From: PaulT23@aol.com
Date: Wed, 7 Dec 1994 04:31:04 -0500


here is the threatened info relating ambience & John Cage
it is long - but read it anyway - knowledge is power or freedom or something
like that. 8?)

>> Maybe it all can be traced back to John Cage.
> (re: Feldman) My guess would be that it was more the influence of modern
> art, as was also mentioned in the booklet, and which I believe Cage was 
> involved with to a certain extent.

IT = beginnings of ambient composition, particularly regarding Feldman, Cage
and their interaction.

It was due to meeting Cage that Feldman became influenced by specific
artists. Feldman was also directly influenced by Cage & vica versa. Cage
and Feldman met in 1950 at concert featuring Webern. Feldman later
introduced Cage to David Tudor ( the avant-garde pianist who recorded
early Cage, Feldman & Stockhausen recordings ). Cage introduced Feldman to
Robert Raushenberg and Jasper Johns. All four influenced each other at the
same time. In the summer of 1952, Cage first viewed Rauschenburg's
all-black and all-white paintings. The first performance of 4'33" was in
August of 1952. Cage later discussed their correlation in interviews with
Richard Kostelantz, admitting the definite art->music influence. 

for those unfamiliar with Cage at all. 

A short list of Cage's main contributions to the way we think about music
concerns the emancipation of three things from the strict compositional rules
of the past : 

 noise, silence, and compositional intent. Any sound in the world was now
in the musical domain. Cage often referred to Varese's Ionisation as one
of the first pieces to bring this into western classical music - of course
Cage's own works took this much further. To Cage, the silences were always
at least as importance as the intended noises, if not more so. Silence in
music emphasizes the form & rhythm of the music around it, but Cage valued
silence for much more than this because he defined silence as non-intended
noise ( of which there is always some - see below ). His mostcontroversial
belief was that music was most free when the composer succeeded in
removing his own selfish preferences upon it. He worked for the rest of
his career at making his music indeterminate ( composed and/or performed
without specific intentions ) mostly by using chance operations and
nonspecific notation. 

some quotes from the lecture "Experimental Music" (1957) from his book
Silence :  

     "For in this new music nothing takes place but sounds: those that are
notated and those that are not. Those that are not notated appear in the
written music as silences, opening the doors of the music to the sounds
that happen to be in the environment.....There is no such thing as an
empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something
to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.... 
     "One need not fear about the future of music..If, when it is realized
that sounds occur whether intended or not, one turns in the direction of
those he does not intend. This turning is psycological and seems at first
to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity-for a musician,
the giving up of music. This psycological turning leads to the world of
nature, where, gradually or suddenly, one sees that humanity and nature,
not seperate, are in this world together; that nothing was lost when
everything was given away. In fact, everything is gained. In musical
terms, any sound may occur in any combination and in any continuity. 
     "And it is a stiking coincidence that just now the technical means to
produce such a free-ranging music are available... [ The invention of
high-fidelity tape recording can now be used ] not simply to record
performances of music but to make new music that was possible only because
of it. Given a minimum of two tape recorders and a disk recorder, the
following procedures are possible : 1) a single recording of any sound may
be made; 2) a re-recording may be made, in the course of which, by means
of filters and circuits, any or all of the physical characteristics of a
given recorded sound may be altered; 3) electronic mixing permits the
presentation of any number of sounds in combination; 4) ordinary splicing
permits the juxtaposition of any sounds, and when it includes
unconventional cuts, it, like re-recording, brings about alterations of
any or all of the physical characteristics. The situation made available
by these means is essentially a total sound-space, the limits of which are
ear-determined only...Any sound at any point in this total sound-space can
move to become a sound at any other point. But advantage can be taken of
these possibilities only if one is willing to change one's musical habits
radically.... 
     "Musical habits include scales, modes, theories of counterpoint and
harmony, [ repetitive beats & rhythms - PT], and the study of timbres,
singly and in combination of a limited nimber of sound-producing
mechanisms. In mathematical terms these all concern discrete steps. They
resemble walking - in the case of pitches, on steppingstones twelve in
number. This cautious stepping is not characteristic of the possibilities
of magentic tape, which is revealing to us that musical action or
existence can occur at any point or along any line or curve or what have
you in total sound-space; that we are, in fact, technically equipped to
transform our contemporary awareness of nature's manner of operation into
art. 
     "New music : new listening. Not an attempt to understand something
that is being said, for, if something were being said, the sounds would be
given the shapes of ords. Just an attention to the activity of sounds. 
     "And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not
dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the
form of a paradox : a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play.
This play, however, is an affirmation of life-not an attempt to bring
order out of chaos not to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a
way of waking up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once
one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of
its own accord." - John Cage