The Silent Network—The Music of Wandelweiser (original) (raw)
Related papers
SILENCE AS A MUSICAL SCULPTURE JOHN CAGE AND THE INSTRUMENTS IN 4'33''
Art or Sound, exhibition catalogue, Fondazione Prada, 2014
At the boundary between art and sound, where music and silence, space and time, instruments and concepts continually intermingle, the career of the composer John Cage is an obligatory point of passage. The silent piece 4’33” occupies a central place in his oeu- vre, as affirmed by the artist himself. The work was conceived and developed over a period of four years (1948–52), precisely at the core of the 20th century; it thus radiates outward over the entire period, its roots drawing on the avant-garde movements at the beginning of the century and its influence extending over the fifty or so years that have followed it. But what meaning does this silent work have today and how does it relate to instruments and technology?
The long-lasting impact that Cage had on his students, many of which would go on to play central roles in the Fluxus movement, cannot be overstressed. But what was so special about Cage? What made his audience in Darmstadt so receptive to his ideas? And where did composers go from there? My aim in this essay is to propose a response to those questions by zooming in on three years from about 1959 to 1962 during which a circle of key figures – among others electronic music pioneer Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, Korean musician and multimedia artist Nam June Paik and visual artist Mary Bauermeister – embarked on a short-lived, yet immensely influential quest for new creative expressions, that would transform the languages of art and music to come.
“Every Something is an Echo of Nothing”: Notes on The John Cage Project in Halberstadt
2020
The text “Every Something is an Echo of Nothing”: Notes on The John Cage Project in Halberstadtaddresses TheJohn Cage Organ Project, the first trans-epochal work of art in music history. It is inspired by the American avant-garde composer and artist’s ORGAN2/ASLSP, which has been played at Saint Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany, since 2001, and is expected to last until 2640. Different aspects involved in the Project are analyzed, such as its history, aesthetics, philosophy, and its utopian vision, as well as John Cage’s conception of time, which provides basis for the project
SOUND AS SILENCE: Nothingness in the Music of Anton Webern and John Cage
Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College, 2020
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre presents nothingness as the foundation for being and the origin of its nihilation, i.e. the non-being. In this paper, I will extend the notion of nothingness beyond the paradigm of being to the world of sound and discuss silence as a sonic state to approach the experience of Sartrean nothingness in the context of contemporary classical music. After a reconstruction of Sartre’s deduction for nothingness, I will introduce the concept of sound with respect to the total sound-space bound by our pure auditory experience. Silence, then, is the non-being of sound which is originated from Sartrean nothingness. The following distinction between absolute and relative silence will then lead to a further discussion of the relation of sound to silence as analogous to the relation of being to non-being. Remarking that the silence has been approached by different techniques in music, I will focus on contemporary repertoires and analyze the role of silence in the third movement of Five Pieces for Orchestra by Anton Webern and 4’33” by John Cage as an embodiment of nothingness in the sound-space.
Sound in Silence ─ on silent sound installation and rethinking John Cage
The purpose of this article is to provide the reader with a description of the development of “silence sound art”, and the details on how the author applied such theories to an art workshop with the installation work Word Chimes. The author include a brief interpretation of the various meanings of sound and silence among different contemporary sound artists to provide a context of philosophy, but mainly focus on John Cage’s interpretation of silence, and argue that the famous claim “there’s no such thing as silence” could be problematic. The emphasis of the paper is on artistic application rather than academic research or theory.
John Cage’s 4’33” is one of the most recognized pieces of avant-garde art. In respect of the concert hall tradition of classical music this apparently ‘silent’ piece has cornered the market in muteness. There is, however, a separate tradition of recorded silences, the majority of which occur within the field of popular music. The purpose of my talk is to sound out and categorize these lesser-known works. Recorded silence has been used for aesthetic, political, memorial and economic purposes. It has raised questions about the sound of recording technologies, the silencing of musicians, the noise of everyday life and the right to be paid for doing ‘nothing’. It has highlighted the visual and audible differences between recording formats. It has sometimes aimed for inconspicuousness; at others it has sought to draw attention to itself. Ultimately, these silent records provide a counterpoint to and a commentary upon their more voluble recorded counterparts. I argue that it is important for analyses of sound recording to address issues of non-sound recording.
Unsilencing the Silence: Unacknowledged Silent Pieces
2021
The following work seeks to restore from obscurity three silent pieces of music that predate John Cage’s 4’33” and establish the reasons why they have not been acknowledged as being the first silent pieces. Hence, we present our methodology, analysis, and conclusion based on the motives that led them to musicological oblivion, their relevance in the context of experimental music, and why 4’33” was possible in its zeitgeist.
Stille Musik: Wandelwesier and the Voices of Ontological Silence
Contemporary Music Review
The 1991 Boswil Composition Seminar took place under the doubled thematic rubric of ‘Stille Musik’/‘Quiet Music’ and constituted a legitimating Ursprungsort for the fledgling Wandelweiser composers in attendance. This article explores the contexts in which silence emerges as the site of musical and philosophical contestation in Europe during the second half of the twentieth century, and examines the persistence of theoretical, literary and musical silences drawn from the thought and writing of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Edmond Jabès and Alain Badiou in the work of Wandelweiser composers and Boswil prizewinners Jürg Frey and Antoine Beuger.
4’ 33’’ - John Cage’s utopia of music
Studia Humanistyczne AGH, 2016
The present article examines the connection between Cage's politics and aesthetics, demonstrating how his formal experiments are informed by his political and social views. In 4'33'', which is probably the best illustration of Cage's radical aesthetics, Cage wanted his listeners to appreciate the beauty of accidental noises, which, as he claims elsewhere, "had been discriminated against" (Cage 1961d: 109). His egalitarian stance is also refl ected in his views on the function of the listener. He wants to empower his listeners, thus blurring the distinction between the performer and the audience. In 4'33'' the composer forbidding the performer to impose any sounds on the audience gives the audience the freedom to rediscover the natural music of the world. I am arguing that in his experiments Cage was motivated not by the desire for formal novelty but by the utopian desire to make the world a better place to live. He described his music as "an affi rmation of life-not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor 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 desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord" (Cage 1961b: 12).