Generational Songs……
I don’t know if any of you remember a songwriter/musician from the ’60’s/’70’s by the name of John Cage, but he wrote a song called, “As Slow as Possible.”…….. The song would take 629 years to play……..
And they say pop culture has no lasting value……
October 19th, 2005 at 7:36 am
A John Cage ripoff?
October 19th, 2005 at 9:00 am
I believe I read about that album in the 60’s. If I recall it was an interactive album (probably the first). Sounded very interesting at the time. I think he was a profound influence on artists such as Lou Reed (Velvet Underground) & Frank Zappa.
October 19th, 2005 at 9:43 am
I think we’re talking about the same person, HuskySooner…… He would have been considered more of a composer than a songwriter/musician and although he was writing as early as 1933, he was, as Sunn stated a huge influence on Reed, Zappa, Captain Beefheart, etc. and, was, himself, writing during the ’60’s/’70’s era right on up into 1992, the year of his death…….
For more info on John Cage check-out http://www.johncage.info ….. I think this site just about covers everything you would want to know about him……
October 19th, 2005 at 12:10 pm
I met Cage in school at U.C.D where he took over a good deal of the campus for a music project. ( he was also a mushroom expert….maybe only of interest to us in the N.W.). He did,conttructed???, three peices during the week and one small in the art dept gallery. Peice 1; he set up tables with turn tables and speakers all along two sides of the large gym. On each table was a stack of LPs. People came in and played an album on each turn table….all at the same time. The better albums vanished fast.
2: Students sign up for his next project which was a way of randomly aquiring a book to read and then report what you had read back to your group. an I ching thing. each book was supposed to have particular significance to the reader. My wife’s sure did.
3: He came in to our art gallery with an electonic type wiz kid and played his music through a sculpture that one of the grad students had set up…..a large grid of tubes filled with water.
4: In the theater on a stage he had a piano where players traded off playing the same three notes for 24hrs. I watched the tansition where one guy slipped his hand under the other player’s and continued on.
Yes, thats four. The music in the art gallery was just a side gig.
October 19th, 2005 at 4:16 pm
I just found the reason HuskySooner wondered if he was a John Cage “rip-off”….. Peanut-Boy me misspelled his last name in the original post (Gage instead of Cage)….. I have corrected it now….. Sorry ’bout that and thanks to HuskySooner for questioning it, although, he should have just pointed out that I had screwed-up…..
October 20th, 2005 at 7:17 am
I wasn’t (for once) being a smart-arse. It just sounded rather Cage-y.
October 23rd, 2005 at 12:42 am
Did Cage invent the sing-along ? On a more serious note, although he was obviously among
the top avant-garde composers of the twentieth century, and I really like some of the
concepts that he originated, I can’t say that I’ve enjoyed listening to any of the
recordings I’ve heard of his compositions. I’m sure there have been superb performances
of his work–the interactive nature of most of it insures that no two performances would
be alike. And in fairness, I’ve only heard a half-dozen or so such recordings, but Edgar
Varese’s auto horns are more melodious than most of it. Another artist of the genre,
Harry Partch, is my favorite. Partch was an inventor of fantastic and bizarre new
instruments as well as fantastic and bizarre new scales with which to perform his
compositions. He described himself as “a composer seduced into carpentry”.
October 23rd, 2005 at 12:57 am
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……………………………thank you. You have just
participated in a performance of 4’33” by John Cage. If it
took you less than four minutes and thirty-three seconds,
you rushed the tempo.
October 23rd, 2005 at 12:18 pm
Imagine if…………….John Cage & Laurie Anderson performed in concert together. May be even to bizarre for us greybeards.
October 23rd, 2005 at 11:38 pm
The modern-day composer refuses to die. Yeah, that Cage / Anderson collaboration would
have been pretty special. Jimi Hendrix once considered, then rejected an invitation to
join the fledgling Emerson, Lake & Palmer–H.E.L.P.
October 27th, 2005 at 11:07 pm
I cannot even imagine what would have came out of that, My little peanut brain cannot begin to process the sounds that would have been made. Because Greg Lake was not that great of a guitar player,not put up against Jimi.
October 28th, 2005 at 12:10 am
True, Lake isn’t a very good guitarist, but he’s a very good bass guitarist. It’s hard to
imagine what Hendrix, Emerson, Lake & Palmer might have sounded like. There would have to
have been a reconciliation of the difference in styles, but I’m sure this innovative and
talented bunch could have pulled that off. Can you imagine Jimi wailing on E.L.P.’s more
improvisational stuff–like Tarkus, Fanfare For The Common Man and The Hut Of Baba Yaga
from Pictures ? I just listened to that last one in my mind’s ear and it was ssssmokin’!
October 31st, 2005 at 8:33 pm
That would probably have been the 70’s answer to Blind Faith. (Hendrix & ELP)
November 1st, 2005 at 12:49 am
Or if they got George Martin to produce, maybe the 70’s answer to The Beatles.
Guess we’ll never know.
November 1st, 2005 at 11:25 am
Wheels in the Sky. Maybe Lennon, Harrison, Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin etc. are somewhere out there in the galaxy doing some serious cosmic jammin’.
November 1st, 2005 at 11:44 pm
I’m a humanist myself, but if there’s a rock & roll heaven, you
know they’ve got a hell of a band. But if they were all playing
and singing at once, it might not sound so heavenly. I bet they
have to break it down into smaller groups, such as Zappa, Cage &
Moon. Of course Duane Allman would be jammin’ with Lynrd Skynrd.
How about John Lennon and Woody Guthrie ? And The Lizard King
would probably be writing opera with Herr Wagner, politics be damned.