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#162233 10/01/2006 10:01 PM
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...has been discovered by a grad. student at U. Va. Now wouldn't that be some feather in your cap?
Read all about it here:
NPR

#162234 10/03/2006 6:51 PM
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How to get good grades at University!

#162235 10/14/2006 11:13 PM
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Just a guess, but I suspect that most poets have left behind the odd bit of poetry here and there, for others to find and perhaps publish. There is no way to know whether the poet deemed the work "finished" in the sense of being ready for publication. With the use of computers, the next big discovery may come on some poet's hard drive, saved from the junk heap and searched for the odd unpublished work.

#162236 10/15/2006 7:52 AM
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Dear Jackie, Sunday morning - browse brought me to your link , this audio report about Robert Frost, again only a name to me I remember from school.
Seems like the perfect poet to take along through gloomy winterdays.
And a nice reason to go to the store.
(trivial side effect: I saw this name and Frosty the Snowman popped up. I brought this little book home from a U.S visit for my grandson,"push the button and the song starts to play":) Is there a ever a name that does not bring up music?
I will buy the poems that are said to be 'foreboding and moody'.

#162237 10/15/2006 10:58 AM
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Quote:

Is there a ever a name that does not bring up music?




John Cage?

#162238 10/15/2006 2:35 PM
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Fal Dage?

You really know how to cheer one up!

#162239 10/17/2006 5:21 PM
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Hello Jackie, so I got myself a new book with old Robert Frost poems at the American Book Center.
Catching up with American poetry. And he seems just the right one for the coming season. I'm a great T.S.Eliot lover, but this also looks very attractive. I'm always so content with a brand new book. What 's going to happen to that new found poem? Will it get published as a single poem with the history of it's find? Do you know about that?

#162240 10/18/2006 1:28 AM
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No, Branny, I haven't heard any more about what they were going to do with the poem; might be worth contacting the university about.

[picking myself up off the floor e] I have finally found one use for Wikipedia. I figured that absolute precision wouldn't be required in order for me to learn who John Cage is or was, so I clicked on the W-pedia link in Google. And boy, did I learn something:
The premiere of the three-movement 4'33"; was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952, at Woodstock, New York as part of a recital of contemporary piano music. The audience saw him sit at the piano and lift the lid of the piano. Some time later, without having played any notes, he closed the lid. A while after that, again having played nothing, he lifted the lid. And after a period of time, he closed the lid again and rose from the piano. The piece had passed without a note being played, in fact without Tudor or anyone else on stage having made any deliberate sound, although he timed the lengths on a stopwatch while turning the pages of the score. Richard Kostelanetz suggests that the very fact that Tudor, a man known for championing experimental music, was the performer, and that Cage, a man known for introducing unexpected non-musical noise into his work, was the composer, would have led the audience to expect unexpected sounds. Anybody listening intently would have heard them: while the performer produces no deliberately musical sound, there will nonetheless be sounds in the concert hall (just as there were sounds in the anechoic chamber at Harvard). It is these sounds, unpredictable and unintentional, that are to be regarded as constituting the music in this piece. The piece remains controversial to this day, and is seen as challenging the very definition of music.

The length of 4'33" is in fact not designated by its score. The instructions for the work indicate that it consists of three movements, for each of which the only instruction is "tacet," indicating silence on the part of the performer or performers. The title of the piece in each performance is determined by the length of silence chosen. Cage chose the length of the famous first premiere performance by chance methods using I Ching models, and later said that it just as easily could have been any other length. There is no evidence supporting the sometimes-made claim that Cage chose the length deliberately, four minutes and thirty-three seconds being 273 seconds and absolute zero being temperature of -273 °C

who'd'a thunk it?

#162241 10/18/2006 10:25 AM
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He had another piece with the instrumentation being several radios. They were tuned to predetermined frequencies that may or may not be the frequency any local radio stations. A backstage engineer would choose which radio or radios to connect to the concert hall amplification system at any given time during the performance.

He was on Terry Gross's Fresh Air at one time. She asked him if he had any idea what a piece was going to sound like when he composed it. He answered, "no" with such an incredulous tone of voice, as if that were the stupidest question imaginable. As far as I'm concerned his work does not challenge the definition of music; rather it is a body of examples of what is not music.

#162242 10/18/2006 11:43 AM
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Oh. Jackie! This is a real laugh out loud. You see how Adriaan Geuze is world famous in Louisville (not in his homeland) and John Cage is world famous in the Netherlands (maybe not in all of his homeland).
Art is just another type of religion. It 's a matter of faith.
Or The new Clothes of the Emperor, the fairy tale by ????
Believe in Cage's empty intervals and you adore him. Or If you want consider him a fraud. Either way he's got his act together.

#162243 10/18/2006 2:07 PM
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What a wonderful statement! Art is just another type of religion. It 's a matter of faith. I have some comments, but would like to know what the rest of you think, if you would kindly oblige.

#162244 10/18/2006 2:59 PM
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Cage also defined music as "organized sound", which I like a lot.

are you some sort of musical prescriptivist, Faldage?


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#162245 10/18/2006 4:39 PM
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Music is organized sound, but not all organized sound is music.(imo) The ticking of a clock is organized sound . The running of an engine is organized sound. Etc. I would not call this music, even when I find both sounds worth listening to (John Cage might not agree with me on this point.) His statement is right , but I may not agree with the use he puts this statement to. It gives him total freedom to work with sounds as he pleases and he may call it music. If he pinches the cat at intervals so that it mews?(cat sound?), it's organised sound and so it's music.
Art in this time , in the leading circuits, is mainly a philosophical debate, in both audio , visual and performing principles. (Architecture has the built in restrictions that it's products must be functional.)
When they put those philosophical ideas into visual or audiable forms they often have a lot of explaining to do.

#162246 10/18/2006 5:46 PM
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I guess I fall with Emerson on this one:

That is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual; the wise man wonders at the usual.—Emerson

that sounds very pompous and condescending, but I hope you know what I mean.


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#162247 10/18/2006 7:01 PM
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No,this sounds very sound, but of course I would like to know who this Emerson is.

(And a bit of the unusual every now and than can't hurt)
BTW. I write this post while the radio plays Philip Glass, an American composer I really like and who's wonderful opera's, that he did with Robert Wilson I saw. He was a great hit in the end 70th/ begin 80th here.I have old LP records of him.

#162248 10/19/2006 1:57 AM
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Quote:

Cage also defined music as "organized sound", which I like a lot.

are you some sort of musical prescriptivist, Faldage?




That might, as BranShea pointed out, be a characteristic, it isn't a very good definition and what Cage comes up with doesn't seem to have that characteristic anyway. I guess if expecting a composer to have some idea what a composition is going to sound like is prescriptivist then prescriptivism is in a pretty sad state.

#162249 10/19/2006 4:31 PM
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Quote:

No,this sounds very sound, but of course I would like to know who this Emerson is.

(And a bit of the unusual every now and than can't hurt)
BTW. I write this post while the radio plays Philip Glass, an American composer I really like and who's wonderful opera's, that he did with Robert Wilson I saw. He was a great hit in the end 70th/ begin 80th here.I have old LP records of him.




Emerson, as in Ralph Waldo.


Fald, I winked!!


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#162250 10/19/2006 5:20 PM
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Yes Jackie, in a way you can say I believe in Rothko or I don't believe in Andy Warhol, John Cage or whatever artist.It means not much more than that you believe in those people's integrety. But some people take it so high that it becomes like a religious dispute and long time friendships can brake over it for eternity.

Last edited by BranShea; 10/19/2006 6:14 PM.
#162251 10/19/2006 5:27 PM
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Thanks for as in Ralph Waldo. I made a print to read it well.
Plus for USU. I already wanted to ask for an abbrevation dictionary.
Often I cannot understand those short cuts. Interesting puzzles but they take too much time.

#162252 10/20/2006 3:19 PM
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Third post in a row. To say that reading about Emerson made me aware of how little I know about American history and litterature.
So,another catch up to do.

#162253 10/20/2006 5:57 PM
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Ralph rocks.




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#162254 10/20/2006 6:59 PM
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To the utmost Waldo might be walzing .
Let's not exagerate in these delicate matters.


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