Thursday, March 03, 2005
What is it
I think I grew up with definition as organized sound, but Cage and others put an end to that (actually had done by the time I was learning the definition, but we were kind of out of the mainstream, both figuratively and literally).
I think now that music is anything that one, as it were, puts the frame around, in other words anything you decide to listen to as music is music. I have some friends with a political/psychiatric/philosophical background who I once had a very long, impassioned, and in the end pretty tedious dinner conversation on the subject. They objected to that idea on the grounds that it didn't make any qualitative judgement--just anything could be good. I don't think I pointed out that there was lots of stuff that would fall under a much less wide ranging definition which was pretty lousy, but I probably should have. Qualitative judgement, any way isn't the point in this case. They didn't convince or dissuade me, though. That's still my definition.
I'm reminded of Cage's writing somewhere, probably in Silence, about going into what was supposed to be a completely silent room that had been built at MIT. When he came out I told them it wasn't silent: he'd heard a very low kind of rumble, and a very high sound. They told him that the low noise was the sound of the blood running through his veins and the high sound was his nervous system (another quote comes to mind, from Eliot: "...the fever sings in mental wires...). Cage said after that he never worried about the future of music.
As I get older I find I have, or maybe had all the time and am just becoming more aware of it, a sort of ringing in my ears, intermittently. As I have got over being freaked out by it, since it doesn't seem to be associated with any loss of hearing aside from that normally associated with aging, it often reminds me both of the Cage story and the Eliot quote.
posted by Rodney Lister
9:37 AM
|
