Play more notes = get paid more!

[rickbass]

So, what's a paycheck like for composer John Cage's "4'33"????

"The first performance of John Cage's 4'33" created a scandal. Written in 1952, it is Cage's most notorious composition, his so-called "silent piece". The piece consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds in which the performer plays nothing."

"...the hand-written score, which was in conventional notation with blank measures, on the piano and sat motionless as he used a stopwatch to measure the time of each movement. The score indicated three silent movements, each of a different length, but when added together totalled four minutes and thirty-three seconds...."

 

[Bruce Lindfield]

So, what's a paycheck like for composer John Cage's "4'33"????

"The first performance of John Cage's 4'33" created a scandal. Written in 1952, it is Cage's most notorious composition, his so-called "silent piece". The piece consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds in which the performer plays nothing."

"...the hand-written score, which was in conventional notation with blank measures, on the piano and sat motionless as he used a stopwatch to measure the time of each movement. The score indicated three silent movements, each of a different length, but when added together totalled four minutes and thirty-three seconds...."

I heard an interview with a conductor who was conducting a performance of this (in a programme of other modern music) at a big London concert hall and it was being broadcast on Radio 3!!

So he said it was quite a problem to get it on radio as there were all these safeguards built into the systems to make sure that silence didn't happen - warning messages etc. As the automatic systems would assume that there was some kind of signal loss problem, somewhere in the audio chain!!

Anyway - he mentioned how it was the first performance of the orchestral version!!

A whole symphony orchestra sitting there doing nothing was quite differnet to one person!!

 

[thrash_jazz]

I saw this. Reminds me of some guitarists I've played with.

If anything, shouldn't the woodwind section be paid the most? They have to use their hands, lungs AND lips!

Reminds me of that joke...

Q: Which is bigger - a violin or a viola?

A: Same size. The violin only looks smaller because a violinist has such a big head.

 

[rickbass]

Anyway - he mentioned how it was the first performance of the orchestral version!!

A whole symphony orchestra sitting there doing nothing was quite differnet to one person!!

From what little I remember from my college music classes, I think it was Cage's intention that much of the "music" consisted of the ambient sounds where it was performed, such as the wind rustling through the trees where it was "performed."

 

[Zon Bass]

All I can say to that is that I'm moing to Germany and learning to play the snare.