This is the course blog for Amy Cook and Ellen MacKay's Graduate Practicum on Scholarship and Performance (Fall 2012).
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Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Another clip: John Cage's 4' 33"
One of my favorite examples of performance testing the limits of the old "the emperor wears no clothes" accusation. What would States say of this, I wonder? Or Handke?
What I find fascinating about this is the role reversal for the audience. For anyone who has been to a play, or any performance where listening is an active part, there's always the crying baby or the cougher.
But here... the audience is so tense. They are making an active choice to not disturb the silence. They are performing right with the musicians. And as soon as each movement ends, those coughers who have been holding the couch back come out. And people shift their weights to get comfortable.
It's interesting that silence is what broke the actor/audience wall.
It's also a really interesting comment on our expectations for musical performance (or at least musical performance that takes the visual shape of classical or symphonic performance).
It reminds me of what Dorothy mentioned in class on Tuesday about some of her friend's more experimental music performances being called out as "not art." In Cage's piece, the sounds of the audience and the everyday sounds of the performance space (the hum of the air conditioning maybe) are asked to stand in for the music.
Actually, Cage is not asking everyday sounds to stand in for the music, he is telling the audience that the everyday sounds ARE the music, that all sound is music.
3 comments:
What I find fascinating about this is the role reversal for the audience. For anyone who has been to a play, or any performance where listening is an active part, there's always the crying baby or the cougher.
But here... the audience is so tense. They are making an active choice to not disturb the silence. They are performing right with the musicians.
And as soon as each movement ends, those coughers who have been holding the couch back come out. And people shift their weights to get comfortable.
It's interesting that silence is what broke the actor/audience wall.
It's also a really interesting comment on our expectations for musical performance (or at least musical performance that takes the visual shape of classical or symphonic performance).
It reminds me of what Dorothy mentioned in class on Tuesday about some of her friend's more experimental music performances being called out as "not art." In Cage's piece, the sounds of the audience and the everyday sounds of the performance space (the hum of the air conditioning maybe) are asked to stand in for the music.
Actually, Cage is not asking everyday sounds to stand in for the music, he is telling the audience that the everyday sounds ARE the music, that all sound is music.
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