-ontic-autoinclusionism, always pretensioned and boosted against some very certain kind hemidialectical-metaphysical-alternative-onthological-exclusionism, which consists the first mainly of a monolithic false formalist Exegesis, and I relate to Bird In a Cage... At least, psychic pain is not so idiopatic as some stubborners maintain even today: Durkheim the positivist even said something like that, I think... As a matter of fact, this reminds me of a beginner who watches a Dali painting as some kind of art foundation, falseably ignoring that Hyeronimous Boschus was the true vanguard, and 4 centuries earlier than the mesmerizing histrionic virtual show off in charge of Mister Moustache... Just saying, but maybe I am too partial me too...
Cage equates anger or fear or rage with fascism. He has swallowed and denied his own shadow and therefore doesn’t wish to see it expressed by others. There must be no expression of darkness according to him / so no Francis Bacon, no Shostakovich - so he too wants a tyranny. A brave new world of passivity. Peace is not the same as ennui and ennui is often what I feel when I interact with Cage. He’s sniper little comments about Laurie Andersen etc just make him sound jealous and prissy,
Really interesting, thanks. Not sure about the way Cage extends his obvious personal-aesthetic differences from Branca into the political. And he's said similar things about much Western music. But his reservations will surely strike a chord with those for whom Branca can be a bit of an apocalyptic bore.
while i both hate and laugh at this interview more each time i hear it, there is definitely inspiration to be gleaned from it. why didn't cage write a piece for breaking amplifiers? (for example).. (did he?)
Politically? I wouldn't want a society elevating paranoid perceptions on others. My program to Branca in 1982 announced this very perception as a motivation to illustrate. Feuerbach: The peak of illusion is the peak of the sacred to so many, potentially. Maybe Cage is more touchy about the possibility of his own fault, so projects that outward. See this Everyday.
As much as I love John Cage (he changed my life), he's off the mark here with his criticism of Glenn Branca. John was about Yin ...he was about minimalism (and so much more...I get it, I've studied JC for years)....what John didn't get (or didn't want to get) was that Glenn B. was about the Yang, which is the perfect compliment to John's Yin approach to music. So actually, there is really nothing to discuss here. I think John had an over reaction to Glenn's Yang approach...nothing more, nothing less.
that´s a pretty interesting view on this accident. i never liked to listen to cage´s works but consumed branca´s excessively since 1980 btw. you´re probably right about the yin/yang thing. it makes sense to me. it´s probably it. nothing else.
I like Branca's pieces' raw power, it doesn't mean I want all music to be like that, while being super appreciative that someone did it. Is Cage's forgetting about the contemplative and reflective side of pieces. They can make you think, but you are the on who follows the though. Personally, I see Cage as being afraid, but I did not know him and can easily be wrong.. Both great artists.
i think Cage's way of reasoning here is a classical example of what we would call today 'passive aggressiveness'. Its almost Guru-like. With a soft voice, he dismisses Mertens argument about goal /non-goal with saying its a false use of language, which is simply not the case, Mertens is right when he says there actually IS a goal in his composition even if Cage calls it 'a non-goal', ironically Cage is here the one misusing the language. The comparing to weird religions is not very factual or anything as well, you could say that about anyone really, its just painting a bad aura around Branca, but it doesn't mean much. And its very Trump-like to say 'i didn't see it' about the fact Branca's music was written and every musician had a stand with notes... Instead of saying 'Oh, i got that wrong, i didn't know it was written', he just says that he didn't see it. Wow. Not sure if i could be in the room with that guy very long. He is basically being a little like a untouchable guru /authoritarian leader who is blaming Branca vaguely, for being one.
I have to say I didn't find him at all difficult to be around when he was the featured artist at Huddersfield Festival many years ago, very approachable and tons of humour - every seemed to delight in interacting with him. I mainly got the feeling from this interview that too much is being read into the way he expresses himself. Wish the Trump like comparison hadn't been used, he was in another universe to that idiot.
@@chrisbywater275 yeah, sorry could have left out that trump thing, its just that trump was all over the place all the time when i wrote that, and cage does use the same techniques here, albeit an a totally different level/planet etc. i can imagine he i a nice guy normally, but not in this interview at least also, i can imagine many people wouldn't even notice him being manipulative or his tendencies in that direction. it surely doesn't look like he is doing this a first time
I'm sorry to see this interpretation. I find that people who love to use some form of the phrase "passive aggressive" (and the word "pretentious" is another one) either don't understand their meaning or their use of it tells more of their social standards than the person they're criticizing. As for not having a goal, the only person in this case who is describing it as a "goal" is Mertens along with anybody else who sees some kind of essential dichotomy. What kind of a statement is "not very factual or anything as well"? Clearly not a well-thought out one. Also, it's truly a ridiculous reach to say that it's "Trump-like" to genuinely not remember seeing any music scores being played on stage. I don't remember seeing them either - and it may have been because of the onslaught of sound coupled with an overwhelming need to be egotistically and highly flamboyant so as to present an emotional spectacle that may have erased any memory that either I, Cage, or a number of other people that I've talked to who don't remember whether they noticed sheet music on stage that night had. Sitting at the same table as Cage, he was clearly shaken - and even tho Cage, later, came to terms with his dislike of the event by opening up some, it was clearly a performance that reflected the antithesis of Cage's own, by that time, 30 year history of philosophical turning towards a lessening of the ego.
Lmao bro Trump is anything but passive aggressive, I mean come on. As for Cage his analysis was probably right but that doesn't change the fact that he was a nob goblin and that Branca's Will to Power is exactly why his music is so superior and forward thinking.
Well, I'm with you on this mostly I think. I don't have a bias for Branca, but my gut reaction to Cage here, however lovely he might have been while picking mushrooms or attending festivals, is 'Ugh.' And I want to say to him, Branca isn't music for the creation of some other society, it's for the one we've got, it's a rage at that one - and we might need it in a Cageian utopia too if it was going to be as coldly pious about itself as Cage is being here.
the interviewer is outright baiting cage by 13:00. this is all a bit cheap, really. a masturbatory discussion. branca's music isn't "useless". i found a use for it.
Eric Sandoval Cage says "I believe.. and i don't believe..." about 50 times in this interview. That to me is subjectivity. Just because cage is confident In his music vs brancas doesn't mean its objective
Cage and Branca both seemed pretty insufferable tbh. But ultimately Branca had incredible vision and Cage just somehow absolutely didn't understand it at all.
another example of Cage disliking an artist because they are doing something that disrupts notions. I may as well start using who he dislikes as a guide to new art.
I have more respect for Branca because he actually knows where he is going with his music, he holds it in his very palm. Cage doesn't seem to know what he wants to express with his music except the contradiction of everything else than exists. However, I admire his devotion to explore news kinds of sounds, but, if the sound doesn't support any emotional purpose, it’s kind of pointless if you want to enjoy something outside of the boundary of the analysis. there is the point where totalitarism is better than anarchism : the totalitarism actually go somewhere and it makes progress possible, and the anarchism is just about chaos; doesn't mean than nothing can emerge from chaos, but nothing can be predicted. I consider Cage as an anarchist, an dadaist. Bianca is an emperor, an expressionist who rules his own world.
the second time he is accusing mertens of misusing the language would have been right IF mertens would have said that, which he didn't. Cage here cleverly twists the argument, he is very manipulative actually... What he does here is masking the fact that first time he accused Mertens of misusage he was wrong, by accusing him rightly so this time, giving the first time more weight, (again, if mertens would have said it) simultaneously breaking down/avoiding the next question that mertens COULD have asked, and probably wanted: Why does it have to be new all the time? What good is 'new'? The way he laughs his way through that manipulative trick, 'the language pro--haha-perly-haha' makes it a little devilish even. He knows really well how to do it.
i think you guys are taking too seriously cage's understanding of glenn branca music. it's only his opinion. he is not trying to force his comprehension of branca's music to the interviewer or anyone. of course i disagree with john cage opinion.
I like both Cage and Branca and in a weird way I like that Cage isn't a fan of Branca's, but I think his reasoning is a bit bogus. He just seems bitter and trying to go down these deep paths to justify it. Cage, in my opinion was just as guilty as most of the things he shames Branca for in this. I think he gets to the bone of it when he started complaining that it wasn't written music being played about half way through the video. A bit too uptight to embrace free forms of expression. I expected him to have this sort of opinion.
Branca’s music sounded different than other music, he was a true and individual composer. He obviously never forced people to play his music, so Cage’s objections about ‘living in a society like that’ are completely pointless. In many orchestras, the Musician’s are playing old warhorse music for the paycheck, but even there, what’s wrong with hearing a little Beethoven sometimes? Branca could unleash the power of that music, but was free to make it sound how he wanted, and many people were honored and inspired to play with him. That is the society we live in.
what is he talking about?i have huge respect for Branca,i believe i have some idea where he s coming from,but Cage is interesting,think about what he's saying...it comes across as very academic and dry,but then so is the worst of branca s music...
is Branca not expressing the society he is living in not a society he desires? Isn't the power and fascism in his music the power and fascism of the 80s?
Cage was as limiting as anyone in his approach to art and music. He had his own definition of what music should be, and whatever went against his definition somehow corrupts the world. Listening to him here is so exasperating. He's hopelessly incredulous. Branca wants to make music. Cage wanted to change society. He was only interested in freedom as long as he was the one defining freedom. That's real narcissism. A controlling authoritarian masquerading under the guise of a liberator.
Sekar Kuno now imagine that you where recorded saying what you've wrote and we are now put to reflect on the thoughts you are projecting onto Cage, what does it say about you?
Hard to call anyone an authoritarian who lived like a monk and never assembled a cult around his ideas. Far as I know Cage's thought never demanded submission to their authority at gunpoint or even prick point.
Never has it been more clear that Cage is an overrated swish. Not surprising when a constipated critic like Hanslick asserts that music should be some certain way but it blows my negative mind when a composer does it. Cage chafes at the totalitarian flavor of Branca's Totalism; it's too deterministic for mister indeterminacy. Just a few years after this interv Branca and Mertens shared the soundtrack work on Greenaway's "Belly of an architect".
I think Cage just didn't enjoy the music and was projecting some vague philosophical/political mumbo jumbo onto it. The part about success was rediculous, if he didn't know what the term means he shouldn't have usedit in the first place. Also Branca's approach to music might be agressive, but it wasn't fascist or anything, like Cage seems to imply. In this video Branca talks about ways to bring ambiguity and freedom into his music: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-3tCX32pUDzQ.html
I would be interested in hearing Branca's own counterpoints to this shpiel here. I picture him either brushing this off and simply giving no fucks or loudly dismissing Cage as a pretentious twat. I feel like either reaction would be fair. I am definitely cringing at just about every word out of Cage's mouth, which is honestly kind of rare for me. While I can appreciate some of his lofty academic ideas about music and sound, I feel safe in saying what little recorded material of his work is boring as shit. Cage himself also suffers from an ideology that is just as restrictive as the scathing projections he accuses Branca of. But whatever... plenty of recorded material exists to prove Glenn the better composer than Cage. And just a way more interesting and inspiring individual for my tastes.
So basically the music was too abrasive, which Cage considers self serving and uncontrolled and other negative things? That's pretty petty on Cage's part. I think there's wonder and validity to both of their approaches. Since he's such an obviously forward thinker, I'm upset that Cage would arrive at such a "I don't get it, so it's wrong" conclusion. I guess no one's free from getting caught up in their ways.
Yeah, but the rest of what I said still stands. He's still picking at petty things to invalidate what Branca does. It's just a different style of putting the music together.
Cage thought loss of authorial control was pretty essential - that's his philosophy - so in that sense it's not petty for him, it's fundamental. there's validity in all approaches. I wouldn't agree with "I don't get it, so it's wrong". I'm sure he gets it, he just disagrees with it. His right.
A person can be fundamentally petty. Still reeks of a man too caught up in his own ways to accept other approaches. The fact that he uses words like terrifying is unreasonable, and all of his rhetoric is full of unfair assumptions.
i suspect he's playing it for effect somewhat. I am both a Cage and a Branca fan. That said I'm surprised how touchy are Branca fans in response to this interview. I don't mean you necessarily
I dunno, Cage talks like a post-structuralist and it gets annoying sometimes--the whole misuse of language thing. The comment on fascism and religious fanaticism is interesting, I see where he's coming from, but there's a lot of hyperbole. It's a simple free jazz vs. structured type of argument, but it's interesting. The comment on if it would become popular music or not is interesting. It *did* become popular: postrock, black metal, shoegaze, noise rock--all these things exist in a range of popularity.
I don't think Cages argument is very smart. A piece of music does not work like a demokracy. there are certain regulations that the musicians have to accept, because the piece can not be played in any other way. This is the same with Cage.
free improvisation doesn't exist. when you free yourself from concepts you're starting to fall into most basic cliches, because they're most obvious for human brain chemistry. then if, as an artist, you recognize that limitation you're don't improvising no more, you're controlling where you DON'T WANT to go.
that's an interesting view. I'm not sure I agree with it because it seems to misunderstanding what free improvisation is. Of course you are controlling yourself, but you are not being controlled by a composer/conductor or any overriding concept of the piece. Sometimes it's simply about focusing on pure sound and timbral evolution which isn't so cliché ridden (at least it gets you away from the 12 notes). But it's totally wrong to suggest that free improvisation doesn't have any concepts. The player has a concept, they are conscious of and deliberate in what they are doing.
I was only talking about Cages own compositions - which are in fact also in most cases detached from the 12 notes, and from functional rhythm and harmony. But the music is still dominated by the composer. which is fine with me, but no principle difference to Branca. Of course Cage's musik is way more interesting, but that doesn't make it a better model for a society. I see indeterminacy as a compositional technique, to create an aesthetic of surprise. The social aspect of it is hypocrisy. Even with improvisation there is an elitist aspect, since not anyone is allowed to play, and usually you don't play with musicians whose music you don't like. Democracy is pretty easy, if everyone has the same opinion anyway.
Actually much of Cage's music seeks to detach the composer, totally the opposite of what you're saying. He used things like dice throws or iching sticks to determine amplitude, pitch and duration of notes, so in this case the music is dominated by chance rather than any deliberation by the composer. It's very different to Branca, that's the whole point he's making. Also, much is left to the musicians. Do your research.
Paraphrase - "If someone else's music doesn't follow my ideas, than it's useless and fascistic." Cage's ideas are interesting and subversive, and the best part of the clip is where he essentially explains what he's trying to do with his music. But it's, um, dictatorial to insist that other composers follow your ideological programme.
It's arrogant and egotistical to think your ideas about music are the only ones worth exploring. Not that Branca's any better - I just read an interview where he said he basically only listens to the music of bands influenced by him (Sonic Youth, Swans, etc.) and his minimalist influences (Reich, Young, etc.) Based on these two, I'd be tempted to say genius might require that you hold everyone else in contempt, but the example of brilliant music-makers like Terry Riley and John Zorn show that ain't so, and that wide, eclectic listening habits can actually enhance your music.
