Pierre Boulez on John Cage 

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.

I won't miss him.

What a crushingly predictable response.

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.

Hello it's gyorgy kurtag a really great hungarian composer

Otto Tomek

@@pauljackson1029the same Otto Tomek that Stockhausen mentions in the spoken section of Hymnen.

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.

😂

1919viola Idiotic pseudo-philosophy; it makes me want to vomit.

@@rumataastorskiy5734 ...because you're dumb yourself.

Muy conmovedor

Actually, there is but it is obviously a phenomenon that can only be experienced by music composer or music listener on a personal level.