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THE_CAGED_SELF

                                              July 14, 2007

John Cage, despite his embrace
of many a strange musical             CHAOTIC_SOUND
technique, had an odd aversion
to Jazz improvisation...

I haven't yet come across
an explicit statement of
his on the subject, instead
there are only oblique hints.


  For example, there's a lecture
  quoted in Tom Nunn's _The Wisdom
  of the Impulse_, where Cage              IMPULSE
  objected to improvisation because
  of it's tendency to become "mere
  gesture".

       And:

      "_Orchestra_ [composed by John Cage] calls
       for improvisation-like playing that - as
       the notes patronisingly and inaccurately
       put it -- "is nonetheless sensitive to
       sound and imaginatively shaped".

               Andy Hamilton
               June 2007 issue of "The Wire".           LONDONS_GRIMING
               p 63




          There are few things that
          might've been going on
          here... one is that Cage
          came out of the Classical
          music world, back in the
          days when there was still           Unlike today, when
          a sense of snobbery about           you can hear refried
          Jazz -- a low-brow                  rebop in Lincoln
          popular music...                    Center whenever you
                                              like.

          More importantly, though:

          Cage early on became
          obsessed with the notion
          of removing his own ego       UNINTENDED
          from the stage.
                                        FALSE_CENTER
              Selfishness is evil.

              The ego must be transcended.


          For him, randomness was a tool to
          generate new sounds that more
          conventional techniques of
          composition would never reach.


                  The practice of jazz improvisation
                  has the completely opposite intent:
                  abandon the constraint of rules
                  for the sake of unfettered self
                  expression.


                        To a superficial ear, modern
                        classical and outside jazz seem
                        like related forms: they're both
                        "difficult listening", with an
                        unconventional appeal (if any)...

                        That doesn't mean that
                        they had anything do         Though now the situation
                        with each other as far       may be different: the
                        as the practitioners         distance between high
                        were concerned.              and low has gotten
                                                     smaller, at least when
                                                     you're looking at the
                                                     fence from the high side.

                                                             IMP_PERVERSE

                                                     (Outside, looking in?)


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