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If you’ve never heard the name, you probably know Cage by his deeds.
In what has to be one of the first instances of trolling in modern music,
he famously presented a piece where a pianist would sit by a grand
piano for four minutes and 33 seconds, not playing a note, not making
a sound. Just silence for four minutes and 33 seconds. Some pianists
get wild with the piece and set up sheet music for it, counting the
measures, and quietly turning the pages when needed. Cage made
some other ridiculous pieces, like the nationally televised “Water
Walk” where he went around smacking radios, boiling water, and
putting rubber duckies on prepared pianos to blow the minds of the
unsuspecting public. He also made some traditional music, but his
intent was to always question and expand the notion of what music,
especially European classical music, could be.
Cage might have been the most out there, but he was one composer
among many who over the last 100 plus years or so have been
reshaping and testing the bounds of what European, orchestral,
classical music sounds like. From Igor Stravinsky’s rhythm heavy
masterpiece “The Rites of Spring” from 1913, to Krzysztof Penderecki’s
terrifyingly dissonant “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” to
Steve Reich’s jazz and West African music inspired pieces, the sound of
classical music has come a long way from Mozart, but unfortunately,
not a long way from the grand halls of power, wealth, and privilege
where Mozart performed. Classical music, even the kind of dissonant
and confrontational classical music of the past 100 or so years, is still
routinely performed in big, prohibitively expensive, and unwelcoming
for those without cultural capital, concert halls.
Why do you think the Concerts survived so long here? There must have
been similar series in other cities.
What did you call this kind of music when you’re talking to people
about it? Avant-Garde? Modern Classical? Experimental Classical?
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