WHEN A GREAT CREATOR DIES...

 

"When a great creator dies, history—including his own history—holds its breath, looks around, and wonders what to do, as if waiting for new directives or new insights that might suddenly shine through the opaque shell of habit. History waits to gather and summarize the significant episodes of creative power; it waits for a new autopsy of the organs and expressive organism of the great creator. Or it waits for a lazy and unexpected silence to be broken.

 

When, moreover, the great creator who dies has recently crossed the border into a new territory rich in meaning, because it has been long and organically prepared, then we wonder, distraught, what else this man might have discovered and offered us if he had lived longer. (...)."

 

Luciano Berio (about Stravinsky)

 

This beautiful text reminds me of the musicians who have inspired me so much over the years, and whose creative work I would love to see continue forever....

 

To name but a few, I am thinking of Klaus Schulze, Hector Zazou, Harold Budd, Jon Hassell, Morton Feldman, John Cage and so many others who are gone ...

 

TIME / DURATION

 

"In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all but very interesting"

 

John Cage, quoted by Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats.  John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, The Penguin Press (2012), p. 385.  

KEEPING THINGS MYSTERIOUS (JOHN CAGE)

"I think it was Steve Reich who said it was clear I was  involved in process, but it was a process the audience didn't participate in because they couldn't understand it. I'm on the side of keeping things mysterious, and I have never enjoyed understanding things. If I understand something, I have no further use for it. So I try to make a music which I don't understand and which will be difficult for other people to understand too." 

 

John Cage, quoted by Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats. John Cage, Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists, The Penguin Press, 2012. 

CHANCE

John Cage during his 1966 concert at the opening of the National Arts Foundation in Washington, D.C.

 

"Most people who believe that I'm interested in chance don't realize that I use chance as a discipline — they think I use it — I don't know — as a way of giving up making choices. But my choices consist in choosing what questions to ask...

If I ask the I Ching a question as though it were a book of wisdom, which it is,  I generally say, "What do you have to say about this?" and then I just listen to what it says and see if some bells ring or not"

 

John Cage, quoted by Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats. John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, The Penguin Press, 2012, p. 213. 

THE SOUND CHARTS OF JOHN CAGE

John Cage "Music of Changes" Manuscript Fragment 

Courtesy the John Cage Trust

 "Until that time, my music had been based on the traditional idea that you had to say something. The charts gave me my first indication of the possibility of saying nothing"

John Cage 

 

"(These elaborate sound charts) resemble checkerboards laid out with combinations of sounds. In composing, Cage makes "moves" by drawing lines — diagonals, horizontals, verticals — on the chart to determine which sound comes next" 

 

Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, Penguin Books, 2013, p. 168.

MUSIC AND SELF-EXPRESSION: ARE WE IN A TOWER OF BABEL?

John Cage (1988)

"The need to change my music was evident to me earlier in my life. I had been taught, as most people are, that music is in effect the expression of an individual's ego — "self-expression" is what I have been taught. But then, when I saw that everyone was expressing himself differently and using a different way of composing, I deduced that we were in a Tower of Babel situation because no one was understanding anybody else; for instance, I wrote a sad piece and people hearing it laughed. It was clearly pointless to continue in that way, so I determined to stop writing music until I found a better reason than "self-expression" for it"

 John Cage, quoted in: Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, Penguin Books, 2013, p. 119-120