[HN Gopher] John Cage recital set to last 639 years recently wit...
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John Cage recital set to last 639 years recently witnessed a chord
change
Author : pseudolus
Score : 149 points
Date : 2025-03-31 15:10 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.spectator.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.spectator.co.uk)
| jfengel wrote:
| This is the same guy who wrote 4'33", the silent piece.
|
| I kinda get that -- the 40000 Hz podcast gave it some good
| context:
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/433-by-john-cage-twent...
|
| Maybe they'll also explain the point of this. The piece is called
| "As Slow As Possible", but it's _not_ as slow as possible. The
| slowest possible piece would have a fermata with an infinity sign
| over the first note, and that 's it. Maybe the rest of it would
| be a jaunty little tune that would never be played in context.
| ("Shave and a haircut", perhaps?)
|
| As a stunt, it's moderately interesting. How do you set up a
| contraption to play for hundreds of years? How do you maintain it
| without interrupting the performance? But it's less interesting
| than the 10,000 year clock.
| treetalker wrote:
| > The slowest possible piece would have a fermata with an
| infinity sign over the first note, and that's it.
|
| But then the piece would never be completely played, which
| seems like a requirement for Cage's musical game / art /
| philosophical statement.
|
| Moreover, your hypothetical piece could still technically be
| played at a high tempo. It seems like the point of the Cage
| piece is to play it at the slowest possible tempo, not over the
| greatest length of time possible (and that's why the fermata
| idea doesn't fit). (So while you're correct that 639 years
| doesn't represent the slowest tempo possible (just play it over
| 640 years instead, right?) it's the idea of extreme slowness
| that's interesting. Or perhaps "as slow as possible" refers to
| the tempo that really was as slow as possible (at the time it
| was set up) because of technological constraints.
|
| Without having deeply researched the piece, I wonder if 639
| years was chosen with any relation to Tesla's 3-6-9 idea.
|
| Edit: It looks like the 639 years comes from the "performer(s)"
| who set up the equipment, not from Cage himself. The composer
| only gave the instruction to play it as slowly as possible,
| which plays into the technological-limitations idea above, I
| think.
| Svip wrote:
| > Without having deeply researched the piece, I wonder if 639
| years was chosen with any relation to Tesla's 3-6-9 idea.
|
| From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2728595.stm
|
| > They settled on 639 years because the Halberstadt organ was
| 639 years old in the year 2000.
| Retric wrote:
| Saying "As slow as possible" isn't followable any more than
| putting an infinity sign next to a note. You can't know how
| long a piece of equipment lasts unless you decide to break it
| at an arbitrary time.
|
| These performers choose a completely arbitrary number
| independent of technical limitations, and then ran into
| technical limitations.
| mingus88 wrote:
| In other words "interpretation"
|
| It's so funny coming from a musical background and reading
| all these comments of people who have no idea what they are
| talking about criticizing one of the worlds most famous
| modern composers
|
| Every performance ever done has been the performer
| interpreting the composer's score and making it their own.
| Nobody want to hear a robotic perfectly accurate recreation
| of what is on the page, because even the act of
| transcription alters the composer's intent. The score is
| not the art!
|
| There is no perfection in art. It's all subjective, by the
| literal definition of art.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| > Every performance ever done has been the performer
| interpreting the composer's score and making it their
| own.
|
| To be fair, there are multiple lines of thought on that
| matter. Some conductors enjoy "making it their own,"
| while other conductors attempt to discover and reproduce
| the composer's original intention as closely as possible.
| Toscanini comes to mind as a historical example of the
| latter, although I'm sure there are others.
|
| At a certain point, a composer needs to provide
| information to compose a piece. What if someone wrote a
| "solo" that just said "improvise" and contained no notes
| at all? The argument being presented above is that Cage
| did the tempo equivalent of that. This is a philosophy
| argument at best, not "people who have no idea what
| they're talking about."
| mingus88 wrote:
| You are right, but the choice to attempt a historically
| accurate reproduction is also subject to interpretation.
|
| It simply can never be perfect. Down to the acoustics of
| the venue, there will always be aspects of a performance
| that are lost to time and can never be reproduced. And
| how can we even know, since no recordings exist (and if
| they did, that recording would introduce its own
| artifacts).
|
| How many people dance to a bouree today? Can any
| performance of one really be be accurate outside the
| context of dance? Sitting politely in a huge recital hall
| is no at all accurate
|
| And even then, the music falls on modern ears. We hear
| and understand music completely differently than ancient
| people did. Can we even consider anything to be accurate,
| since Art is experienced?
|
| I love renaissance music, and listen to as many
| recordings as I can where the performer uses a vihuela,
| theorbo, lute, etc. It's a totally nerdy pursuit. But
| it's only "accurate" to a point
|
| The bottom line for me is that Art is subjective. Do it
| in the way that satisfies your urge to create. As soon as
| it leaves your body, it belongs to the rest of us to
| interpret and experience. There are no right or wrong
| ways to express yourself.
| Retric wrote:
| Nothing stops someone interpreting an infinity sign.
|
| The point is both are impossible to achieve, not that
| nobody can make a related performance.
| ehnto wrote:
| Adam Neely and his band Sungazer did an interesting live
| experiment with his audiences, to figure out the slowest beat
| or pulse that people would be able to "feel" and dance to.
| Slowest possible isn't really as interesting in my opinion as
| slowest practical, which I think Neely and co's experiment
| explored. The track was Threshold on the album Perihelion.
|
| The whole album explored beat, pulse and timings as it relates
| to how people can actually feel and interact with music. Really
| interesting!
| markedathome wrote:
| is that also the album/live shows that had the audience
| dancing to the beats 1,2,3,4 which they thought was 4/4 but
| in such a way that the underlying time-signature was
| different?
| nkrisc wrote:
| > The piece is called "As Slow As Possible", but it's not as
| slow as possible.
|
| In what way is it "possible" to play an infinitely long piece
| of music?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > How do you set up a contraption to play for hundreds of
| years? How do you maintain it without interrupting the
| performance?
|
| All you need is more than one source of sound and you can
| maintain each of them while they're not playing.
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _How do you set up a contraption to play for hundreds of
| years? How do you maintain it without interrupting the
| performance?_
|
| You play it with an orchestra (or perhaps a quartet is enough).
| Players may take turns to eat, sleep, and even have work-life
| balance. They also may retire (or die) and be replaced by new
| musicians. (How much would it cost?)
| derbOac wrote:
| Sort of interesting that the Clock of the Long Now and Cage's
| ORGAN2/ASLSP were conceived around the same time -- 1989 and
| 1987, respectively.
|
| Also worth noting the clock's name is from Brian Eno, who has
| expressed interest in developing chimes for the clock. So
| Cage's work was kinda presaging the clock.
| brookst wrote:
| I think you may be misinterpreting "possible" here. I'm shocked
| that it's possible to get funding and interest to make a 639
| year piece happen. It is unclear if it will be possible to
| complete. I do not think it would be possible to make a 10,000
| year piece happen.
|
| As with all things, the contraption is not the hard part. It's
| the supporting civilization, society, economic context, and
| will of generations of people.
|
| Cage's game here is to question the entire scaffolding of art,
| not the pigments of the paint.
| mingus88 wrote:
| No musical performance is ever a 100% literal translation of
| the score. That's pretty much impossible for any work. A score
| is not a set of MIDI instructions and a performer is not a
| sound card.
|
| This post is wild because "what is the point of this" seems to
| be complexly divorced from the human drive to create and
| express one's self.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _The slowest possible piece would have a fermata with an
| infinity sign over the first note, and that 's it._
|
| That piece has already been written. It's called AUM.
| cess11 wrote:
| Less known than 4'33" being "silent" (which it's not) is that
| John Cage was an anarchist.
|
| "Both Fuller and Marshall McLuhan knew, furthermore, that work is
| now obsolete. We have invented machines to do it for us. Now that
| we have no need to do anything what shall we do? Looking at
| Fuller's Geodesic World Map we see that the earth is a single
| island. Oahu. We must give all the people all they need to live
| in any way they wish. Our present laws protect the rich from the
| poor. If there are to be laws we need ones that begin with the
| acceptance of poverty as a way of life. We must make the earth
| safe for poverty without dependence on government."
|
| https://monoskop.org/images/9/9c/Cage_John_Anarchy_New_York_...
| (PDF)
|
| A shorter read here:
|
| https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/09/15/john-cage-silence-...
| kleiba wrote:
| Any sufficiently advanced art is indistinguishable from baloney.
| brookst wrote:
| While any mass produced off the shelf baloney runs the risk of
| being transformed into art at a moment's notice.
| seydor wrote:
| avant garde is so 20th century
| brookst wrote:
| I weep for the future of post-post-modernism.
| sayamqazi wrote:
| I bet every generation before us thought the same and every
| generation after us will think the same.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| This is one of the core tenets in the mythology of social
| conservatism. This notion that somehow thigns cam somehow
| stay the same... forever. This is usually expressed with
| wording around values, tradition and customs.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| As opposed to the core tenant of the mythology of social
| liberalism, the notion that somehow things can
| continuously change, at infinite speeds to an infinite
| degree, without blowing everything up at some point?
|
| I don't think most social conservatives would agree with
| your interpretation that they want everything to stay the
| same forever. Rather, the "values, tradition, and
| customs" that you're crapping on are something to reflect
| on and guide change in a hopefully more peaceful,
| sustainable, and manageable way.
|
| "Conservatives want everything frozen in time forever" is
| a straw-man to support a false dilemma.
| zombot wrote:
| I would have expected that headline from The Onion, but once
| again reality trumps satire.
| wtcactus wrote:
| And some wonder why the great majority of the people can't really
| be bothered with the argument "but AI is destroying real art".
|
| Look at the sad, ridiculous, self pleasing, detached group, the
| art community has become. And this example is not really even one
| of the most offensive.
|
| I bet that if today's artists were still sculpting La Pieta or
| painting The Girl With the Pearl Hearing, the common men would be
| way more willing to accept the argument that AI art doesn't have
| a soul... but for playing 4 chords every 10 years, or for
| sticking a banana to a wall? No, thank you, I'll have those
| Studio Gibli ChatGPT look alike instead. At least they look
| minimaly interesting and visually pleasing.
| piva00 wrote:
| Your view about art is just too constrained by an appeal to
| aesthetic beauty. Art's beauty can come in many obtuse ways,
| and doesn't even need to encompass aesthetic beauty.
|
| The exploration of philosophy through art has its own beauty,
| it's not an easily digestible beauty but it's a kind of. What
| you show is just a complete lack of perception to other ways to
| appreciate art, and for that your soul is a bit more empty than
| it could be.
|
| Instead of looking at art from this productivity view try to be
| more curious, challenge yourself on what is even the notion of
| art and what it can give to us that is ineffable in other
| forms... Right now you are just too miopic to even be able to
| appreciate art as a whole, you just want the product of art,
| not the process, meaning, and philosophical questions it can
| spark in you.
|
| To understand art takes effort, it tells me a lot about people
| when they show how uncurious and set in their ways they are
| about art, they just simply aren't free people.
| wtcactus wrote:
| Oh, please. Enough with that fake intellectual nonsense.
|
| We spent the last 6000 years improving our artistic
| endeavours up to the 19th century when artists were capable
| of displaying human emotion with the most absolute mastery of
| the human body and its movement in all its glory, and then
| come along, a bunch of fake intellectuals, decided to explain
| to the rest of the world that they were experiencing art
| wrong, so that any lazy or ungifted artist could put together
| a bunch of garbage (yes, literally garbage in some examples)
| and call that art, and that the rest of us were too dumb to
| understand it's fabulous meaning
|
| Well. Nobody is falling for that any more.
| airstrike wrote:
| Hear, hear! This point is beautifully made by philosopher
| Roger Scruton in his "Why Beauty Matters"
|
| https://vimeo.com/groups/832551/videos/549715999
|
| Unfortunately I think too many people are still falling for
| that nonsense
| piva00 wrote:
| Sure, keep being uncurious and ignorant, it's all your
| choice, it's you who is missing out.
|
| "Fake intellectuals" is just... Sad, devaluing whole bodies
| of work simply because you cannot understand them, instead
| of attempting to curiously explore that you prefer to use a
| thought-terminating cliche and embrace your ignorance as
| supreme... All the while you live during a time where all
| information and knowledge in the world is there for you to
| access for free.
|
| It's just... Sad to live that way but ignorance is bliss
| since it's just so much easier to reject anything that
| challenges you.
| wtcactus wrote:
| The fact that this modern "art" needs to be subsidized by
| the people that actually works with their taxes, is all
| the argument needed to tell you that indeed this is
| nothing more than fake intellectualism.
|
| I'm not missing on absolutely anything by not
| appreciating a banana glued to a wall. In fact, nobody
| really appreciates that, it's just a bunch of sycophants
| pretending they have some artistic knowledge the rest of
| us, the poor populace, lack, that go on pretending with
| the charade.
|
| The rest of the world, are just willing to tell you that
| the emperor has no clothes.
| piva00 wrote:
| > The fact that this modern "art" needs to be subsidized
| by the people that actually works with their taxes, is
| all the argument needed to tell you that indeed this is
| nothing more than fake intellectualism.
|
| When exactly did art not need financial support from the
| State, or rich patrons, to be able to be made?
|
| You are moving the discussion into a completely different
| territory now, and again showing how your view of art is
| principled in some kind of "productivity" measurement,
| which is so absurd that is not even wrong.
|
| > I'm not missing on absolutely anything by not
| appreciating a banana glued to a wall. In fact, nobody
| really appreciates that, it's just a bunch of sycophants
| pretending they have some artistic knowledge the rest of
| us, the poor populace, lack, that go on pretending with
| the charade.
|
| The banana glued to a wall is one work of art (and
| polemic for a reason), and you are using that to paint a
| broad stroke over all contemporary art as if there is
| nothing being told there... You don't know what you are
| missing exactly because you don't know what it is, you
| wouldn't know the colours you'd be missing if you were
| born with black-and-white sight, nor would know you are
| missing music if you were born deaf. The difference is
| that you are not born with an unchangeable characteristic
| to not appreciate art in different ways, you can work on
| that, you just choose not to.
|
| There's no charade, the actual charade is why are you so
| vitriolic opposed to something you do not even
| understand, lol. It reeks of some sort of insecurity,
| since you do not understand you feel it's beneath you
| because makes you feel lesser that others might "get it"
| and you are out of the club? I don't know, look inside
| you to find an answer because the passionate rage about
| something you do not understand has deeper roots.
| airstrike wrote:
| It's not up to you guys to say we "do not even
| understand". It's too handwavy and a false premise. We
| could argue the same... you guys "don't understand" how
| much bullshit there is in contemporary art to the point
| it's basically noise at this point.
| jcattle wrote:
| What do you think about the state of music? Do you also
| feel that since the 19th century it has only been down
| hill?
| wtcactus wrote:
| Erudite music (i.e. what we call classical Music)?
|
| I think it managed to hold off a bit more, we still have
| Bizet, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, even Stravinsky and others
| composing great (fantastic, in some cases) pieces in the
| first half of the 20th century.
|
| But then, a bunch of Jonh Cages came along...
| dahart wrote:
| What taxes or subsidies are you talking about?? The
| Halberstadt project is funded on voluntary donations by
| people who want to see it happen.
|
| It's not clear what's making you angry about one obscure
| performance of an obscure piece of music, but you might
| have more in common with Cage than you imagine. Cage
| described himself as an anarchist, and pieces like 4'33"
| are, in part, a commentary on the rules of music that
| make fun of establishment. Maybe he's saying the same
| thing you are about the emperor's clothes.
| brookst wrote:
| Tell me more about these fake intellectuals who degrade
| discourse by telling everyone else they're doing it wrong?
| wtcactus wrote:
| It's those ones that are not measured on the merit of
| their work, but on how popular their ideas are to the
| self-appointed gatekeepers of intellectualism.
| brookst wrote:
| Truly, they do not belong in our True Intellectual
| kingdom. We must close the gates to keep them out!
| wtcactus wrote:
| Oh, you are damn right that the taxpayer that is paying
| these self anointed intellectuals should have every right
| to kick them out of our True Intellectual Kingdom by
| cutting their funding.
|
| Let them survive in the free market of ideas, then. If
| they are so great, they surely don't need public funding
| to continue their activities.
| malcolmgreaves wrote:
| The last three or so comments of yours prove you don't do
| much self-reflection and that you hold others to a
| standard you cannot make yourself.
| gweinberg wrote:
| Tastes are by nature subjective. But if 99% of people
| think X is beautiful and Y is ugly, and 1% think it's the
| other way around, there probably is an objective reason
| the ratios are as they are.
| jcattle wrote:
| I like art that can spark conversation. This recital is a
| masterpiece :)
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| If I could go back in time and shoot 2 painters, well the
| second one would be Monet, whose damn water lilies started
| us down this awful path.
| airstrike wrote:
| _> Your view about art is just too constrained by an appeal
| to aesthetic beauty._
|
| This gets repeated a lot, but the reality is to many people,
| including philosophers, artists and appreciators of both,
| aesthetic beauty is a fundamental property of art without
| which it cannot survive.
|
| The fact that contemporary art circles handwave away that
| relevance while arrogantly mumbling "you're just miopic,
| ignorant and misguided, learn more" doesn't really change
| that fact.
|
| From the outside, it just shows that you too have been co-
| opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that view,
| but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no matter
| how many members that cult may have.
| jcattle wrote:
| In this particular case for me I see a certain kind of
| artistic beauty in the recital. The fact, that we as a
| society try to keep something going for 639 years, just a
| sliver of a thread connecting all those different lives
| together. Not knowing if it will work, how it will end up,
| if it will fail spectacularly or just fizzle out into
| obscurity.
|
| I wouldn't say that people who do not see this as art are
| wrong, that's the beauty of art isn't it? It's in the eye
| of the beholder. To me this recital sparks some hope or in
| any case makes me stop for a second and wonder about
| greater things than just my day to day.
| airstrike wrote:
| I don't even mind this particular piece, but I do mind
| most of what gets labeled as contemporary art. Or pretty
| much anything since Duchamp's Fountain or maybe Yoko
| Ono's Cut Piece before that.
| piva00 wrote:
| > The fact that contemporary art circles handwave away that
| relevance while arrogantly mumbling "you're just miopic,
| ignorant and misguided, learn more" doesn't really change
| that fact.
|
| > From the outside, it just shows that you too have been
| co-opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that
| view, but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no
| matter how many members that cult may have.
|
| Isn't beauty in the eyes of the beholder though? I do see
| beauty in a lot of art deemed "part of the cult", how do
| you even attempt to objectively judge aesthetic beauty in a
| vacuum? Beauty exists in contexts, there is stuff that
| without the context just looks weird, with context it
| becomes beautiful, how do you assess the objective
| aesthetic beauty of such without delving into philosophical
| discussions?
|
| You are all free to create an art movement that aspires to
| do what you believe art should be: aesthetically beautiful,
| devoid of philosophical meaning as pursuit of beauty,
| beauty for its own sake, etc., it will be included,
| admired, rejected, judged as misguided, so on and so forth,
| just like you are doing with contemporary art that you do
| not agree with.
|
| Isn't that all art anyway?
| airstrike wrote:
| _> Isn 't beauty in the eyes of the beholder though?_
|
| This is a truism, and I don't even think it's that
| accurate. There are some universal aspects to our
| perception of beauty such as symmetry, balance, tension-
| and-release, contrast, recursion... whatever it may be.
| We don't need to know what it is to tell that it's there.
| wrs wrote:
| Maybe, but all of those are context-dependent and can
| operate at high levels of abstraction. The beholder needs
| to be able to recognize them to appreciate them. A Rothko
| or Pollock has those things, but that doesn't make them
| automatically appreciated. Assuming you're from a western
| culture, listen to some Thai classical music and see how
| obvious the beauty is to you.
| a-french-anon wrote:
| So, how (in truth, "when") do you recognize that the emperor
| is missing his clothes?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Yes, art needs to have both aesthetic beauty and technical
| skill behind it. Contemporary art has neither of those
| things, and thus it is an embarrassment to the label of
| "art".
| internet_points wrote:
| This is not the art that's being destroyed by AI (in fact, I
| would say this academic ideas art is exactly the kind of art
| least likely to be supplanted by AI)
|
| There are still non-modernist artists who focus on technique
| and sincerity, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Nerdrum
| sussmannbaka wrote:
| Get a brush and be the change you want to see.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Art also is a massive money laundering operation. Why make
| 10,000 fake invoices when you can make one $10mil invoice for
| something with zero definable value.
|
| All the pretensions are maxed to legitimize the BS.
|
| Then the talent-less, listless, bored children of the ultra
| rich have mommy and daddy force museums to put their
| kindergarten macaroni art on the walls of places that great
| artists used to be. (Aka banana taped to wall literally the
| same as macaroni child projects). The mental gymnastics to
| pretend it is more than that requires the irrational love for
| your untalented child.
|
| Rich people have destroyed the global art community.
| jjmarr wrote:
| The Girl With the Pearl Earring is considered a masterpiece
| because of the technological limitations of the time.
|
| Blue was one of the most expensive colours because the
| ultramarine dye was derived from lapus lazuli, a rock imported
| from Afghanistan and ground with a labour-intensive process.
| Medieval European art typically depicted the Virgin Mary in
| blue. The expense indicated devotion.
|
| Someone living in that time period would know anything in
| ultramarine is important.
|
| Except Vermeer used it for whatever he wanted, including a blue
| turban on The Girl With the Pearl Earring (originally called
| Girl with a Turban). The pearl is expensive in the world of the
| painting, but the blue turban was expensive to create in real
| life. That is the central mystery of the painting.
|
| But we literally cannot appreciate that because we did not grow
| up in a world where ultramarine blue was as expensive as gold,
| because synthetic ultramarine was invented in 1826. That's why
| you care about visual interest and aesthetics instead of
| reacting with "Holy shit! Why is this blue?"
|
| Our descendants will likely feel the same about the art we
| create today, and ignore whatever aspects of it are trivialized
| by AI.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| Someone must have played it sped up? Is the music public?
| cactacea wrote:
| You're missing the point.
| hinkley wrote:
| We're missing the performance otherwise. Unless you're
| immortal.
| Carrok wrote:
| I think you're starting to make progress towards the point.
| jjulius wrote:
| You're not missing the performance. It's playing right now,
| and will play your entire life. You just don't get to see
| what comes next, how it changes, and how it ends.
|
| Just like life.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| Is _there_ a point?
| salynchnew wrote:
| Yes, but the piece is specifically composed to be played "as
| slowly as possible" fwiw.
| LorenDB wrote:
| https://archive.ph/rHOsC
| _petronius wrote:
| Some art-haters in the comments, so to defend this piece of
| contemporary art for a moment: one thing I love about it is a
| commitment to the long future of art, creativity, and
| civilization. What does it take to keep an instrument playing for
| six hundred years? To commit to that idea -- like the century-
| long projects of cathedral building in the middle ages, or the
| idea of planting trees you won't live to see mature -- is (to me)
| the awesome thing about the Halberstadt performance. All rendered
| in a medium (church organ) that has existed for an even longer
| time.
|
| It's a pretty hopeful, optimistic view of the future in a time of
| high uncertainty, but also represents a positive argument: it's
| worth doing these things because they are interesting, weird, and
| fun, and because they represent a continuity with past and future
| people we will never meet.
|
| Plus, you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant
| descendants can go see it :)
| hbsbsbsndk wrote:
| It's not surprising that people who love AI and NFTs are
| willfully ignorant about what makes art meaningful. It's a
| sadly transactional view of the world.
| mingus88 wrote:
| It's obvious that many people in this industry believe
| themselves to be supremely intelligent and curious hacker
| types, yet they obviously never taken a humanities course.
|
| They have a huge blind spot that they aren't even aware of,
| or worse just devalue the entire history of human thought and
| creation that doesn't involve hard science.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| Most of them don't value hard science either.
| kristopolous wrote:
| barbrook wrote an essay about this 30 years ago.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology
|
| Still on the nose.
| nottorp wrote:
| Ok but why would you need a "humanities course" to
| appreciate art?
| mingus88 wrote:
| You don't. It's a great way to get an introduction to a
| field outside of your typical realm of expertise though.
|
| It's one of those things that really lets you know how
| much you don't know. Then when you comment about such
| things on the internet you might be open to learning
| more, as opposed to what many folk in this thread are
| doing.
| dmoy wrote:
| I can appreciate art, and play music at a pretty damn good
| level myself, but still think that John Cage is totally
| wack.
|
| I don't dislike all strange music - Satie and Poulenc are
| some of my favorites. But a lot of John Cage's stuff is...
| no longer music.
|
| Like I'm sorry, but 4'33" is not music.
|
| I draw a line somewhere, and a lot of John Cage's stuff is
| wayyyyyyyyy the fuck over the line.
|
| Sure maybe it's some kind of art, but it's not music.
| trbleclef wrote:
| Your comment will rattle a few cages here but I honestly
| think about this all the time, as one of the minority of
| music educators around HN. The blind spots (or perhaps a
| STEM vs STEAM upbringing) are unfortunate. We are possibly
| the only -- or one of an incredibly small number of --
| species that even makes sounds solely for enjoyment and
| aesthetics. The humanities are what make us us.
| plastic-enjoyer wrote:
| We call this people "Fachidioten" in Germany, people who are
| really good at their craft but absolute morons in every other
| field. Unfortunately, these are the people that dominate tech
| and you can see this in how technology develops.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Google Translate renders this in English as "Specialist
| idiots" and I like that.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| But that word equally describes artists
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I don't see how that follows. Avant-garde music of this type
| is basically an NFT already. All of its value is in the
| novelty, none is in the aesthetics. The meaning of the piece
| is completely externalized to the identity of its author and
| the history of its composition and cannot be derived from
| observing the piece itself. That describes NFTs to a tee! The
| only thing missing the layer of cryptography on top.
| airstrike wrote:
| Why are you making such sweeping assumptions about us? I
| studied architecture and art history for over a year, I'm the
| son of a painter, I have an uncle who's a Grammy-winning
| musician and an aunt who's a musical scholar who literally
| has a doctorate degree on John f* Cage of all people... which
| is to say I grew up surrounded by art. I've visited every
| museum you can name this side of the Berlin Wall's remains,
| many more than once.
|
| I have a degree in humanities, another in business and
| another in computer science.... and while I still don't mind
| Cage that much, I do think most of contemporary art is
| _absolute shit_.
|
| I don't have to agree with you for my opinion to have value.
| You need to learn to name call people less and make your
| points on the merits of arguments. It's tiring for everyone
| else to engage otherwise.
| TheCondor wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing with you, but you should invert the
| question and think about it.
|
| In the case of a cathedral, I think it is relatively easy to
| commit to the project you won't see through, it has a
| significance to those people making the commitment. What
| becomes much more challenging is when future generations don't
| have the same level of commitment, it's a much bigger ask to
| stop. Maybe there is a better use of the resources that could
| impact people immediately; if it's a church, I'm thinking
| feeding the hungry and clothing the naked sorts of things. It's
| hard to stop something that "we've just been doing." It's also
| hard to ask "why are we doing this?"
|
| In 200 years, suppose there is some crisis we cannot predict
| and the recital is to be interrupted or stopped. There will be
| an incredible amount of pressure on somebody to make a good
| choice. Pressure that was created by a distant ancestor, of
| sorts. That might be part of the beauty of it, that might be
| part of the bond that ties different people together throughout
| time and it might be wonderful. What if there is a caretaker
| that is ready to retire and cannot find the next caretaker?
| That seems like a horrible position to be in.
|
| Japan is or was doing multi-generational mortgages a while back
| (I assume they might still be.) as it was the only way a family
| could afford to buy a property. I can see that being a
| tremendously loving act for your children or grandchildren in
| providing a property that they will own, but I could just as
| well see it being a gigantic burden to them, what if they want
| to live somewhere else? Them following their bliss effectively
| changes the living and working future of the parents.
| jl6 wrote:
| Maybe a crisis will occur and maybe our descendants will have
| to make a tough choice, but that could enrich the story of
| the performance. If they choose to end the performance for
| whatever reason, that's their business. The hopes and desires
| of one generation can only hold sway over the next for so
| long.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| > If they choose to end the performance for whatever
| reason, that's their business.
|
| Well, in this case, "you can already buy a ticket to the
| finale, so your distant descendants can go see it." Selling
| tickets for an event that far in the future makes it the
| business of the ticket purchaser and whoever they leave the
| tickets for.
|
| Is the money collected from the tickets being held in such
| a way that it can be refunded if/when this project fails
| before another 600 years have gone by? If not, it seems
| like a potential scam in that sense.
| dahart wrote:
| No need to speculate wildly or cast unsupported
| aspersions. The funds from the "Final Ticket" sales are
| explicitly a financial contribution to supporting the
| project. Nobody buying one is unaware of that fact,
| there's no potential for scam.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| It's not wild to speculate that a ticket I buy for an
| event 600 years in the future might not be honored.
| People get screwed over on pre-orders with timetables far
| smaller than that.
|
| Again, if they sell something they're calling a ticket to
| the final part of the performance, then they have a
| financial duty to keep the project going (or refund the
| ticket) and it's not "their business" to end the project
| early like the person I replied to was claiming. At the
| very best, they could invest the money and use only the
| interest to support ongoing operations, but they need to
| keep the original value available to refund or else they
| need to fulfill what the ticket's for-- if they do
| neither of those things, they ripped people off, period.
|
| If they're just funding the project's continuation, it's
| on them for pulling the marketing stunt (and/or false
| advertising) of calling it a ticket for this event in 600
| years instead of just taking donations, selling present-
| day tickets and/or merch, etc. Fine print saying
| "actually, this ticket isn't a real ticket, it's just for
| fun" doesn't make them look better to me, so I don't see
| how that'd be a defense in your mind.
| dpc050505 wrote:
| There's always an opportunity cost to making art. Taking your
| argument to it's extreme people should never paint or make
| music but instead spend all their time growing food and
| building homes (and distributing those goods because that's a
| big crux, we could feed everyone on the planet if we got food
| to the right people).
|
| The cool thing about freedom is that we don't have to be
| rational monks that are slave to economic utilitarism.
| hinkley wrote:
| They couldn't even quarry the Washington Monument out of a
| single color of stone. It's not that visible in pictures but
| if you go see it on a sunny day it's hard to ignore that
| stupid line in the middle.
|
| If you take too long building a cathedral the quarry might
| exhaust itself in the meantime. So even if you keep to the
| design it might not look right.
|
| > The outside facing consists, due to the interrupted
| building process, of three different kinds of white marble.
| groby_b wrote:
| That's the beauty of a long-term commitment. You are stating
| so much confidence about the future that you say "yes, we can
| have a functioning society _and_ set aside these resources ".
|
| Sure, you can create scenarios were that fails. You can do
| that for anything. The power lies in saying "we are willing
| to remove these paths from consideration because we as a
| people are committed to not letting them occur".
|
| It's a model that fails if you apply first-order utilitarian
| calculus. But the intangible value of the hope and commitment
| in it likely overshadows any immediate gain. This isn't about
| how to maximize utilization or optionality. It's a bold
| statement about who we are, and a lodestar to aspire to.
| (Which is, ultimately, the job art does)
| mikepurvis wrote:
| This conundrum comes up sometimes in the context of
| generational starships, about intermediate generations being
| born into bondage board, committed by their ancestors to a
| shitty life in a metal tube, with their only purpose being a
| preordained duty to keep a few systems operational and
| produce the next generation of slaves just so that eventually
| someone can birth the arrival generation.
|
| Alastair Reynolds' book Chasm City touches on a bunch of
| this, in particular the class warfare angle of some wealthy
| travelers getting to enjoy the journey in peaceful cryosleep
| while the poor ones pay for their passage in servitude.
| parpfish wrote:
| I spend too much time thinking about all the stuff that can
| go wrong on generation ships.
|
| You take off for your destination, but when you get there
| you find out that humans back on earth made a faster ship
| 100 years after you left and beat you to the destination.
|
| You spent generations expecting to be bold explorers
| pushing the frontier and getting to claim nice territory,
| and you show up to find you're in second place.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I won't spoil it here, but you might really enjoy _Chasm
| City_ ; I recommend giving it a read. :)
| aaronax wrote:
| And that the highly-refined citizens of that future era
| think that your BO and deodorant are incredibly
| overpowering.
|
| (as described in Vogt's "Far_Centaurus" short story.
| jstanley wrote:
| > being born into bondage board, committed by their
| ancestors to a shitty life in a metal tube, with their only
| purpose being a preordained duty to keep a few systems
| operational and produce the next generation of slaves just
| so that eventually someone can birth the arrival
| generation.
|
| This isn't really so different from being born on Earth,
| except that we take being born on Earth for granted, and
| the population is really really big.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Ehhh I see where you're coming from but I don't think
| it's quite the same. Here on Earth is the default, and
| while each individual's opportunities are greatly
| affected by the circumstances of their birth and
| parentage, with effort and luck there's a fair chance to
| change one's stars.
|
| Opting into an interstellar voyage is a significant
| reduction in opportunity for almost anyone.
|
| And yes, the same could be said for a European colonist
| crossing the Atlantic to the Americas in the 16th
| century, and many of them did face starvation, exposure,
| etc, but it's different when you're largely committing
| _yourself_ and your immediate family to those hardships,
| under the belief that the timeframe for "a better life"
| is the next generation. Committing intermediate
| generations is a different beast.
| XorNot wrote:
| You're assuming life after the journey was guaranteed to
| be better, but not all colonists and immigrants happened
| to head to the world's future superpower.
|
| Every decision is potentially committing descendants to
| the consequences of that choice (and to wit: life aboard
| a generation ship hardly need be a miserable or
| undesirable one, at the size of say, a large town and
| surrounding hinterland you have as much or more
| opportunity as anyone else at most times in history - I
| think generation ships force us to confront uncomfortable
| questions about what is the meaning of life on Earth
| which we try to sweep aside by deciding they're an
| impossible moral burden).
| guelo wrote:
| We're all living in the world created by our ancestors.
| All their short sighted fuckups (lead poisoning, climate
| change) or triumphs (tech, art) is ours to bear.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Heinlein also tackled some of these problems with
| generation ships in _Orphans of the Sky_ [1].
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky
| 7bit wrote:
| Does the ticket come with a snorkeling set?
| seydor wrote:
| Cage died in 1992 , this is not contemporary art
| thih9 wrote:
| > Contemporary art is a term used to describe the art of
| today, generally referring to art produced from the 1970s
| onwards.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_art
| korkybuchek wrote:
| Assume you already know about this given your interests, but
| just in case: https://longnow.org/
| tshaddox wrote:
| It's a neat goal to keep an organ playing for hundreds of
| years. I just don't think that's related to the musical
| composition itself, which is not impressive to me. The fact
| that Cage added the phrase "as slow as possible" is not, in my
| opinion, musically interesting.
|
| It would be analogous to writing a screenplay, adding the note
| "produce the film using as much money as possible," and then
| having someone attempt to do that. It's technically impressive
| to spend $500 million on a film production, sure, but that
| small note at the end of the screenplay is not cinematically
| interesting.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Oddly enough, Bach's BWV 639 is one of my favourite (organ)
| pieces. But it appears to be just a coincidence, since the length
| was decided as the number of years since the construction of the
| first organ in Halberstadt to the new millennium.
| stavros wrote:
| > In theory, a pipe organ can sound indefinitely, so long as it
| receives adequate power and its pedals are pressed continually.
| [..] Thus, the only threats to this performance are the survival
| of the organ, the will of the unborn and the erratic tides of
| arts funding.
|
| And, you know, power outages.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Halberstadt seems to last have had a power outage in 2023. I
| wonder if the organ has battery backup...
| mingus88 wrote:
| TIL that there were no organ works in the history of humanity
| until electrical power was invented
| stavros wrote:
| Oh I didn't realize we had donkeys powering this organ 24/7
| for 600 years.
| mingus88 wrote:
| Part of the wonder with this work is thinking of how to
| overcome such a problem
|
| It's actually a very optimistic work for Cage. The idea
| that we could have a continuous performance for hundreds of
| years, without ever being interrupted by wars or disasters.
|
| I think it is amazing that someone has risen to the
| challenge to try and perform this, and if they are
| successful what that means for us as a society that it was
| allowed to happen
|
| I have a pessimistic outlook. All it will take is one bad
| actor to interrupt this performance that could potentially
| involve thousands to maintain. It feels inevitable that
| this will fail. Nevertheless, this in itself is a statement
| on us as a species and what a wonderful work this is to
| have provoked such a thing.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| If it's contemporary art, then they may well have planned
| to have someone come in with a sledgehammer and smash it
| to bits in front of audience who paid to hear the next
| note change or on some other date of significance.
|
| It won't be the first time an artist has done this.
| saalweachter wrote:
| If the music pauses for less than 1/64 note, has it really
| stopped?
| stavros wrote:
| If it's meant to never pause, yes.
| soupfordummies wrote:
| Ah dammit, just take it once again from the top
| salynchnew wrote:
| I am so happy that this is in my HN feed today.
|
| I wish there was more stuff like this, both in my feed and in the
| world.
| gweinberg wrote:
| 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?
| itishappy wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| Especially given how loud and sometimes discordant the tuning
| process is.
| kbutler wrote:
| 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...
| lazystar wrote:
| > the audible music begins...
|
| right, so it begins when the music starts playing?
| throwway120385 wrote:
| The experience begins when the conductor starts marking
| time.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| That's like saying "my meal begins from the time I start
| driving to the restaurant". It's just not true.
| malcolmgreaves wrote:
| Incorrect. A rest is as important to music as a note.
| hinkley wrote:
| Found the jazz musician :)
| p_j_w wrote:
| It's more like saying your meal begins when you sit down
| at the table, which is a proposition that a lot of people
| would agree with.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| Certainly every chef-run fine dining restaurant would
| agree with that.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| It's nothing like that, but you're entitled to be
| confused and wrong.
| bmacho wrote:
| Technically it's okay to be confused and wrong, but it is
| not really okay to be vocal about it. It just steals
| people's time. Maybe it is deliberate trolling, how
| should we know? Better to be moderated out
| jacobgkau wrote:
| There doesn't seem to be a conductor at all in this
| performance, and there certainly wasn't one for the
| entire 17 months that the rest lasted. (The person in
| charge of this project, Rainer Neugebauer, is not
| conducting; the linked article makes mention of a speech
| before the note was changed, but nothing about marking
| time.)
|
| Not that I'd expect a conductor to be needed for a
| soloist performance, but it makes the whole "when the
| conductor raises his hands" point a little off-topic.
| egypturnash wrote:
| 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"?
| jacobgkau wrote:
| You typed a really long comment, but you're not talking
| about the same thing. Listening to an ad before a song
| starts is very obviously not part of the music, even if
| it's part of "the experience of listening to music (on a
| streaming service)." The ad before a song plays is not
| included in the song's official runtime.
|
| You're essentially describing the time the audience sits
| waiting for the orchestra to walk onto the stage as being
| "part of the experience of going to the orchestra." Which
| is fine, but it's not considered part of the song (unless
| the composer's quirky and writes "walk onto the stage" at
| the beginning of the music sheets, which is basically
| what this guy did with the 17-month rest).
|
| Moreover, nobody was actually sitting in that cathedral
| for 17 months listening to the first rest. If a 17-month
| rest is played in the middle of a forest and nobody hears
| it, was it really a 17-month rest? Who experienced that
| "experience?"
| mykowebhn wrote:
| Not unless it was a "meaningful", aka "musical", rest
| ssttoo wrote:
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| robin_reala wrote:
| 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_
| cwillu wrote:
| An exploration of what is and is not a piece of music,
| like this work explicitly is, needs to acknowledge the
| possibility that the answer might be "no, this isn't".
| Dictionary definitions are entirely irrelevent except
| insofar as they provide the inspiration to ask "wait, but
| is that _really_ all a work of music is?"
| trbleclef wrote:
| One of HN's few(?) music appreciation professors here: in
| fact, I start every term posing this question. It's hard
| to teach music appreciation before a group of humans can
| agree where music begins and ends :) At the end of the
| day, like everything else it's a certain degree of
| statistics and a certain degree of subjectivity.
| itishappy wrote:
| Not the 639 year recital?
| noman-land wrote:
| This is as genuine a piece of music as the original.
| mingus88 wrote:
| Please explain what makes a composition "genuine" and show
| your work
| Isamu wrote:
| 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.
| dahart wrote:
| 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.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| 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.
| tokai wrote:
| 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
| goldchainposse wrote:
| 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.
| cfbolztereick wrote:
| Complaining about a rest (however long) in a piece by the
| composer of 4'33'' is certainly A Take.
| williamdclt wrote:
| 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
| jancsika wrote:
| > 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Oh yeah, I have a millenarian musical piece. It's a 1000 year
| rest and then the first measure starts: another thousand year
| rest. It's actually constantly playing in space. L
| itishappy wrote:
| Let us know when you convince a few hundred people it's
| interesting enough to visit!
| renewiltord wrote:
| Are you kidding me? I have 8 billion listeners. And a new one
| born every second.
| itishappy wrote:
| How many of them do you think know your name?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| So art is all about the identity of the author?
| itishappy wrote:
| I'd say it's about connecting with the consumer. The
| connection doesn't need to extend to the author, but it
| should probably extend to the art itself.
|
| I'll rephrase my question: How many of those 8 billion
| people care about and/or are aware of Rene's art?
| jacobgkau wrote:
| The few hundred people who visited during the 17-month rest
| are just as silly as someone who'd be convinced to see a
| random forum poster's millennium rest, that's the kicker.
| itishappy wrote:
| Maybe if they were visiting just for the music, but perhaps
| the organ itself is of some interest?
| jacobgkau wrote:
| Sure, if you want to make it about the engineering
| accomplishment rather than the music itself. Somewhat to
| your point, I guess I have more respect for Rainer
| Neugebauer and the team actually attempting to put this
| performance on than for John Cage simply writing it down
| vaguely.
| itishappy wrote:
| Totally agree. I think Cage's work is vaguely interesting
| in an abstract sorta way, but the actually interesting
| part of this piece is the organ itself. I think they're
| both art, but I personally value the latter more.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Here's a video (with sound) of one of the other chord changes. It
| didn't occur to me they'd just swap in a pipe instead of pressing
| a key on a keyboard.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3BBgQPuPI0
| labrador wrote:
| 639 years? Big deal, The Long Now foundation built a clock to
| last 10,000 years. I hate John Cage since I got his massive
| world-wide hit 4'33'' stuck in my head.
| pfd1986 wrote:
| The foundation cocktail place in SF has some art on the wall
| that changes every minute. I can't remember if by John Cage or
| someone else..
| muppetman wrote:
| I just need you to know that I went and googled "John Cage
| 4'33" " and now I am quite upset with you for this comment!!!
| labrador wrote:
| It's quite an ear worm!
| shawn_w wrote:
| Every time I listen I notice something new in it.
| speed_spread wrote:
| One thing I like about 4'33'' is that it is very compressible,
| especially the studio version. The live version, a little less
| so.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > The Long Now foundation built a clock to last 10,000 years
|
| The Long Now Foundation is attempting to build a clock to last
| 10,000 years.
|
| Construction began close to a decade ago, and there is no
| estimated completion date. Construction of the clock may well
| last 10,000 years.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I think at one point the Van Horn TX clock was considered a
| "prototype" or another one that would be built incorporating
| lessons learned, although I don't know if that's still the
| plan.
|
| Coincidentally the clock will ring with a cycle of chimes
| that repeats every 10,000 years
| bell-cot wrote:
| Obligatory XKCD reference: https://xkcd-
| time.fandom.com/wiki/Hugo_Award#Acceptance_Spee...
| gred wrote:
| This makes me think of the Hari Seldon recordings which play over
| the course of centuries in the "Foundation" books by Isaac
| Asimov.
| Carrok wrote:
| To be a bit pedantic, those recordings are played at real time
| for normal speech, and have gaps between anything being played
| of centuries. They don't play continuously for that long,
| unlike this project which does play continuously.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Longplayer: a one-thousand year long composition_
|
| https://longplayer.org/
| uwagar wrote:
| white people love john cage.
| watersb wrote:
| Remember where you were when the eighth drop of pitch fell in
| Queensland?
|
| Man, that was wild.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment
| johnea wrote:
| So, an organ changed to a new chord, and I'm supposed to pay to
| _read_ about it?
|
| I find the subject mildly interesting, but the paywalled internet
| is just another sign of end stage capitalism...
| moon2 wrote:
| Finally some good news.
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