source file: mills2.txt Date: Mon, 22 Jan 1996 23:50:53 -0800 Subject: Re: TUNING digest From: eric@cmlab.sfc.keio.ac.jp (Eric Lyon) I very much enjoyed Brian Mclaren's recent posting on Cage's music. While his article retains all of its considerable entertainment value, regrettably, its argument collapses completely on his confusion of the terms "randomness" and "indeterminacy". Randomness is simply lack of predictability of outcome. We sometimes perceive as random, totally predictable events (a recording of psuedo-random numbers mapped to pitch (predictible since it will be the same each time)), so what we are often judging from an aesthetic view is not randomness but the flux of information in a piece of music - as well as our ability to observe patterns in this flux. Different people have different thresholds for information, thus music with very high information density in rhythm, harmonic complexity, tuning structure and so forth will be interpreted by some people as noise. This has certainly been the case with high information masterpieces such as Beethoven's late string quartets, Ives' 4th Symphony, Varese's Ameriques, or Richard James' Auto Hangable Lightbulbs. Why is this all irrelevant to Cage's music? Because indeterminacy refers not to randomness, but to lack of pre-determination of elements of a musical performance. It is clear that almost all music has elements of indeterminacy. Bach's scores do not specify the rate, depth and pitch bend pattern for vibrato, nor the deciBel intensity level for each instrument, nor the precise size and dimension of the performance hall, nor tuning in Hz or cents nor hundreds of other of factors contributing to a successful realization of the score. What is striking about Cage's indeterminate music is that most aspects of the performance are indeterminate, particularly aspects which have previously been composer-predetermined such as pitch, rhythm and instrumentation. Rather than follow the 20th century trend towards hyperspecification (perhaps most extreme in Ferneyhough's scores), what Cage did is provide contexts and attracted phenomenal musicians such as David Tudor and Gordon Mumma to help realize his designs. Cage was well aware of the difference between performances by artists of this caliber and indifferent hacks and spoke of "disciplined" performers much as Morton Feldman did with his wisecrack "my boys are everywhere". While I do not admire Cage taking the lion's share of credit for inherently cooperative ventures, I enjoy the successful outcomes from his activities. Mclaren describes the music as garbage. Fine, that's his opinion. To me, Tudor's prepared piano performance of Variations II sounds poetic, sinuous and terrifying. It does not sound "random", suffused as it is with performer sensitivity, focus and vision. Eric Lyon Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 23 Jan 1996 22:21 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id NAA02914; Tue, 23 Jan 1996 13:21:53 -0800 Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996 13:21:53 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu