source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 12:30:03 -0700 Subject: Reply to Greg From: John Chalmers Greg: I wish I could put my finger on the exact reference to John Cage's remark about microtonality being a "new wing on the academy." My recollection is that I read it in the 60's either in Perspectives of New Music or J. Music Theory and probably not in an article by Cage himself. If anybody knows the source for this remark, I'd appreciate knowing it myself. Thanks for the Coomaraswamy reference. I had thought the source was Greek philosophy (Lucretius?), but had never sought to track it down, because, quite frankly, Cage has never been an obsession of mine, though I have greatly enjoyed some of his music over the years. My first exposure to Cage was in a lecture by Stockhausen in Germany in 1960 in the context of a historically oriented presentation of "Elecktronische Musik." I had assumed Cage's embracing of randomness to be one with aleatorism, total serialization, Stockhausen's "open form," Xenakis's "stochastic" procedures, and other quintessentially Western approaches to removing the personality of the composer from the musical product. While I became aware of Cage's interest in Buddhism and Indic philosophy, one can derive a preoccupation with random and "chance" phenomena from Western traditions as well. Shortly after becoming aware of experimental music, I began seriously studying biology and quickly learned the difference between various types of indeterminacy. Hence I became uncongenial with the idea that nature, on the mesoscale of human existence and perception, is wholly random, nor did I ever see why art should be, even if the universe is fundamentally random, chaotic, and meaningless. But I digress. Anyway, I found your post thought-provoking. While the aesthetics of John Cage's music are somewhat off the topic for this list, I'd appreciate references to his original statements and their contexts. --John Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 23 Jul 1996 22:46 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id NAA13874; Tue, 23 Jul 1996 13:46:28 -0700 Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 13:46:28 -0700 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu