Comment by gweinberg
Comment by gweinberg 9 days ago
It doesn't make sense to me that the piece should start with a 17 month rest. Surely it doesn't really start until the first note is played?
Comment by gweinberg 9 days ago
It doesn't make sense to me that the piece should start with a 17 month rest. Surely it doesn't really start until the first note is played?
To be fair, while the piece is a deliberate provocation, like some of his others, the rest wasn’t imagined by Cage to take 17 months, that’s just an artifact of someone else’s decision to play the piece for 639 years. In typical performances while Cage was alive, the opening rest wasn’t more than a few seconds.
Beethoven’s 5th symphony (da-da-da-DAA) starts with a rest too, it’s not unusual to notate like this. Many pieces have “pickup” measures which are not complete and much shorter than a full measure. But when the pickup is more than 50% of a normal measure, it’s no longer much of a pickup and starting with a rest to make up the complete measure makes sense.
That's all fine and dandy when you're talking about a genuine piece of music. But for something like this, counting a rest that goes for 17 years is taking it way too far.
17 months. But in what sense isn’t this a genuine peice of music? It certainly meets Merriam-Webster’s definition:
a: vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony
b: the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity
An exploration of what is and is not a piece of music, like this work explicitly is, needs to acknowledge the possibility that the answer might be “no, this isn't”. Dictionary definitions are entirely irrelevent except insofar as they provide the inspiration to ask “wait, but is that _really_ all a work of music is?”
One of HN's few(?) music appreciation professors here: in fact, I start every term posing this question. It's hard to teach music appreciation before a group of humans can agree where music begins and ends :) At the end of the day, like everything else it's a certain degree of statistics and a certain degree of subjectivity.
Complaining about a rest (however long) in a piece by the composer of 4'33'' is certainly A Take.
Regardless of the philosophy of it (which is certainly interesting), many pieces uncontroversially start with a rest. If the first bar doesn’t start on a note, then the piece starts on a rest.
You could argue that the first bar is actually shorter than all the following ones and only starts on the first note, but… no one thinks like that that I ever heard of
> Surely it doesn't really start until the first note is played?
That question itself is built on a radical assumption. Example:
Just skimming, it looks like 38 out of 48 of the fugues from Bach's WTC Books 1 & 2 begin with rests followed by several beats worth of melodies in the first measure[1]. If you think the piece only really starts when the first note of the melody is played, then you've got problems. Either:
1. You hear the first articulation of the melody as the downbeat. But that would mean the first measure is in a disparate (and probably irregular) meter. Radical!
2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!
You can use accent patterns on a modern piano to play any of these fugues using either of these methods, and it will sound silly to non-silly keyboard players.
What's more, non-silly keyboard players do feel the pulse for the first downbeat of these pieces when they perform. Most of them will even inhale before the downbeat, as if they are somehow singing the melody through their fingers.
Finally, lots of music begins with rests: not just conservative cases like Bach, but progressive cases like the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth, and of course the radical cases like Cage's.
This leads to one of the things I love about Cage's music: it compels criticisms that reveal fundamental misunderstandings about music. E.g., you don't buy the radical case-- perhaps reasonable. But you then speculate there are no cases-- which is at odds with common musical practice.
If Cage's music did nothing but compel these questions it would be worth its weight in pine nuts.
Edit:
1: Bach does this because nearly all the fugues have three or more independent melodies singing at the same time. If they are all singing on every downbeat it can quickly sound really clunky and predictable.
> 2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!
Why is this radical at all? This is exactly how most humans perceive it: as a lead-in to the second (I might even argue first) measure. It's very strange to me to say that most humans are supposed to understand the piece to have started before any sound is played. In fact that's quite preposterous: play a song that starts with a rest to 1000 people and ask them to gesture as soon as the song starts, and every single one of them will gesture on the first note played. How are they supposed to perceive the song to have started any earlier than that? A song "starting with rests" is written that way to make it understandable to the performer who is reading the notation. It's a purely notational thing. The notation is not the song, the sound is the song.
> If you think the piece only really starts when the first note of the melody is played, then you've got problems. Either:
> 1. You hear the first articulation of the melody as the downbeat. But that would mean the first measure is in a disparate (and probably irregular) meter. Radical!
> 2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!
Why? Why can't you just say the piece starts partway through a bar, and we notate that with a rest for convenience? Just as when a piece ends partway through a bar we would generally accept that it ends when the last note ends (and while we might notate that as being a full bar in the case of a long held note, we don't always play it that way), not after some trailing rests, and we wouldn't consider this as being some kind of radical accented thing.
> This leads to one of the things I love about Cage's music: it compels criticisms that reveal fundamental misunderstandings about music. E.g., you don't buy the radical case-- perhaps reasonable. But you then speculate there are no cases-- which is at odds with common musical practice.
Love this thought. You disagree with an extreme interpretation, do you take the exact opposite? If not, up to where do you go?
This idea is applicable to so much
In a live orchestra performance, the conductor raises his hands. The audience quiets in anticipation.
He gives an up tick indicating the beginning of the music, then the downbeat of the start of the first measure.
No sound is heard.
The conductor continues to mark time. The silence is deep...profound.
The conductor continues to mark the time of the passing measures.
The audience listens.
At some point, positive sound breaks the silence - suddenly, loudly destroying the stillness! Or possibly very nearly silently - at the uncertain threshold of perception, the audible music begins...
> the audible music begins...
right, so it begins when the music starts playing?
It is 1973.
You go to your hi-fi setup, a veritable temple of sound reproduction.
You peruse your library and select an album. Or perhaps you have a new one that you have carefully carried home from the store. Whichever.
You lift up the cover of your turntable.
Carefully, you extract the vinyl disc from its cardboard and paper sleeves. Taking care not to touch it by its surface, you place it on the turntable. Perhaps you clean its surface with a special lint-catcher designed for this.
You lift up the needle by its little handle. Delicately, you place it on the disc, in the space between the very edge and the visible band of the first track.
There is an anticipatory crackle. A fuzzy pop. The sounds of the needle skidding across the smooth surface of the disc, and dropping into the groove.
A pause.
And then the music begins.
Perhaps the music begins loud and fast. Perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps it's a few words from the bandleader, welcoming you to their new album. Perhaps it's a collage of natural sounds that gradually gives way to music.
When, precisely, did you begin the experience of "listening to music"?
----
It is 2025.
You take out your phone. You turn off its notifications.
You find your headphones and put them on. Perhaps they give off a beep complaining of being out of power, and you have to put them on the charger, and dig up your backup pair, possibly along with an adaptor to plug them into the headphone jack that no longer exists on your new phone.
You open up Spotify, Youtube, whatever you use to stream music. You type in the name of what you want to listen to.
You hit 'play'.
Your phone begins downloading music off the internet. Perhaps first there's an ad. Perhaps several ads. Perhaps not. Perhaps it takes a while to buffer. It's an indeterminate thing.
And then the music begins. As before, perhaps it hits the ground running immediately; perhaps there's some collection of anticipatory sounds, some pause, before the music really gets into gear. Perhaps it's interrupted five seconds in by your discovery that this is actually just the first five seconds of the track followed by an ad for Bitcoin, or the discovery that this is a track with a name similar to what you asked to be played, and you get to go back a few steps. Perhaps you actually get what you wanted.
At what point did you begin the experience of "listening to music"?
You typed a really long comment, but you're not talking about the same thing. Listening to an ad before a song starts is very obviously not part of the music, even if it's part of "the experience of listening to music (on a streaming service)." The ad before a song plays is not included in the song's official runtime.
You're essentially describing the time the audience sits waiting for the orchestra to walk onto the stage as being "part of the experience of going to the orchestra." Which is fine, but it's not considered part of the song (unless the composer's quirky and writes "walk onto the stage" at the beginning of the music sheets, which is basically what this guy did with the 17-month rest).
Moreover, nobody was actually sitting in that cathedral for 17 months listening to the first rest. If a 17-month rest is played in the middle of a forest and nobody hears it, was it really a 17-month rest? Who experienced that "experience?"
The experience begins when the conductor starts marking time.
There doesn't seem to be a conductor at all in this performance, and there certainly wasn't one for the entire 17 months that the rest lasted. (The person in charge of this project, Rainer Neugebauer, is not conducting; the linked article makes mention of a speech before the note was changed, but nothing about marking time.)
Not that I'd expect a conductor to be needed for a soloist performance, but it makes the whole "when the conductor raises his hands" point a little off-topic.
That's like saying "my meal begins from the time I start driving to the restaurant". It's just not true.
Check out his other work 4'33". It's an even more extreme try at silence as music.
It looks like this is his gimmick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3#/media/F...
Haters gonna hate, but there's not much more to his work than using extreme pauses and tempos as art. Maybe it's meta art.
Lots of music starts with rests. If the first note isn't on the 1, you'll have rests before it. Not usual at all.
It’s a deliberate provocation, he certainly anticipated exactly this sort of response.
In a sense he is exploiting a lack of rules that would prevent a piece from starting with this long of a rest.
In other words, he is hacking the process.