From: Mark Kolmar <mkolmar@ccs.nslsilus.org>
Newsgroups: rec.music.industrial
Subject: John Cage/What is Music?
Date: Thu, 22 Dec 1994 23:06:42 -0600

Perhaps this will tie together the John Cage and the What is Music? threads.
 
>From the liner notes of The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of 
John Cage, Recorded in performance at Town Hall, New York, May 15, 1958

"In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain 
engineering purposes, it is desireable to have as silent a situation as 
possible.  Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, it's six walls made 
of special material, a room without echoes.  I entered one at Harvard 
University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low.  
On describing them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the 
high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in 
circulation.  And they will continue following my death.  One need not 
fear about the future of music.

"But this fearlessness only follows if, at the parting of the ways, where 
it is realized that sounds occur whether intended or not, one turns in 
the direction of those he does not intend.  This turning is psychological 
and seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to 
humanity, for a musician, the giving up of music.  This psychological 
turning leads to the world of nature, where, gradually or suddenly, one 
sees that world together, that nothing was lost when everything was given 
away.  In fact, everything is gained.  In musical terms, any sounds may 
occur in any combination and in any continuity.

"...This project will seem fearsome to many, but on examination it gives 
no cause for alarm.  Hearing sounds which are just sounds immediately 
sets the theorizing mind to theorizing, and the emotions of human beings 
are continually aroused by encounters with nature.  Does not a mountain 
unintentionally evoke in us a sense of wonder?...These responses to 
nature are mine and will not necessarily correspond with another's.  
Emotion takes place in the person who has it.  And sounds, when allowed 
to be themselves, do not require that those who hear them do so 
unfeelingly.  The opposite is what is meant by response ability.

"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 words.  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."

John Cage, Winter 1957