Mod Edit: This and the following 40+ posts were split off from the Favorite Song thread as it was getting off topic


What an incredibly cool choice!

Meh, 4'33" is a composition that serves solely to explicate a single idea. An interesting and influential idea, to be sure, but to put it next to works that expertly capture human emotions and thoughts non-linguistically? Gnaw, son.

surely that was sarcasm, only a complete asshole would actually call that music

Must be Curiosity, then.

Interesting that you equate competent use of the English language with being a complete asshole.

cage was legit, if alvin lucier's 'i am sitting in a room' is music so is 4'33. and i certainly think it's music, whether its worthy of repeated listening is what's in question and nope sir, i've learnt my lesson

if we are to pick on people for being as close to pseudo musicians as musicians can get then certainly we can talk about bull of heaven. even if i ever listened to a 7,000 year long record, i would probably rate it one star. needs more uhn-tiss and blastbeats.

wow, nevermind the 7000, they released one in march that is 8,462,937,602,125,701,219,674,955 years long. they need to die.

So what? A lot of very good music is based on few ideas, and 4'33'' certainly captures human emotions and thoughts, and it does so very non-linguistically. I can see that if Cage had not composed that piece somebody else what have done that later, but it was a necessary consequence of modern composition, and it remains a very beautiful idea nonetheless.

I really don't see what 4'33" captures beyond the idea it exemplifies. Maybe you find the inherent organization of sound in the shuffling of 500 people in a performance hall to be particularly moving—I find it remarkably dry. That piece, for me, is just the idea and nothing more. Nothing in the piece develops the idea in interesting ways. And frankly I don't think the idea itself is all that profound or original.

I could see a composition containing four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence interrupted by whatever environmental sounds were present as being a compelling part of a larger work, but as a stand-alone, it just doesn't compel me.

Out of genuine curiosity, what emotions and thoughts do you think the piece captures?

Holy shit. I just checked the RYM page for their most recent album which consists of 10,000,000 1 second tracks. WTF is the point?

ART forgie, ART

they are insufferable cunts in person too. one of them joined rym because there was a thread for them and people were chiming in saying they don't see the point of their music, and this guy joined and flamed for a whole bunch of pages claiming people weren't intelligent enough to understand their music. what music, you put a fucking loop on repeat for a time frame that is longer than the universe has existed. somewhere, sometime god's gonna be like "jeez, i fucking hate drone"

that'll be the moment god and i finally connect

It captures the emotions and thoughts of the respective listener and leaves him/her alone with them. It's the beauty of silence. As I already said the idea itself is not all that original. Some other composer would have made the idea into a piece sooner or later. It's really a work where you probably won't listen closely all the time, a lot of minimal music is similar in that way. It's music that rather lets you drift away. I could imagine that it depends a lot on the listeners' personalities whether or not they enjoy 4'33''.

If 4'33" captures those emotions then every piece of music captures every random, unrelated emotion that a person happens to feel while listening to it.

It personally strikes me as pointless to listen to 4'33" any other way than closely.

The random sounds of X number of people all gathered together in a room trying to respect a performer who isn't, at the moment, playing anything, could have been really interestingly incorporated into a larger work. But that's the most interesting thing about the piece and it's not even what it's about, and then of course there's not anything to contextualize those random sounds, either.

I strongly disagree. 4'33'' leaves much more open spaces for the listener. Whenever a listener actually hears a certain kind of music with a certain tonal material, he will automatically associate other things with it. When he/she hears a slow piece of music in a minor key and has a Western musical background, he might associate rather sad moods with it. 4'33'' doesn't do that. It leaves the listeners alone to listen into themselves.


Why do you think that? From your previous posts it rather seemed as if you had trouble getting into the piece that way.


Why do you think it would have been more interesting when included within a larger work? The sounds are contextualized by yourself and your surroundings (by the reality if you wish). Just because the composer isn't responsible for the context doesn't mean that the sounds don't have any context at all.